EFR 805: Top 5 Biomarkers You Need to Know to Prevent and Reverse Chronic Illness and Disease, 6 Principles of Good Energy, and the Metabolic Key to Limitless Health with Dr. Casey Means

00:00 - Speaker 1 The following is an Operation Podcast production.

00:03 - Speaker 2 In the modern American body that process of food energy to cellular energy is broken. Recent research is suggesting that it's broken in about 93% of American adult bodies. Every aspect of the environment we're living in in modernity is uniquely hurting the mitochondria and that's leading to bad energy and it's the biggest blind spot in healthcare.

00:23 - Speaker 1 Why does this matter so much now?

00:26 - Speaker 2 Just in the last 30, 40 years, food has gone from nutrient-filled substance that comes from good, thriving soil to 60 to 70% of our calories being ultra-processed, industrial food-like substances that come from poor soil. 74% of Americans now are overweight or obese. Obesity was rarely ever described 150 years ago. We're actually eating ourselves into a grave. You can get to people in their homes with a book, with podcasts, like what you're having, and help people understand that there is a different way to feel good. That involves understanding your own body and root causes, because the system's not doing it for you.

01:03 - Speaker 1 If you're interested at all about having a doctor's perspective, but also someone who is very aware of all the other things that matter and are meaningful in life to empower you to move you forward. She's your girl.

01:15 - Speaker 2 My name is Dr Casey means my book good energy the surprising connection between metabolism and limitless health is coming out May 14th. This is Ever Forward Radio.

01:34 - Speaker 1 What's up. What's up, what's up. Welcome back to the show. This is Ever Forward Radio. I am Chase Tuning, certified health coach, wellness enthusiast, army veteran and someone after good vibes, good energy, and that is exactly what my repeat guest today, dr Casey Means, is going to talk about on the show. Welcome back to Everford Radio, my friends. Welcome back, dr Casey. If you guys find value out of today's episode, make sure to go and check the last two interviews I had with her on the show. I'll link them for you down in the show notes.

02:05 But today we're diving into Good Energy, the title of her amazing new book, the Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. Casey poses the question what if depression, anxiety, infertility, insomnia, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, alzheimer's, dementia, cancer and so many other health conditions that torture and shorten our lives and, unfortunately, the lives of our loved ones actually have the same root cause? Our ability to prevent and reverse these conditions and feel incredible today is under our control and simpler than we think. The key is our metabolic function. This is the most important and least understood factor in our overall health. In her book and in today's conversation, casey explains how nearly every health problem we face can be explained by how well the cells in our body create and use energy. The through line here today is that the right knowledge and practices a life of quote good energy is well within all of our reach. If you find value in today's episode, it would mean the world. If you would do one of two things. On whichever platform you're listening or watching, hitting that subscribe button, that follow button, does immense things to the show. It supports us in big, big, big ways so we can keep growing, expanding production and getting even more amazing guests like Casey today. Also, if you think there's one person in your life a friend, a family member, a coworker that could benefit from learning how to have more good energy in their life, sharing it out with even just one person really helps spread the word, helps us all have good energy and helps all the people you care about live a life ever forward.

03:52 Recently on social media, I was asked what is your number one supplement and I responded if I could only pick one supplement to take daily for the rest of my life, hands down, it would be Mito Pure by today's sponsor, timeline Nutrition. Flat out, it's because the way that I have had an increase in my daily baseline energy is one of the most noticeable differences I've experienced in years of my wellness practice. Not to mention, I actually went off of it recently for about a month to make sure it wasn't all in my head, and I didn't like the way that I felt. I won't say that I felt bad, but the drop in daily baseline energy for me was so noticeable I cannot wait to get back on my daily MitoPure. The best part is I know that I'm not only feeling my best daily, but thanks to the 10 plus years of clinical human evidence supporting longevity, mitochondrial revitalization, muscle muscle endurance, strength recovery, I am contributing to a better me tomorrow and year after year after year, thanks to timeline, I'm able to fortify my health at the cellular level and support my longevity with two simple soft shells daily for the recommended dose of their key ingredient, urolithin A. Their clinical studies showed a muscle strength increased by up to 12% after only 16 weeks. Muscle endurance increased by up to 17% after only eight weeks.

05:15 And now, yes, mitopure is something you can find in nature, which is great. We all should be focusing on whole foods, but in order to get the same amount of urolithin A, you'd have to really do some damage. Mitopure unlocks six times more urolithin A than diet alone. So if you're looking for help in your daily energy levels, cellular regeneration focusing on recovery and longevity, mitopure is the product for you. I want you to head to TimelineNutritioncom slash EverForward to learn more. Do your own due diligence, check out all the amazing science and research and literature there and then, when you decide to do it because I know you will I want you to save some money at the same time. So at checkout, code EverForward Details are linked for you, as always under episode resources and today's show notes, number three third time Welcome back, so glad to have you here.

06:04 - Speaker 2 Chase, it's so good to see you.

06:06 - Speaker 1 We're just like hype. The ketones are kicking in already. Yes, they're kicking in already. There's this quote in the book bad energy is the root of disease. I know it's called good energy, but let's start talking about bad energy. What do you mean by that?

06:20 - Speaker 2 Yeah, so unfortunately right now in the United States by that yeah, so unfortunately right now in the United States, the research is suggesting that 93% of American adults have metabolic dysfunction, and so this is really what I'm calling bad energy. Bad energy is kind of this easy to access term that helps you understand what we're talking about when we talk about metabolism or metabolic dysfunction. Good energy is metabolic function. Bad energy is essentially metabolic dysfunction, and energy is metabolic function. Bad energy is essentially metabolic dysfunction, and we know this is important because we have these incredible bodies that are made of 40 plus trillion cells, and every single one of those cells needs energy to function properly, and that energy is made through our metabolic processes. We take in 70 metric tons of food in our lifetime, and all of that food is potential energy. It's not energy we can use. We have to convert that energy, through the mitochondria by and large inside ourselves, to a currency of energy that our body can use, and that's ATP. That's this. I think of it as like the money that we pay for all the chemical reactions that are happening ourselves. So 40 trillion cells each of those cells is doing trillions of chemical reactions per second, and all of that bubbles up into our lives and into function and health.

07:31 And right now in the modern American body, that process of food energy to cellular energy is broken, and recent research is suggesting that it's broken in about 93% of American adult bodies and a lot of children as well now who are getting metabolic dysfunction.

07:47 And what's so unique about the modern industrial Western world that we're living in is that every aspect of the environment we're living in in modernity is uniquely hurting the mitochondria, uniquely targeting that incredible organelle that makes energy and that's leading to bad energy, and it's the biggest blind spot in healthcare. So this is what we're talking about when we're talking about metabolic dysfunction and bad energy. It's a fundamental problem with how our cells are powered, and what the research is showing us more and more is that nearly every leading cause of death in the United States and more broadly in sort of Western industrialized countries, all of these different diseases, are fundamentally rooted in metabolic dysfunction. So the real call to action of the book Good Energy is to help people understand this concept, to reimagine what healthcare could look like if we were looking at disease through a metabolic lens, for people to be individually empowered to understand their own metabolic health and learn how to improve it, which is a lot simpler than we think.

