1040 How to Upgrade Your Brain, Boost Metabolism, Maximize Hormones & “Burn” Body Fat w/Shawn Stevenson

“If we can get folks healthier we can start to have healthier conversations.”Today's guest is Shawn Stevenson, author of the international bestselling book Sleep Smarter and creator of The Model Health Show which is featured as the #1 Fitness & Nutrition podcast in the United States! He is a personal friend to Lewis and has a valuable mission to share quality information with the world about living a healthy life. Lewis and Shawn sat down for a wide-ranging conversation about our body's amazing ability to store energy in fat, what hormones are and how they affect us, the truth about calories, details from his new book, "Eat Smarter," and so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1040Read his new book: www.eatsmarterbook.comCheck out his website: www.themodelhealthshow.comThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,040 with bestselling author Shawn Stevenson.

• 0:06Shawn Stevenson?

  This is how powerful food is. You know, it becomes everything about you. The things you see in the mirror, how you feel, it's all based on food.

• 0:14Lewis Howes?

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

• 0:37Lewis Howes?

  Steve Marboli once said, "By choosing healthy over skinny, you are choosing self-love over self-judgment." And author Paul Kahn said, "I live in my body, my house, so I better be good to it." My guest today is a good friend. His name is Shawn Stevenson. He's an author of the international bestselling book, Sleep Smarter, which was transformational for me and my health, and creator of The Model Health Show, which is a top fitness and nutrition podcast in the United States. He graduated from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, studied business, biology, and nutritional science, and went on to found a company that provides wellness services for individuals and organizations worldwide

• 1:19Lewis Howes?

  called Advanced Integrative Health Alliance. Shawn's been featured all over the world on many major media outlets, including New York Times, Fast Company, Muscle and Fitness, ESPN, and many others. He's a personal friend of mine, and I truly value his mission to share quality information with the world to help us all be healthier. And I could talk to Shawn for hours about nutrition and mindset, health, and even relationships. I never want to stop. And he was able to give us a sneak peek of the crazy new information that he's learned while writing his latest book, Eat Smarter. Use the power of food to reboot your metabolism, upgrade your brain, and transform your life. I'm so excited to share with you this information.

• 2:00Lewis Howes?

  Some of the research he shares may shock you and blow you away, but I know it'll support you with your personal growth. And in this episode, we discuss how our body burns fat that we've stored. What hormones are and why they're so important to understanding them? How to get a healthier microbiome? How much water we should be drinking daily? The true amount? The five different types of fat? And how our body uses each one of them? The history of calories? And why they have become such a prison to us? Why it's so important to diversify the foods we eat? And this is something I struggle with. Why we need to treat the root of chronic disease? Not just the symptoms? And so much more? Get ready. Share this with a friend, with someone you think would be inspired?

• 2:44Lewis Howes?

  And someone who you truly value and you appreciate in your life? Who you want to see improve their life as well? Just send them to lewishouse.com/1040 For the full episode, show notes? Or just copy and paste wherever you're listening to this? Over on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere else? And while you're at it, please click that subscribe button to the School of Greatness On Apple Podcasts right now? As well as give us a rating and review? Each week, we bring some of the most incredible insights and interviews and guests all around the world? And I never want you to miss these coming up. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Shawn Stevenson.

• 3:23Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. I've got my dear friend Shawn Stevenson in the house.

• 3:28Shawn Stevenson?

  What's up, brother?

• 3:28Lewis Howes?

  Good to see you, brother. Very excited about this. You've got a new book called Eat Smarter: Use the Power of Food to Reboot Your Metabolism, Upgrade Your Brain, and Transform Your Life? And I want to jump in and ask you a question about something I've been insecure about my entire life. Belly fat. Never had a six pack? Never? And no matter how hard I've trained as an athlete in the past? No matter how hard I tried to biohack? Optimize sleep, which I did in your last book? To eating the right foods? To eating just chicken and broccoli all day? It seems like I've always got a little belly fat that I can never get rid of. I'm curious, is there a way you think I'll ever be able to burn belly fat for good? Through the things that I'm eating in a better way?

• 4:12Shawn Stevenson?

  First of all, folks need to know that you are ridiculously masculine. You know what I mean? Like you've got a great frame.

• 4:19Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 4:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Just an incredible athlete. You know, we've done a lot of stuff together.

• 4:22Lewis Howes?

  Worked out together at St. Louis.

• 4:24Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And.

• 4:25Lewis Howes?

  Played basketball together.

• 4:26Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, man. Dude. I've got a story about that I can tell everybody. But afterwards, driving home, because we were just gonna shoot around a little bit. Then we ended up playing three games. And then lifting afterwards. And on the way home, I've never felt like that. I had to pull over and take a nap.

• 4:43Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 4:44Shawn Stevenson?

  I've never felt like that before.

• 4:45Lewis Howes?

  You played hard.

• 4:46Shawn Stevenson?

  Because you and me were both like, I'm not gonna let him win. But yeah, there's a, there's a component, of course, with genetics. Now, with that said, we know that the leading science right now, and what's really beginning to finally explode and become a popular part of the lexicon, is epigenetics.

• 5:05Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 5:05Shawn Stevenson?

  And things that are above genetic control. Now, with that said, I think the first thing is having a understanding and an association with what fat actually is. And most folks have no idea. Unfortunately, we're like, we're at war with something we don't even understand. And so, fat can be broken down into essentially five different categories, at minimum. And a couple of these folks might have heard before, but we're gonna go even deeper. So the first type is subcutaneous fat. And subcutaneous fat is a type of white adipose tissue. This is a fat that's just below your skin. And so, if you're trying to, if you think about like, fat on your arms, or your thighs, your butt, you can also have some subcutaneous fat on your belly, but that's the stuff you can pinch. Now.

• 5:50Lewis Howes?

  I can pinch a lot right here.

• 5:52Shawn Stevenson?

  The other type of fat is visceral fat. And that's also, it's also known as omentum fat. And omentum fat is the kind of deeper recesses of your abdominal cavity. Right? So this is the fat that's really kind of around the organs, you know, kind of putting, if you have a lot of visceral fat, putting stress on your pancreas, and on your kidneys, and just everything in your core.

• 6:15Lewis Howes?

  This is the fat inside your, not on the outside of your muscles, but inside your body.

• 6:21Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, so it's like your abdominal cavity.

• 6:22Lewis Howes?

  Got you. Your visceral fat, and you want less of that.

• 6:25Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, this is the most dangerous type of fat. This is the fat that's most correlated with heart disease, with Alzheimer's, with type 2 diabetes. You know, it's just putting stress on your core, everything, which there's so much around there.

• 6:38Lewis Howes?

  Digestive tract, your organs, your liver, your stomach, everything.

• 6:42Shawn Stevenson?

  And this is the stuff, it's a little bit more firm to the touch. It's a little bit harder to get your hands around. And so these are both still two types of white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Okay, so your body's storing energy. And before I go on, let me preface by saying this. Our fat is actually amazing. It's one of the most important things that have made us the humans that we are today. Is our ability to store energy and to go back and utilize that energy. Our fat is programmed to do what we've taught it to do. It's just doing what it's programmed to do. It's very good at it, though. And it can be a little bit clingy, you know? So you have to give the right messages, and that's part of the issue. So I just want to make that clear.

• 7:23Shawn Stevenson?

  And fat is also, it's not, we tend to think it's like scattered droplets of cells or unhappiness throughout our body, but it's really an organ itself.

• 7:33Lewis Howes?

  Fat is an organ.

• 7:34Shawn Stevenson?

  It's an organ. It's an organ that has this interconnected communication. And being that it's an organ, it produces its own hormones. All right? So it's like making, producing more hormones and encourage more fat storage if it gets out of hand. All right, so I wanted to preface by saying that.

• 7:51Lewis Howes?

  Wait, is it an organ or is it like an organ?

• 7:54Shawn Stevenson?

  It's an organ.

• 7:55Lewis Howes?

  Fat is an organ?

• 7:56Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 7:56Lewis Howes?

  And?

• 7:58Shawn Stevenson?

  Just like, for example?

• 7:59Lewis Howes?

  So fat in our body is one organ and it's all connected? From the brain in my, from the fat in my brain to my belly to my toe?

• 8:06Shawn Stevenson?

  Now, there's different types of fat communities. All right? So this is another conversation. This, I go through all of these. I literally call it the fat communities in Eat Smarter and break this stuff down. So there's another type of fat in the white adipose tissue camp that a lot of people don't know about. It's called intramuscular fat. All right, intramuscular fat.

• 8:25Lewis Howes?

  This is the third type of fat?

• 8:26Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And so this type of fat really works on site to provide energy to your muscles. Now, when I went to school, my conventional education, I really was indoctrinated with an idea that fat and muscle are kind of, they have this dichotomy. Like they're two different things, they're separate, but they actually work together. And intramuscular fat really provides, and just to think about what it looks like, if you think about the marbling of a steak. All right? That's, that's your intramuscular fat. Now, that can get out of hand, too. And you can get what we refer to as chubby muscles. All right? With the intramuscular fat. So there's too much white adipose tissue storage on that particular fat community. All right?

• 9:09Shawn Stevenson?

  So these three are white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Now, here's what's really amazing, and a lot of folks might know about this next one. We also have body fat that burns fat. So they're not storage fats. These are fats that contribute to the burning of energy. The first one that's becoming a lot more recognizable is brown adipose tissue. All right, or BAT, brown adipose tissue, or brown fat. Now brown fat, the reason that it's brown is that it's so dense in mitochondria. All right.

• 9:42Lewis Howes?

  Which is mitochondria are good, right?

• 9:44Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, mitochondria are really the energy power plants of our cells. Really producing the energy. When we talk about having energy, these are the power plants creating that energy. And mitochondria is where your fat actually gets burned. All right, so folks don't, we're taught these like diet paradigms, like where the, how does it work? Where does the fat go? How does it get burned? Your mitochondria actually are the place where the triglycerides get shipped to, to actually burn them and use them as fat. So brown adipose tissue is brown because it's so dense in mitochondria.

• 10:17Lewis Howes?

  Side note, how, how do I go to bed weighing a certain amount and then I wake up and I lose two pounds? Where does that go? Is that just burned through sweat? Is that just mitochondria burning and it's disintegrating to the air? What is happening?

• 10:30Shawn Stevenson?

  This is such a great question. So in each, this is the first time in book form, like we're walking people through how the process of fat loss actually happens. And it's just, the question should be like, where the hell does fat go?

• 10:41Lewis Howes?

  Where does it go? You just poop it out? Do you sweat it out? Does it?

• 10:45Shawn Stevenson?

  You've got that.

• 10:45Lewis Howes?

  Do I breathe it in?

• 10:46Shawn Stevenson?

  You've got that Thanos keychain. Does it go to another dimension? You know what I mean? But what they did, and this was so fascinating, they actually tracked the path of fat getting burned throughout the body and tracked how it actually is eliminated. And so what they discovered was that about 84% of the fat, because, okay, we have to preface by saying this. For us psychologically, in our culture, we tend to think of burning fat, if there's a visual of it, it's sweating.

• 11:13Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Like we're out there, we're at the gym, we're sweating it out. That's like, that's your fat cells crying, having a good breakup cry, you know? That's how, that's what we think.

• 11:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 11:22Shawn Stevenson?

  But in actuality, about 84% of the fat that you lose or that you expel from your body is through breathing.

• 11:30Lewis Howes?

  What?

• 11:31Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, it's eliminated via your lungs. Yeah, it's carbon dioxide.

• 11:34Lewis Howes?

  So it, no way. So fat burns in the body and then it goes, what, into your lungs? It's like transporting through the lung cavity and then you breathe it out?

• 11:43Shawn Stevenson?

  It's, it's an eliminatory organ, you know? We don't think about that.

• 11:46Lewis Howes?

  What?

• 11:47Shawn Stevenson?

  We tend to think about like our gastrointestinal tract, our bladders, eliminatory organs, your lungs. And so you breathe about eighty-four percent of the fat that you lose comes out via your breath. And about a third of that happens while you're, while you're sleeping at night.

• 12:00Lewis Howes?

  So you breathe that out. That's how you burn it?

• 12:03Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Lewis Howes?

  Eighty, how much?

• 12:04Shawn Stevenson?

  Caesar Milan is the dog whisperer.

• 12:06Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 12:07Shawn Stevenson?

  You're the fat whisperer.

• 12:08Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. I burn it in my sleep. So wait a minute, how much fat do we burn through our, our lungs?

• 12:16Shawn Stevenson?

  About eighty-four percent of it.

• 12:17Lewis Howes?

  All of our fat. So if I'm a hundred pounds-

• 12:19Shawn Stevenson?

  But this is not just, you're breathing, it's all the metabolic processes that take place to create the metabolic kind of offshoots.

• 12:26Lewis Howes?

  It just comes through the mouth?

• 12:28Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, through the breathing. You also do eliminate some of body fat through fluids. So about, you know, somewhere around the ballpark of about fifteen percent, sixteen to fourteen percent sweat, urine.

• 12:38Lewis Howes?

  And bathroom, yeah.

• 12:39Shawn Stevenson?

  Tears.

• 12:42Shawn Stevenson?

  All of these things are, are eliminating products.

• 12:46Lewis Howes?

  Fat cells. Is the fat, it looks coagulated when you look at it in like, in your body, right? So how does it break down and then turn into just nothing that you can see?

• 12:58Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, it's a very complex and beautiful process.

• 13:03Lewis Howes?

  The body is fascinating what you can do.

• 13:04Shawn Stevenson?

  It is, it is. And we go through, we, and it can be so overwhelming. But what I did was I made it an analogy in the book of a theater, making your body like a cellular movie theater. And there are particular ushers who are there to put fat into the seats. So we tend to think that fat cells, we're trying to quote, kill fat or burn fat. But that's not really how it works, actually. Your fat cells are storage containers. And what they're getting filled with, the fat cells, basically when you're, when you're born, you have a certain allotment of fat cells. All right, you can't just indiscriminately kill them. They get filled with more and more energy. It makes the fat cell expand. So what we're trying to do is to get the fat cell to let go of its contents so it can be used as fuel.

• 13:49Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 13:49Shawn Stevenson?

  All right. And so there are two enzymes that are really the head ushers that push- Fats, the fat contents are triglycerides into the fat cell, or they usher them out when it's time to leave. So one of its hormone-sensitive lipase is the one that comes and gets folks out of the theater. All right, lipoprotein lipase takes the triglycerides and ushers them into the theater. All right, and then there's organs that kind of dominate and regulate what those enzymes are doing. You know, namely, your pancreas is like the mother of two brothers who have two different roles. One of them is insulin, and the other one, its brother, is glucagon. All right, insulin is so, man, when you think of insulin, what do you think of, though? Eating sugar? Yeah.

