EFR 830: The Role of AI in Healthcare, Best Ways to Spend Your Money on Wellness, the Truth about NAD, Ozempic, Nitric Oxide, Why VO2 Matters for Longevity and More with Darshan Shah

00:00 - Chase (Host) The following is an Operation Podcast production.

00:03 - Darshan (Guest) Hi, I'm Dr Darshan Shah and I'm the CEO and founder of Next Health, and I'm happy to be here today on Ever Forward Radio.

00:17 - Chase (Host) What's going on everybody? Welcome back to Ever Forward Radio. I am joined today by Dr Darshan Shah. He is not only a health and wellness specialist, well-known board certified surgeon, published author, tech entrepreneur but also the founder and CEO of brands and entities such as Butology and Next Health, this cutting edge leading concierge, wellness meets functional medicine kind of one-stop shop. I love them. I've been going to them for years now here in LA and they are spreading like wildfire in a good way all over the country. Darshan is an expert on all body systems. He, in fact, has performed over 10,000 surgical procedures, including trauma surgery, general surgery and even plastic and reconstructive procedures. As a health and wellness specialist, he has advised thousands of patients on how to optimize their well-being and extend their lifespan, culminating in the creation of next health, the first health optimization and longevity center to offer life extending and enhancing technology and treatments in this incredibly beautiful, truly welcoming, warm environment. He went through through an accelerated MD program at the age of 15, earning his medical degree at the age of 21. In fact, becoming one of the youngest doctors in the US.

01:34 If you want to check out the video, I'll have it linked for you down in the show notes. He was with me in Everford Radio Studios out of Santa Monica. You can check us out on YouTube if you'd like to watch. If you're more of a visual learner, it's going to be available at everfordradiocom or, like I said, youtube. And if you're listening right now and you have not yet done so, following on either Apple podcast, spotify or wherever you are tuning in right now, hitting follow, hitting subscribe, is the biggest thing you can do for me to support the show. So if you get value added today what Darshan has to talk about or any other episode please go ahead and do so. Thank you, but what are we talking about today? Well, you're going to learn to optimize your health, turn back the aging clock and live a life full of vitality.

02:17 But in this interview, I kind of break it up into a few different sections and we kind of run through what I'll call rapid fire ish. So we dive into tech in terms of AI and what role he sees AI playing in the future of healthcare. Here's a hint. It's a big one. We talk about money. Money is one of the biggest limiting factors getting people well, staying well, and what to do if you have zero disposable income or a hundred dollars extra a month, or even up to a thousand dollars a month, or even up to $1,000 a month. Where are the best areas, the smartest areas to invest your hard earned dollars to get you feeling and performing your best today and for tomorrow and year after year? Not to mention, we talk about access to information, misinformation, and then we really break it down, talking about unique health and wellness areas such as NAD, metabolic health, nitric oxide, testosterone and hormone health, vo2 max and so much more.

03:14 Welcome to the show. Everybody. Here is Dr Darshan Shah.

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04:52 We got a hookup for you 20% ever forward radio listeners. You get 20% off of your first blood test by simply heading to cyfoxhealthcom slash ever forward, linked for you as always, in the show notes under episode resources. But that's S, I, p, h, o, x, h, e, a, l, t, hcom. Slash ever forward to save 20% off of your first blood test. So you've got the Shaw protocol quote. Let me help you live a longer and healthier life, learn to optimize your health, turn back the aging clock and live a life full of vitality. That's a lot. Those are some bold claims. Are you finding you're actually able to do that, to execute that?

05:34 - Darshan (Guest) Short answer yes, we actually can. It's a bold claim because it takes actually takes some work, right, and so I think that if someone is dedicated and they're able to do some of these things, it takes some work, right, and so I think that if someone is dedicated and they're able to do some of these things, it takes some work. You don't have to dedicate your entire life to it. The idea is to make it as easy as possible to integrate this in your day-to-day life, but I think it's mainly just teaching people how to unlearn all the negative things that we've learned over the course of the last 50 years, that we've been taught or told by media and the government, et cetera. I think once you do that part, that's the biggest part of this thing. I'm a big believer in the Pareto principle. There's 20% of the information 80-20.

06:14 Yeah exactly 20% of the information is going to give you 80% of the result. So you really only need to apply your energy to that 20% of the information to start with, and that's going to get you there where you need to be.

06:25 - Chase (Host) Mostly unlearning. Can you dive a little bit deeper there? I think that's a crucial concept because people, especially when embarking on their health and wellness journey in the very beginning stages, maybe the first stage we think and I've been there, you know, at my work as a clinical health coach for years it was I need to learn everything I need to consume from the fire hose in order to make my life better. But in my experience what I'm hearing you say as well, it's more so unlearning to get healthier.

06:52 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, yeah, um, I think it's best explained in like examples, right? So I think one of the things that I learned, um, as kind of the cornerstone to health is you go to the gym, you know as much as you can, but at least four or five days a week, and you spend an hour in the treadmill, right, and so that's what I learned was the healthiest thing to do. So I got a gym membership, like we all do, you know, 30 bucks a month, or whatever. You go to the gym, hit the treadmill for an hour because that's how you lose weight, right, you lose weight by burning calories on the treadmill, and I, like many people, found out quickly that I wasn't helping. In fact, I was gaining weight getting on the treadmill an hour every other day, and so what I found out later was that actually your body needs to focus in absolutely spending time developing VO2 max and zone two. Cardio is great.

07:43 - Chase (Host) We're going to get to that later, yeah, so I'm glad you bring that up, yeah.

07:45 - Darshan (Guest) Right, but I had to unlearn that that was not the optimal use of my time, really. I then moved to a combined routine of strength training and cardio and that strength training is really building muscles or really helped me to lose weight and to increase my energy levels and, just you know, overall improve my metabolism, and so I think there's a lot of these little things that we've thought were the healthiest thing to do. I mean, there's a laundry list of them, right, like avoid fat.

08:12 - Chase (Host) There's don't eat carbs after six.

08:15 - Darshan (Guest) It's all laundry list of things that we've, that we've heard or taught over the last 50 years that some of the unlearning needs to happen so you can move forward in the right direction.

08:25 - Chase (Host) Now, do you think in another five years, 10 years, are we going to be saying the same thing about? We need to unlearn what we're in fact talking about now as the cutting edge, as optimization.

08:38 - Darshan (Guest) You know, I think that there's been massive advances in science and understanding and really really understanding from a scientific viewpoint, looking at the studies and really critically evaluating them, that we don't just have the government telling us certain things anymore with very little information, and people have taken a lot of personal responsibility to understand the science and question the dogma. So I feel like there's going to be a lot less of that. But I think, you know, as humans we will always learn one thing and need to unlearn it to move forward. It's just a fact of life, I agree.

09:10 - Chase (Host) I agree Absolutely, and you know it's interesting not to get political, but you immediately made me think so much of our nutritional information and public guidance on food groups, the food pyramid, eating habits, you know my healthy plate, healthy people, all these things up until really the last eight years, 10 years before the boom of social media and mass information. That's really kind of where we, we the general public, relied on to get our information and guidance of what's healthy and what's not. Do you feel like kind of finally the government has woken up and you know these kind of governing bodies, so to speak? You know the NIH, cdc healthy people are actually. Are they going to adjust their ways? Or because we can just go on Instagram, we go to a podcast and we can get more cutting edge information?

10:00 - Darshan (Guest) Exactly so. You know, it used to be where most of the information that we got was coming from the government, right, and so the government would build themselves as the consolidative information and vetting it and then putting stuff out there to us, like the food pyramid, is a perfect example, right? And there's just this assumption that the government has done this due diligence. This is what we pay them to do and therefore they're giving us the right information, and we now know, you know, 50 years later, that that's what actually made us all sick.

10:31 - Chase (Host) Isn't the food pyramid now literally inverted?

10:32 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, exactly.

10:34 - Chase (Host) Quite literally everything like not out of flip-flops.

10:36 - Darshan (Guest) This is almost completely flipped around, and I think now that the government is not the kind of the source of information the government and government is not the kind of the source of information the government and media is not the source of where we can get information from. The Internet has changed everything in that way and it's really good, right. Like people question things and you know we saw a massive amount of this during COVID, I think and I think people again learn that you need to be personally responsible for your consumption of information, where you're getting it from and who you're listening to, and I think so now there's a massive shift like I said, not to get too political a massive shift in awareness that maybe the best source of information is not the media, is not the government, is actually getting on podcasts like this one and getting all the information for yourself. Unfortunately, the government still controls the purse strings for a lot of this stuff too right. So a lot of attention and a lot of some of the guidelines that were given follows the money, sadly, always Right, and so you have massive food companies, tobacco companies, pharmaceutical companies, guiding massive organizations through donations and through the money.

11:44 Once again, I think it's always good as humans for us to take some personal responsibility over where we're getting our information and really finding what works for us.