08:55 - Speaker 1 It should be obvious, right, the energy potential of you know, maybe, a hot bar at Whole Foods or a salad, or you know a home cooked meal that you know where everything came from. Versus takeout, versus fast food, the energy potential should be drastically different and obvious, right. Can you help us understand more of this energy potential concept when looking at all calories, all food?

09:15 - Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely so. It's more than just thinking about a calorie, because ultimately that energy potential in food, the substrates, the raw material, that's not the thing that's actually powering ourselves. What's actually powering ourselves is the byproduct of that, after it goes through metabolism in our bodies. So all of this is just a flow of energy through our body. But that flow is broken because our mitochondria are broken. The machine that's actually converting the potential energy to the real energy that we can use is dysfunctional. So when we eat we have to think about not just what is the caloric content of our food and how is that going to yield energy in our body. We have to think about what parts of the food are actually hurting or helping the machine that converts that potential energy to real energy.

10:06 So an example of this is the mitochondria people might remember from high school biology. You know it's the powerhouse of the cell and there's the electron transport chain and it's these sets of proteins embedded in the mitochondrial membrane that basically pass electrons through to make that ATP, that currency of energy that we can actually use. Well, each of those proteins in the electron transport chain require several micronutrients as lock and key cofactors to make it work. So these little you think of, like vitamins and minerals and micronutrients, as actually binding to these big protein machines and creating these tiny conformational shifts that allow them to actually work properly. Well, we get those micronutrients from food. This is things like zinc and manganese, magnesium, b vitamins, vitamin C, that literally bind and make it work properly. So that's an element of sort of the non-caloric content of food that's actually changing the machine that makes the energy.

11:01 Another example would from food would be antioxidants that we eat, so the mitochondria. When it is damaged from environmental factors, like environmental toxins or sleep deprivation or chronic stress, it can essentially become this dysfunctional engine that produces too many damaging byproducts, free radicals, reactive oxygen species, creating this phenomenon called oxidative stress in our cells, which is essentially like a damaging state of too much metabolic waste and byproducts that can go on to hurt the cell. Well, in our diet we can load it with antioxidants, these molecules that bind the damaging free radicals and neutralize them, and that can also support good mitochondrial function. So there's many aspects of our diet that are independent of calories and potential energy, that actually just shape a system that works better and so it's really. This is why whole foods and foods that are grown in a really thoughtful way in good soil, are so important for our metabolic health because they include all these other molecular components that support the energy producing system of our cells. That makes that energy that ultimately we need to power our bodies and lead to health.

12:22 - Speaker 1 I want to make maybe a little bit of a devil's advocate argument or statement. The body is pretty damn good at keeping us alive. It has a lot of systems, a lot of things to navigate, things like free radicals. We're constantly, daily, everybody fighting cancer, you know overgrowth of cells and tissue, and we have things that are happening that are not ideal for homeostasis, for optimization, for longevity. But the body will get us through. So why do we have such a focus on things now such as mitochondrial health and free radicals? Is it really truly because the choices we're making are not keeping this resilient system as operational as it once was? Why does this matter so much now?

13:08 - Speaker 2 I think, because things have changed so drastically in recent history. The way I like to think about our choices and our daily dietary and lifestyle behaviors is all through the lens of what are we exposing the body to? What types of energy and matter are we exposing the body to that either helps it function properly or, like gums up and hurts the system? And when you match your choices with the needs of the body, you and don't overwhelm it, which too much that hurts it you ultimately get health. And so, um, I think that in recent history, the default of every aspect of our environment that our body's exposed to and living in has become either overwhelming for the cells or is not meeting its needs anymore. So let's just go through a few example. The main ways that we sort of expose our body to different environments is through the food we eat, how we move, how we sleep, the level of stress we are exposed to, the environmental toxins, the way we interact with light and the way we interact with temperature. So those are kind of the seven main pillars I think about in terms of choices we have to interact with, to expose our body to different sort of realities every single day.

14:25 When you think about food. Just in the last 30, 40 years, food has gone from this nutrient-filled substance that comes from good, thriving soil to 60% to 70% of our calories being ultra-processed, industrial food-like substances that come from poor soil that doesn't have a thriving, biodiverse microbiome in the soil. So our food is actually nutrient depleted, and then we're further nutrient depleting it because we process it. So food has changed drastically. So that's one way our body interacts with the outside world and that's completely changed in the last 40 years. Those 70 metric tons of food that we take in, a huge percentage of it is just actually devoid of what the body actually needs, and this is one of the reasons why we're literally, as a country, eating ourselves to death. You know, 74% of Americans now are overweight or obese. Obesity was rarely ever described 150 years ago. We're actually eating ourselves into a grave, and part of that is because the food that we're eating is so devoid of real nutrition that our bodies are constantly seeking to get what it actually needs. So we just keep eating and eating and eating to meet the needs of the body. But the food is so depleted that we never actually meet the needs, and so that's just food.

15:44 You look at sleep. We're sleeping 25% less on average than we did 100 years ago. That's a huge change in our circadian biology. Our bodies are. Our biology is based on chronobiology. It's based on doing certain things in the waking light period and doing certain biologic processes in the dark sleeping period, and right now we've totally thrown that for a loop with our modern schedules. You look at movement. The average American is sitting 80% of a 24 hour period, just sitting. We're the only bipedal animal that can walk around on two feet and we're choosing to lock ourselves in chairs 80% of the time. That totally changes our biology.

16:26 - Speaker 1 It's like real life, wally. It's real life, wally.

16:28 - Speaker 2 I talk about this in the book. We're literally living Wally um, where we're like sitting essentially in chairs, having things brought to us all the time. That changes our cellular biology. Every time we move our muscles we're pushing our glucose channels to the cell membrane. That's true. Like muscle contraction is a biologic signal to change what's happening in our cells, and we've totally radically changed our relationship with movement.

16:51 You go to environmental toxins. There's 80,000 plus synthetic environmental toxins that have been pumped from industry into our food, water, air homes, personal care products in the last 75 years, many of which are direct mitochondrial disruptors. You look at our relationship with light we now spend 93% of time indoors not exposed to photon energy, and so you just go through each of these pillars and things have changed drastically. So this body that's evolved over millennia in a specific relationship to the environment around us and we think of the environment and our choices as the ways we tell our body what to do and when, it's all changed. So I think that chronic disease epidemic, the metabolic epidemic that we're seeing, is fundamentally confusion from the body and it just does not know what to do, and so we're getting very, very, very sick. So a lot of what we need to do is really examine how our body's designed to work and make our choices, to give the body what it needs and not overwhelm it with things that are going to really gum up its processes.

18:03 - Speaker 1 As you were describing all of these things, what came to mind for me was what I see most when I go on my personal social media, when I go to my community, and that's I feel like now.

18:15 The more healthy a person is outside looking in, or the more healthy a person is trying to become, the more hyper aware they are of all of these things and the more not this is not a knock on you but the more stats they want to share or the more hacks they want to have, or the more tests they want to run, or the more concerned they are about how they move their body, their sleep, what goes into it. But if we look at who, objectively, would benefit the most from any or all of these practices, it would be the person. I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say middle America. It would be the person that is not really not really doing much or a lot of these things to improve their health. Why is it that it seems like the more healthy we get, the more focused we are on these things, when we are not the person that it seems like the more healthy we get, the more focused we are on these things, when we are not the person that it really matters most for.