• 14:33Shawn Stevenson?

  That's what I think of, because insulin spikes in the body when you eat sugar, right? Yeah, and most folks think of diabetes, too. It's like tied into that lexicon. But insulin is so important for our survival. It's just, it's a super amazing. We need it. Yes, you absolutely have to have insulin. And if you're born, you know, in a condition where you have type 1 diabetes, and the beta cells in your pancreas aren't even making insulin, like, you can die, your cells won't get energy. So, now here's the thing, insulin's job is to store energy. Fat. Yeah, and to encourage all those enzymes to do their work as well. So when it's out of hand, when insulin is too active, it can be a problem. It's storing too much fat. Yeah, and it can get to a point where there's so much activity with insulin,

• 15:17Shawn Stevenson?

  it's getting overrun and stressed out that it stops doing its job properly. That's where you get insulin resistance. All right, and then you have something called, um, this kind of instant cell, fat cell creation that can take place with the liver. It'll just start making its own fat as well. So, but we'll circle back to that a little bit later. But here's the thing, so you've got insulin doing its job of fat storage or energy storage. Glucagon does the opposite. It encourages your cells to let go of their contents to be used as energy. But glucagon cannot do its job unless its brother sits his ass down somewhere and stops. Yes. So how do you get insulin to stop doing its job? That's what it's all about, man. That's what it's all about. But we don't want it to stop, we just want it to be efficient.

• 16:02Shawn Stevenson?

  Efficient. And it's, now here's another thing. We do know that, as you mentioned, sugar is a big driver of insulin. Carbohydrates in general.

• 16:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, breads, pastas, right?

• 16:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, but protein does as well. It incites the activity of insulin, at a lesser degree for sure. And even fat, in a kind of backdoor way, does drive insulin function too. Or even contributes to potentially insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance. So it's not just this one thing. But we do know that in our culture, you know, on average, folks are eating like 150 pounds of sugar a year, you know? So that abnormal amount of exposure is chronically creating this over-activity of insulin to the point that we have insulin resistance.

• 16:49Lewis Howes?

  Because 100 years ago, we weren't eating as much sugar, I'm assuming.

• 16:52Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, it's not even close. It's not even close.

• 16:54Lewis Howes?

  But what is with the life expectancy increases every year, it seems like? We're eating more and more bad things, but we're able to live longer, whereas before we weren't.

• 17:04Shawn Stevenson?

  That's the misnomer, though. We're not necessarily living longer, we're dying longer.

• 17:10Lewis Howes?

  We're getting sick and being able to stay alive.

• 17:12Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes, very different. And this is the first generation. We are the first generation right now that is going to not outlive our generations before us. Right? This is the first time we're seeing this downtick. We're supposed to be seeing folks, well, basically, the life expectancy has gone down for the first time in like recent history. Yeah, yeah.

• 17:33Lewis Howes?

  So we're saying we're not supposed to outlive our parents? Or what do you mean?

• 17:37Shawn Stevenson?

  So we'll just say the life expectancy of the past generation was 80 years old. Now it's 79.

• 17:45Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 17:46Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, so it's just going, a life expectancy is going down for the first time.

• 17:49Lewis Howes?

  Previous generation, got you. It's interesting, I was asking Dr. David Sinclair about this.

• 17:54Shawn Stevenson?

  I love him.

• 17:55Lewis Howes?

  He was like, "The goal is not to live as long as you can and be sick and miserable." He's like, "I've seen that in too many people. The goal is to live as long as you can, healthy, flexible." Abundant, you know, not with chronic pain and then die quickly.

• 18:10Shawn Stevenson?

  Right.

• 18:11Lewis Howes?

  It's a get sick and then die within a week. Not get sick and die within 20 years of misery. He's like, that's not a great life.

• 18:17Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, we don't want to just want lifespan, we want health span. And it all really boils down, and this is the most beautiful part about this. And what I'm really hoping to impress upon culture, because when we tend to think of food, we tend to think of it in relationship in our culture. We think of diet in relationship to weight. It's just like what's connected. When in reality, food is one of the greatest, if not the greatest determinant of what every single cell and organ system in your body is doing at all times. And this is what I really want to get across is, of course, I'm going to give you the best information possible on the metabolism connection with food. But also, how does food affect your cognitive performance? And it's shocking when you find this data out, how deeply food impacts your levels of empathy and your ability to connect with other people. Break that down as well.

• 19:02Lewis Howes?

  What are the foods that cultivate more empathy and compassion?

• 19:06Shawn Stevenson?

  And what are the foods? Before we get to that, the fat storage, there was one more.

• 19:10Lewis Howes?

  Were you talking about brown fat?

• 19:11Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, brown fat.

• 19:12Lewis Howes?

  And there was another fat.

• 19:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, so there's one other fat. And so brown adipose tissue is very dense in mitochondria, right? So these energy power plants, that's why it's brown. Babies have a lot of brown fat. It's kind of an evolutionary adaptation advantage to prevent hypothermia. Just to basically keep thermogenesis going. As you become an adult, you have a lot less brown adipose tissue. It's mostly located like around your collarbones, your shoulder blades, down your spine. And brown adipose tissue is remarkable in that it's really correlated if you have enough brown adipose tissue, which you can create more, and the mobilization activity of it is correlated with having a better body composition.

• 19:57Shawn Stevenson?

  So this type of fat is burning fat for you, if you know what you're doing.

• 19:59Lewis Howes?

  Brown fat.

• 20:00Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. All right, so that's, we've got three storage fats, and then we've got two other types of fat.

• 20:06Lewis Howes?

  And that's body fat that burns fat.

• 20:08Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes, and so this other one, and this is one a lot of folks might know, might not know a lot about yet, is beige fat.

• 20:14Lewis Howes?

  This is the fifth type of fat?

• 20:15Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, so this is beige fat.

• 20:17Lewis Howes?

  Beige fat.

• 20:18Shawn Stevenson?

  And so beige fat is really, really remarkable in that it can actually become brown fat or white fat.

• 20:27Shawn Stevenson?

  All right. Based on your lifestyle inputs and your nutrition can determine whether it's going to be coming, turning into a fat storing type of fat or a fat burning type of fat. And the browning of this fat, one of the things, and I'll just throw this out there for folks since you asked about specific food, when we go through so many different, but I'm going to throw one out that might sound a little bit crazy, a little controversial, is coffee. Coffee has been found to encourage your beige fat cells to become brown fat cells. And in fact, one of the studies that I cited in Eat Smarter found, they actually used FMRI and they looked at what was happening in the body when somebody drank coffee and they

• 21:08Shawn Stevenson?

  saw the brown fat areas of the body actually light up, signaling increased thermogenesis. And one of the studies found that there's about a three to 11% increase in metabolic rate from having caffeine. Now, there's a U-shaped curve of benefits, right? Some is good, once we get to a certain place, we can mess ourselves up. And also, we get in the conversation of what is that coffee coming along with, right? Is it just, is it coffee or are you consuming coffee?

• 21:34Lewis Howes?

  Donuts and crap.

• 21:36Shawn Stevenson?

  And like, you know, these coffee creamers with all these synthetic chemicals.

• 21:40Lewis Howes?

  That is not good.

• 21:41Shawn Stevenson?

  And even the coffee itself, are you getting a piping hot cup of coffee with pesticides and herbicides and rodenticides? And these toxicants that damage these hormones related to fat loss and fat storage and create kind of dysbiosis in the gut. So there's a big conversation there and we dive into all these pieces to see like, there's so many wonderful things that we have access to, but in our culture, we've been a little bit led astray. And it's not that coffee is inherently good or bad, it's been utilized for, by humans for centuries, but it's the quality and how you're going about it that can make all the difference.

• 22:16Lewis Howes?

  And the quantity probably, and yeah.

• 22:18Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And so, just going back to your original question, when we're targeting that, you know, the belly fat specifically, and this is something that is not talked about enough, it's really about encouraging and optimizing the hormones related to fat storage and fat burning.

• 22:35Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, and this gets into the conversation of calories because we tend to be very calorie focused. As far as we're trying to lose weight or we're trying to lose belly fat. And it's not that calories don't matter. I want to make that clear. I want to preface with this. But when I was in my nutritional science class in college, the very, like the king, the monarch, the warden of diet is calories. And I say warden intentionally because it's a little, it gets into this kind of prisoner mentality. Yeah. And diets are really revolving around this. And I, I'm always asking this question and I'm so grateful that I've kind of hardwired myself to do this. Where did it come from? Where the hell did this idea start? And so I went back and examined the entire history of calories.

• 23:20Shawn Stevenson?

  And it actually, for me, it's just like, when we find like Egyptian pyramids, like they didn't have any shit about calories. You know, like, nobody was even thinking about it or looking for it, even when it was discovered. And it wasn't discovered and used for nutrition. It was discovered and utilized initially in physics and engineering. And calorie. Yeah, and this was in 1800s. And then it made its transition into nutrition, thanks to a guy named Wilbur Atwater. But he's just kind of a little side note as well. And I basically, I go back and talk about all the people involved. But this is what changed America. This is what changed the world, really, was a physician. She's a pioneer for sure. Her name was Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters.

• 24:02Shawn Stevenson?

  And she's the one who popularized the term calorie. And she sold, and this was back in the early 1900s. She created a nutrition book, a diet book, and it sold 2 million copies back then, which is basically everybody and their mother had this book, alright? What was it called? This was Diet and Health and the Keto Calories, something like that, the Keto Calories. But I went back and read these old fangled writings. There's like a lot of pieces of it online. And this began the indoctrination of our culture in starting to look at food in terms of numbers. It's no longer this dynamic, multifaceted entity that affects all of our hormones and neurotransmitters and organ systems. Now it's numbers.

• 24:43Shawn Stevenson?

  And she specifically said, "We will no longer call a slice of bread, a slice of bread." You won't say a one slice of bread, you'll say 100 calories of bread. You will no longer say a slice of pie, you say 350 calories of pie. And so we stopped looking at food as food. We started this evolution and started looking at it as numbers. And she asserted that a woman of her height could eat whatever she wanted, as long as she maintained 1,200 calorie intake. And now, let me also make this clear. Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters battled with her weight for her lifetime. All right. And it's that term of like, teach what you want to learn kind of thing. Now, this is also crucial. And some people, this might tug at their heartstrings a little bit. This was also the beginning of this indoctrination,

• 25:27Shawn Stevenson?

  associating food with character, associating food with morality. And so she basically asserted that it's a character defect if you're not able to manage your weight. There's something wrong with you. And started to use terms like sin and punishment in relationship to food. And this was also during the time of like World War I. So food rationing was a big thing happening. And she said, one of her quotes I put in the book, and I'm paraphrasing that, for every pang of hunger you feel, you should have a double joy, knowing that you're saving the hunger pangs in a starving child or, you know, with soldiers and what. So she's basically saying, this was also a massive change in our perception that hunger is related to weight loss.

• 26:11Shawn Stevenson?

  If you're hungry, you're doing it right. And this started to really change the psychology of dieting. Right? And so calories began to become the king and the big focus. Now, I want to say this, calories matter for sure. It's a, it's a measurement of energy in food. Just like a meter is a measure of energy and distance. But that meter is consistent. If we measured this room consistently, it's going to be the same.

• 26:37Lewis Howes?

  Same distance.

• 26:38Shawn Stevenson?

  However, calories.

• 26:39Lewis Howes?

  Are different.

• 26:40Shawn Stevenson?

  Completely ignore, when you're talking about a measurement of energy, it ignores the complexity of human digestion and human hormones and neurotransmitters and cellular function. It's going to be different every day. The calories that you consume and what effects it has on your body.

• 26:55Lewis Howes?

  Because our hormones are changing, our bodies are changing, our timelines are changing. What we used to eat when we were 12 may not affect us now when we're 40 or 50.

• 27:04Shawn Stevenson?

  Exactly. Let alone you versus another person. And this is where we get in these situations where a diet works for one person, but it doesn't work for someone else. And it's, I'm sick of it, man.

• 27:13Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 27:14Shawn Stevenson?

  Because people keep thinking there's something wrong with them. And they're not getting these very fundamental principles. And so, so folks can start to. Free themselves of this caloric prison. I can share, there's five really powerful metrics that are not examined. There's really five major things that control what calories do in your body.

• 27:34Lewis Howes?

  What's one of those?

• 27:36Shawn Stevenson?

  So, if we think about, I keep mentioning hormones, but just to give a good analogy of what hormones are. Hormones are really biochemical messengers that help your cells, the cellular community that you have, this amazing cellular community, to communicate with each other. It's like metabolic DMs, right? It's like text messages, emails.

• 27:54Lewis Howes?

  How many hormones do we have?

• 27:55Shawn Stevenson?

  There's about 50.

• 27:57Lewis Howes?

  50 different hormones?

• 27:58Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, about 50.

• 27:58Lewis Howes?

  Are hormones, what is a hormone? Is it a cell? Is it an organ? Is it a connecting point? What is it?

• 28:07Shawn Stevenson?

  So, the building, the most important fundamental building block of our hormones are proteins. Alright, so I wanna, I wanna really reiterate this, how important protein is. Because it's needed to build your freaking hormones, alright?

• 28:22Lewis Howes?

  Where are hormones stored?

• 28:24Shawn Stevenson?

  All throughout your body. You know, even like that fat organ that we talked about is making its own hormones. But there are hormones that are being produced and secreted by your pituitary gland. Your hypothalamus is like a master regulator of your hormonal system, your endocrine system. It's in your brain. And so, one of the things we talk about in the book is this growing epidemic of neuroinflammation that is messing up people's hypothalamic function, that's screwing up what's happening downstream. Like, your thyroid is on that HPA axis.

• 28:55Lewis Howes?

  Is the thyroid here or something?

• 28:56Shawn Stevenson?

  In your throat, in your throat. And so, that's largely considered like the metabolic regulator, like your master gland associated with fat loss or fat storage. And it definitely plays a role. So, these are all pieces in this web. Now, what's actually determining what these calories are doing? And so, I mentioned, I gave a little preface of what our hormones are. So when we're talking about calories, these five things, and I'll give an analogy. I'll give like an acronym, the DM, alright? We're gonna use that as our letters. So it goes down in the DM. You know what I'm talking about.

• 29:31Shawn Stevenson?