11:53 Because another thing that I think a lot of people need to realize is that every single one of us is an individual and we have different biologies too. So just because something works for one person doesn't mean it's going to work for you. So now you have to consume the information but also understand that you're different than the person actually telling you the information, and how does that apply to you? So I talk a lot with my patients about the bell-shaped curve, right. So you know there's everyone falls somewhere in that bell-shaped curve. You might be right in the middle, to the left of middle, to the right of middle, on the outliers or way on the outlier right, and so if you're going to implement the carnivore diet, okay, for example I'm just giving one example, I'm not saying that's right for everybody it could work for some of the people on one side of the bell-shaped curve and can be an absolute disaster for the other people on the other side of the bell-shaped curve.

12:39 - Chase (Host) Or even the same person over a period of time Exactly. I'm sure you can relate. I have found that as I get five years old or 10 years older, the same things that I used to do in terms of enjoyment, but also getting results in terms of body composition, energy, mood. Even labs don't always cut it, but they used to right. So even the same person over time needs to adjust.

13:01 - Darshan (Guest) You're absolutely right. Yeah, we're evolving as humans constantly, both up here and in our biology, constantly as we age, and you have to do different things as you age, otherwise you're potentially going to be doing something completely wrong at a different time in your life, right, potentially detrimental, exactly. Exactly.

13:20 - Chase (Host) I want to get into technology with you quite a bit, but before we do just something kind of timely. So I recently spent a long weekend down in Cabo with my wife and in between getting ready and stuff, we had the TV on on, just like cable TV, which I never have on. I don't have cable and I shit you not every single ad, every single commercial was for a different prescription medication.

13:49 - Darshan (Guest) Crazy.

13:50 - Chase (Host) I, it's one of those things that you kind of you know I work in the health and wellness space and you, you know these things are going on, but I'm kind of far removed from the day to day of that. I Darshan, I was so blown as to every channel, every channel. We would flip through every commercial, maybe for like one or two. It was this medication, that medication, this side effect, that side effect. And I was just going putting myself in the shoes of the general American consumer, going this is all I'm being fed about, information of healthcare, of. If I feel this way, this is my solution. What's your take on that?

14:24 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, it's a travesty, obviously that is not regulated more and unfortunately advertising costs money, right, and so a lot of money, exactly a lot of money. And who has a lot of money? Pharmaceutical companies have a lot of money, and so they are just the way the system is set up. They can buy all that TV space. They have more money than anyone else trying to advertise anything. They can buy all that TV space. They have more money than anyone else trying to advertise anything, even more money than the food companies. And look, there's no one advertising. Get eight hours of sleep right, Right.

14:54 - Chase (Host) I was like where are the sleep ads? Where are the healthy podcast ads?

14:57 - Darshan (Guest) I mean.

14:58 - Chase (Host) I would love to put an Everford radio ad up there, but I don't have an extra couple hundred grand for that ad.

15:04 - Darshan (Guest) Exactly so. Unfortunately, pharmaceutical companies are making a lot of money on their products and they're able to spend a lot of that money on advertising, which just goes to also further highlight the fact that that's why healthcare is so expensive. We are paying for this through our insurance health insurance, right? We're paying for those ads on TV constantly, and so the whole system is immensely broken right now and it's going to take a massive reset. But I know you're moving into technology.

15:32 I think technology is going to be the solution out of all of this, because I think people are tired and sick of being sick and tired, as our friend Dr Mark Hyman says, all the time. People are just sick of this now. Tired, you know, as our friend Dr Mark Hyman says all the time, people are just sick of this now. And, um, I think people are realizing through other forms of media like podcasts, youtube, et cetera, that there is another solution. I think technology is going to be our only way out of this massive, this massive dysfunctional system that we've created, that we call healthcare right now of misinformation, really, yeah yeah.

16:03 - Chase (Host) Do I have any honey fans out there? I'm raising my hand over here. I absolutely love myself. I'm honey. I'm normally not a big sweet additive in things like tea or coffee, but when it comes to honey, honestly, I'll find a reason to put it anywhere. It's one of my most favorite pre-workout snack toppings. I'll take a little English muffin, some peanut butter, drizzle some honey on it. Well, like this snack and pretty much every other area of my life, I'm always looking for what do I like, what am I always doing, and how can I make that habit or that product better?

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18:18 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, I think AI is going to be a massive shift in our healthcare.

18:21 So everyone will have a free AI primary care physician, health coach, personal trainer in their phone and it's going to be for free and you can use it whenever you want. And it's going to be better than any physician you've ever had because it's constantly tracking biomarkers on a constant basis your heart rate, your HRV, maybe even your glucose level and this constant monitoring will be able to make adjustments for you immediately, in real time, versus waiting for a year to go by when you've already developed metabolic disease and now you've seen your doctor and they're like oh whoops, your hemoglobin A1C went up. We should get you on some you know some medication now. That's all going to go away with the evolution of AI and wearables and monitoring of our of our data through our phones, right and so, um, it's so funny. I was just having dinner last night. I was sitting next to somebody who heard me talking about this and and this guy came up to me and said hey, I overheard you talking about AI and healthcare.

19:20 - Chase (Host) I'm actually developing an app to put a physician in everyone's pocket and I'm like developing an app to put a physician in everyone's pocket Overheard in LA, of course.

19:27 - Darshan (Guest) Overheard in LA, right, and I'm like that's exactly what's needed to happen. Thank you for doing that. I know five, six companies that are doing that and it's great. I think it's going to happen. I think it's. You know, a lot of people are scared of it. I think I think a lot of physicians actually are saying you're never going to replace me as a doctor. And you know, there's some certain, there's a human element that the jury's still out if we can replace that. You know. I think we just talked a little bit about the bell-shaped curve of people and where you are in your biology. Well, there's also that bell-shaped curve about where you are in your mentality about health as well, right, very true, yeah, absolutely, and so.

20:01 I think there's some human to human interaction that needs to happen there with a provider that can kind of guide you. But I do think for traditional health care, AI is going to make a massive difference.

20:13 - Chase (Host) So I have kind of an interesting take on that, because that's actually how I leveraged exiting my last job, my last job.

20:25 So when I was running this um concierge medical practice, the wellness director and I would work still one-on-one with patients every day. I actually left to create my own health coaching app that synced with their smartphone wearable devices, even third-party apps, like my fitness pal and I was. This was 2017 and I was convinced that this was the future, and I knew that even then it was kind of still some spin-up, getting people used to really using daily technology or at least setting it up so that it could passively in the background run and provide that information. To me, it was a challenge then, and this wasn't really that long ago. What's that? Six years, five, six years ish, and now I feel like we're still talking about it. So what is, what is it going to take for both the provider, the physician, the health coach, the professional but then on the user side, to both get it and to be able to meet in the middle in terms of adherence?

21:24 - Darshan (Guest) Right, I think you know, I think Steve Jobs said once that there's a perfect time for every new technology, and I think probably back then you might've been a little bit ahead of your time.

21:33 I think you know and I think I think what it's going to take is that someone will have an app that is very easy to use as an incredible, an incredible user interface. It's pretty transparent in your day to day and it's just going to communicate with you things that it's seeing, and these communications will actually make a measurable difference in what's happening with your biomarkers of health, and then you're going to start developing this trust with the system to really believe that what this is telling me to do right now is actually making a difference, and there'll be this feedback loop that's created. And so, um, I've been tracking these AI programs here pretty, pretty closely. Um, there's this one that's incredible, that that, um I can't remember the name of NutriSense or something that you can scan your food and automatically knows grams of protein in it, and all of this.

22:21 - Chase (Host) That's. It's been around for a a while. It definitely has some bugs to work out, but I'm sure it's gotten better. It's going to get better and better.

22:27 - Darshan (Guest) I mean I did a few things with it and it's actually getting pretty good, to be honest with you, things that I mean it's incredible that you can scan, take a picture of something and it can break down the macronutrients in it I remember seeing, maybe like two years ago, on shark tank.

22:39 - Chase (Host) These guys were on and it was a smart plate that had built-in cameras. So whatever you put on the plate, it would scan for you and then send to the device. Yeah, that was pretty wild, that is wild, yeah.

22:49 - Darshan (Guest) and so when these these things kind of all come together in this perfect confluence of and it doesn't need to be actually be perfect, right? Because as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that, as long as you know that we're going to rely less and less on pharmaceuticals to keep us healthy, the pharmaceutical industry is going to have less money and there's going to come a point in time where they're no longer the dominant force. Do you think that'll?

23:38 - Chase (Host) really happen? Will they allow, will the powers that be really ever allow us to get to a point to detach this high level of reliance on pharmaceuticals for healthcare?

23:55 - Darshan (Guest) You know, it's the same question that we can ask about energy, right, like will the oil companies allow us to finally go off of oil and gas for energy, right? I think that human innovation and for humans to be able to keep our species alive, it's an unstoppable force, and being sick and using pharmaceuticals is getting in the way of us being healthy and living our most vibrant and, you know, our most vibrant and disease-free lives, you know, and so we need to get that out of the way, and so I just trust in humanity being able to take us in the right direction as a collective force.