19:10 - Speaker 2 It's a great question. I mean, I think that, unfortunately, we have a rigged system that has normalized things that are so unhealthy and that's just. It's just created a world in which we have accepted this very like unnatural, sick, you know, existence as normal, you know, and I think, and unfortunately I think, that, um, when you, when you talk about, yeah, like populations who, like populations who you mentioned, like middle America, where there's really high rates of chronic disease and obesity, the system has pushed everything from the level of policy and farm bill, subsidies and what we're serving in school lunches to normalize something that is so abnormal, which is basically the vast majority of Americans.

20:08 - Speaker 1 You know what Casey and I are talking about here today is truly what a revolution starts with the revolution of yourself and revolutionizing your mindset and your approach to your physical self, your total well being and for years, my well-being was ignoring mental health. Recently, if you've been following along my social media, especially on Instagram at chase underscore tuning, you might have seen some recent struggles I've been having in my mental health. Unfortunately, I'm having some PTSD triggers and I have had a slew of panic attacks since the beginning of the year. Now, getting back into therapy, going back into mindfulness and breathwork practices and honestly opening up a little bit more and more in safe environments has really helped me develop more rapidly available tools to navigate them when they happen. I'm not out of the woods yet, but I can tell you by daily, taking this one thing from Cured Nutrition has helped me just feel so much more in control and an overall mental and physical cool, calm and collected state.

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22:06 - Speaker 2 I think what's so devastating about the time that we're living in right now is that people are very, very sick. Six in 10 Americans have a chronic illness and what has been normalized is so abnormal being sick is now the majority of American adults. And I think what people don't realize is that the whole system has really been rigged against us from the top down. You look at our farm bill subsidies and they are literally putting billions of dollars towards commodity crops that are turned into processed foods that then, for that person that you're mentioning, you know, in middle America, is going to the grocery store, they see this food on the shelf, this ultra processed food, and it's cheaper. And we just think, well, this is the way it is, processed food is cheaper, but it's cheaper because taxpayers are subsidizing that.

23:02 And the farm bill puts an infinitesimal amount of money towards fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes that the foods that actually would prevent and reverse disease, that have the most potential, that have the most potential to really help us. And then you look at what's happening in school lunches. America serves about 3 billion school lunches per year in the public school system. In the National School Lunch Program, there's huge compromise interest happening between industry and the USDA that puts lunchables in front of children's in the school lunch program. Because of deals that are brokered between Kraft Heinz and the USDA Um or how they count pizza as a vegetable because it has tomatoes.

23:42 Exactly, or ketchup as a vegetable or French fries as a vegetable. So there's things happening from the top down that make it so, so, so difficult to be healthy in the U? S and and even on a more broad sense, about the way that doctors are even trained. So you know these people like they are going and seeing their doctors probably they're, they're going into their annual physical, but that doctor is not going to be talking to them about foundational metabolic health because that doctor hasn't learned it. I didn't learn anything about metabolic health at Stanford Medical School. I had to learn all of that after.

24:18 And the reason is because the health care system is very much focused on a fragmented view of the body.

24:25 We focus on the body as a collection of isolated parts that is so built into the very foundation of education in this country, which trickles down into big problems.

24:37 And the reason it's a problem is because when you have a system that is financed and incentivized to have lots of different specialties each which can bill for different conditions and profits off of having a patient with 10 issues go to 10 different doctors as opposed to get to the root cause of that issue, what it does is it causes doctors to ignore foundational connections between diseases.

25:10 And you know it's really interesting we have now over 42 medical and surgical subspecialties in the United States and as we make and literally invent new specialties, we're getting sicker as a country. So it's not like the hyper-specialization is making us healthier, but it does serve the business model of healthcare, which is doctors and systems will make more money the more patients that are seen in the system for longer periods of time. So let's say you have a patient with arthritis, migraines, erectile dysfunction, early heart disease, hypertension and depression hypertension and depression this patient in our system is going to go for to a different doctor for each of those conditions and probably get on a medication for each of those issues, when in fact what we know now is that all of those conditions are fundamentally rooted in metabolic dysfunction. But because of the incentives of our healthcare system, the business model, there is no incentive to educate about that root cause or to change the system that way, because it would actually hurt the bottom line.

26:15 - Speaker 1 The diagnosis becomes siloed. The system becomes siloed, the treatment becomes siloed the patient becomes just compartmentalized into paychecks instead of really imagine if you had all those specialists together and you know they realize, oh, if we actually treat this one thing with the patient, all of us would be out of the job.

26:32 - Speaker 2 Totally, totally, and no one is nefariously having that conversation, it's just the way on every level the system is designed. It's an invisible hand. So, getting back to this person that you're talking about, who's sort of? You know, middle America, and they need this more than anything. What, what, what? People don't. Everyone says, oh, these patients, you know, they're not going to eat healthy. They, they want to eat that processed food. But the reality is that the whole system, on every level, from food to financing of healthcare, to how taxpayer dollars are spent on subsidizing certain foods it's all stacked against these people. And so the hope with, of course, writing a book and, you know, getting this message out is that you can get to people in their homes with a book, with podcasts, like what you're having, and help people understand that there is a different way. There is a different way to feel good. That involves understanding your own body and root causes, because the system's not doing it for you. There's a chapter in the book that says trust yourself, not your doctor.

27:34 - Speaker 1 I was just going to bring this up. Is this what you're talking about when you say trust yourself, not your doctor? That's a very uh. I've never heard anybody say that, especially not a doctor.

27:40 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, well, we specifically talk about how this applies to chronic disease prevention and management, not acute issues. Obviously, if you're in a car accident or you have a complicated pregnancy or childbirth or you have a severe infection acute issues, you should absolutely go see your doctor and get an intervention to fix that issue. But when we've, when we talk about the chronic disease issues that are accounting for 80% of healthcare costs and are the causes of all nine of the 10 leading cause of death in the United States chronic diseases, diseases that are, you know, rooted in diet and lifestyle and lasts for many, many years that is where the system has abjectly failed and does not deserve our trust, because as we have medicalized these lifestyle based issues, they have gotten worse. As we have medicalized these lifestyle-based issues, they have gotten worse. As we have spent more money on treating these issues, they have gotten worse. So this is where we actually really need to understand that we are in control of the choices that we're making every day that impact chronic diseases. And there are tools now, and there's information now for us to really deeply understand how our body is functioning on the metabolic level, and there are tools now and there's information now for us to really deeply understand how our body is functioning on the metabolic level, and it is our responsibility to take ownership for that.

28:58 Um, it would be great if the system were promoting these messages, but it's not, and so waiting for the system to catch up is not the right answer. We have to each take control, and so the hope is that, by sharing this message, you would get more people who are, um, who are feeling really lost in their health journey, to take ownership of it. Um, and I would just say that I really believe in people. I believe people want to be healthy. I believe people want to be there for their children's wedding and don't want their kids to be sick and depressed and don't want their parents to, to to have Alzheimer's. People want to be there for their children's wedding and don't want their kids to be sick and depressed and don't want their parents to to to have Alzheimer's. People want to be healthy.