  So the first thing that's controlling what calories are doing, the T stands for the type of food itself. Determines what the calories are doing in your body. And this is highlighted in this crazy study. This was published in Food and Nutrition Research. Listen to this, this is freaking crazy. They went to find out what would happen with a meal of the same calories. That's either a meal of whole foods or processed food. Same amount of calories. So a bowl of cereal and some fruits and vegetables. So what they did was, they had sandwiches. And so one set of folks got the sandwich that was considered whole food sandwich. It was whole grain bread and cheddar cheese. The other folks received a processed food sandwich, which was white bread and cheese product. Oh no.

• 30:16Shawn Stevenson?

  And that's, that's Kraft, Kraft slices. That American cheese tastes so good. They can't call it cheese.

• 30:23Shawn Stevenson?

  And so here's what happened after, and I love this study because they tracked the pathway of calorie burn. Their metabolic rate and what happened when they ate these two respective sandwiches. After they compiled the data, the folks, even though the calories were the same. The folks who consumed the processed food sandwich had a 50% reduction in calorie burn after eating that damn sandwich. What? 50% reduction. Why is that? Because the body, so this gets into some of the other things we'll talk about. But that, the processed nature of those foods created some metabolic dysfunction. And some confusion for your endocrine system. Oh man. And your nervous system and all these, the cellular community, that, that communication. So now the body is less apt to let go of that energy. It's confused, it's trying to hang on to it.

• 31:09Shawn Stevenson?

  Alright, now what are most folks eating? Processed foods. Processed foods, alright? So it's literally changing their way, changing the way their body even associates with calories. And they're trying to count these damn points. And not understanding that the very nature of how their body's operating is skewed. So that's just the T, that's the type of food, alright? So the H is how the food is prepared. Has a massive impact on what the calories do in your body, so. You mean whether it's cooked, whether it's raw, whether it's.

• 31:38Lewis Howes?

  Stir fried, I don't know.

• 31:39Shawn Stevenson?

  All of that.

• 31:40Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 31:40Shawn Stevenson?

  Exactly, yes. So to give a good example, if you think about spinach, right? Spinach, a lot of folks, of course, consider it's a healthy food. Popeye was like knocking it down in a can. I don't know if, have you ever had spinach out of a can?

• 31:53Lewis Howes?

  No.

• 31:55Shawn Stevenson?

  It must have been tough times. But, so spinach is a good, this is a good one because these green leafy vegetables, there's nutrition that's locked inside the cell wall. And you have to basically crack open the cell wall to extract the calories and some of the nutrients. And as the, as the spinach gets older, that's why we have this baby spinach. And as the spinach gets more mature, the cell walls become harder to break into. All right? So just right off the bat, baby spinach versus the same quantity of mature spinach, you're gonna get more calories out of the baby spinach.

• 32:28Lewis Howes?

  Is that better for you, or?

• 32:30Shawn Stevenson?

  This is not about better or worse right now. This is just like understanding there's some other stuff happening.

• 32:34Lewis Howes?

  Interesting, okay.

• 32:34Shawn Stevenson?

  Now, but here's another thing. Cooking the spinach too breaks down the cell wall. So regardless if it's a baby spinach, cooked spinach, I mean a mature spinach. And when this happens, it also, the density of the spinach, like you've seen it.

• 32:49Lewis Howes?

  Shrink, whole bag.

• 32:51Shawn Stevenson?

  Comes this little teeny baby teaspoon, right? And so this is one of the things, and I really start the book talking about this, that most experts will agree that it was our ability to cook that really created like a quantum leap in the evolution of the human brain. Because we're now able to extract more nutrients and calories from our food. Even though this, this term wasn't invented yet. Not to say that it's good or bad, or that raw food isn't good. It's just understanding when you, how the food is prepared changes what calories do in your body.

• 33:23Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. So if you're cooking spinach, it has less calories in it?

• 33:27Shawn Stevenson?

  If you're cooking spinach, calories become more available.

• 33:30Lewis Howes?

  So what does that mean? When you consume it?

• 33:33Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 33:33Lewis Howes?

  Your body's consuming more calories?

• 33:35Shawn Stevenson?

  It's able to extract more of the calories when it's cooked.

• 33:38Lewis Howes?

  If it's raw, it's got less calories, a little bit less.

• 33:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Less that you can extract from it, in general. These are, these are minutia. These are small things, but they matter. So this gets into the conversation of. What food is and so even when we talk about calories. The way that this was initially kind of brought to the forefront, they use something called a bomb calorimeter. All right, a bomb calorimeter. And what they do is they took the food and they put into a box. And they put that box into another box that's filled with water. And then they would burn the food with electrical energy to find out all of the available calories that were in this food. That was used to heat the water up. And so, once they did this, they were like, okay, there's 200 calories in this particular food product.

• 34:25Shawn Stevenson?

  The problem is, you might, you might be the bomb, Louis, but you're not a bomb calorimeter. All right, your body is very different. There are indigestible components of that food, for example. Whereas the bomb calorimeter is basically saying all the calories that are here. When you don't absorb all the calories in the food that you eat. Okay, so this creates this schism. All right, so those indigestible components could be, they're gonna be more in raw spinach. You're not gonna digest as much. I hope that makes sense. So you're not gonna digest as much and you're not gonna pull as many calories in. However, there's bioavailable micronutrients that you're gonna get. It's not that raw spinach versus cooked spinach is good or bad.

• 35:08Shawn Stevenson?

  It's just, there's different ways that it impacts your body. That's how the food is prepared. Types of food, how it's prepared. Right, so the DM, it goes down in the DM, all right. The next one is the E. And the E stands for energy exchange. Now, this one here, this is something folks might have learned about a little bit in school. I know I did in my university class. However, I don't think we really get this. It costs energy. It costs calories to digest calories. Your body uses calories to digest calories. To burn or digest the calories. To produce the. To chew. The saliva, to chew, to swallow. The intestine wall, like everything, right?

• 35:52Shawn Stevenson?

  To churn the stuff, to produce stomach acid, to move it, to take the food from your gastrointestinal tract through your uh, small intestine and move it through uh, into your bloodstream and move those cells, those, those nutrients to your, to your brain, to your eyeballs, to your toes. How much does, how much do we burn from one meal? From eating, chewing, to eliminating?

• 36:14Lewis Howes?

  How long does that take typically? Is that a 12 or 24 hour window?

• 36:17Shawn Stevenson?

  It depends, man. That's such a very diverse question because it depends on the type of food. It depends on, matter of fact, we'll get to that in a moment.

• 36:24Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 36:25Shawn Stevenson?

  We'll get to that. So.

• 36:27Lewis Howes?

  Energy exchange.

• 36:27Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, energy exchange. Now, this energy exchange, how many calories or how much the caloric expenses in digesting food depends on the type of food too. The macronutrients specifically is what people know about, but it's a little bit more diverse.

• 36:40Lewis Howes?

  Processed food is going to be harder to digest? It's going to be more work or less work?

• 36:45Shawn Stevenson?

  It depends on the type of food.

• 36:47Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 36:47Shawn Stevenson?

  But let's, we'll stick with the overarching because we could do the whole show just on that one topic. But just on the macronutrient side.

• 36:55Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 36:56Shawn Stevenson?

  Proteins are well noted to be more calorically expensive to digest. It costs you about 20 to 30% of the protein that you eat is, the calories in there are used to digest the protein. So we'll just say if you consume 100 grams of protein, 20 to 30, I'm sorry, 100 calories of protein, 20 to 30 calories are used to digest that protein.

• 37:18Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's pretty good.

• 37:19Shawn Stevenson?

  So you get a net profit of calories of 70, alright?

• 37:24Lewis Howes?

  So you can have more calories and realize it's going to be less that you're actually.

• 37:28Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, with protein. With protein, with carbohydrates, it's going to cost you, it's about 10 to 15% of that energy that you take in, caloric energy is used to digest it. For fats, it's about zero to somewhere in the ballpark of about 5% to digest it.

• 37:42Lewis Howes?

  So more protein equals more burning of calories.

• 37:46Shawn Stevenson?

  It's called the thermic effect of food, alright? And protein is largely kept out of the conversation today. It's, people are battling about carbs and fats.

• 37:54Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 37:54Shawn Stevenson?

  These are the big diet frameworks. And protein is like Rodney Dangerfield, is like, you know, I get no respect. You know what I mean? It's just like, so it was so fascinating because I think too, in our culture, we believe that most Americans are just eating a ton of protein.

• 38:07Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 38:08Shawn Stevenson?

  When the data actually shows something very different. There are populations that are eating, um. Very high amount of protein, but the quality of their protein too is a problem. And then, but there's a large portion of our society that's not eating enough protein. They don't, not even near.

• 38:24Lewis Howes?

  What are they eating, sugar and carbs?

• 38:27Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, because we've replaced so many things in food with more, with more sugar, you know? So, the thermic effect of food, this is not taken into consideration. This does not show up on your product label. And just to give people a food tip here, one of them is almonds. Almonds is really a great example. And there was actually a study that was done and they was looking at, basically is saying there's a discrepancy in the at-water system of caloric. So what you see on the back of a product label, people, companies are not using a bomb calorimeter anymore to measure calories in their food. They're just doing some math.

• 39:01Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 39:02Shawn Stevenson?

  All right, they're just like, okay, there's four, um, four calories per gram of protein, right? And they're just doing some math, right? So that's the at-water system. But what they found was that even though it might be a hundred and seventy calories of almonds you're consuming, that's on the product label, in actuality, you only get a net caloric intake of a hundred and twenty-nine of those calories, all right?

• 39:25Lewis Howes?

  Say it one more time.

• 39:27Shawn Stevenson?

  A hundred and seventy calories you're consuming of almonds.

• 39:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Shawn Stevenson?

  You're only netting, you're actually only getting a hundred and twenty-nine.

• 39:33Lewis Howes?

  Because you're burning.

• 39:34Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Lewis Howes?

  The other.

• 39:35Shawn Stevenson?

  There's energy being used, there's a thermic effect of food, right? So almonds are a great.

• 39:40Lewis Howes?

  Now, is that true for everyone or is that based on your hormones and your metabolic rate?

• 39:44Shawn Stevenson?

  That gets to the next one, all right? So, the T H E, so it's going down in the D M, all right? The D M. So the D is digestive efficiency, all right? Digestive efficiency. And this leans us into the conversation of your unique metabolic fingerprint, all right? Every single human being. is incredibly unique in what their metabolism and their digestion is doing. There's never been a digestion like you before in human history that will never be after. And you are not even the same today as you'll be tomorrow. Exactly. It is always fluid and changing. And the problem is, we think that we're, we put ourselves in this box, even a diet. A diet might work for us for a year and then all of a sudden, we're doing the same things and it stops working.

• 40:28Shawn Stevenson?

  And we blame us. It's like, no, I just need to paleo harder. I need to keto harder. I need to vegan harder. Count calories more. Yeah, and these are great frameworks, but we don't want to, we don't want them to imprison us because we change. Our bodies are continuously changing and evolving. Not to say that any of those aren't wonderful. And Eat Smart is really a unifier of whatever diet framework you want to go with. I support that, but there are principles that apply for success in all of them. So digestive efficiency means your ability to produce stomach acid is one factor of that. Your enzyme production, like folks that produce lactase. The enzyme that can break down lactose, right, milk sugar.

• 41:13Shawn Stevenson?

  About 75% of the population don't produce adequate amounts, if any, of lactase enzymes. So they're not digesting, right? And so they're not extracting as many calories from it. Not that this is a good thing though, because your bacteria in your body are gonna go crazy if you're not digesting it properly. Thus, you know, running off to the bathroom, you know, because you don't know if you have to fart or whatever. You know what I mean? And you're not fun to be around if you're lactose intolerant, like you have a, you know, extreme case of that and you're like down in some, you know, some, some milk. You're on the gallon day diet, right? So these are all factors that influence your digestive efficiency. And also for you, for example, your gastrointestinal tract is probably longer than the average person. Right?

• 41:58Shawn Stevenson?

  Cause I'm bigger and taller. Yeah. And there's more time for it to kind of stay in your body. That that's super highway is just longer because it has to try to fuel this bigger vessel. How long is our intestinal tract? Depends on the person. How long is? It's several feet. I'll just put it like that. Yeah. It's, it depends on the person and it's, but it's also, we tend to think it's very uniform. We think these things are uniform across the board. Right? Like this five foot two girl is supposed to be doing the same protocol as a six foot four Lewis Howes. Right? You should drink the same amount of water, eight glasses of eight ounces a day. No, we have, everything is unique. We gotta get back to these principles.

• 42:41Shawn Stevenson?

  So digestive efficiency, that's the E. The D. The D. Goes down in the DMs. So I'm sorry. That's the D. Yeah, that's the D. The M. That's the D. The M, alright, goes down to the DMs. This one right here, oh.

• 42:56Shawn Stevenson?

  This is really, this one man, this is like the final frontier when we're talking about nutrition and health and where we're at with science right now. And the M is your microbiome makeup. The makeup of your microbiome has a massive impact on your body's association with calories.

• 43:14Shawn Stevenson?

  This is part of the lexicon now. I know just about everybody listening has probably heard of the microbiome, right? This incredible ecology, this, this dynamic plethora of microbes that inhabit our bodies, that are in and on our bodies, even right now, dude, you got like 400 trillion viruses. Yeah, I know. The viruses on people's mind. Bugs. Right. All the body. All over. Isn't that crazy? 400 trillion and many of them are opportunistic, right? But that means that when you're compromised, they can take control. But the thing is why they're around, they all play a role. It's not good or bad. It's about us being in a good state of health because viruses have actually helped us to evolve as humans.

• 43:56Shawn Stevenson?

  As a matter of fact, when the human genome was decoded, they found that humans, the human gene itself is 8% virus.

• 44:03Lewis Howes?

  Right. It's like alien, right? It's like a

• 44:06Shawn Stevenson?

  Dude, it's, it's crazy. It's crazy. And we're at war with these things. We're at war with microbes. We want to kill viruses. We want to kill bacteria. Not to say that novel things or things that the body doesn't have an innate immunity towards, we, we shouldn't be careful about, but we also have an adaptive immune system that this is how we got here. And what the greatest science that we have right now shows that our immune system itself was started by viruses that were defending itself against other viruses. And that's how we became the kind of dynamic adaptive immune system that we have today. And so this is the B cells, T cells, you know, these interferons, natural killer cells, all these things.

• 44:48Shawn Stevenson?

  So, but going back to the microbiome and the association with calories, this, this, this is going to freak you out. Listen to this. So, to start with, they, this was published in the journal Cell.

• 45:00Shawn Stevenson?