24:30 - Chase (Host) I'm with you. I would love to see it. It's going to take everybody listening, watching, to not only be your own champion, but to be a champion for health for your family, your household, your community.

24:40 - Darshan (Guest) But like, think about it, like even now, compared to 10 years ago how many more champions of health do we see?

24:47 - Chase (Host) Yeah, well, well said, I think a lot, a lot more.

24:49 - Darshan (Guest) A lot, a lot of people are really taking it upon themselves to listen to podcasts like yours, to read the books that are out there and to improve their own lives and spread the word. I see it, I mean I'm, I'm on on the speaking circuit now and I have never had more speaking engagements that I do right now and I'm just like it's almost like unmanageable the number of people that want me to speak about optimizing their health and and living longer and living disease free longer, and I just you know, I never thought it would be this way, but and people are definitely questioning the traditional system now.

25:25 - Chase (Host) Okay. So do you think maybe, particularly in these audiences, is it more so because there are more people waking up for the first time and going oh, I actually do have dominion over my health and I there's a lot, to your point, of unlearning that needs to be made. Or, in kind of my opinion, maybe I'm just skewed because this is the world that I live in. It's almost like this obsession with people. You know they have like I'm healthy and I want to get healthier. You know the biohackers and the optimizers. What's the new, latest, greatest, best thing? Is it more the first or the latter, or is it kind of both?

25:57 - Darshan (Guest) It's that entire bell-shaped curve moving more towards the right. And so what I mean by that is you have the bio-mark, the bio-hackers that are the um, that, that are the early adopters. Right, they're like way out there doing all this crazy stuff, talking about it, but what they've done is they've piqued the interest of people in their own health and they've turned people's attention towards, oh, you mean, I could like get into a sauna and detoxify myself and feel better. Maybe I should look into that, maybe you should look into other health things, you know. And so now those early adopters have increased that, the number of followers in that direction. And now, um, I think that even people that would never biohack okay, which?

26:39 is a large population, exactly, most people most people in the middle of the bell curve that would never biohack, right, but I do see more and more people going in that direction, towards maybe taking a few supplements. These are people that would never have taken a supplement before really understanding the value of vitamin D.

26:57 - Chase (Host) okay, or creatine now I think has a whole new following for cognitive benefits and I think the last year or two have been incredible for females and creatine. Absolutely I know so many more women now on the creatine train, which is incredible.

27:12 - Darshan (Guest) It's incredible right, Because all the talk about muscle health, right, and I think what's happening is more and more people that would have never thought about this or even you know, put any attention or time or energy toward their own personal health are now taking the time and energy towards their personal health. So I do think it's not just the biohackers. I think the biohackers have served some purpose in getting people's attention towards this.

27:34 - Chase (Host) They get attention Exactly. A good friend of mine is Brian Johnson.

27:37 - Darshan (Guest) I love this guy because he does some crazy out there stuff. Probably the epitome of biohacking, Exactly the epitome. But he's gotten a lot of eyeballs and a lot of people are asking like maybe I should do some of this, you know, maybe I should understand what my biomarkers mean. Maybe there are a few supplements out there for me.

27:53 - Chase (Host) Should most people strive to be Brian Johnson?

27:55 - Darshan (Guest) No, I don't think so. I think I think, uh, you know, brian Johnson is a special case. I think he is getting a lot of attention in that direction. I think it's a positive thing actually what he's doing. But I don't think anyone can really be Brian Johnson. You could try very hard to do those things, but Brian Johnson is Brian Johnson.

28:13 - Chase (Host) Exactly, exactly, but I do think that having personal dominion over your own health is a mindset shift. That is, a collective mindset shift that's happening right now. How can we become healthier human beings without it dominating our personality trait? How can we maybe just learn and appreciate and still get excited about the things that move the needle for our personal wellness goals without it taking over our life? And you know I see this happen with a lot. I've been. Know I see this happened with a lot. I've been there. I see this happen with a lot of people, especially in the biohacking space, or even just someone who works out, and they just start feeling great after a couple of weeks. All of a sudden, they just start screaming from the rooftops Fitness is the best thing ever and you're just like shut up, bro, let me live my life. But we still, to your point, should become our own champion and hopefully become a champion for other people.

29:08 - Darshan (Guest) I think so how do we kind of navigate that? Yeah, so I talk a lot about this with my patients, about using the Pareto principle in this particular, for this particular reason as well. There's really only a few actions that you need to put into your life that will make you much healthier. Some of those actions we all know we should be doing. One is avoiding ultra-processed food, eating real food right. Another one is really prioritizing sleep, getting to bed on time and having a sleep routine and a sleep schedule. Another one is spending some time in movement, going for a couple of walks every day. These are all things that everyone can do for free, and I think it really starts at like a family level implementing this for yourself and then taking your family along with you, and then maybe getting some of your friends involved as well and forming this community of people around you that kind of believe in the same kind of ideals and lifestyle that you do, but not overdoing it to where you know like you said you're screaming this from the rooftops.

30:04 - Chase (Host) So maybe doing it not for the gram Right, you know, doing it for you and your house first, exactly.

30:10 - Darshan (Guest) Exactly Believe it or not. I think that you know, I think we get a lot of attention towards those people because of Instagram and social media. So we feel like a lot of people are shouting it from the rooftops but they are. But I think on the grassroots level there's also much, much, much more of that going on and I see it every day in the patients. I'll see, you know a few patients every day. They're not shouting at the rooftops. A lot of my patients don't even have instagram, but they've definitely brought their family along with them. You know they're teaching their kids how to cook at home now, how to shop um, they've. If it's a female, they this is, you know they've. They get their husband to do it. The husband get. Husband brings their wife to their next appointment. So I think there's a lot of that kind of grassroots swell up happening in people's day-to-day life.

30:52 - Chase (Host) Hey guys, quick break from a conversation with Darshan to bring your attention to something that, honestly, I can't believe more people aren't talking about yet, and that is this new C15 essential fat deficiency called cellular fragility syndrome. That is just astounding. In fact, cellular fragility syndrome is the first deficiency syndrome discovered in 75 years and, thanks to a new study that has recently come out, this may explain why some of us are aging faster than we should, resulting in impaired metabolic, even liver and heart, health. It's caused by a deficiency in a very particular nutrient, this essential fatty acid called C15. It's been 75 years, like I said, since the last nutritional deficiency syndrome was discovered, so this is pretty wild news. Why is this important.

31:36 What is C15? Well, c15 is an odd chain saturated fat, and while most of us here in the US at least, have been taught that we need to lower our dietary intake of all saturated fats, it ends up that C15 is a good one. In fact, c15 is the first essential fatty acid to be discovered in over 90 years, since omega-3. That ring a bell, yeah, omega-3, fish oil, krill oil, things like that. And not to mention, they just naturally decline. C15 levels naturally decline as we age. So what can we do about it? Well, besides maybe looking into your diet and sourcing things through whole fat dairy products, you can do what I do, and I reach for one single, small little capsule daily from fatty 15, today's sponsor. This is a science backed, patented, award-winning, pure and vegan friendly C15 supplement to support your long-term health and wellness. This is stuff our body relies on at the cellular level, so do not dismiss this breaking news. If you want to learn more and even save quite a bit of money, head to fatty15.com slash everforward to learn more. In fact, with code everforward at checkout, you're going to save an additional 15% off of their already discounted 90-day supply starter kit. Head to fatty15.com slash everforward to learn more. F-a-t-t-y one fivecom slash ever for to learn more. Or, as always, you can check the show notes, have everything linked for you, including all these amazing new scientific articles down under episode resources.

33:05 You know to your point, and just to kind of bring a full circle, a mutual friend, sean Stevenson yeah, uh, january 2017,. I was at his like live book tour live podcast event back in DC and this person asked a very similar question going Sean, I've been listening to your podcast, I've read sleep smarter. It's impacted my life tremendously, I'm feeling better, blah, blah, blah. But no one else in my family is on board, and I love them so much, I care for them so much, I want them to feel better and to have a better life, but no one else is getting on board. How do I get them on board? And I'll never forget his answer. Sean was just like in the coolest, swaggiest way that Sean can.

33:50 - Darshan (Guest) He's so cool.

33:52 - Chase (Host) He was just like man, you just gotta. You gotta keep a the table for him.

33:56 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah.

33:57 - Chase (Host) And I think that still holds true today. It's so hard not to scream from the rooftops when you lower your A1C, when you get off of medication, when you wake up and you actually don't need to stretch for 15 minutes or have pain in your knees or you hit that threshold on the scale or on the treadmill or in the weight room. You want everybody else that you care about to feel this way, or just to know that it's possible and to your point. It doesn't really take a whole whole lot, it takes a few simple, consistent things. And then you just wake up one day and like holy crap, I feel better and that's that's still so, true.