29:36 Don't want to have to take millions of medications but the whole system is stacked against them, and so I think that, you know, education can be a lifeline and that's the whole idea of writing a book is, you know, for people who are striving but the whole system is telling them essentially the wrong message. Um, you know it's, it's a book as a way to reach out to people and get them that information.

30:01 - Speaker 1 Some of the tools that you talk about in the book are the data and, you know, wearables. I'm going to start with the data being blood. Blood doesn't lie. What metabolic panels should the general public focus on you think, for harnessing, creating good energy?

30:13 - Speaker 2 Well, there's sort of like the easy to access, a little bit more nuanced, and then there's like the sky's the limit testing, and I think that, for most people, starting as basic as possible is really good.

30:24 So, based on research that came out of UNC and then a follow up paper from the American College of Cardiology, that these are the studies that really showed us that, um, that 93% of American adults have some elements of metabolic dysfunction, they focus on literally just five key biomarkers.

30:42 Just five biomarkers that are cheap, usually free at your annual physical. You're not going to have to haggle with your doctor about these, and so that's where I would just ask everyone to start is five biomarkers, and this is fasting glucose, triglycerides, hdl, cholesterol, waist circumference and blood pressure. So the ranges that we want to shoot for, for those just to understand directionally if we are metabolically healthy or not, is a fasting glucose under 100 milligrams per deciliter, triglycerides under 150 milligrams per deciliter triglycerides under 150 milligrams per deciliter HDL above 40 for men and above 50 for women, waist circumference less than 35 inches for women and 40 inches per men. And a blood pressure less than one 20 over 80. And then, additionally, one other blood sugar test that was included in that was a hemoglobin A1C which is sort of a long-formin for the blood sugar or blood pressure medication for the blood pressure. They are part of the 93% of people I'm sorry they are part of if they meet all those criteria. They are part of the 7% that is metabolically healthy and again, those are easy, easy tests.

32:05 - Speaker 1 So it really doesn't take much to be in the top 7% of Americans, health-wise.

32:10 - Speaker 2 It's meeting all those criteria, not on medication.

32:13 - Speaker 1 What's amazing about those? In my opinion and I know there are a lot of different barriers to entry socioeconomic status, belief systems, food deserts but what is so exciting to me about those is that, should somebody get a lab drawn and those five, or any of those five, are out of whack. Very scientific term, I'm going to say within 30 days you can make subtle lifestyle changes, and I mean subtle in terms of cleaning up a couple of things in nutrition, a little bit more activity, sleep. In 30 days you could retest. I'd be willing to bet most, if not all, you're going to see a decrease, or in some of you could retest, I'd be willing to bet most if not all, are you going to see a decrease or, and some of you might want an increase hgl is the one you want.

32:54 You're going to see things get very close to a better range no question I got something for you.

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34:24 - Speaker 2 I've seen triglycerides drop 150 points in two months Wow. And I've seen fasting glucose drop 10 points, 20 points in a couple of months. These are things that can and blood pressure can certainly change if you start sleeping, exercising, managing stress, getting off the sugar. So these things can change rapidly. We can make that 7%, so so, so, so, so much bigger with the good energy habits that are mentioned in the book.

34:50 - Speaker 1 Can we start a 7% 30 day challenge? I love that. Let's make it.

34:53 - Speaker 2 Let's make it 30% and it's getting worse. You know it went from the UNC study in 2019 showed that 88% of American adults are metabolically unhealthy, and then the study in about 2022 from the American college of cardiology that was showing 93%. They use slightly different criteria, but it focused on these basic biomarkers and so it's. It seems to be getting worse, which is incredible. I mean, we're getting close to a hundred percent of dysfunction and, like you said, they're easily modifiable. So that's kind of the basics and I think ideally everyone would.

35:26 You know, pause the episode, write these down, go look at their labs and their biomarkers from their last physical and if they can't find them, just make sure your doctor gets them on the next physical, because the doctor will not fight you about those. Those are very basic. You know, when you start asking for things like fasting, insulin or CRP, you might have a. The doctor might say, oh, you don't need this, but those you can get, so, so make sure you know where you are on those. Then, as we get a little bit more detailed, I talk about some of my next sort of tier of really favorite metabolic tests in the book, and these are ones where they might be your doctor might not be willing to order them because they might say, oh, you're, you're, you're healthy, you don't need these. But there are things that I really do think everyone should should, get.

36:12 - Speaker 1 You're too healthy.

36:12 - Speaker 2 You're too young or you don't fit certain criteria.

36:15 - Speaker 1 The textbook 20 years ago.

36:16 - Speaker 2 Right. So one of them that I love is fasting insulin, which is probably my favorite test of any test. And insulin is the hormone that is released from the pancreas when the body has higher blood sugar levels and wants to take that sugar out of the bloodstream and put it into the cells. So insulin binds to the cell and lets the glucose flow into the glucose channels. So when we eat carbohydrates and our blood sugar spikes after a meal, our body will release insulin and take the glucose out of the bloodstream. So when the mitochondria become dysfunctional from all these different dietary and lifestyle factors and it can't effectively convert that glucose to cellular energy, atp, the cell and its infinite wisdom is going to say well, I'm broken, I can't convert this glucose to energy, so I'm going to block it from coming into the cell because it's going to overwhelm me. Block it, that's insulin resistance, not block it entirely, but it's going to put a block to the entry of glucose because it has lower capacity to make energy. So we have bad energy, which is fundamentally rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction. The cell will block the insulin signal so the glucose isn't going to continue to overwhelm it. That's when we see the blood sugar levels rise. So fasting insulin is such an interesting and effective test to get because when the body starts generating insulin resistance, well the body's like wait, no, no, no, we have to get this glucose into the cell. So it's going to actually secrete more insulin to drive more glucose into the cell, but that cell can't process it. So now what you have is rising insulin levels and rising blood sugar levels. So if you can test that insulin, you can get an early clue as to whether there's some insulin resistance happening in the cell. But studies have shown there was an amazing paper from the Lancet, which is a premier British medical journal, that showed that fasting insulin levels will actually go up before the blood glucose goes up Really, yeah, and up to like 10 years early. And that's because as the cell develops insulin resistance and the body tries to overcome it with higher insulin levels, that will work for a while, that high insulin level will continue to drive glucose into the cell. Only when that system gets super, super dysfunctional and broken again, rooted in that mitochondrial dysfunction, will the blood sugar levels start to rise. So the beauty of a fasting insulin test is that will give us an early clue as to whether those glucose dynamics are going to go off the rails a few years later.

38:41 But that's not a standard test that we ever order in conventional medicine, so fasting insulin is a key one. Crp, which is an inflammatory marker, is a very important metabolic test, the reason being that when we do have bad energy, metabolic dysfunction, what that represents, like we talked about, is an underpowered cell, a cell that can't make enough energy to do its work, which is fundamentally a cell that's under duress, and that cell will release signals that say I'm under duress and this is a threat that will actually mobilize the immune system, which is our army in the body, to start mounting a response. So that will be represented by higher CRP levels, which is an inflammatory marker. So CRPs are really actually important metabolic tests because it's a clue that there's something in the body that is causing a sense of chronic alarm and in many American bodies that is underpowering due to bad energy. So fasting insulin, crp.