  They found that there's specific bacteria in mice that actually block their intestines from absorbing as many calories. Alright, so the bacteria in their gut blocked the absorption of calories. Now, some folks are like, well, we're not mice. I get that. Now we have human studies, and now we know that folks that start to lean into being overweight and obese, there's a very distinct shift in the microbiome cascade. We can literally just look at somebody's microbiome cascade, not even know what they look like, what their body composition is, and know that they're overweight based on their bacteria. Alright, and so what they did was they took these human quote fat bacteria and implanted them into lean mice.

• 45:41Shawn Stevenson?

  And what happened was, the mice who were in, uh, who had the fat bacteria put into their bodies began to gain weight. They became insulin resistant and, and gained body fat rapidly. Versus taking human samples from healthy test subject, lean test subjects, and putting them into mice. And they began, they, they stayed lean, alright?

• 46:05Shawn Stevenson?

  Well, I'm getting excited. This is the one. This is this. This study right here is the freakiest one to me. They took identical twins. All right. Humans? Humans. Yeah. They took identical twins and they looked at their microbiome cascade. And they found that the, again, these are identical twins. Same caloric intake. All right. The the twin who had a higher ratio of bacteria associated with obesity gained more weight, had the tendency towards gaining more weight and body fat. Even though they're eating the same diet and they're identical freaking people, they're identical twins. The calories became such a lower tier thing. They're eating the same amount, yet one's gaining fat and one isn't.

• 46:49Shawn Stevenson?

  So this conversation is so much bigger than just managing calories and telling your patients that they need to be in a caloric deficit. We're way past that right now. These things matter. They absolutely matter. But there's so much more to the picture and so many people are suffering because they keep doing calorie restricting and trying all these different diets and not understanding, we need to get your microbiome healthy. How do we get the microbiome healthy? Ah.

• 47:16Shawn Stevenson?

  So that's the solution. Yeah. It's focused on the microbiome, not the calorie deficit. Yeah, this is a big part of the book, too. You know, we focus on these things. Yeah, yeah. Uh, we can get into that. So one of the the the most important things that the research is showing is that one of the most remarkable things in association with fat loss and weight loss is associated with having a higher diversity of of microbes in your gut, specifically bacteria. The higher the diversity, the lower your body weight and body fat percentage, the correlation. The problem is, here in the Western world, our diversity of our microbes is just like, we've got a lot of endangered species and a lot of things are extinct versus folks who

• 47:59Shawn Stevenson?

  are in more of a kind of an indigenous culture. A plethora of fruits and vegetables and uniqueness, right? Yeah. Somewhere around four times as many different microbes. Right? So take yours, multiply it times four. The different, um, the different species of microbes. All right? So in the Western world, our our diversity is going down. And this is also associated with the, some of the problems we're seeing that we don't, we think it's just associated to, it's it's, people are, they don't have willpower, end of story. Right, right. But here in the United States, and I want people to really get this. We have an epidemic. And nobody's talking about this. And nobody's talking about this right now and associating to the problems we're seeing. We have an epidemic of obesity.

• 48:44Shawn Stevenson?

  Over 200 million people here in this country right now are overweight or obese. All right.

• 48:50Lewis Howes?

  What's the definition of obesity?

• 48:52Shawn Stevenson?

  Obesity?

• 48:53Lewis Howes?

  How much body fat?

• 48:55Shawn Stevenson?

  Unfortunately, this is tied to some questionable metrics with like with BMI. You know, because somebody can be like have a lot of muscle on their frame. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about, we know what's happening here in the United States. And a recent study came out, it's meta-analysis. I determined that about only 12% of United States citizens are metabolically healthy. All right. So we got over 200 million people who are overweight or obese.

• 49:21Lewis Howes?

  How much body fat is overweight on a person? Or how much body fat percentage would that be?

• 49:25Shawn Stevenson?

  It depends.

• 49:27Lewis Howes?

  20%, 30%?

• 49:29Shawn Stevenson?

  I mean, even these numbers, man, can be a little bit. You know, for, just for example, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're healthier because your body fat percentage is low. Like I had a 4%, 4.6% body fat at one point. I was not healthy. But just in general, you know, guys can be somewhere in the ballpark of 12%, 15%. And that's still, but then it's just like the vanity aspect. Like I can't see my, I can't see my lines.

• 49:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Cause I'm, right now I'm like 16%. And I just checked.

• 50:01Shawn Stevenson?

  But you're a healthy guy. Like this is what I'm saying, like, when I say that it depends on you. These numbers, we have a big problem with these numbers. But I'm using the numbers as a leverage as far as with statistics to try to like get our eyes open. But there's so much variance within that. Because again, like, some people would sell their, like they'd name their first born child Rumpelstiltskin, like to have your body. You know what I mean? So, yeah, we gotta keep this stuff in context.

• 50:28Lewis Howes?

  Sure, sure, sure, okay.

• 50:29Shawn Stevenson?

  200 million people in the United States.

• 50:32Lewis Howes?

  Are obese.

• 50:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Obese or overweight. On top of that, over 130 million people in the United States have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes.

• 50:40Lewis Howes?

  130?

• 50:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 50:42Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 50:43Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 50:45Shawn Stevenson?

  It is crazy. It's crazy. So diabetes or prediabetes. And on top of that, about 60% of the United States population has some degree of heart disease. Right now.

• 50:56Lewis Howes?

  What is, what does heart disease consist of? What are the types of heart disease in that category?

• 51:03Shawn Stevenson?

  So this is such a diverse topic too, because even our definition of these things is a little skewed. You know, hardening of the arteries, for example, like how does all this stuff work? But I want to point back to a really important point because I just, I don't want this to go left unsaid. Some of my best friends are like the top cardiovascular surgeon in the world or the top gastroenterologist in the United States. All right, these are my friends, colleagues, and they will tell you. So top gastroenterologist, just talked with him recently. He was in school for like, what, 15 years? 15 years.

• 51:48Shawn Stevenson?

  And he shared with me, he got, and he specializes in the treatment of of systems associated with digesting your food. The systems and organs. But guess how much education he got on food?

• 52:02Lewis Howes?

  One month?

• 52:03Shawn Stevenson?

  Two weeks. Like you, even a month versus 15 years of education, learning about food for two weeks. You treat organs that deal with food.

• 52:14Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 52:14Shawn Stevenson?

  We have a big problem. So in the cardiovascular domain, same thing. Elective, right? And your heart is made of the food that you eat. Your arteries are made of the food that you eat. Your blood is made of the food that you eat. How do we not have an education on these things? You know, like our attention is so... The system itself, these are incredibly smart people. These are some of the best and brightest. But if you take a really smart person and you miseducate them or you teach them the wrong thing, they become world-class at doing the wrong thing. And we're keep trying to treat symptoms. We're treating the symptoms of not knowing how food creates all these things. So it is that deep. This is how powerful food is. You know, it becomes everything about you.

• 52:58Shawn Stevenson?

  The things you see in the mirror, how you feel.

• 53:02Shawn Stevenson?

  It's all based on food. You know, it's so powerful, so.

• 53:06Lewis Howes?

  What is, I'm talking about how to optimize the microbiome.

• 53:10Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 53:11Lewis Howes?

  And I'm hearing you say it's the diversity of the whole foods that we should be eating. And in America specifically, we have very limited diversity of these whole foods, these vegetables, these fruits, these healthy fats and meats and nuts, I'm assuming. Is that what it is?

• 53:27Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 53:27Lewis Howes?

  Having a diversity and the more diverse we can have, the better our microbiome makeup will become.

• 53:33Shawn Stevenson?

  Yep. And in the book, I cite a brand new study that found that increasing your diversity in your fruits and vegetables inherently increases the diversity of your microbes. So this is a very simple thing we can do. Even if we're eating healthy, we tend to get caught in our little like food meal prep gone awry. You know what I mean? Like chicken, rice.

• 53:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, same thing every day.

• 53:53Shawn Stevenson?

  Chicken, rice, broccoli, you know, but I'm eating healthier compared to the, but what are you doing for your microbes? They need a diversity. And really, the heart of the matter is, I've been talking about probiotics for 15 years.

• 54:05Lewis Howes?

  Taking probiotics.

• 54:06Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, not taking, but just the, the science of probiotics. And of course, that's one input. But you can take all the probiotics you want. They're not going to colonize if they don't have the food that they want. It's kind of like going to a party and you're hungry and they don't have snacks that you want. You're gonna have to leave there soon. Hit Del Taco.

• 54:23Lewis Howes?

  You're gonna Taco Bell life, baby. I'm gonna Taco Bell about 10 years.

• 54:28Shawn Stevenson?

  Dude, I would get the 10 pack.

• 54:32Lewis Howes?

  Back in St. Louis.

• 54:33Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 54:34Lewis Howes?

  Getting Taco Bell.

• 54:35Shawn Stevenson?

  We've come a long way.

• 54:36Lewis Howes?

  Steak and Shake. Oh, man.

• 54:37Shawn Stevenson?

  That's if you want to get fancy, you know? So here's the thing, and it's, it's so wonderful because, you know, when we get into these principles and how all of this stuff kind of fits together, um, this is a simple input, is increasing the diversity of the fruits and vegetables helps to give, helps to create the preferred food choice or the prebiotics. So there's probiotics. Prebiotics. Prebiotics are the food that the microbes want in order for them to stick around. So we're losing all of these species because they don't have their preferred food in our system anymore. All right. And then we have postbiotics. We have pre, pro, and post.

• 55:20Shawn Stevenson?

  The postbiotics are basically the vitamins, minerals, scaffers, these short chain fatty acids, all the nutrients your bacteria create in you for you. It's a symbiotic relationship. And that's really the front line right now. It's the, you know, the, like I said, the, the final frontier that we're studying.

• 55:38Lewis Howes?

  Let me ask you a hypothetical question. Obviously, this would never happen, but I've asked this to different nutritionists and doctors and scientists who've come on. Hypothetically, you're only able to eat five foods for the rest of your life.

• 55:55Lewis Howes?

  Just say hypothetical. You're on an island, there's only five food groups there. Or you're only able to choose five every day for the rest of your life. If you had to choose, what would those five foods be to try to optimize your hormones, your mitochondria, your microbiome? You know, everything to optimize, obviously be very limited, but if you could only choose five. And you get to choose five vitamins and supplements if you wanted to. So five foods, five vitamins, obviously it's hypothetical. But what would you say?

• 56:23Shawn Stevenson?

  Louis, I don't know if anybody's ever done this on your show before, but I'm gonna have to plead the fifth. Like, I can't answer that question. It goes against everything, you know, and there are, you know, that, even that, if I had to choose like my five favorite or whatever, you know, I could do that, but it's, it's really getting away from the, the urgency of us increasing our diversity of food. It's, it's an urgent situation right now. And on top of that, I, I gotta share this too. We go to the grocery store, it looks like there's all this different stuff to choose from. But the majority of foods that the average American eats are from the same 12 foods, just packaged up differently. Like, most of those, like, wheat, corn, soy, you know, sugar. Orange is made the top of the list, too.

• 57:08Shawn Stevenson?

  A large deal of orange juice, you know, but we're just eating the same stuff packaged up differently.

• 57:13Lewis Howes?

  Over and over and

• 57:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Wondering why our gastrointestinal tract and our microbiome, so many species are becoming extinct. We're eating the same stuff, so, yeah.

• 57:22Lewis Howes?

  It's becoming extinct because we're not eating more diversity?

• 57:25Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes, diversity.

• 57:26Lewis Howes?

  So it's why grow it, why plant it, why, you know, develop it if we're not eating it, essentially, right?

• 57:31Shawn Stevenson?

  It's, it's the way that this, this gets into the most important part of the book for me, which is the systems behind why we're eating the way that we're eating, and how do we fix those systems? You know, our governments, unfortunately, a lot of our food policies are controlled by lobbyists, who, you know, work for these major food companies. And our government, and I shared one of the studies in the book, which is, this should be really eye-opening for folks, provide government subsidies for processed food creation, you know, like billions, hundreds of billions of dollars. And there was, and the thing is, it's like, okay, does that actually correlate with worse health? And there was actually a study done, looking at the people who consume the highest amount of these government-subsidized foods, had about a 40% greater incidence of being obese.

• 58:16Shawn Stevenson?

  So there's a direct link between what's being provided to our citizens. And it started off with good intentions, providing government subsidies to farmers, but now it's these big agricultural businesses that are growing the same genetically-altered food crops that become the very basis of the human diet.

• 58:35Lewis Howes?

  The foundation of our food, yeah.

• 58:36Shawn Stevenson?

  And the fruits and vegetables aren't getting anything. And so this also leads to the reason it's so damn cheap for us to go to Taco Bell and get a whole damn taco.

• 58:45Lewis Howes?

  For 99 cents.

• 58:46Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, not just one, but you get two for 99 cents.

• 58:50Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy, man.

• 58:50Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, two for 99 cent tacos, and avocado costs four bucks or three dollars, and it falls off a damn tree, right? How, how is that possible? And it gets into how the money is managed and where money is being funneled, is being funneled into the processed food system.

• 59:06Lewis Howes?

  So what would you say on a, on a weekly basis are the types of foods you're eating in your house? What do you eat then? What's the diversity of foods? If you're not eating five, if you're eating 50, what are those foods? Those main foods for you?

• 59:18Shawn Stevenson?

  Okay, so, key word here, diversity.

• 59:21Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 59:21Shawn Stevenson?

  Diversity, and

• 59:24Shawn Stevenson?

  I hesitant to say because I don't want people to base on what I'm doing. Because they need to do what's best for them. And what we do is we go through all of the the stuff that has some clinical efficacy. Like actual peer reviewed evidence to support how this food is effective in blank things. So whether it's helping the diversity of your gut, whether it's helping. Mental performance. Yeah, that and also since we're on the subject of metabolism still, I'll give you one of my favorite food groups. And what I do on a regular basis. And this is highlighted in an incredible peer reviewed study that found that the consumption of green leafy vegetables. Everybody hears it, eat your veggie, eat your veggie. Why? Now we know why.

• 1:00:07Shawn Stevenson?

  So what they found was that the consumption of non starchy green leafy vegetables led to a direct increase in the production of our body's major satiety hormones like GLP one leptin. Right. So the things that control our satiety. Because that's one of the issues with any diet framework is you need to you need to make sure that you're avoiding the thing. Like I call these these kind of three amigos of body fat growth. And one of them is hunger and managing your hunger hormones and neurotransmitters related to that. That's one of the things. So green leafy vegetables and another study found that. To help with the metabolism. Yeah. So they found that for every serving of vegetables that you have in a day correlated with a one third reduction in waist circumference.