34:32 And so I think to anybody listening and watching, if that's you, if you're struggling, true. And so I think to anybody listening and watching, if that's you, if you're struggling, the best thing you can do for especially your mental health because you can go crazy trying to help other people, but the best thing you can do is just keep a chair. I wish I had another chair here at the table. We'll keep that for all the people that we're trying to influence and champion for Right exactly.

34:52 - Darshan (Guest) I think also there's a big realization that I had a few years ago when I first started down this journey. So I started off as a surgeon and I changed my entire life into this health optimization career of mine now, about eight years ago, and one of the things I realized very early on in seeing patients and trying to coach them through changing their health was, before they changed anything about their biology, they had to change their mentality around it, right, and so what I mean by that is, um, I think a lot of people don't live in a place of positivity or or kind of a growth mindset.

35:28 - Chase (Host) Sure, If you don't feel your best or you have some kind of negative self-talk or even body image issues, I mean it's gotta be so difficult to get out of that up here.

35:36 - Darshan (Guest) Exactly, and you'll never put these actions into place if you don't get into that growth mindset, into that feeling where you really believe that you can change your life, you know, and so I spend a lot of time upfront evaluating what is the mindset of this person and how am I going to get them from potentially having a negative mindset or a fixed mindset into that growth mindset. And so there's different things that we do on the mindset piece as well, things like visualization, gratitude, et cetera, that can help push them into that. And it takes time, you know, because? But the reality is true is that you're not going to change anything about your biology or your habits unless you get into the growth mindset I, majority of all my patients.

36:16 - Chase (Host) For years it was less and less about what's the diet, what's the workout, more so about behavior change. It was all behavior change. It was all up here. Let's talk money. So I looked up according to Forbes, the average US salary in 2024 is $59,428. And then and now this was a couple of years before that they're still waiting to, I guess you know. Add everything up, the average monthly expenses, according to Forbes, again for just one person, was $3,693 or $44,312 annually. So I don't math good, but that only leaves about $13,000, $14,000 annually, again according to this Forbes article, to play with. When we're talking about a lot of the things that we've talked about optimization, biohacking, even gym memberships, clean eating that doesn't come cheap. So how can the average person who only has 13, 12, 13 thousand dollars extra a year really invest in their health?

37:24 - Darshan (Guest) right.

37:25 So I just got into a big um, not a big, but a semi-big instagram war with somebody over this oh, I gotta check this out so I did a post um, uh a few a couple weeks ago that I stated that it's actually cheaper to eat healthy or Dow than it is to eat unhealthy, eat processed food. And you know a lot of people are like no way you're wrong, yeah, that's, that's BS. And so I actually went to the supermarket and I compared your standard American breakfast of like waffle syrup, orange juice, you know, to getting some frozen blueberries and a carton of eggs. And if you look at the pricing now of some of this ultra processed food is actually more expensive. A box of cereal is like six bucks now. Oh yeah, right. And compared to eating healthy, you can actually eat healthy now for less than eating ultra processed, probably when you break it down like serving for serving kind of thing, yes, exactly, and so there's all sorts of ways to kind of skin a cat with your diet.

38:29 Obviously, buying organic produce is going to be more expensive, but you don't have to. You can buy frozen or frozen produce and it's, it's almost just as good. It's not fresh but it's, but it's probably frozen right on site.

38:40 - Chase (Host) Flash frozen is great. Flash frozen is great. A lot of people discredit frozen fruit and vegetables. In some situations it can actually be a great option.

38:47 - Darshan (Guest) It can be better because the nutrients are locked in at the point of freezing, Right? So so little things like that. And what I say is, once again, the Pareto principle is that there's 20% of actions that's going to make the 80% result. That 20% is actually free, believe it or not. Right, and you and I both know this. Right, you don't have to have an expensive Equinox gym membership to buy a couple of dumbbells in your house and do a home workout. That's just as effective as going to your gym, almost right yeah absolutely.

39:14 And what does it cost to get into a good sleep routine? Like it's almost nothing, just change your schedule around, right? And so these kinds of things are are free. Um, everyone can do them. Um, you know, I'm a I'm a big fan of giving people the the most impactful stuff first, and I find that it's almost always free.

39:34 - Chase (Host) I'm sure this is in your uh, your wellness wheel house. I know and I'll link this to you have some amazing resources. I'm going to link all your stuff in the show notes for everybody. Um is financial wellbeing in that wheelhouse by chance.

39:46 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, so one of the things I do talk about is mental health, mental and emotional health, and part of that is, um, all the different things that cause stress in your life. Right and this is other people, your finances. There's a lot of externalities that can cause stress in your life and trauma as well. Right, I mean, a lot of people have trauma from financial issues as well, and absolutely it works into the overall paradigm of taking care of yourself.

40:17 - Chase (Host) So, then, in efforts to be able to make the choice that I can afford a healthy life, I need to first break that barrier of a limiting belief of poor financial health, exactly. So what would you advise somebody to begin to do to make the better choice in the grocery store? By first looking at their wallet?

40:41 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, yeah, you know, I think, I think a lot of people make a lot of rash decisions with their wallet and they don't really think through things, and so you know.

40:51 - Chase (Host) I like to spend Right, right, I get very excited.

40:54 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, exactly, a lot of people do. A lot of people do like to spend and they spend over their skis and they get themselves in a bad financial situation. But you know, I think that and look, I'm not a financial expert by any means, but I think you know, I think living within your means is definitely a guiding philosophy and not getting into debt is a guiding philosophy as well, and you know for a lot of people that they're already in that place where they're in debt. They're already, you know, living outside of their means. But any change is going to take place, is going to take education, is going to take time. So, have a plan over the next year or two to get yourself into a better financial position. And I don't think you're. In fact, I don't think your health should be a source of financial stress. In fact, I think that if you focus on your health, you'll have less financial stress because you're gonna be spending less money on the things that actually harming your health.

41:46 Things like you know, alcohol going out, going out at night and going to a restaurant and then having some drinks and then having the dessert, and then you know, all that costs a lot of money. In fact, if you commit to your health and you prepare a week's worth of food at home and you stay home for a week and you get to bed on time and you eat the meals that you prepared, you're going to end up saving a lot of money at the end of the day.

42:10 So a health commitment can actually help your finances, in my opinion.

42:13 - Chase (Host) Yeah, you know it comes to mind for me. A lot of people go to their nutrition and trying to get healthy first and they go to looking at calories or looking at, you know, intuitive eating, mindful eating, or maybe even you know if it fits your macros. They kind of go to the more that quantitative aspect, I think, because, thankfully so, we have food with calories and macronutrients and things like that. That's an option for people. I'm not saying it's the only option, but just take that same mentality of quantifying what it takes to get to the nutritional quantification. You know, look at the budget for your calories the same way you would your budget for the money to get those calories have that same level of awareness and mindset and plan going into it.

42:53 - Darshan (Guest) That's a really good. That's a really good analogy to make. I'm sure you know you probably had this conversation a lot. I've had a lot too with my patients is how am I going to afford to do all of this? You know, and and it's when you really break it down for people and understand like that's a limiting belief that they're having, and they change your mindset around it, then they understand like how can I afford not to do this? Yeah, exactly yeah.

43:18 - Chase (Host) I think a lot of people think healthy people and they think the person that has maybe the big, nice fancy car that drives to Equinox or the big fancy gym or goes on these vacations or, you know, spends all their money on green smoothies and all this stuff. Which kind of brings me to another question I have around money and healthcare and wellness is that there seems to be more dollars being poured into getting as quote well as possible. Does wellness nowadays mean who has the most disposable income?

43:44 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, so I mean once again, it does seem like, you know, the only way to get well is to buy that uh $8 smoothie, and that's what's going to lead to where you get an $8 smoothie.

43:53 - Chase (Host) I haven't spent less than like 12 in LA. You got a sidebar with me on that.

43:58 - Darshan (Guest) I actually don't buy smoothies. I would love an $8 smoothie. That's kind of disheartening to hear that they're $12 now Wow.

44:05 Yeah, on the low end, oh man, yeah. So I think I think that you know, um, I think a lot of people just have to get their mind wrapped around that the biggest things that you can do to make a difference in your health are going to be free. That just require your behavior change. I love talking about the ability to build habits, right, I think the most powerful weapon that you could have, not just in your health but also your life, to make massive difference is to be, is to have some knowledge around habit forming, and so I absolutely, when people come and see me as a patient, like I don't talk about their health at all the first visit or two. We're talking about mindset, habit forming. We're talking about those key skills, and I think once you get into the habit of building better health, you'll find out that a lot of it can be done for less money than than and it involves not buying the $12 smoothie actually.

44:57 - Chase (Host) All right Point taken. Thanks, doc. But I get points so like every eight, every eighth one is free. Of course it is. You dangle an incentive in front of me, I'm going to do it. That's literally why I joined the military, but a $20,000 signup bonus.