39:41 I highly recommend liver function tests. So this is like AST and ALT, which can tell you how your, whether your liver cells are damaged. One of the big ways that our liver cells are damaged in the United States now is that they are essentially filled with fat, because metabolic dysfunction, again rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction from our environment. If that, if that mitochondria isn't effectively converting glucose to ATP, it will convert a lot of that glucose to fat to store it.

40:15 - Speaker 1 I see so much fatty liver disease popping up more and more.

40:18 - Speaker 3 now, I think this is kind of a new thing. I think this is kind of a new thing. I think this is kind of a new thing. I think this is kind of a new thing. I think this is kind of a new thing. I think this is kind of a new thing.

40:36 - Speaker 1 I think this is kind of a new thing. I think this is kind of a new thing, I think this is kind of a new thing Any big issues or symptoms. But until you get one of these labs to look at this could be something really underlying, that's a big problem.

40:43 - Speaker 2 Huge. Yeah, absolutely you, you. There's probably a lot of you walking around to have some belly fat and aren't feeling great and have some vague symptoms and actually have fatty liver disease, which is a sign of this bad energy. Because again, it's all comes back to the cell. You know, if that, if the environment is hurting our powerhouse of the cell and it's not able to convert food energy to cellular energy properly, the body will have to store that somewhere that excess energy and it will sort as fat and that can fill our cells and cause massive dysfunction and that's a root of fatty liver disease.

41:18 So, looking at AST and ALT, which are liver enzymes which basically, when a liver cell is damaged, those will leak out into the bloodstream, higher levels are a sign that there's something going on with the liver. So so, liver function tests, inflammatory markers, fasting insulin, these are a few and there's there's many more that can start to, together with the fasting glucose and the triglycerides, which is another form of, you know, when glucose converts to fat it's high triglycerides, um, waist circumference. Together you can start to read the tea leaves of something going on in the body. That's not quite right.

42:00 - Speaker 1 One of these is not like the others.

42:01 - Speaker 2 When I see someone with slightly high fasting glucose triglycerides are creeping up, the the waist circumference is a little high. The fasting insulin is is high. We've got the liver function tests are starting to creep up. I'm I know that I'm looking at someone who's fundamentally got an issue deep inside their cell of how they're converting food energy to cellular energy, and it's manifesting in these biomarkers. And we've got to do everything we can to focus diet and lifestyle activities on improving the capacity of the body to make good energy, improving the capacity of the mitochondria to do their best work, which means giving it what it needs to function properly and taking away the things that are hurting it. And that's fundamentally how we developed the plan and the book, which was to do those two things.

42:52 - Speaker 1 Are we saying now that mitochondrial health, metabolic health, poor energy, internal is the place to go? This is the culprit that is causing all of these problems. Or are we just in a better place now in medicine, that doctors should be going to a newer starting point that maybe has been overlooked for so many years? Is this the new place to go to kind of rule things out and to help people get healthy?

43:18 - Speaker 2 I think that every American needs to start by understanding their metabolic health because it's affecting metabolic dysfunction, is affecting so many Americans, close to 100%, that if you have almost any symptom in the body, this is a good place to investigate. Really Wow, because if it's not optimal, if it's not in the healthy range, that's something you can do to help your body do its best work.

43:46 - Speaker 1 So it's really safe to say, regardless of whatever symptom I'm presenting with, if I chose to work on metabolic health, that would be something that we could really figure out pretty quickly is helping or not?

43:58 - Speaker 2 Absolutely. I mean, I think everyone if their, if their metabolic health is not in the healthy or optimal range, that is where we should absolutely get to just a baseline, good level, because what you might find is that many of your symptoms just get better when you do that. Because and this is a key point that I think is helpful for people to understand is that because people might say like that seems like a bold and broad statement to say that this is something that almost anyone should work on, but this is the key point Again, we have 40 trillion cells in the body.

44:30 They all need energy to function properly. Every symptom and disease that we have is necessarily the result of cellular dysfunction. You don't have any symptoms or diseases that just arise from out of thin air. It has to be. We are all cells, it's just cells, and so when cells are not working properly, for whatever reason, you will have, you know, symptoms and diseases so you have to fix the functionality of the cells for the disease and symptom to go away.

45:03 We can sometimes mask diseases and symptoms with medications, but unless they're actually affecting the dysfunction, they're not truly healing the patient. So symptoms and diseases necessarily a result of cellular dysfunction. So then, our job as physicians what it really should be is trying to figure out what is the cellular dysfunction and what is causing it, and then peel back the things that are causing it and making sure that the function is improving, and biomarkers are one way that we can start to understand where the dysfunction might be coming from. This is not how we practice medicine at all. Right, how we practice medicine is people show up with a symptom and we have no curiosity about that symptom, and we just put things on the symptom to mask, to stop the symptom. We don't look at symptoms as what is this telling us about the function of the body and how we can fix it? We say that symptom is intolerable, telling us about the function of the body and how we can fix it. We say that symptom is intolerable. We're going to hammer it with some type of medication, regardless of whether it fixes the real problem or not. So, because the data is showing us that so many American adults have this metabolic issue, a problem making energy in their cells. That is why it is a really good place to start, because it is likely a cause of dysfunction in many of the people, showing up with different symptoms.

46:17 Now to get to the question of how are so many symptoms related to this? We have 200 different types of cells in the body. So we have epithelial cells of the skin, we have endothelial cells of the lining the blood vessels, I have retinal cone cells, I have astrocytes and glial cells in the and hippocampal cells in the brain. We have, you know, ovarian theca cells. We have hepatocytes and kidney cells. We have all these different types of cells. They each do different things. They're parts of different organs. So underpowering metabolic dysfunction in a ovarian theca cell is going to look different than underpowering in an astrocyte or a glial cell, which is going to look different than an endothelial cell being underpowered. They're going to emerge as different symptoms because they're different cells, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the actual disease is different.

47:12 - Speaker 1 The symptoms are different, it doesn't mean we're not dealing with the same root issue.

47:15 - Speaker 2 Exactly, but unfortunately, and I think again, this benefits the business model of healthcare, because if we see these things as based on their symptoms, we can treat them all separately and that's like 10 different bills as opposed to one. I don't want to imply that that is nefarious. I think it's actually that we're just practicing outdated medicine, because before proteomics and metabolomics and network biology and you know, all these advanced tools that we can now use to actually see the invisible processes happening inside the body cell signaling pathways and epigenetics all this stuff, like even mitochondrial dynamics Like when we were originally describing diseases, all we had was the symptoms. So this is why when you look at something like depression, we describe depression literally. The diagnosis of depression is a symptomatic criteria. If you have a certain number of these symptoms, we say you have depression. Because when we were categorizing diseases, that is what we knew. Now we actually know what is going on inside the bodies and cells of people with depression, and yet we haven't updated how we actually define.

48:33 - Speaker 1 What's it going to take to do that? What's it going to take to update these things? So, like the next generation, the new wave of doctors, of providers, are actually going to have updated baseline information to base all of these diagnoses off of?