• 1:00:52Shawn Stevenson?

  What's that mean? So every serving of vegetable led to about a third less fat being on your waist. Really? Yeah, yeah, really fascinating. And then if we want to make the jump to the cognitive side. What would be the top veggies, leafy, leafy greens? So many diversity, man. Spinach, kale, bok choy. All of it, just get it all. All of it diverse. Now, is it cooked, raw in a salad, what's? Both. Really? Diverse. Doesn't matter. And it also keeps things fresh and fun. And also, let me be clear about this too, when I'm talking about green leafy vegetables. You know this, man, or Mike, you might not have, you might not remember. I didn't eat a salad until I was 25. Yeah, took me until about 25, 30. Maybe I was 30 when I got sweet greens. It was 30 in New York City. Yeah, the greatness bowl.

• 1:01:37Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I'm, I think part of why I'm so good at this is that I was really, really messed up. You know, and I just grew up in a culture where, you know, this just wasn't a part of my reality. There's no way that I would eat a salad. Right. And so. Please understand, a big part of that is association and culture and environment. We talk about in the book, that in the book. But also, if food tastes good, it makes it a whole lot easier. What if we make those vegetables taste phenomenal, right? And that's the thing that's missing oftentimes. And we also have this thing in our minds that if it tastes good, it's not healthy. There's like this little thing, like this can't be good for me. But it's actually, why do you think food tastes good? It tastes good for you to eat it.

• 1:02:22Shawn Stevenson?

  It encourages, we're hardwired to seek tasty things. But food manufacturers have leveraged that desire to eat tasty things to our detriment. You know, and so I talk about that food science and the science of flavor. Because even flavors and foods are indicators of nutritional content. If we were living in a natural way, right? So we develop these flavor preferences. Based on, we might be deficient in selenium and omega threes. So we have these flavor associations, we know like, okay, I need to go and eat blank food. You know, I need to go and catch some fish because my body is wanting this thing. Now we just go to 7-Eleven. You know what I mean? Like, but we can take back control of these systems and recalibrate them.

• 1:03:05Shawn Stevenson?

  And I was gonna share earlier, one of the things that I wanted to do was stack conditions. So when I give you this food, it's not just one thing it's good for. There's another side with the cognitive function side. And this was conducted by researchers at Rush University in Chicago. And what they did was, they looked at folks who were beginning, you know, into their senior years. And actually looked at their brains and looked at their diets. And they found that folks who ate two or more servings of green leafy vegetables each day had brains that were about 11 years younger on average.

• 1:03:34Lewis Howes?

  Shut up.

• 1:03:35Shawn Stevenson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:36Lewis Howes?

  This is why I was so stupid in school. I'd say sugar all day. I never ate any vegetables.

• 1:03:42Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Lewis Howes?

  Man.

• 1:03:43Shawn Stevenson?

  Me too, me too, man. I would get that personal pizza.

• 1:03:47Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 1:03:48Shawn Stevenson?

  Get the pretzel with cheese.

• 1:03:50Lewis Howes?

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 1:03:51Shawn Stevenson?

  I dipped the pretzel into the cheese and then dipped the pizza into the cheese.

• 1:03:55Lewis Howes?

  That sounds like my life.

• 1:03:57Shawn Stevenson?

  So I'm over there, game day, you know, like the musket totally dinner. When the offense is in, I'm doing my thing. Defense, I'm yawning, I'm tired, like, you know.

• 1:04:07Lewis Howes?

  I was so tired all the time.

• 1:04:08Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Lewis Howes?

  Working out, practice, always yawning.

• 1:04:10Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Lewis Howes?

  Never ate anything healthy.

• 1:04:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:13Lewis Howes?

  Did I think I told you this, when I went to Principia at the boarding school.

• 1:04:18Lewis Howes?

  There was a milk dispenser in our dorm. I was thirteen years old. A five gallon milk dispenser.

• 1:04:23Shawn Stevenson?

  What? A milk dispenser?

• 1:04:25Lewis Howes?

  Milk dispenser. Not two percent. Whole milk.

• 1:04:28Shawn Stevenson?

  That whole milk.

• 1:04:29Lewis Howes?

  This is the cafeteria milk dispenser, you know what I'm talking about, that you like.

• 1:04:32Shawn Stevenson?

  Oh, yeah, for the cereal.

• 1:04:33Lewis Howes?

  They put the big bag in there, like big five gallon bag that you put in there, cut it open, and then you open it up. I got them to move it into my room. And I swear to you, I swear to you, I would go through five gallons every week.

• 1:04:47Shawn Stevenson?

  No, this is crazy.

• 1:04:49Lewis Howes?

  Drink it throughout the morning, drink it at night when I'm studying, drinking it all day. Cause this is how I was conditioned as a kid. My dad would give me a glass of milk every night. It was just like, drink more milk.

• 1:05:00Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, milk does.

• 1:05:00Lewis Howes?

  Commercials, all this stuff. I had a five gallon dispenser for a year in my dorm. Just drinking it all day. And I was like, man, why am I always tired? I can only imagine the, the quality of athlete I could have been. Had I learned nutrition when I was a teenager. Cause I didn't eat anything quality.

• 1:05:22Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Lewis Howes?

  Never.

• 1:05:23Shawn Stevenson?

  Crazy. Man, like, that's literally blowing my mind. You got them to move it into your room?

• 1:05:27Lewis Howes?

  My room.

• 1:05:27Shawn Stevenson?

  You're free.

• 1:05:28Lewis Howes?

  Right next to my bed, just drinking it all day.

• 1:05:31Shawn Stevenson?

  Wow, dude, that's crazy. And like you said, what could have been?

• 1:05:35Lewis Howes?

  What could have been?

• 1:05:36Shawn Stevenson?

  Same thing for me, you know, and I ran a four, five, forty when I was fifteen, you know?

• 1:05:41Lewis Howes?

  Imagine eating healthy.

• 1:05:42Shawn Stevenson?

  Dude, but it was that same season.

• 1:05:45Lewis Howes?

  You'd be six feet tall if you ate healthy.

• 1:05:46Shawn Stevenson?

  It, this, in the same season, in the same season, I was doing track practice, two hundred meter time trial. And as I was coming off the curve into the straightaway, you know this story, my hip broke. And my bones were so brittle. I was, dude, I was five nine in eighth grade. Like I was towering. You know how you're in the back row? And then everything just starts to break down, you know, my bones. And it wasn't until I was twenty when I got diagnosed with this degenerative bone disease, degenerative disc disease, so my spine was just deteriorating. And nobody stopped to ask like, how could this happen to a twenty year old kid or fifteen year old kid is breaking his hip at track practice? And from there, my, my dreams of, you know, college football, everything started to become vanquished.

• 1:06:29Shawn Stevenson?

  I've got game films where I break away, like thirty nine sweep, I'm gone. I'm five yards from the end zone, nobody's behind me. And then I, I start to fall, like breaking down.

• 1:06:39Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 1:06:40Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, tearing muscles, yeah, like I've got on game films and I'm like limping into the end zone and falling down. It's, it was a nightmare, man. And I couldn't stay on the field anymore because my body was just breaking down. And what I was exposed to is what's called standard of care, which standard of care means they gave me some NSAIDs, gave me some crutches, like you'll heal up. I did, but I, nobody asked, how is his bones breaking from running? And when this diagnosis happened, man, it was earth shattering because I was always like this fit guy, like capable and like now I can't even really walk right because of this pain in my, from my spine that's going into my leg. And my physician at the time, uh, he put the MRI up and I was just like, okay, like, how do we fix this?

• 1:07:24Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, just working with the trainers and like, okay, what do we do? You know? And he's just like, pump, basically like pump your brakes, like, slow down, son. This is, this is bad, you know, this is incurable. And he told me that I had this, I had the spine of an eighty year old man.

• 1:07:40Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:07:41Shawn Stevenson?

  When I was twenty and not a healthy eighty year old either, you know, like shout out to Marcus Sisson, you know?

• 1:07:45Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:07:46Shawn Stevenson?

  But, um.

• 1:07:47Lewis Howes?

  Is he eighty?

• 1:07:48Shawn Stevenson?

  He's like, he's seventy, I think he's seventy or seventy two now.

• 1:07:51Lewis Howes?

  No, no, no.

• 1:07:52Shawn Stevenson?

  He's gotta be. No, no, I think he's in his seventies.

• 1:07:55Lewis Howes?

  I think he's late fifty or sixty.

• 1:07:57Shawn Stevenson?

  And he's definitely not in his fifties. He's definitely, he's at least in his sixties. I think he's seventy.

• 1:08:02Lewis Howes?

  I don't think he's seventy. That's amazing if he looks that great at seventy.

• 1:08:05Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, but this is what's also possible, even wherever he is.

• 1:08:09Lewis Howes?

  He's a freak. He's a six pack at sixty something or seven, whatever it is, yeah.

• 1:08:13Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. And, but I was the opposite. I was what you would think about with the eighty year old person breaking down and, you know, a lot of chronic pain. And, you know, he sent me on my way and that was that, you know, he gave me some medication, told, prescribed bed rest. Now I want to encourage anybody, if you've ever, if you ever get a diagnosis with something life altering like this, do your best to get a second and or third opinion before taking any dramatic action.

• 1:08:40Shawn Stevenson?

  And I did, unfortunately, it was the same thing. And it was until two, and by the way, for the next two years, every doctor that I saw told me bedrest, so I just kept doing nothing. Sleeping, yeah. Just sitting around playing video games. Isn't that the worst thing you can do for yourself? Not only, not only was my spine beginning to atrophy in my hips and my bones, but now everything else is. Muscles, everything. Your organs are not producing, they're not, yeah. Your body works on this user to loser basis, so I'm literally just decaying, you know? You're dying at twenty-two. Yeah, accelerating that process. And two years later, man, it was, it was a little over two years. It's tough to, man, it's tough to talk about incredibly, I, I was in fear.

• 1:09:23Shawn Stevenson?

  I, I got into a place where I was scared to stand up because the pain, I would have to like walk very gingerly because I know like the sciatic nerve has to like hit. And then I could walk normally like a normal gait. And so I just decided not to get up because I was scared to. Wow. And being that I'm eating the food that I was eating at the time, what I call the tough diet, typical university food, I was made out of this, my body was made out of this, and I'm not moving now, so I gained so much weight. Pretzels and cheese dip. Yeah, dude, I eat fast food every day, every day. Not a day went by because it's cheap and tasty. Tastes amazing. Yeah. And so, but everything changed and it was, I don't remember if it was that day or the day after,

• 1:10:07Shawn Stevenson?

  but I went to see the last physician, um, because I had a hope. And I had this chronic question going on in my mind all the time. Why me? Why won't somebody help me? Just like, but I didn't realize it. And our brains are really run on the questions that we ask. It's this, it's, it's a reflexive thing, it's called instinctive elaboration. Because our brains are like a servo mechanism. Is even right now, we're exposed to trillions, hundreds and hundreds of trillions of bits of data and information that our brain has to filter and only present to us consciously the thing that we hold most important, right? Because even now, like you'd be focused on your toes, you know, and probably you thought about your toes a little bit, you know, for people that are listening. But were your toes not existing before?

• 1:10:51Shawn Stevenson?

  They're there, but it's not a top priority. And so that servo mechanism is guided by the questions you ask. And so if I'm asking all the time, why me? Why this happened to me? Why won't anybody help me? My brain is just looking for a reason to affirm why my life sucks. And after I got that last diagnosis, he again gave me a new prescription, told me bedrest. Two years later. And sent me on my way. And he meant well, he meant well, but I realized it was either that night or the next night. That.

• 1:11:21Shawn Stevenson?

  I'm by myself, they're not thinking about me, even though they mean well. They are not walking in my shoes and dealing with the suffering. And it was the first time that I asked. A different question, I asked, what can I do to feel better? What can I do to get healthy? It was the first time I ever looked at like, what can I actually do? Because I've been like, why won't somebody else help me? And it changed everything, man. That was the first night I slept through the night in like two years without drugs. And I woke up with just a renewed sense of purpose. Because I had already, I went to school, I was in the auditory nutrition class. But I got out of it because. I hated it, I hated science. Ironically, which. You gotta love it.

• 1:12:05Shawn Stevenson?

  Science is my boo now, you know what I mean? But it's the way that I was taught, it didn't really have an association, it didn't have that connective tissue. And I began to dive back into my training because I always did good in school. You know, straight A's, but I would get into trouble, you know, I would. I didn't enjoy the process of like learning science because it just, it didn't stick. And so. Asking a different question, I did the low hanging fruit first, which was exercise. Like I just went and started like going on a. A cycle, you know, just got on a stationary bike at the gym, just started paddling, it was hard. The next week I started doing a little walking. And just built up from there, the first thing I did.

• 1:12:48Shawn Stevenson?

  Was I did Slim Fast first because that's the commercial. Right, I'm like, I gotta lose weight. A shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, a sense of but then. Right. But thank goodness, I quickly transitioned out of that. And because of that question, somebody that I knew for two years, no, three years at that time. She was a, you know, somebody that I'd, you know, kind of hung out with for a while, you know, just hung out. Anyway, she was a chiropractor.

• 1:13:15Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:13:15Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, she was older. She was like, you know, 10 years older. And she took me to Wild Oats. I'd known her this whole time. We never went to Wild Oats. Went to Wild Oats. I'd walk into this entirely different dimension, like, I'm like, why is there grass sitting up there on the counter?

• 1:13:30Lewis Howes?

  People to buy this and eat it.

• 1:13:32Shawn Stevenson?

  And the, um, but there was this nutrition prescription book. There's this massive like nutritional bible there. And I began to look at all this like peer reviewed evidence on this nutrient working for this thing. And I was shocked that this stuff existed. I had no idea. And this goes to the conversation of exposure, you know? So many people are, were born into these conditions. When I was growing up, man, you know, we were on WIC. We, you know, food, food stamp Christmas would come around, you know, the first and 15th. And we even got food from, you know, shelters and, you know, these food pantries. And, um, we didn't know that there was a difference with food, you know, it was just stuff that you eat. And I just want stuff that tastes good. And that's the end of the story. I didn't know that it mattered.

• 1:14:16Shawn Stevenson?

  I thought that if you want to be healthy, you exercise, because I looked fit, you know, but it was, my body was made out of straight.

• 1:14:24Lewis Howes?

  Crap.

• 1:14:24Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Sugar crap, processed food.

• 1:14:27Shawn Stevenson?

  But going, going there, I started to, this, then I went from Slim Fast to becoming a natural pill popper. All right. Because now it's like all these isolated nutrients. But I quickly, thank goodness, again, transitioned out of that.