45:12 - Darshan (Guest) Now I'm blowing it all on smoothies, yeah truly so.

45:16 - Chase (Host) let me ask one more question around finances here.

45:18 If the person listening watching. If they have an extra $100 a month for a year, they've kind of budgeted out their finances. And you know what? I have $100 a month I'm going to commit to my health care. What do you think they should spend it on? And then also, let's go all the way to kind of the other end of the spectrum. Maybe someone has a thousand dollars a month disposable income they want to commit to their health. What would you advise those two people to do with it?

45:44 - Darshan (Guest) Okay. So I think for a hundred dollars a month I would kind of space things out a little bit. I think one month I would get a set of blood markers done. Okay, a hundred bucks to get a set of biomarkers on. Maybe your doctor will do it for you for free, but that that's um something definitely worth the investment, one time at least. Um. Secondly would be, if you're not used to going to the gym and working out and exercising, um, getting a trainer to really help you do it correctly. You know, get finding someone that can give you a workout program, show you how to do it without hurting yourself, right, I think?

46:17 - Chase (Host) also it's a great answer. Yeah, it's a great answer.

46:19 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, I think, I think that's. That's something that, um, a lot of people skip over. They just get a gym membership and then then then they don't do things right.

46:26 - Chase (Host) Then they get sore, they get frustrated, they don't come back.

46:29 - Darshan (Guest) Right, exactly, exactly. Um, I do think a lot of people have a lot of concern and confusion over nutrition, and the reason is because nutrition is different for everybody, and so you really need to work with someone, one-on-one, to really get your nutrition right, you know, and so I think maybe investing in a one-time consult with a nutritionist would be a good idea as well. I think, arming yourself with some information, using your $100 one month to buy five books on health that are incredibly impactful.

46:58 - Chase (Host) What maybe not five, but what maybe top health books would you recommend or keep in mind for you?

47:02 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, yeah. So I would say Casey Means Joe's written a book called Good Energy, incredible book. Gabriel Lyon's book about muscle-centric health is an incredible book as well. I would also buy Mark Hyman's book Food what the Heck I Should Eat. One of my favorite books of all times Atomic Habits by James Clear incredible the first book I buy. To be honest with you is get that book first and learn how to build habits. Become a habit-forming ninja.

47:30 Know how to change your mindset, the course of your life at any moment, by learning how to form habits. It's so important. And then a good book on sleep. If you're struggling with sleep, you know Dr Michael Bruce has an incredible book on sleep.

47:45 - Chase (Host) I think the power of when yeah, the power of when it's a fantastic book.

47:49 - Darshan (Guest) I think you know there's a lot of books that kind of lead you down the rabbit hole of, like, the science and the philosophy of things. You know those are good books to read later. These are books that give you practical, practical, applicable, like do now things to do, and, and so those are the books you want to read first.

48:08 - Chase (Host) Okay, again, I'll make sure to link all those in the show notes for everybody, most of the ones, except for Gabrielle's and Casey's, cause they're new. Um, those books that you mentioned were all the very beginning books that I read in my health and wellness journey. The Power of when Atomic Habits has been out for a while, but also was it.

48:27 - Darshan (Guest) Charles Duhigg's books on habits. The Power of.

48:30 - Chase (Host) Habit Power of Habit, and then Mark Hyman's book Food what the Heck Do I Eat. And then Mark Hyman's book Food what the Heck Do I Eat. And then also one that I think we shared. We talked about recently Dr Oz, his book you, the Owner's Manual.

48:44 Right, that was one of the first books, the first book for me that kind of peeled back the veil of what's going on underneath this meat suit in a very understandable way. I didn't need to be a doctor to understand this stuff, even though it was written by him and another doctor Um, and just made me go. Oh wow, there are things going on that I actually have control over and I can influence in a positive way.

49:06 - Darshan (Guest) Right, and these books believe I mean believe it or not like almost anyone can read them. Like you were a high school student, you can read these. People in high school should be reading these books, because that's what things.

49:15 You know. That's where you can make the most difference for the rest of your life direction directionally. So, um, yeah, I think. I think these are some books that are totally worth the investment. They're not going to take you a year to read a lot of these books. You can read in, just like you know, a month or so and you're going to make a massive difference in your health journey I know what about the person who's like balling?

49:34 - Chase (Host) They're very financially secure. They want to commit $1,000 a month to their health care. Maybe at this point that's more of like advancing or optimizing. I'm assuming if you got an extra $1,000 you want to commit, you've already kind of done the baseline work. What can they do? What would you recommend?

49:48 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, so for those people, once again, it totally depends on where you are right in your health journey. Most people are right in your health journey. Most people do need to start off with a full functional medicine workup. Okay, now this is checking, not just 10 biomarkers just checking like a thousand biomarkers including your genetics, your hormones, you know your, your cancer risk.

50:08 All of these things we can text, we can check for, and right now there's more biomarkers out that are incredibly beneficial than ever before, and so we have a massive amount of information that we can use to help guide your health journey. And so getting those functional medicine biomarkers and seeing a functional practitioner, I think, is a good starting place, like getting your supplementation right, getting your exercise program correct, your nutrition, your sleep, Then I think now you start to start doing some of the more I'm using quotes biohacker stuff, right. So maybe getting a membership to a place where you can use things like sauna therapy, cryotherapy, LED light therapy, hyperbaric oxygen therapy All these things can become part of your routine. You can't do these things one time and expect a difference.

51:00 - Chase (Host) Right yeah, it's not a one and done result. You might feel a certain way. You know especially sauna, you know IV drips and cold plunge. You're immediately going to feel a way. But to your point, the compounding benefits, the actual health benefits, they need reps.

51:11 - Darshan (Guest) Exactly, Absolutely, they need reps. And so getting into some sort of routine. Either Exactly Absolutely, they need reps, and so getting into some sort of routine, either weekly or biweekly, where you're doing some of these programs. I would spend some money on that. I also think you know that there's some expensive stuff.

51:26 That you can do as well that, once you've gone down this road for a while and you're really feeling good and you want to really take it to that next level, next level, now you can start doing things like full body MRIs maybe you know IV NAD drips you can, you can do things along those lines that can now start moving the needle for you and, to be clear, like some of these more advanced, more expensive things, you don't need them. These are towards the end of the wellness. Right Now. You're talking about that 20% of um. It's really a one, not as much a need Exactly, exactly, right, right.

51:59 - Chase (Host) Where do you think people are unnecessarily spending too much money under the guise? Of this is for my health, this is for my wellness.

52:10 - Darshan (Guest) Where do you?

52:10 - Chase (Host) kind of think. It's just like honestly, bro, you're throwing your money away.

52:14 - Darshan (Guest) Some of it is a $12 smoothie bro, you're throwing your money away. Some of it is a 12 smoothies, shots fired, all right, no, look, I mean look we, we. We have friends that make. Make expensive smoothies that are incredible and like I use them. I use them for treats all the time, but um I would say I'm gonna pay rent or get a smoothie, exactly.

52:32 - Chase (Host) Yeah, also overheard in la right.

52:34 - Darshan (Guest) Right, Right, I, you know, I think, chasing the latest supplement trend. I think you know people. There are people that have like bags and bags full of supplements and, look, if that's what you want to spend your money on, that's totally fine. But I think, you know, I think that you want to like focus. If you have a limited budget, you want to focus in on things that are really going to move the needle. If you have an unlimited budget, you can definitely go down the long tail of all these other things, and so I think just dialing it back a little bit on focusing on things that make the biggest difference is the key.

53:08 - Chase (Host) So kind of shifting gears into information. We touched on this a little bit in the beginning, but do you think nowadays here we are summer 2024, do we have too much access to information in terms of what really improves our health, or is information overload actually negatively affecting our wellbeing?

53:25 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, I mean, this is something I talk about all the time is that we are living in an age of information overload and people are getting analysis of paralysis over analysis, right. So there's so much information, information people don't know what direction to go in and they are kind of paralyzed in their health journey. They're not making any movement in their health journey. Maybe they tried one thing and it actually took them backwards because they didn't implement it correctly or whatever. So absolutely there's an overabundance of information out there. Okay, but the blessing in disguise there is that now you can really start seeing the differences between good information and, you know, like Instagram content information how?

54:08 - Chase (Host) how can the average person really differentiate that?

54:11 - Darshan (Guest) Because what happens is is you, you have the different people that are putting out information, and you can see which ones are developing the most credibility, Right and so, um you know, for example, there's Andrew Huberman, there's Peter Attia, there's all the people that wrote the books that we talked to.

54:24 - Chase (Host) Thank you.