48:45 - Speaker 2 Well, I think it's. I think there are really positive trends happening. I mean, you think about this is fundamentally what functional medicine is all about. Functional medicine is basically the type of healthcare that's being practiced today that actually focuses on what is the function of the cells and how is that leading to different diseases. And you now see there's a functional medicine institute at Cleveland Clinic, which is one of the premier hospital systems in the country. You have Thomas Jefferson University has the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Precision Medicine, which is one of the premier hospital systems in the country. You have Thomas Jefferson University has the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Precision Medicine, which is practicing this way. Sarah Gottfried leads that, you know, and so there are small pockets that are changing, but it's certainly not the norm because of how.

49:27 - Speaker 1 Not a full blown health revolution.

49:28 - Speaker 2 I would know, and I think that it's it's. I think it's going to be a bottoms up revolution. I, when I practiced functional medicine after I left being a surgeon, I opened up my own more like root cause focused medical practice and a lot of people would say to me, oh, it must've just been like wealthy people who could pay out of pocket for this. And actually the reality was it was not all wealthy people who could pay outside of insurance and the reason is because there are so many people out there who maybe don't have a huge amount of resources or means but with our health insurance plans these days, sometimes the deductibles are like $6,000. And let's say there's this person out there who maybe doesn't have a ton of extra money, but they're in the normal healthcare system and they have hypertension, high cholesterol, their blood sugar is rising, they have migraines and they're like going from specialist to specialist and every time they go they're paying a hundred dollar copay. Well, and they're not getting better, right, they're just getting more medications but they're not actually healing those conditions. Then they may be seeing something on the news or read something a book about. Oh, there's a different way to do this. I could actually pay up front to see this doctor who could maybe help me get on top of all of these things for good.

50:44 People are smart and and so actually I saw a lot of people like that, like an amazing man who was like a train conductor and he came in and he was. He drove two hours to come see me because he'd read a book at a gym. He went to that was just sitting in the lobby from Mark Hyman and learned about functional medicine and thought this feels like the right investment for me. So I just am astounded by people and this is why I'm so inspired by media and podcasts and books, because I think that it will be a bottoms up situation where people are demanding this type of health care from their doctors and things will shift. But I don't think it's really happening from the top down because the incentives aren't aligned.

51:26 - Speaker 1 To shift gears a little bit. What role do you think, or how would you medically describe and then maybe personally qualitatively describe the role of relationships and our health and good energy, and specifically with you, if you're open to kind of talking personally a little bit. Yeah, since the first time you've been on the show it's been a couple of years now You're you've now been in relationship with a great guy Shout out out Brian Um, and you know I'm curious. What role has that relationship played in your good energy and how would you get somebody on board? Here we have a Stanford trained MD talking about all these amazing health things that we can, that we can do to empower our lives and health. To hear you talk about relationships might throw them off a little bit. Why are they important? What have they done for you and how can we all benefit from relationships in terms of good energy?

52:17 - Speaker 2 Yeah, you know, the power of relationships for our metabolic health cannot be overstated. I literally devote an entire chapter of a book on metabolic function to relationships, because the data is overwhelming that when we have close, loving, in-person community and we are actually with people and feel connected to people, it is so good for our metabolic health. And part of this is because, aside from being energy producing factories of the cells, the mitochondria are also exquisitely sensitive to fear or safety, because if you're in a sense of threat versus safety, your body's going to have different energetic needs. It's going to need to put its resources in different ways. So the mitochondria is actually almost like a sensor to what's going on in our put its resources in different ways. So the mitochondria is actually almost like a sensor to what's going on in our environment Is it safe, is it not safe? And it will adapt accordingly.

53:19 So the best thing for the mitochondria at baseline is a sense of safety that we are okay and we can actually promote our energy towards repair and building and thriving, as opposed to diverting a lot of energy towards defense and alarm and safety. So you know, and creating safety. And so there's actually this amazing biological phenomenon called the cell danger response, the CDR, which is orchestrated by the mitochondria. And when there are things around the cell like excess stress, hormones or toxins, the mitochondria senses that and totally changes the activity to basically either be in a state of defense or like putting resources towards war versus putting defense its resources towards thriving.

54:12 - Speaker 1 So it's getting engaged to the terrain. It's like I need to be in offense mode, that's right.

54:16 - Speaker 2 Exactly, exactly. And this is why relationships are important, because we are social organisms who one of the best ways for our body hormonally and biologically and neurologically to feel a sense of safety is when we are with someone that we trust and love. That, on so many different levels, um, creates the biological reality inside of us of safety. So I think there's two aspects to it. One is having people around you that engender a sense of safety and groundedness, and the second is actually just more our own thoughts, like how do we, in our own brains, create relationship with self, relationship with shelf, create for our bodies a sense of safety, no matter what is happening in the outside environment.

55:02 You know it's again gets back to the question of like acute and chronic Like we are totally biologically able to mount an acute response to a threat or to stress and to, you know, engage the hormones that help our body be ready to sort of fight that and that's fine for our biology and ideally that you would address it and move on. But the way that we're living today in our society, with isolation, loneliness, not living in community, constantly having these devices in our hands, streaming fear, inducing sensationalist media to our eyeballs 24 hours a day, we're literally waking up and falling asleep with a screen in our hand that's projecting war and murder all the time. Our bodies are totally overwhelmed with a sense of lack of safety and that's crushing our biology. It changes our mitochondrial function and so really the two things that we, the journey we each need to go on as people, is to cultivate loving, trusting community with in-person relationships in our life and then also do the personal work to create a psychological sense of safety in our own body, and so that that can look like a lot of different things from the community standpoint and so that that can look like a lot of different things.

56:21 From the community standpoint, it's really being intentional about who you spend your time with and how and when, and um, making sure that you're prioritizing in person, loving relationships, which sometimes means putting yourself out there more, you know, putting your phone down and actually inviting someone to come over for dinner and to take a walk with you and to do things that are meaningful to you. And then, from the personal work standpoint, it's really examining like what in your life is causing you a sense of chronic lack of safety and then how do you modulate that? So that could be from childhood trauma that you have not addressed, that you know things that happened to you in childhood that basically have created a sense of hypervigilance in your brain that's with you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even when you're 30, 40, 50. So really examining, is that a part of it?

57:06 It can look like re-examining your relationship with news and media and the digital streams of terror that are coming in through our devices all day long in the modern world which are totally unnatural, or it could be actually more existential, things Like are you petrified of mortality and of death and are have you not gone down the road of really approaching some of these big existential fears with curiosity? Those are some of the big buckets that I think about when I think of how the average American in our, you know, highly digital, de-spiritualized culture that is petrified of death. You know, we think that's just a given. But you look at other cultures indigenous cultures, Eastern cultures, the Stoics the relationship they have to death and dying is so integrated and important to the part of living.

57:56 Yeah.

57:57 - Speaker 1 They're. They're equal in my opinion.