• 1:14:40Lewis Howes?

  You mean supplements?

• 1:14:41Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah. Because, and not to say that supplements aren't helpful, especially the right ones. But it's still looking at food through this allopathic lens that I was taught in school, which is like a pill for this.

• 1:14:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:54Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, a pill for every ill.

• 1:14:55Lewis Howes?

  Do you take supplements now?

• 1:14:57Shawn Stevenson?

  Definitely not as many. And there's a reason why too, that we talk about in Eat Smarter. Which it went from about 7% of all liver damage to about 20% in recent years being associated with supplements.

• 1:15:08Lewis Howes?

  Shut up.

• 1:15:09Shawn Stevenson?

  Overconsumption. Yeah. Yeah. It's real. Because your liver has to handle the processing of these isolated nutrients. Oftentimes, it's not a very regulated system either. Not to say supplements aren't good. But we're taking like, some people are taking 20, 30 different supplements a day.

• 1:15:24Lewis Howes?

  So what happens when we take that many supplements a day consistently over time? It affects our liver?

• 1:15:29Shawn Stevenson?

  So your liver is responsible for number one, like drug metabolism. We have over somewhere around seventy percent of the United States population is on prescription drugs. Your liver is handling that shit first and foremost. And also your liver is responsible for food, you know, food metabolism, that interaction as well. Which, and your liver, the name, liver. It's responsible for you being alive, like massively. We can't survive without your liver.

• 1:15:53Lewis Howes?

  There's only one liver, right? It's two kidneys, one liver.

• 1:15:57Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, you got two eyes. There's some pirates out there.

• 1:15:59Lewis Howes?

  You can have, you know, but you can only, you can have one kidney and survive.

• 1:16:03Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Lewis Howes?

  But you can only, it's only one.

• 1:16:04Shawn Stevenson?

  And even with your liver, like you can lose portion of your liver and grow, grow it back.

• 1:16:08Lewis Howes?

  No way.

• 1:16:08Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Lewis Howes?

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:16:09Shawn Stevenson?

  It's regenerative, magical, like seemingly magical.

• 1:16:12Lewis Howes?

  How big is the liver?

• 1:16:13Shawn Stevenson?

  It's pretty big. I mean, as far as like the internal organs. But here's the crazy thing is that with, again, I want to reiterate, it's not that supplements are bad. Especially the rights, food-based supplements especially, but synthetic, isolated synthetic chemicals. Hmm, right? So about twenty percent of hospitalizations from liver problems is associated with supplement consumption now.

• 1:16:38Lewis Howes?

  No, come on.

• 1:16:39Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:40Lewis Howes?

  From supplements, not, not pill, prescription pills, but actual over the counter supplements.

• 1:16:45Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Lewis Howes?

  Twenty percent of liver challenges in the hospitals are due to this?

• 1:16:50Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Lewis Howes?

  How do they know it's based on supplements and not?

• 1:16:52Shawn Stevenson?

  They just do an intake and like look at what the person's consuming, you know? So again, not this, these types of sci, this type of science is still like very, there's nuance there. But just for us people to, just for us to be aware that this exists, that hey, wait a minute, maybe I want to pump the brakes a little bit on taking all these pills. So this was game changing for me, man. I asked the question, okay, so I've got degenerative disc disease. My spinal discs have degenerated, I have two herniated discs, it caused me all this pain. What are they made of? I asked this simple question.

• 1:17:23Lewis Howes?

  What are my, my discs made of?

• 1:17:24Shawn Stevenson?

  What are they made of? What is my spine, what are my bones made of? I'm, my, my, my bones are so, my bone disease is so low, what are they made of? We think of calcium, right? Because of the marketing, but there was like twenty other things that were. As important, if not more important, for the formation of bones and our bone density. Really? That I had no idea about, magnesium, even omega threes that we think about and associate to like brain health. Omega threes are needed for bone formation as well. All right? So I wasn't getting any of that stuff in my diet, so I started taking pills first, but then I was like. Supplements or? Supplements. Supplements, yeah. So I asked, what foods are these things found in? And then I understood the seemingly magical aspect of food, which there are all these other things that are there too.

• 1:18:08Shawn Stevenson?

  These cofactors and biopotentiators. And the game changing insight was that what have we been consuming the longest? This supplement is new. This drug is new. Humans, we have millions of years of evolution in relationship with eating foods that have supported our development. What do my, what do my genes expect me to eat? Where does it expect it to come from? From a concentrated pill supplement or from food? Yeah. So I started to make my mandate then, 20 years ago, was food first. And that was a game changer. So, once I did that, man, six weeks after that moment of decision and like revelation, the pain that I've been experiencing every day that had me in fear of standing up was gone. Wow.

• 1:18:53Shawn Stevenson?

  And I was scared. I was even more scared then because I felt like I'm gonna do something that's gonna happen. So I'm like freaking out, but I'm also like, let me just keep going with this. Let me keep going. And I was feeling so good, I lost about 18 pounds at that point, which is not typical, but I was like the skinny kid in my family for a while. And now like it just, those, you know, fat, quote fat genes, these epigenetic influences turned on. So weight just came off of me. And the most wonderful part of why I'm sitting here today with my, with my man Lewis Howes is my professors, students, you know, at the school, they started, they saw me. And it wasn't like I looked like somebody just lost weight. It looked like somebody who was like really healthy and alive. Because when I see my pictures of myself then, I look like freaking like Casper the

• 1:19:38Shawn Stevenson?

  ghost. Wow. I look like a shell of myself, like there's something missing. The light is not there. And so people started coming up to me and the first person who like specifically asked me for help, she's somebody I went to high school with who went to end up going to the college I was at. And she saw this transformation, she was like, can you help me, you know, to do to do what you did? And I was like, absolutely. And so I was just like gonna like schedule time to like meet up with her. And then she was like, how much should I pay you? And like time froze.

• 1:20:07Lewis Howes?

  You're like, wait a minute. I can make money helping people?

• 1:20:09Shawn Stevenson?

  I had no idea it was a thing, you know? And I was like, um, seven dollars? And that was the beginning, man. So then I went on to like certification for personal training, strength and conditioning coach, then, you know, graduating, shifting all my coursework like to biology and those things and then opening my clinical practice and working as a nutritionist for over a decade, man, and just seeing some amazing transformations. Um, you know, we specifically work with a lot of folks with chronic diseases, you know, diabetes, heart disease, people coming in, they got blood sugars like three hundred, four hundred, thrombin formans, sometimes insulin. Oftentimes, somewhere around eighty percent of the time, we're able to normalize their blood sugar without medication, you know, working alongside with their physicians and,

• 1:20:53Shawn Stevenson?

  you know, just but we did that by education because that's the thing that's that's not given to them, you know, this nobody's telling them why. It's just like, sugar's bad, okay? But I would reverse engineer it. I would like literally walk them through, here's how your body actually does this thing. Here's how diabetes is created. Here's how insulin resistance happen. And you could see the light come on in their eyes and.

• 1:21:16Lewis Howes?

  Proper education.

• 1:21:17Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:18Lewis Howes?

  What's your thoughts then on fasting in general? Because I don't know if you've seen Dr. Jason Fung's work, uh, the obesity code, the cancer code, where he's talking about fasting a lot to reverse type two diabetes in a lot of his patients. As part of the process, a part of the treatment plan, I guess, is is adding fasting into your life.

• 1:21:38Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:39Lewis Howes?

  How does that apply to things, to the hormones when we fast, whether it's a one day fast, three day fast? How does it apply to our metabolism? Does it slow down our metabolism when we fast? Again, whether it's intermittent or three days? What does that do to the body?

• 1:21:53Shawn Stevenson?

  Oh, man. This is in, this is, I could not not put this in there because the data exists. And it's just, and I want to make this clear. I also have a protocol for if you don't want to fast and you just want to have your three square meals a day. You know, like, but for all of us, if we can put our nutrition even into a 12 hour window and that 12 hour of fasting of not eating, which is just, that even includes your sleep time.

• 1:22:17Lewis Howes?

  12 hour window of not eating, eight hour window of eating.

• 1:22:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, just say you finish your last meal at eight o'clock and then you sleep. You get a good night's sleep. You wake up the next day, you have your first meal at 8 a.m. Wow, let me tell you some of the things that can happen. Number one, we see a substantial increase in the production of human growth hormone. Right, which is largely, it's considered the quote, youth hormone. You know, associated with, you know, healthy body composition, but also like cognitive development and especially in recovery, you know, protection from illnesses and it's speed of recovery from injury and things like that goes, it just goes on and on and on. It's why kids have so much energy too. It's really tied to energy, right? HGH, but I know we talked about this before. I think of like Barry Bonds, like, you know, Jason Giampi, you know?

• 1:23:02Shawn Stevenson?

  We've been for St. Louis, Mark McGuire, Big Mac. They named the highway after it, Highway 70. They took it back though.

• 1:23:09Lewis Howes?

  They took it back down?

• 1:23:12Shawn Stevenson?

  But, um, yeah, so by having a little bit of fasting, that process is elicited and, you know, you produce more HGH, but also improvement in insulin sensitivity. Like we see marked results with that too. And one of the studies that I put into the book was so shocking for me that I could not not talk about it. They had folks to consume essentially the same amount of calories. But once they partitioned it, all they did, they gave them this one restriction of like, okay, let's take this consumption of caloric, you know, availability that we're giving you and put it into this 12 hour window. And then they saw increased weight loss simply by having the same amount of calories, but in this window instead, same amount of calories.

• 1:23:52Shawn Stevenson?

  And they also saw increased production of satiety hormones or normalization of like leptin and ghrelin. Um, they saw. biomarkers associated with longevity as well. So and I can go on and on just by putting your nutrition into a window. And there are so many different types of fasting too.

• 1:24:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:10Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, and I can't talk about anything with efficacy or ethically without me doing it. So, man, that's part of what happened to me too of going too far. I've tried all of them. Whatever diet framework you know, I've done it. Raw food.

• 1:24:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, everything. Vegan.

• 1:24:28Shawn Stevenson?

  But I'll do it for like a year, two years, three years. You know, and that that change and the and I didn't know at the time of my microbiome in taking away certain foods that really my for myself personally were associated with good health by removing those prebiotics sources like that can cause gut dysbiosis. And so I was dealing with that for a couple of years. And like I started to become food have these all these food sensitivities that were rooted in this change in my microbiome. And so my even my story of like, what did I do to fix this? Because it's like one of the biggest things growing right now is dysbiosis of gut bacteria. And you might not have stomach problems or digestive problems, but it might show up with migraines. It might show up as issues with the thyroid. It might show up with arthritis.

• 1:25:13Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:25:14Shawn Stevenson?

  This is important because even our methods of testing. Look, man, I'm just gonna say the thing nobody else is willing to say.

• 1:25:22Shawn Stevenson?

  Dude, like, honestly, man, we've gone through a lot of stuff today, but we don't know shit.

• 1:25:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:28Shawn Stevenson?

  We don't know anything, man. Like, even the top virologist in the world knows less than a fraction of a percent about all the viruses there are and how they function. We don't know anything, but we act like we do, you know? And it's it gives us a sense of certainty. We do, we we know so much more than we did. But and that's the beautiful part too. Even our innovations in the last couple of decades have been amazing. But what have we done as a result? Like, we're not getting any healthier. You know, the data exists and part of this problem is that on average, when we have a peer reviewed, even if it's a placebo controlled, double blind, like everything, gold standard of study. We get a result finding that, say, curcumin, active component in turmeric,

• 1:26:12Shawn Stevenson?

  has anti-antigenesis properties, meaning it helps to cut off the blood supply to cancer cells and fat cells selectively. Curcumin? Yeah, alright, well, we'll circle back to that. But we find that it has, it's been proven. It takes on average, from proof to being in clinical practice in medicine, seventeen years. We don't got that kind of time, Louis. And that's part of the problem, is that these studies are often designed and speaking to, in this language of academia, to sound smart to other people, instead of like, how can people take this information and use it in their lives? Because I don't have to wait seventeen years to find out that this thing can help me. Right? So we don't know anything, that gatekeeper system and also the level of information

• 1:26:55Shawn Stevenson?

  getting to people is changing, thanks to the work that you're doing, what I'm doing, taking this information and making it available to everybody, but making it make sense. Because it doesn't have to be, food is complex, but it's also incredibly simple. You just put it in your mouth and chew, your body handles the fine print. But it's very complex in that it affects so much, you know, like, there's so many different factors. And that's one of the things I move towards in my clinical practice is that personalization, and also looking at where do people come from, like, what's their lineage? Maybe we can eat what your ancestors ate, you know, a little bit more like that, and I would find great effects with that, too. You know, there's so many different things to consider, but the basics are often not addressed, you know?

• 1:27:38Shawn Stevenson?

  For most folks in our society, and we again, we tend to like, try to treat a symptom. But at the end of the day, we have to cover the basics, and make sure that we are getting the nutrition that our body needs, right now, which can be different next week. Let me give you an example here. Right now, as we're recording this, we're at a, probably the most stressful time in human history. And the number one mineral that's really associated with the modulation of stress, like, our body's stress systems, is magnesium. And prior to this experience we're having right now, as a culture, fifty-six percent of the United States population was chronically deficient in magnesium. Yeah. And it's responsible for over three hundred and fifty biochemical processes in the body.

• 1:28:22Shawn Stevenson?

  So that means there's three hundred and fifty things your body can't do, or can't do properly without it, you know? So, that one, getting that one nutrient addressed, can help to...

• 1:28:34Shawn Stevenson?

  Elicit the parasympathetic nervous system response, turn off that fight or flight, and start that healing to deal with stress because what I was gonna say is the nutrition side, stress, it seems invisible, that's the thing, like you can't see stress, but it is very real and it can kill you. Mm-hmm. One of the most interesting reports, and this was in my first book, about over ninety percent of all physician visits today are for stress-related illnesses. What? They have a stress component, yeah. I'm stressed, I'm anxious, I'm overwhelmed. Because what does, what does that mean? What is it doing? This related to your hormones, your neurotransmitters, the things that are determining what your liver's doing, what your heart's doing, what your body fat's doing.

• 1:29:18Shawn Stevenson?