54:25 - Darshan (Guest) That's all the people that wrote the books that we talked about, I think. I think there's a lot of um differentiation now in the um credentials and the people putting out the information, and there's trust that's also developed between people that have been around a long time, and you can you can parse this now by the number of, by the number of articles that they've written, the number of books they've written, the number of people that are actually listening to them, and you can make your own decisions now about where you're going to get your information from, right. And also, I think that you know there's people that'll give information in the format that you need to hear it in as well, right Cause we don't have an unlimited amount of time Right.

55:03 So there's not not everyone out there, even though you know he has a massive following, andrew Huberman, not everyone out there is going to be able to take Andrew's information and be able to apply it into their life, because you have to invest three hours into a podcast.

55:15 - Chase (Host) I mean hell. I live in this space and many times I'm like rewind what.

55:19 - Darshan (Guest) Like repeat, please, exactly, exactly. So I think you know um people like yourself that are taking some of this information and making it more accessible to the average or the non-Huberman scientists, exactly the people that you know you can definitely speak to at an intelligent level. You pick the four or five things that you know are working for you, okay. And I think it's easier now that we have choices. Before it was just. You know, here's a food pyramid, right? Good luck, Good luck.

55:52 - Chase (Host) Exactly. Maybe go to the library or do your own research, but no one's going to do that.

55:57 - Darshan (Guest) Right, most people aren't going to do that.

55:59 - Chase (Host) Yeah, when you look at content, what has you shaking? You know health, wellness. You know books, podcasts, content, social media, lectures, whatever. When you look at this stuff, what has you shaking your head the most? What are people? Where are people taking extreme liberties with their claims and really just leveraging one-off examples of scared for scare tactics and views?

56:22 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah.

56:24 - Chase (Host) That's a tough question.

56:25 - Darshan (Guest) Right, right, right. I mean not to name any names but, I, think we all see biohackers. You know, I use biohackers in a loving way, actually, because I think, I think I'm very appreciative to people that are self-proclaimed biohackers, who are bringing a lot of attention to this field. Pioneers Pioneers, exactly. Creatives, absolutely Exactly.

56:46 - Chase (Host) Pushing the boundaries.

56:47 - Darshan (Guest) Right, right, but people have to realize that they're pushing the boundary on their own bodies and this might not work for you, right and so, and it might not be something that you should necessarily do for your individual biology, right and so. I think that if you have that level of understanding about the information that you're taking in, you're going to be mostly safe. Now, if you're looking at people using scare tactics, right, that's generally a red flag. Right, generally a red flag when someone's trying to scare you. But that's so difficult, right, i's generally a red flag. Right, generally a red flag when someone's trying to scare you.

57:17 - Chase (Host) But that's so difficult, right? I'm just thinking of the general, everyday American who is on social media or walking through a book aisle. It's marketing, it's hooks, it's colors, it's sounds, it's. They're going to get drawn in, typically to the thing that intentionally catches their attention first, not necessarily the most credible headline.

57:38 - Darshan (Guest) Right, it's absolutely true, and that's the power of marketing, right, and so the power of marketing is always going to be out there. But I think now, at this point in human history, we are less susceptible to the power of marketing than we ever have before.

57:51 - Chase (Host) I really believe that.

57:53 - Darshan (Guest) I think people have become, for good or for worse, more skeptical of a lot of things. I mean, if you look at every Instagram post where someone is saying this is the way half the people are saying yes, totally agree. The other half like this is bullshit, you know. And so I think when you see that kind of like questioning happening on the comments of Instagram posts, you see people are less conducive to marketing, basically, and I think that's a good thing. I think we're not all following one direction. People are definitely questioning more.

58:31 - Chase (Host) I also just think nowadays maybe this is just me. I just assume everything is an ad.

58:36 I assume I'm constantly being targeted and marketed to. Maybe it's a little cynicism, but it's just so true. I think, especially in social media and you know, really in content space in general, it's really hard to decipher what is not even just genuine information, because it could be genuine, real information, but it's under the umbrella of, hey, this all has been an ad kind of thing. It's a very tricky place to live in and I speak very openly on that because that's how I make my living. I mean, this podcast has sponsors. I talk about things and promote things through the lens of what works for me. But, like I have to pay my rent, I have to eat and you know I'm trying to inform and educate a public, but also myself, and make a living at the same time. It's not easy.

59:23 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, but I do think that your listeners um do have that certain degree of uh, respect and trust for you that you're not going to take on a sponsor. You're not gonna take on a sponsor that you really don't believe in their product. I think you know. I think your guests have known you long enough You've been doing this long enough and your listeners have known you long enough that they know that if there's a sponsor on your podcast, that is generally something you would believe in, or you wouldn't promote it.

59:49 - Chase (Host) It always is. It always is, absolutely. Thank you for that. Yeah, you for that. Yeah. What about blood work? What are, when it comes to, you know, information? I know we talked about it earlier, but I view diagnostic labs, comprehensive labs, maybe even getting into genetic testing, allergy testing, functional medicine testing. That is probably the best snapshot of information when it comes to our bodies, our health, possible.

01:00:14 - Darshan (Guest) Sure.

01:00:14 - Chase (Host) So what are the most vital diagnostic labs to be aware of that we actually have control over, and what biomarker should we monitor most closely over time Meaning, I'll say, annually?

01:00:26 - Darshan (Guest) Right? No, this is great questions, but one of my favorite topics to talk about. So one one topic I talk about a lot with my patients is really empowering them to become the CEO of their own health, Right? And so when you're running a company, as a CEO, as you know this you look at your numbers all the time. You have to make sure you can pay your bills. So you look at your profit loss statement, probably even on a weekly basis, maybe monthly at the most is when the last time you look at it. And you're also looking at other indicators of your business, like for a podcast, you're looking at the number of listeners you have, et cetera.

01:01:02 So why would you outsource your health to a primary care physician that's looking at you don't even know what they're looking at once a year for 15 minutes and letting them tell you if you're headed in the wrong direction or not right, it's absolutely the wrong mentality to be in. People need to take control of their personal well-being and their health, and they need to learn just as much about their biomarkers and what they mean and check them more frequently, and so I think there's about 10 biomarkers out there that everyone needs to be able to follow on a frequent basis, maybe even quarterly if possible. These are biomarkers that you can get really inexpensively or even for free by asking your doctor, and your doctor will order them for you and your insurance should pay for it.

01:01:44 If your doctor doesn't order them for you, you could still go to the lab and get them, but you might have to pay a little bit for it.

01:01:48 - Chase (Host) Yeah, a lot of these now are being incorporated with your HSA, fsa, if you have it. So maybe your regular insurance might not cover it, but through your HSA, fsa, significant reimbursement, if not total coverage, yeah.

01:01:58 - Darshan (Guest) Right, exactly, and so I actually make a lot of my patients get a spreadsheet, like you know. I know there's apps that'll do this for you, and people love these kinds of things, but I make them use a spreadsheet that I've developed for them. I can even give you a copy of it.

01:02:12 - Chase (Host) So next to their budget and their diet, it's blood work as well. Exactly All right, all right, exactly All.

01:02:17 - Darshan (Guest) By the numbers here, and I have the biomarkers, what they mean and what is the optimal range? Right, because when a doctor looks at your blood work, it's it turns red from black, like the ink turns red from black once you're in disease state, okay. So you don't want to know when it's too late, when you've already developed the disease. You want to know if you're headed in that direction, so, like the yellow here, if we're going Exactly, exactly, and you want to get into optimal where it's green, so you want to head directionally towards green, away from yellow and definitely away from red. Right.

01:02:48 So I'll give you some examples for your metabolic health, which is the most crucial, one of the most crucial biomarker sets you can manage and watch. You're monitoring things like hemoglobin A1c and your insulin levels okay. Your triglyceride levels and then this thing called your triglyceride to your HDL ratio. Okay, those are four biomarkers that I educate all my patients on your insulin level. You want it optimally if a fasting insulin level around between less than two to four, okay. So overnight you measure your blood test first thing in the morning. Do you know what your insulin level is first thing?

01:03:23 - Chase (Host) I was gonna actually bring up. Just this morning I got my. I'm doing quarterly labs this year. I just got my recent labs back in and my a1c was five great, and so it's actually gone up slightly. The beginning of the year I it and it was like a high four, which is great personally for me. I have diabetics in my family, I'm team carbs, I've got a bad sweet tooth, but I also live an active lifestyle. So it's in my mind, but I've never, in years of getting labs drawn, I've never had it get below a five, and so that was a huge win for me, and so that was a huge win for me, and so now to only be back up at a five is still a win for me.

01:03:58 - Darshan (Guest) Right right no, your hemoglobin A1C of five is excellent.

01:04:02 - Chase (Host) My fasting blood sugar was 91.

01:04:04 - Darshan (Guest) 91. Did you check your insulin level by chance?

01:04:06 - Chase (Host) Yes, great. If you want to keep the answer rolling, I can pull up my results.