57:58 - Speaker 2 Right, and in our culture of being indoors 93% of the time, we're so separated from nature and nothing is more of a fear diffuser than just being out in nature. Cause you look at the trees going through their cycles of dying and rebirth and blooming and the ephemerality of all these things, and you look at the sunset and the sunrise and you see that there are cycles all around us, but we're totally separated from these teachers in nature and so we're fearful. So a big call to action and the reason I end the book with the concept of fear. The chapter is called fearlessness, the highest level of good energy, which is about relationships and then our own psychological safety.

58:41 - Speaker 1 Can I share a quote with you Please? Yeah, I wanted to bring this up Fearlessness. I thought was so perfect and beautiful how you kind of wrapped up the book and you quote say don't confuse setting boundaries to what information you allow in your ears and eyes with putting your head in the sand. It's understanding and protecting your biology so you don't implode. This allows you to show up with the maximal energy to positively impact the world yeah and again to credit.

59:09 You like to hear an md, a doctor, a health care provider talk about. To summarize, to put a bow on a book about energy and health, and you chose to talk about fearlessness. Why.

59:24 - Speaker 2 Well, the why is because the data is absolutely profound, you know, literally. There are now studies showing that a perceived sense of loneliness impacts our mitochondrial function.

59:37 - Speaker 1 Not actual loneliness, just even perceived loneliness.

59:40 - Speaker 2 A feeling of loneliness, feeling yeah, a sense that you are lonely, wow. And and then, of course, we know that the more adverse childhood experiences you have ACEs, you know things like death of a parent or abuse, physical or emotional abuse, things like this in childhood the more of those that you have, the vastly higher likelihood you're going to have a metabolic issue in childhood or adulthood. Chronic stress, perceived stress at work, is associated with metabolic issues. So the data is just absolutely overwhelming that these psychosocial factors, many of which are uh it, you know it's real or imagined, because what's inside your head is what's real. So you know you could. You could be living in a very objectively safe neighborhood low statistical probability of something happening but if you have a phone in your hand that is telling you about murders all over the world, you may still be very, very scared.

01:00:43 We have to understand, step one, how impactful this aspect of our modern lives is on our biology, and then we have to work, to do the personal work to unpack what is causing chronic fear in our lives and to set the appropriate boundaries to the fear inducing information coming into our lives.

01:01:06 A lot of this is digital and, again, it's not to be ignorant of what's going on. It's to literally be protecting our biology so that it can do its best work, so that we can have the actual energy to show up and be a positive force in the world. You wouldn't show a three-year-old a rated R, violent movie, right, and because you know it's going to impact them, and so it's a little bit like that. It's like how do you protect yourself from and your, your cells, which you are the parent of, from being inundated with something that will traumatize and hurt them? I always think about this concept of you know. I think in many ways that the longevity conversation and the biohacking conversation, it's lost its way a little bit, because it's very militant, it's very focused on ritualistic behaviors and it's about control and I think I like to think a lot of, a lot more like in a compassionate, almost like parental, caring sense.

01:02:05 - Speaker 1 I remember you talked about this on the last episode. You really kind of like relinquished in a lot of ways a lot of your disciplines and protocols. You kind of were just like just just being.

01:02:16 - Speaker 2 And and come at it with love and with joy. You know you are, you are caring for these cells and you know you wouldn't show a three-year-old an R-rated movie. Like why are you showing your cells social media 18 hours a day?

01:02:29 - Speaker 1 You don't get your three-year-old McDonald's every day, so why are you doing it for?

01:02:32 - Speaker 2 you. But when we come at it with love, you know and I also love this framework of you know, we are, we love medication in the United States, we love, we have thousands of medications and pills. But what we kind of forget is that our own bodies are actually pharmacies in their own right. With different stimuli and different energetic forces from the outside world, we actually can synthesize and manufacture medication. So you think about, like, we give a lot of women in labor Pitocin, but what is Pitocin? Pitocin is oxytocin. It's synthetic oxytocin.

01:03:13 Well, the body makes oxytocin. How do you make oxytocin? Intimacy hugs when my partner comes up and gives me a hug and rubs my back, I am becoming a pharmacy for oxytocin. Intimacy hugs when my partner comes up and gives me a hug and rubs my back, I am becoming a pharmacy for oxytocin. Similarly, when I we talk so much about Ozempic right now GLP one agonist Well, my L cells of the gut and yours all make GLP one. How do you do it? You change the environment. If I put fiber and short chain fatty acids and omega-3 fats and certain amino acids from protein like valine into my body, the nutrient sensing cells of the gut touch those different nutrients and say, okay, cool Time for me to make GLP-1. So everything when we listen. It's so beautiful.

01:04:00 We are a pharmacy and even sound, so so. So everything you do, all your lifestyle choices, are actually just energetic signals to the body, whether it's molecular information, sound energy, light energy, um, thermal energy. So we talk about cold plunging, we talk about morning sunlight, we talk about all these protocols and rituals, but really it's like in our daily lifestyle and choices we're choosing how to interact with other forms of energy outside of us to change the synthesis of molecules inside our own body.

01:04:36 That's it, that's really it, that's it, that's it and it's so beautiful and we, I think, are so. We've been so divorced from this sense of awe about what our bodies are capable of by some of the messaging of basically, like you know, trust the science. It's all, trust the science and it's like real message that I have for people is like trust yourself, like we have the tools to understand our bodies, like never before the molecular biology research is. Actually, if you step back and look at it in a bigger picture, like what we're talking about, it's so inspiring. We have so much power, but we have to know how to change our environment to get the best out of what our cells are capable of. And that's really the re-imagination of, of of a good energy world that I would love to see, that I know I want to live in.

01:05:24 - Speaker 1 And it's exciting? I really do think it's exciting. It can be overwhelming. I think some people might feel overwhelmed because the switch goes off in your head like, oh, anything's possible, but with that comes work. And so I'm curious before I ask my last question, what is something that you're working on now or have been working on? Maybe you don't define it as I'm doing this for my health, or I'm doing this for a biomarker, or I'm doing this for any particular, you know, quantifiable change, maybe, but what is something you're doing or have been doing that you're seeing some surprising downstream effects in your overall health?

01:06:02 - Speaker 2 some surprising downstream effects in your overall health.

01:06:08 I mean the two that immediately come to mind for me are meditating daily and not drinking alcohol Like those two things. Both started on January 8th when my partner and I, you know, made a commitment. We went to this lecture. We've been going to a meditation sort of lecture in class every Sunday morning at this wonderful um meditation Institute in LA, um called Lake Shrine. It's basically, uh, based on the principles of Paramahansa Yogananda, who wrote the book autobiography of a Yogi, which is the book that Steve jobs gave to everyone at his funeral the one book he wanted everyone to have.

01:06:40 So it's. It's just basically like very general spiritual principles about you know how we've just so forgotten our modern world, that like we are spiritual beings, like living in a human body, you know a body, but that's duality, and like how, how amazing it is that we, we literally just forget that we are, we are in in, in infinite, eternal, you know universe on a planet, and it's like we just, we just think we're these bodies who are here and we live, and then we die, and it's this thing. And it's like, for if you just spend five minutes thinking about the bigger picture, it's like wait a minute, actually we are a constellation of quadrillions of atoms that are constantly in flux with everything else in the universe. We are totally connected to everything. The this universe is eternal and infinite. I mean, it's just, it's just wild.