  You could overeat your way fat, you can undersleep your way fat, you can under-exercise your way fat, and you can overstress your, yourself fat as well. Mmm. And now, most people have issues with all of these things because a hundred and fifty, a hundred and fifteen million Americans are regularly sleep deprived. What are we doing? Again, we're looking for another drug to solve our problems right now. We're, we're the sickest nation in the history of the world, self-inflicted, let me be clear, self-inflicted. Right. That's the root, and the system that all of this, that's governing all of this, is sick in and of itself. And unfortunately, you know, again, we have a, a, a great medical system, especially

• 1:30:01Shawn Stevenson?

  for emergency care, but as far as the treatment of our biggest killers, sucks. Mmm. Everything continues to get worse. Heart disease, cancer. Right. Diabetes, Alzheimer's, obesity, nothing is getting solved because we continue to treat symptoms. Not the root, yeah. With pharmacology and not addressing the issues that cause these things. How many people go in that have Alzheimer's and, or even early onset, how many people go in and get counseling on sleep? Because now we know that sleep deprivation is correlated. Mmm. With Alzheimer's. Wow. And this is the stuff that's gonna continue, even Alzheimer's also is, in many aspects, is being called type three diabetes.

• 1:30:48Shawn Stevenson?

  So the relationship with insulin in the brain, you have receptors in your brain too, and your body's ability, because your brain runs largely on glucose, and it needs to be able to do that process right. But what happens when insulin resistance happens in your brain?

• 1:31:02Shawn Stevenson?

  Man, so how often are we getting this kind of education? We're not, we're not, but we can change it. That's the beautiful part about right now is that so much is fluxed up. You know, so much is in flux and it's so malleable now that it can be changed. It's getting shaken. Before the systems were very sturdy and I'm just like out there promoting like, "Don't go to McDonald's." No, like I'm not gonna get very far doing that. But right now when things are so shaken up, I really, I'm so grateful to be alive right now. I really feel that Eat Smarter coming out right now is not an accident. And I even share with you, like, we have a national campaign. We're gonna be at essentially every Target store in the United States. I used to work at Target.

• 1:31:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:45Shawn Stevenson?

  I was a floater, I'm out there pushing the carts. Now my book is gonna be in Target. And not just in the book section, special 2021 Wellness Initiative. I'm not playing, man.

• 1:31:58Shawn Stevenson?

  You know, we were born for this moment. This is the time right now. All the stuff that we've done to prepare ourselves, this is the time to do it. And we really have to work to get our, our communities healthier. At the end of the day, that's our greatest defense. That's our greatest defense because unfortunately, this isn't being talked about enough. A CDC report came out, which I've been talking about this stuff since April and also in March, looking at the numbers coming out of Italy and finding that about 88% of the folks who passed away with this virus had pre-existing chronic diseases and comorbidities. Uh, somewhere around two to three on average, comorbidities.

• 1:32:35Lewis Howes?

  What's that?

• 1:32:36Shawn Stevenson?

  So these are additional causes of death.

• 1:32:38Lewis Howes?

  Additional causes of death.

• 1:32:39Shawn Stevenson?

  Right, and or pre-existing chronic diseases, right? So heart disease, the, the main three were heart disease, uh, diabetes and obesity. And I was like, oh, we're, we're in trouble.

• 1:32:49Lewis Howes?

  So they were a co-cause of death with COVID. They got COVID, but because they had these other elements, it's what also caused the death.

• 1:32:58Shawn Stevenson?

  So this, and what tends to happen right now is people get skewed because everything is so polarizing right now.

• 1:33:05Lewis Howes?

  So I think I saw recently there's 250 death, 250,000 deaths in USA related to COVID. Is that?

• 1:33:12Shawn Stevenson?

  So let's, let's be clear because we get so skewed on what this means. This does not mean that COVID-19 is not a factor. And some folks can lean so heavy into this, just like, well, these people would have been alive. Or these people died because they were going to die anyways, because they had heart disease. Not saying that. Let's be clear. What I am saying, and what the data now shows even here in the United States, because when I saw the numbers, I was like, we're in trouble here. We're the sickest nation in history. And so the CDC report found that ninety-four percent of the folks who lost their lives with this virus had an average of two point six pre-existing chronic diseases.

• 1:33:54Shawn Stevenson?

  So would, had they, this, only six percent of people didn't, didn't quote, have a health problem, which

• 1:34:02Lewis Howes?

  They might have had some health problem, but not.

• 1:34:04Shawn Stevenson?

  Right? Because these are opportunistic viruses that I talked about earlier. You can be compromised, being sleep deprived and being overstressed.

• 1:34:12Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:34:13Shawn Stevenson?

  But ninety-four percent of these folks, and nobody is scratching their head, and nobody is saying a thing on major media and our health leaders, like, we have to get our people healthier. We see the number one risk factor is being sick, having pre-existing lifestyle-related chronic diseases. And I'm not saying this because it sounds good. The Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the most prestigious journals, twenty eighteen, published a report, massive meta-analysis, they concluded diet, poor diet is the number one cause of our chronic diseases in America.

• 1:34:42Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:34:43Shawn Stevenson?

  Number one. It's right there.

• 1:34:45Lewis Howes?

  It's the root that causes so many things. Obesity, heart, diabetes, all these other things.

• 1:34:49Shawn Stevenson?

  But we're not talking about that. We're not talking about it.

• 1:34:52Lewis Howes?

  It's the root.

• 1:34:53Shawn Stevenson?

  We're talking about, let's get another drug to treat a symptom. We really need to be talking about how do we get our citizens healthier, you know, and so in truth, our chronic diseases loaded the gun and COVID pulled the trigger. You know, that's really a good way to look at it. It was setting us up for trouble. And this isn't the last time. This isn't the last time.

• 1:35:14Lewis Howes?

  There's gonna be more.

• 1:35:15Shawn Stevenson?

  Oh, yes, absolutely. This is just, especially if you look at the trend. We've got SARS, we've got MERS, all this stuff is just happening in the last couple of decades. People keep talking about the, the flu from back in

• 1:35:28Lewis Howes?

  Nineteen, whatever, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:30Shawn Stevenson?

  But it's been pretty quiet now, all of a sudden. Why? We're more susceptible than we've ever been before. And humans are tinkering with stuff that we've never tinkered with before, messing with our food system, all genetically modified crops. And, you know, we're of course in the lab tinkering with viruses and not really understanding like, we keep carrying this level of arrogance. Like, we could outsmart a virus. What? Like, how's that working out for us?

• 1:36:00Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:36:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Just look at the numbers. And we keep blaming, we keep blaming people and not the systems that are governing all this stuff. You know, there is absolutely a degree of personal responsibility. But I grew up in a situation, I didn't know that there was a choice. I didn't know there was a difference. You know, and I want to make sure we have access. That's one of the things that changed my life is just getting access, getting exposure, and we can provide that for everyone, truly.

• 1:36:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:30Lewis Howes?

  So many things I could go down there. But what I'm hearing you say is going back to the basics with nutrition. And if we could go back to the basics, if we give people one prescription today around types of foods and/or types of supplements they should be adding to give themselves the best chance to have a strong immune system, burn the unnecessary fats they don't need, optimize the metabolism, what would you say we should be eating and taking in general? Obviously, each person's unique and different stages of life, but I'm hearing green, leafy greens, a mixture of diversity. Is this a mixture of a diversity of meats, fruits, nuts, oils as well?

• 1:37:14Lewis Howes?

  Or is it more in the leafy green category?

• 1:37:16Shawn Stevenson?

  So that's one facet for sure. Another thing,

• 1:37:22Shawn Stevenson?

  it's so funny. I've been talking about this stuff for years, but now like we've got really cutting edge data on this stuff. Another major thing I want everybody to focus on from today forward is their omega-3 fatty acids. A lot of folks have heard of this. Now we have a wonderful study that was just released and it's highlighted in Eat Smarter, where they're looking at the ratio of omega-3 fatty acids to omega-6 fatty acids in human tissue. The ratio as we evolved was about three to one, omega-6 to omega-3s. And omega-6 are known to be the kind of more pro-inflammatory of the omega-3, of the omega family. Omega-3s are more of an anti-inflammatory. But omega-6 are important. They're important for many processes in the body.

• 1:38:04Shawn Stevenson?

  But when that ratio gets skewed, we see increased inflammation, which inflammation is tied with every hormonal problem you can name. And I talk about that as well. And also inflammation in the brain.

• 1:38:16Shawn Stevenson?

  And so now that ratio is 20 to 1. 30 to 1 for some people. Omega 6s to omega 3s. And what they found in this particular study was that as folks improve their omega 6 to omega 3 ratio is directly correlated with decreased body fat. This is a major regulator of what your fat is doing, right? Your fat communicates with each other. The fats you consume, part of the problem is, I know I was indoctrinated with the idea that eating fat makes you fat. You know, I, I thought we were past this, but we're not because it keeps coming up in the media every now and then like saturated fat, saturated fat is gonna kill you. And I've got studies that show the opposite. Not to say, but they're not taking into account where does it come from? The types of fat. Yes. Quality of the fat.

• 1:39:01Shawn Stevenson?

  Quality, yes. And so, one thing you can do immediately is improve your omega 3 ratio. All right, so avoid consuming things that are extremely high in these inflammatory omega 6s, which for most of us, we primarily get that through these highly processed seed oils. Right, so corn oil, so-called vegetable oil, which is not, it's not damn broccoli oil. Right. Like, these are, these are highly processed seed oils. And dude, what happens like canola oil, canola, even at Whole Foods, if you go to a hot food bar if it's open, a lot of it's cooked in ho, in a canola oil. Like, it's organic, canola oil, healthy.

• 1:39:45Shawn Stevenson?

  No, canola oils are high, what it takes to make these oils, they, they smell and taste disgusting, they would, but they have to be deodorized, highly processed and refined. And then, can you, just even that in and of itself should tell you, because these oils are very delicate. They're very delicate. It makes them rancid and increases their

• 1:40:08Shawn Stevenson?

  The capacity of like oxidative stress for your body. What are the top oils we should be eating then? Olive oil is number one, right? I wouldn't say number one, very important. Important one. Very important. It's also a lot of calories, right? Yeah, but there's some really cool studies that I put into the book showing this direct correlation with increased olive oil consumption and and weight loss. Wow. So, yeah, something special there, but here's the thing. Olive oil is not highly processed. Right. Right? It's often cold, it can be cold pressed and is bottled in dark glass bottles because it's sensitive to light. So don't get your olive oil in clear plastic. If you can see it, don't, don't buy it. It's already, it's denaturing. Extra virgin olive oil, is that better?

• 1:40:53Shawn Stevenson?

  Extra virgin, organic, or if you know the farm, they're not using like pesticides. Olive oil is good? Yeah, but with the omega threes, the, the number one source is through fish, cold water fish. Now, some people listen like, I can't do that, I'm, I don't mess with the fish. And some people, you know, I've heard this so many times in my years of, of clinical work that, you know, they're vegetarian, I'm sorry, they say they're vegetarian, but I only eat fish. Pescatarian. But they wouldn't, they wouldn't say like, like the term, it's more like, I don't eat meat, I don't eat meat, but I'm pretty sure. Fish is meat. Yeah, it's just, just say, I don't eat land meat. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:41:35Shawn Stevenson?

  So, but if you don't, if you don't eat fish, or that's okay, we have, there's other ways, however, this is the most dense source that humans have been eating the longest. If we're talking about real whole food sources, which we want food first. And so specifically, I'm saying this because of the DHA and EPA. These are the omega threes that are clinically proven to have all the benefits I've been talking about, whether it's cognitive performance and or it's stuff with the metabolism. There are omega threes in plants, but they're in the form of ALA, all right? ALA is very different. Your body can convert some of the, your, your ALA into EPA and DHA, but you lose about 95% of it in the process, conversion process. So you gotta eat like. Clinically speaking, a buttload of chia seeds. Wow.

• 1:42:19Shawn Stevenson?

  Daily, like you gotta be shoveling it. Whereas wild-caught Alaskan salmon might be just like a higher source of. Over the, over the top, you know. How, so again, but what do we do? Algae oil. Looking for a high-quality algae. Algae oil. Yeah. It's good for you, huh? Yeah, and super high. Cook it or you just drink? So algae oil will come in capsules. Very concentrated sources of, of algae. Or krill oil. So krill is like a microscopic shrimp. So maybe that on your, on your, uh, ethics, maybe that is like a, you know, more viable source. Yeah. Super high in azanthin, which is correlated with longevity and reductions of heart disease and all this stuff. So that's really cool. Um, so krill oil or algae oil?

• 1:43:03Shawn Stevenson?

  Now, to be clear, 99.9 of the studies on the effectiveness of omega threes, they're done on fish and fish oil, not these other things. The oil, the, the, the compounds are there, but we just don't know if they have the same effect. Okay, so just be aware of all that stuff. Green leafy vegetables, we covered omega threes. One other thing I want to make sure everybody walks away with today, because we talked a little bit about the macronutrients, but there's not just three. So in school, again, we're taught fats, proteins, carbohydrates. There's actually six. The other ones, alcohol is a macronutrient. And we talk about that, all the ins and outs of that as well, which is, we can't even get into that, but you gotta read it.

• 1:43:48Shawn Stevenson?

  The, the data is, is bananas. Yeah. Not to say good or bad, but you need to know. Yeah. Also, the sixth man coming off the bench for the macronutrients is fiber. But that fifth player that doesn't get a lot of attention is water. Water is probably the most profound of all these macronutrients. So here's a question, how much water a day should we be drinking? All right.

• 1:44:14Shawn Stevenson?

  So this is, I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give you the answer. Okay. But it doesn't matter if I tell you what to do unless you really have a connection of why to do it. Water, your body, your, everything about you is based on water. We hear this stuff, you're mostly made of water, what the hell does that mean? In the, in the book, I cite a study that had folks to drink seventeen ounces of water. And just within a couple of, no, just within a couple of minutes. And what happened is something called water-induced thermogenesis. They ended up burning about twenty-five calories from drinking water. Now, is the quality of water mattered? Is the temperature matter? Not as much. Hot or cold? Not as much. Okay.

• 1:44:59Shawn Stevenson?

  That's a personal preference. There are like the Ayurvedic principles, like I know about all this stuff. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so here's the cool thing. So wait, they burned? They burned twenty-five calories from drinking water, Louis. One, just one little serving. Ten, fifteen minutes or something? No, if you do that four, five times a day, you're burning, you know, hundred, two hundred calories just from drinking water. Seventeen ounces of water. That's what was used in the study, okay? That's like a tall cup, right? But the question is, why? Why? Why the hell, how can you burn calories like that? I thought you had to go exercise your face off, not just drink water. It's because water makes everything work better. Every single hormone we talked about is operating in a water medium. Your mitochondria is based on water.

• 1:45:40Shawn Stevenson?