01:04:11 - Darshan (Guest) So insulin changes way before your hemoglobin A1C does. Okay, so your insulin level is actually the real biomarker you want to be watching. But hemoglobin A1c is just as good a lot of times, or just as good if you can't get the insulin level that a lot of time, your doctor will get a hemoglobin A1c on you but not get an insulin level on you. Hemoglobin A1c for people that don't really understand or know what that means is that your three month average of your sugar levels in your in your blood just speaking in generalities and so you want this level as close to five as possible, definitely under 5.4. If you get over 5.7 to 6, that's when you're headed towards diabetes, right as pre-diabetes headed towards diabetes.

01:04:50 So this moves over the course of 10 to 30 years towards diabetes. So you need to know what direction you're headed in and you're doing exactly what I educate my patients on is. You know you saw it was 4.8 and then you were like, oh, it's five now, right, okay, so I'm still good, but I want to try to get it back down under five Right Again, knowing for me, I've got immediate family members that are diabetics, exactly.

01:05:11 Exactly so you know you don't want to head in that direction. So now you're going to be making lifestyle adjustments to get it back down again right, and so people don't do this at all. And if you don't do this at all for five years, 10 years, 15 years, you have no opportunity to make these adjustments right, and so that's why I make people keep their own spreadsheet so they can see what direction some of these biomarkers are headed.

01:05:34 - Chase (Host) So you were asking me my fasting insulin correct. 2.94. Excellent, millimeters, mercury, is that correct?

01:05:41 - Darshan (Guest) No no.

01:05:43 - Chase (Host) Here. I got a doc in the house. Let's have a look. What am I reading here correctly?

01:05:46 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, so this is micro units per milliliter.

01:05:49 - Chase (Host) Micro units per milliliter. There we go.

01:05:51 - Darshan (Guest) Cyphox is great, yeah, so. So this is exactly where you want your fasting insulin under four.

01:05:57 - Chase (Host) Killing it.

01:05:58 - Darshan (Guest) So you're metabolically healthy, which is excellent, and so having diabetes in your family, you know you're not headed towards that, and if you do not check your blood work for another five years, you might find yourself with a hemoglobin A1C of 5.7. You're pre-diabetic and now you can't make the adjustments to turn it around right, and so this is that's a great kind of discussion around the concept of following your biomarkers. Okay, now there is a massive list of biomarkers that you can get right, and they get I've done a little lab that it's hundreds, hundreds, right, you don't need hundreds all the time.

01:06:31 It's good to maybe do them once or maybe once a year if you can afford it. But there's about 10 or so, and cyfox is a great company. They measure a lot of these with a finger.

01:06:39 - Chase (Host) Okay, yeah, right, yeah, I did it all at home.

01:06:41 - Darshan (Guest) Easy kit, yeah easy kit and home with a finger stick. Um, like I said, your doctor can order these for you. These 10, they're pretty standard.

01:06:48 If your doctor won't order them for you, it's time to ask for a new doctor go see this doctor yeah or um, but, but I think once you're empowered with just this bit of information and following it over time, it's going to make such a massive difference to your health that, over a long period, that you could potentially avoid all forms of chronic disease just by doing this one thing could not agree more and that is such such one of the most baseline pieces of information I have ever and probably will ever give out, when I had patients asking me this question and now when I have audience members or you know people you know on Instagram or whatever.

01:07:25 - Chase (Host) Hey, chase, what should I do? What should I check? You know I go, when was the last time you had your annual lab? When was the last time you had your annual physical? Because it's going to do a lot of different things, I believe. I think that's going to, first of all, remind you that at least once a year, you need to develop and nurture that relationship with a primary care provider. You have to have that relationship and then usually in that, whether out of pocket or through insurance, you're going to be getting some kind of baseline labs and I'm assuming a lot of them are going to be what you just described. You know we need to know A1C, we need to know cholesterol, fasting glucose, we need to. You know, ideally, if you can, vitamin D, omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, if you can get a CRP. You know these inflammation markers. I think that baseline panel has been expanding over time, which I'm all here for, but start with that. There is not a wearable, there is not a book, there is not anything else that's going to help move the needle more for you than getting that snapshot information for you first.

01:08:17 - Darshan (Guest) Absolutely, you're absolutely right, because that's what's actually going on in your biology right now. So at Next Health, what we do is every patient that comes in, we encourage them to get a baseline and we've have all these markers in there and we encourage them to do it quarterly actually, and we follow it for them. But we also want them to follow it just so they can make those micro changes in their day to day um routines and habits as well, to get things going in the right direction. Perfect as far as a large panel goes, like everyone should get their genetics done once, once in their life just to kind of see, um if there's any major genes that could be affecting their health and um, the big panel of blood biomarkers once a year is what we encourage people to do. So we have this thing called the total wellness panel. We measure literally like every toxin that you can be exposed to inflammatory markers, hormones.

01:09:07 - Chase (Host) Do you guys check for mold by chance? Yes, we do. I need to come in for that. Yeah, let's have you come in, absolutely, you should do the total wellness panel because it'll elucidate a lot of information for you. That's a good reminder. All right, so now I want to get into a little bit of a semi-rapid fire around some, I think, high attention, unique areas in the health and wellness space that someone is probably going to read. Listen scroll through sometime in the near future. Sure NAD. What is it? Why is it important?

01:09:36 - Darshan (Guest) NAD is the precursor of energy, basically so mitochondria, which are the organelles that make energy for every single cell in our body. They require NAD, oxygen, to make ATP, which is energy. Unfortunately, because we live in a toxic environment, because we're stressed, because we're not getting enough sleep, we have a deficiency of NAD almost all the time.

01:09:59 - Chase (Host) Okay, and so the general public, most everybody, all the time. Nad deficiency.

01:10:03 - Darshan (Guest) Yes, because of our environment and our lifestyle. Okay, so if you're a super healthy person like you, you might not have an NAD deficiency, right?

01:10:10 - Chase (Host) now Maybe, maybe we'll see. I got to check these labs and there are.

01:10:15 - Darshan (Guest) there's going to be a blood test now for intracellular NAD, which I'm really looking forward to, so you can actually see what your NAD level is at this moment in time. However, if you're not, you know, if you're having some brain fog, if you're feeling low energy, if you're not sleeping good all of these things could be a sign of low NAD. Now we can supplement directly with NAD supplements now as well, um, but there's easy ways to raise nad. Get a good night's sleep um, go to the gym and do some more muscle mass, body fat mass exactly exactly um just generalized movement um eating, um eating nutritious food.

01:10:53 All these things will increase nad, but there is now any supplementation available as well yeah, I've been a been a fan and user of true nitrogen.

01:11:00 - Chase (Host) I love true.

01:11:01 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, they're great yeah, true, nitrogen is a great form because it's nicotinamide riboside, and nicotinamide riboside is more easily absorbed into the cell, into the mitochondria, than nad is. So yeah, you get a bigger action quicker we had dr charles brenner on the show earlier this year to kind of decipher all of that Fantastic episode One.

01:11:21 - Chase (Host) You kind of have to decipher a little bit. He knows his stuff but he also love you, chuck. He'll skirt around some things because I think he's not trying to ruffle some feathers, but I appreciate it. Speaking of mitochondrial health, I want to go there next. And so mitochondrial health when we talk about it, you know, everybody knows it's the powerhouse of the cell. If you went to high school science you probably heard that term. But what do we mean when we say mitochondrial health? And also, I actually heard you talk about this in another interview and I've never heard this before. Paraphrasing here, you were talking about how the mitochondria, evolutionarily speaking, are actually a separate organism that has learned to coexist inside of the human cell as kind of this symbiote. Yes, exactly.

01:12:07 What.

01:12:07 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah.

01:12:08 So if you look at how life formed, at the earliest beginning stages of life, we had unicellular organisms, right, just one cell, and they were able to carry out all their functions without mitochondria because they only needed a little bit of ATP.

01:12:24 As cells started dividing and becoming multicellular organisms, it just was not enough energy to provide all the cellular processes. So somehow mitochondria, which are these other organisms that can turn oxygen and NAD into ATP, were usurped by the unicellular organisms to provide energy. And so now the unicellular organisms got much, much larger, to humans, to elephants, to dinosaurs, because of the symbiotic relationship between mitochondria living inside of the cells. So if you look at, if you look and you probably learned this in high school biology too mitochondria actually have their own DNA. Right, because they are a separate organism that are now living symbiotically within us. Right, because they are a separate organism that are now living symbiotically within us. So when I say mitochondrial health, what I mean is every cell's health depends upon the amount of energy that it's able to produce, right, and so that's dependent upon the number of mitochondria you have and the mitochondrial efficiency.

01:13:25 - Chase (Host) So quantity and quality.

01:13:27 - Darshan (Guest) Quantity and quality exactly. So that's mitochondrial health in a nutshell. How do you improve either one of those or both of those? Do you want to be improving those all the time with exercise, diet, sleep, lower levels of stress, et cetera, reducing the amount of toxins you're exposed to? All of that, okay.