01:07:36 So anyways, long story short, we went to a lecture on on in the beginning of January and the monk said something so interesting which was, like he said is this going to be the year that you talk about how you're going to start meditating every day, and then next year you're going to be here in the first week of January saying, shucks, didn't do it this year, or is this going to be the year that you actually do it? And it really struck something. It's like, oh my God, probably 15 years. I've said I'm going to start meditating every day and I just haven't done it. And so we, we've done it every single day, and we also. I the same weekend, I listened to a rich roll podcast you know, he's so amazing talking about alcohol. Um, and that clicked something too, and so we stopped drinking and we started meditating every day, and the impact of those two things have been really profound.

01:08:23 Of course, the data supports both of those things being helpful, but I think that what it's really solidified for me which is, I think, that that sort of take home point for others is that it is very important, I think, for each of us to intentionally be cultivating some time each day to think about the bigger picture and the bigger, you know, ecosystem of reality that we're all living in, because that is so much a foundation of fearlessness, because it's it's when we, when we, think of ourselves as these isolated bodies that live and die, and not about our true nature of this buzzing hive of atoms that's constantly inflected with the universe. You know that's going to be recycled into things forever. You know, it's incredible and I think that one of the biggest things we fear, like we talked about, is our fear of mortality, and I think that, because we don't address that with curiosity or a bigger picture lens, it actually, in subtle ways, is is controlling so many of the ways we live our lives, cause we, we, we end up living our lives very much based in fear and scarcity, thinking that this is this and actually what what that ends up doing is making us turn over our power to other people who we think can help in some way save us, like doctors and anyone, and consumerism, basically. So, starting from a sense of your spiritual nature, your limited, your limitlessness, like as part of this eternal process. I love this Taoist statement. You know the the human body is a process, not an entity, and I love that because it's just, it's a reminder to meditate on of like.

01:10:01 We are a flow and the way that impacts our health is profound, because every day we have choices that impact the process and we have the ability to like really literally re 3d print our body every day when we eat, and the first choice we all need to make is to believe that health is possible and to believe that we are worthy of it. Worthy of it and capable of actually having the joyful, high on life, limitless feeling that I think we all want. Mark Hyman talks about how like the real epidemic is this FLC epidemic that we have, which is the we all feel like crap, it's the like we are used to it, and so I just think that, like it is a revolutionary act to believe that you actually can have the most incredible, joyful, limitless feeling in this one lifetime and, you know, really start from that foundation of belief, because you know it's going to make it a lot harder to be happy and healthy and calm and feel. Incredible is if you don't believe it's possible.

01:11:09 - Speaker 1 You never will, or you might start, and then you're back. Here we are again in January, again trying to start over.

01:11:14 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, like if you believe it's possible or you don't, you're right. I love that. It's Henry Ford whether you think you can or you don't, you're right, I love that saying.

01:11:20 - Speaker 1 It's Henry Ford, whether you think you can or you can't.

01:11:21 - Speaker 2 You're right, exactly, I think that is one of the most powerful statements.

01:11:24 - Speaker 1 We apply that to anything in our life, but damn sure when it comes to our health.

01:11:28 - Speaker 2 Absolutely, and meditation, I think, is a really great way to do that is to really sit there and spend that time each day thinking about the infinite possibilities, like one thing that is true, I would say it's hard to debate is that anything actually is possible, you know, like anything and, and maybe things aren't likely, but fundamentally possible, maybe not probable because we don't know.

01:11:56 So so why not think something incredible as possible? Because what that will do is change the biology in your whole body. When we think positive thoughts, we have a different hormonal reality in our body that changes our gene expression, so so so I think that's the key point. Is is just um start with the mindset of you know, and start with thinking big and positive, because it will change the biology, I think, on a more positive direction be more forward thinking and you know, to bring it home, speaking of mindset, that's what I like to come back to every time is moving forward in life.

01:12:35 - Speaker 1 My goal in this conversation and every conversation is to highlight somebody who has an expertise and experience that can help me and my audience move forward in a unique area or all areas of our life. So I want to ask you now for the third time, casey, to move ever forward, to live a life ever forward. What does that mean to you? How do, how do those two words fall on you here today?

01:12:56 - Speaker 2 Oh well, I think that to me, ever forward, what's resonating right now in my life is fundamentally about connection. I think that connection is what's going to heal our bodies and heal our world. And I think about connection on four key levels. I think one we need to really internalize the connected nature between almost all of the things that are causing suffering in the modern, modern Western world today being rooted in the connection of metabolic issues and this fundamental block to effectively producing energy in our own bodies. So that's the number one aspect of connection.

01:13:36 The two the second is what we've just talked about really internalizing and meditating on our connection as a body, as a process, to everything else in the universe air, water, soil, photon, energy from the sunlight uh, that we are dynamically connected to everything else. We are not isolated, and that is really beautiful and we need to be thinking about that a lot more. Anything we do to hurt our environment, our water, you know, to keep ourselves indoors, away from sunlight, away from nature and trees, is not good for our health. We need to be outdoors, protecting the environment and being in touch with it, not locked in chairs in rooms all the time. That's that's killing us.

01:14:23 - Speaker 1 For your next interview. Uh, we're going to have an outdoor studio. I'll set it up, We'll do something.

01:14:29 - Speaker 2 The third piece of connection is the other one we talked about, which is that we need to realize that in person, loving, trusting connections with other human beings is is non-negotiable for optimal biology.

01:14:40 Being with a person that you care about in real life, in their field, changes our biology hormonally, molecularly, epigenetically, and we need to reject these concepts of sitting on our phones, scrolling all day, social isolation, these ridiculous things that are just they're not conducive with optimal human biology.

01:15:00 And then the fourth piece of connection that we have to internalize and that I'm spending a lot of time meditating on is, you know, the connection between life and death and life in this endless cycle of just, you know, really cosmic connection that we are a part of and that has nothing to fear.

01:15:19 And so really getting back to some of those more Eastern, indigenous, stoic, whatever so many other traditions that really examine this continuity of cycles in our world that we are a part of. And if we root our healthcare system on a foundation that ignores those four points of connection, we will never get healthier because it ignores the real nature of who we are as humans. So Ever Forward, to me, is all about moving away from silos to connection and pushing the healthcare system to recognize those pieces of connection and building our multi-trillion dollar system on that bedrock, such that we can actually heal and not base it on false pretenses. That, uh, that underpins why the more we spend, the sicker we get. We need to really get back to our true nature and build a system based on that, which I think will be one of a lot more awe, joy, health and and true, meaningful longevity.

01:16:22 - Speaker 1 Well, there's never a right or wrong answer. I say I always appreciate my guests interpretation and it's so cool to have multiple interpretations of yours. Um, congratulations on the new book, thank you. We're going to have it all linked for everybody, and I'll say for everybody tuning in here on the video or listening in now. Check out Casey means work, her social media, your blog, everything you do at levels. Uh, the book comes out in may, may 14th, may 14th. I'll have it linked for you down in the show notes. Check it out. Uh, it's been a pleasure to have you back here again. Thank you, casey. I appreciate you For more information on everything you just heard. Make sure to check this episode show notes notes or head to everforwardradio.com