  All your neurotransmitters are based on water and it moves throughout your body in this water superhighway. And when you become deficient, which most people are, just habitually through the day, all these systems start to basically, these wide superhighways start to become these like dark back alleys where like Batman's parents got killed, you know what I mean? And so how do we fix this? Drink, drink the water. But, like you said, the type of water matters. And we go through all of that too, but just to give some simple principles. There was one study, this was done from testing houses from Southern California all the way to New Jersey. And they found that tap water was contained dozens of pharmaceutical chemicals.

• 1:46:25Shawn Stevenson?

  All right, metabolic waste from people taking chemotherapy medications, antidepressants, Lisinopril, you know, stuff for heart disease. This was showing up in our water supply. It's like, what the hell? Why? How's that possible? We're all, we're really, this, we're in this earth bubble, you know? And this stuff is getting recycled, you know, there is toilet to tap water. There's new projects that are taking, yeah, and taking the water from our, you know, from our bathrooms and putting it back through the faucet. But it's one of the things trying to solve our problem with water here on the planet. But oftentimes it's not due to that. It's just the hydrological cycle and stuff that we're as humans putting into the environment now that would never existed before. And we don't have filtering processes that can get, and these are microscopic amounts, let me be clear. But they're there nonetheless, you know?

• 1:47:10Shawn Stevenson?

  So just understand, if you don't get a water filter, you are the filter. You become the filter. All right, so I highly recommend getting a water filter. But ideally, this would be something like reverse osmosis. But that makes it like blank water. There's no vitamins and minerals in the water, right? It's like dead water. Exactly, dude. You need like rich vitamins and minerals in our water, correct? This goes back to nature. When I was in school, we were taught water's H2O. But there is no H2O anywhere in nature by itself. There is no plain H2O anywhere in nature. It's called the universal solvent. Water is always combining with other things. And it's what gives water this character and structure is the minerals that's in that water.

• 1:47:54Shawn Stevenson?

  So when you take all the minerals out? Yeah. What is that doing to our body when we're just drinking dead water? So one of the things that I was like even battling with the publisher on is like putting this full story of water and how our cells actually get hydrated. So I'll just put it, to put it simply, it affects the hydration levels of your cells and your extracellular fluid. And it can cause some serious problems. But what if water has too many minerals? Like ocean water, it'll kill you, right? So it's just, it's a basic. So where do you get your water from? I want to drink your water. Would we evolve drinking, like in recent? Bottled water. No. It's what we've been drinking. Right, but I mean, like throughout the recent centuries. It's tap water. No, no.

• 1:48:39Shawn Stevenson?

  People go to where the springs are at, in the wells. I'm talking about recently. Oh, like super recent, yes. But like. We used to go to wells. We would, humans would set up shop in civilization where the water was at. And dig a well. Yeah, if they could, if they had the technology for that. Yeah. So that's what would determine what we're doing, right? So that's ideal human water is spring water. Yes. But now we're getting it from bottled sources or bottling it and. Yeah. Right? There are great, there are great sources that, you know, um, maybe bottled in glass. We get in the conversation about BPA and all that kind of stuff. Where do you drink your water from? You know, when you came to my house in St. Louis, we lived on a well. We had well water. That's crazy. Right? But when we moved here, very different.

• 1:49:24Shawn Stevenson?

  So we get like, you know, spring water delivered, bottled in glass. You know, we got like a water dispenser. What's it called?

• 1:49:34Shawn Stevenson?

  Mountain Valley, everybody knows about Mountain Valley now. But again, I've been on this for like 20 years. You know, waking up every day, I'll drink about um, 20 to 30 ounces of water start the day. How much, so how much should we drink throughout the whole day? To give people a simple barometer. Yes.

• 1:49:51Shawn Stevenson?

  The number one marker for you to know how much water to drink is listening to your body.

• 1:49:59Shawn Stevenson?

  Unfortunately, we're largely disconnected from what our bodies are telling us. All right? So to give people a barometer as just a starting point. Take the, take your weight and divide that number in half. And just say if you're 150 pounds, you divide it in half, that's 75. That's the number of ounces that I want you to drink as a baseline. So half your weight. Yeah. Now, once you get to 200 pounds and up, just 100 ounces, that's solid. Yeah, because I'm 230 right now, so 100 ounces a day. Yeah, that would be the ideal. How many gallons is that a? It's not that much. It's really not that much. Is that a gallon? How much is in a gallon? How much is it? Is that 64 ounces? So you remember, man, you went to school. I'm not trying to remember this stuff. So it's. Okay, so 100 ounces a day for me. Yeah. Wow, that's a lot of water. I know, but this is.

• 1:50:45Shawn Stevenson?

  If you're active, you know what I'm saying?

• 1:50:47Lewis Howes?

  If you're running and working out, you need it.

• 1:50:49Shawn Stevenson?

  So like even given that barometer, it's gonna depend on your lifestyle. So that's why I don't even like giving these numbers.

• 1:50:56Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:50:56Shawn Stevenson?

  Because it's so individual.

• 1:50:58Lewis Howes?

  Okay, let me ask you a few things on better relationships. What are the foods we should be eating to have better moods? And a higher chance of quality intimate relationships?

• 1:51:10Shawn Stevenson?

  This is the most, this is the most important part for me personally of this work.

• 1:51:14Lewis Howes?

  Because relationships are a big factor of stress for people, which causes a lot of bad habits and obesity and all these things. It's a level of stress.

• 1:51:23Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:23Lewis Howes?

  So if we can have better relationships with everyone, our lives would be better. So what are those foods that can support that?

• 1:51:31Shawn Stevenson?

  And have you ever seen as many people fighting? Like arguing and like, is so much polarization and people being separate? It's, that's the major epidemic. Because we can't solve our greatest problems with everybody fighting. And nobody's willing to listen. And what the data shows clearly, and that I really brought forward for the first time in book form and just getting this out to everyday folks, is how much our food affects our ability to perspective take and have patience.

• 1:51:59Lewis Howes?

  My gosh.

• 1:52:00Shawn Stevenson?

  And to have empathy. And this is highlighted, one of them is, you know, a study. This was from the Ohio State University.

• 1:52:06Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, the Ohio State.

• 1:52:08Shawn Stevenson?

  And what they did was they had couples. They just looked at their blood sugar, which largely what they found was that these blood sugar spikes and crashes, you know, you consider like hypoglycemia and your blood sugar going low, which is largely related to what you eat. When the, the study, I mean, the study participants, these couples, when their blood sugar would go low, they found that they were more aggressive and irritable towards their partners and less likely to perspective take and to resolve their conflicts because of their blood sugar being disturbed.

• 1:52:44Lewis Howes?

  Too low.

• 1:52:44Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:45Lewis Howes?

  So how do we, do we want the blood sugar to be high?

• 1:52:46Shawn Stevenson?

  Not high, just normal.

• 1:52:48Lewis Howes?

  Medium level.

• 1:52:49Shawn Stevenson?

  Normal. And the reason that it could go so low, and but here's the thing, when your blood sugar goes low, it will normalize. But it usually does that because it's like a survival response. It increases your production of stress hormones to get it back up. So cortisol, your body can literally, it's a process called gluconeogenesis. It can break your muscle tissue down and use it for fuel to get your blood sugar back up. Right? There's so many different ways your body does to figure out the problem. But it makes you more irritable and aggressive. And so many times in relationships, people are not fighting the other person. They're fighting their biology. People are not, people are not fighting a real, actual issue. They're creating, often create issues.

• 1:53:31Shawn Stevenson?

  How, how many times do you get into it when you're tired? How many times you get into it when you're actually just hungry or hangry? This term is used now and it's cute, but it's real. Like we've got science on this. And how many times you get into it when you're, when you're just stressed out about stuff? Right? And you get into an argument about, you know, some damn like, I don't know, house shoes or something like, why'd you put my house shoes here? You know, it's like some of the stupidest things. You know, and it's just because you're not showing up as your best self. Because our biological needs or our biological thermostats are off. Right? So we have to address these things. So that's number one. One of the most shocking things, and this is more so than ever right now.

• 1:54:14Shawn Stevenson?

  We're seeing these, we're seeing violence displayed. Right? Social unrest due to violent incidents. And there was, this is kind of messed up, what I'm about to say.

• 1:54:33Shawn Stevenson?

  But it's, it's a great community to study because it is a controlled environment. But they took prison inmates. And they went to see how nutrition would affect their behavior. Interesting. And so this was Oxford University researchers. And because it's a ward study, it's controlled environment. They wanted to see if they gave these inmates increased nutrition. So vitamins, minerals, omega three fatty acids. Not the crap they're getting every day. They didn't change their food. That's another study where they changed their food. And the results were even bigger than what I'm about to share with you. But I want to give you the baseline study. So they gave, they had a control group who didn't get these additional nutrients. And they had the study group. After they compiled all the data, they found that the prisoners who were getting increased nutrition

• 1:55:15Shawn Stevenson?

  had a 30% reduction in overall behavioral offenses. And they had almost a 40% reduction in violent offenses.

• 1:55:24Lewis Howes?

  Now, is that because they were just happier they were getting good food?

• 1:55:27Shawn Stevenson?

  No, this was not, this was not the food.

• 1:55:29Lewis Howes?

  It's affecting the mood.

• 1:55:29Shawn Stevenson?

  They had a placebo group. Everybody's taking pills. They don't even know what they're taking.

• 1:55:33Lewis Howes?

  It's just supplements.

• 1:55:34Shawn Stevenson?

  That's it. That's why I wanted to share this study first.

• 1:55:37Lewis Howes?

  Supplements only.

• 1:55:38Shawn Stevenson?

  Right. And just getting the increased nutrition.

• 1:55:40Lewis Howes?

  Everyone's taking the same supplement, a one or two.

• 1:55:43Shawn Stevenson?

  Wow. Yeah. 40%, almost a 40% reduction in violent offenses.

• 1:55:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:55:48Shawn Stevenson?

  By improving the nutrition available in their body.

• 1:55:51Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So food, the nutritional value really affects our mood.

• 1:55:54Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:55Lewis Howes?

  And it can affect our relationships.

• 1:55:56Shawn Stevenson?

  This study was so profound, another set of researchers saw this and they was like, this, this can't be possible. 40% reduction in violence? No way. So they repeated the study with another set of prisoners. And this was published in the journal Aggressive Behavior, which there's journals for everything. But they found almost the exact same thing happened. We can increase our propensity towards violence by improving our nutrition. And then so studies that were done actually implementing more whole foods saw even better results. Because food does something else. It does something really special. So with that said, right now in communities that are in conflict, where oftentimes your likelihood, you, let's be clear.

• 1:56:41Shawn Stevenson?

  You can have empathy and compassion and patience for someone else when you're not well. It's just harder.

• 1:56:46Lewis Howes?

  So much harder. And when you're stacking all the stresses and sleep deprivation and not working out and you're lacking community and you're doing all these things and stacking it, you're going to explode at some point.

• 1:56:59Shawn Stevenson?

  Yeah, it's just a matter of time. And just, just your ability to have patience. You know, your ability to see the other person's point of view, your ability to have compassion and understanding. It's harder to elicit those things, but it's not impossible. What we, what we're experiencing right now, because we know that we are the sickest nation in human history, self-inflicted. A nation of sick people are arguing against other sick people and wondering why nobody's listening. If we can get folks healthier, we can start to have healthier conversations. It's not that it's impossible if you're not well, it's just harder.

• 1:57:36Lewis Howes?

  Harder.

• 1:57:36Shawn Stevenson?

  And I know some folks are listening, they think, you know, I might not be that healthy, but I know that I'm compassionate and I have empathy. Absolutely. But please understand, it's not just about your perception of who you are. When you're not well, your biology starts to act very different. And we start to see shifts in your brain activity. And your prefrontal cortex that's responsible for decision-making and social control and distinguishing between right and wrong, starts to go cold. And your amygdala, you know, these more primitive parts of our brain start to take over. And we're just not our best self. So, this is my big mission, that, you know, I might not say that often, but this is imbued into the pages of the book is, let's get our citizens healthier.

• 1:58:21Shawn Stevenson?

  Let's make this a mission, because just imagine what we can do, once we start to feel better.

• 1:58:26Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely, man. Man, this is powerful. Make sure you guys get this book, Eat Smarter. Use the power of food to reboot metabolism, upgrade your brain and transform your life. This is gonna be extremely helpful for you guys. Definitely check it out, some amazing research, lots of studies in here, and a 30-day smart plan of action at the end, which you're gonna really wanna take on, which breaks down everything on what foods to eat, how much, when to eat. So if you need some sauces, dips, dressings, everything that is the best stuff for you, make sure you check this out, it'll be very powerful. Check out Sean, eatsmarterbook.com. Also get sleep smarter while you're at it, because sleep is such important to our overall

• 1:59:11Lewis Howes?

  health and wellness. And when I started out to my sleep, from your teachings, it really helped my overall well-being. So, just getting quality sleep, and it's not just the amount of time, it's also the environment, everything, so get sleep smarter. Make sure to follow Sean on the Model Health Show Podcast, one of the top fitness nutrition podcasts in the country. Check him out on Instagram, SeanModel, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, which we're gonna get you up on YouTube more. I want you to get more videos out there, so. Man, this is powerful. Eat smarter.

• 1:59:46Shawn Stevenson?

  Thank you, man.

• 1:59:47Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for being here, brother.

• 1:59:48Shawn Stevenson?

  Hey, it's my pleasure, man. Love you, bro.

• 1:59:50Lewis Howes?

  Love you too, man. Thank you so much, my friend, for listening to this episode. Make sure to share it with a couple of friends right now if you found this valuable. LewisHowes.com/1040 to take people right to the show notes link at our website, or just copy and paste this if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And please do me a favor. If this brought you value in any way, click on that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts right now on your phone. Click on that, subscribe, and leave us a rating and review. That will truly help us reach more people in the Apple Podcast ecosystem. And if you have any friends you think would be inspired by this, then just send them this link, shoot them a text, post it on Instagram Stories, Facebook, WhatsApp group message,

• 2:00:32Lewis Howes?

  wherever you like to share things best, post it there right now. And if you want inspirational messages from me, if you like this type of content and you want it bite sized, text it to your phone every single week, then text me the word "podcast" right now to 614-350-3960 and I'll send you weekly updates and inspirational messages to keep you going every single week. And I want to leave you with this quote from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, who says, "Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend." I hope this information builds your health and increases your level of confidence because

• 2:01:16Lewis Howes?

  now you have the knowledge to take action and improve this area of your life. And I want to remind you that if no one has told you lately, you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. I'm so grateful for you, and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.