01:13:47 - Chase (Host) And I know we could do a whole other episode on mitochondrial health. Yes, and I actually have before. We could do a whole nother episode on mitochondria health and I actually had before Dr Chris wrench from timeline. Um, but I love that you kind of just boiled it down to how do we have, how do we increase the quantity and quality of our mitochondria?

01:14:01 - Darshan (Guest) Exactly.

01:14:02 - Chase (Host) Literally just focus on more energy, more exercise, more sleep.

01:14:07 - Darshan (Guest) Right.

01:14:08 - Chase (Host) I think those are kind of the two main things in there. So I mean, it's it's not this exercise and not this sleep pattern, it's just more sleep, more exercise, more, even just daily physical activity. We'll get us there, right? Yeah, I was gonna say, let me make it even simpler, for you.

01:14:19 - Darshan (Guest) So, um, it's not about what you should do is what you shouldn't do, so you shouldn't be sedentary for more than an hour Every 45 minutes. You want to get up and move around? Okay, even if you don't go to the gym, that's going to have more of an impact on mitochondrial health than actually going to the gym. Okay, um, eating, or just let's talk about detoxifying your life in general. Okay, so eating less ultra processed food, exposing yourself to less polluted air, less microplastics and water, um, and water pollution, water pollution, um. And then also getting good sleep, prioritizing sleep. So if you can do those few things, you're going to have much healthier mitochondria, both in number and quality. Just by doing those those few activities and all those things are free yeah, absolutely yeah, and then now?

01:15:07 then there's other things you can do on top of that, of course, like resistance training. You can go into the sauna, you can things you can do on top of that, of course, like resistance training, you can go into the sauna. You can do lots of other things to improve past that, but that's where you're going to spend most of your time and energy.

01:15:19 - Chase (Host) I also heard you talk about in this section on mitochondrial health. Mitochondria really respond well, in terms of increasing quantity and quality, to kind of the extremities of those things. So again, stacking on here daily physical activity exercise, kind of high intensity, high intensity exercise, contrast therapy, hot cold therapy, so it's really kind of pushing our bodies to the limit, so to speak, that really gets us the most bang for the buck in terms of mitochondria.

01:15:47 - Darshan (Guest) right, Exactly so once you have those basics in place and then exposing your body, and therefore your mitochondria, to hormetic levels of stress really help to encourage a process called mitogenesis, where you create more mitochondria okay, and you also get rid of poorly functioning mitochondria, right, right, and so that hormetic stress is things like sauna therapy, cold therapy, like even a cold shower works great, but cryotherapy. Um, you know, even things like high intensity interval training, exposing your body to extreme levels of physical activity, those things will reset your mitochondria to produce more and also to get rid of the old, non-functioning mitochondria all right, I got a nip in the bud there.

01:16:29 - Chase (Host) Like I said, we can go down a lot of rabbit holes in mitochondria health but we kind of already touched on metabolic health and so I feel like you know, knowing the A1C and blood sugar is crucial information. I'm seeing a lot of new to me information or awareness around the importance of VO2 max, more so as a longevity factor. Now. I used to conduct VO2 max and sell VO2 max tests for people as part of a. You know we call it our executive wellness package um, just to kind of really see that next level snapshot. So what is going on in the world of VO2 max? What is it and why is it so important for the general public now?

01:17:05 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, so VO2 max is a great consolidator of your overall physical fitness. Okay, by that I mean there's this one biomarker, vo2max, that really tells us overall how fit your entire biology is and specifically, even your mitochondrial health. So you want to know what your VO2max number is. There's different ways of testing this, so I think it's called a Cooper's test, where you can run for 12 minutes and see how long you've run.

01:17:32 That's one way of doing it. There's VO2 max testing that you used to do where you wear a mask. Even now, wearables are giving estimates of VO2 max.

01:17:41 - Chase (Host) And even running a sub VO2 max test, which I think most treadmills in most gyms probably have an option for that.

01:17:56 - Darshan (Guest) It's a particular protocol in terms of like incline and speed, but you can get that information pretty easily, yeah, yeah. And so knowing what this number is is very more than almost any other biomarker. I think grip strength is pretty close is correlated to your longevity how long you're going to live, right, and so you should know what this number is, and then you should be able to improve upon it, right. And so there's all these charts that anyone can find by Googling them that shows you what is the VO2 max that you should be at for your age and your sex, and then how, where you can be at if you are an elite or or an athlete, right. And so you want to get to a higher level of that VO2 max range, and so I think it's a great number to know and it's a great number to follow over time.

01:18:33 - Chase (Host) Add it to your spreadsheet, everybody. Yes, hormones, particularly testosterone, for both men and women. And I say women because I feel like most females in the general public have a misinformation situation about testosterone in terms of how important it is for their health, their energy, their reproduction. I can't talk to a reproductive health, um, it almost kind of similar to that barrier to creatine for a lot of women. They feel like if I have too much of it or any of it at all, it's going to make me look some kind of way, feel some kind of way. Why is testosterone so important for men and women?

01:19:11 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, and so I'm so glad you touched on this, because women need to understand that their testosterone level is very highly correlated to all forms of chronic disease, for women as well as for men.

01:19:23 So Alzheimer's disease, heart disease the testosterone level makes a big difference in your risk of developing chronic disease, but also not only developing chronic disease, but also how you feel, your level of energy, your ability to keep fat off.

01:19:37 For men and for women, your testosterone level is an indicator of that as well. So you know it's a natural fact of life that men will go through andropause, women will go through menopause, and during your 40s especially, I think it's very important and now, even earlier, even in your 30s, it's important for women and men to keep an eye on their testosterone level, at least getting it checked. You know we do it quarterly for our patients, but at least once a year, knowing if you're headed in the wrong direction, because it's generally a sign of aging, but also if it's dropping off a cliff, there's something else going on. And so you got to, you got to adjust and you have to figure out what the reason is, because if you, if you, have a low testosterone level, not only are you going to have more chronic disease. You're also going to not feel great Right and having a good testosterone level, as we know. You feel vital, you feel energetic, you want to conquer the world. That's true for men and for women.

01:20:29 - Chase (Host) Yeah, I know the range of what feeling, what it feels like to be in like the five hundreds and also know.

01:20:35 you know, like 1200. Yeah, it's literally. You're going to conquer the world too. I don't feel like getting off the couch. Yeah, there's a lot of men living out there in two hundreds, you know. Yeah, so from personal experience, but also just kind of, you know, diving deeper into it testosterone the number on paper, in terms of your labs, does not always directly equate to a symptom, absolutely. So expand on that for us please, because you said we could be heading in the wrong direction with testosterone. So we could technically, on paper, have low T but not be symptomatic, or we could be symptomatic but have high T. Why is that?

01:21:13 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, it's because that every person's testosterone level that they live at is going to be different. Okay, and so, really, your optimal testosterone level is where it was for you in your 20s. Okay, in your early 20s, I wish I got my labs during my 20s man. And that's why it's so important if you're out there and you're in your 20s get your labs done now.

01:21:32 - Chase (Host) Even if you feel great yeah.

01:21:34 - Darshan (Guest) Even if you feel great, because if you have a full lab panel now, you'll have something to compare it to as you age. That's such a good idea, yeah 20 to 27 is really like our optimum biology right God.

01:21:46 - Chase (Host) I wish I had that data.

01:21:46 - Darshan (Guest) I know, but every person who's listening that can do that now and get that data. It's so valuable to know Anyhow. So that's your optimal testosterone level. It's going to be different for each person. It might be 1,200 for one guy or it might be, you know, 600 or 700 for somebody else, and so you really want to know what that is, and your symptoms won't necessarily correlate to that number, right? And so it's kind of a dual-edged sword on that as well. So if you're having um normal testosterone, but you're still having symptoms, um, we have to figure out why symptoms like like what for for men and women?

01:22:22 - Chase (Host) maybe low t, yeah, low energy?

01:22:25 - Darshan (Guest) I would say low energy, brain fog, um, sleep disturbances and inability to keep fat off, inability to build muscle. I think those are some of the top symptoms that you can consider if you have any of those brain fog, sleep disturbances and inability to keep fat off, inability to build muscle. I think those are some of the top symptoms that you can consider. If you have any of those, it might be worth looking at testosterone levels. There's ways to naturally encourage your testosterone to go up, things like heavy weight lifting. There's also supplements like creatine, ashwagandha that can help with testosterone elevation. So explore those things first and then, if those aren't working for you, see someone who really specializes and really understands hormone replacement therapy, because there's all different ways of doing it. There's safe ways and unsafe ways of doing it. So hormones are wild especially testosterone.

01:23:03 - Chase (Host) You know my wife now kind of for the last year specializing in hormone replacement therapy for men and women, trt and advanced hormone labs. Nice, um, it is such a finesse, it is fine tuning, fine, tuning, fine tuning. It's wild, and especially when you look at the number compared to symptom and symptom compared to number. The two don't always correlate, you know, hence my kind of original question. But it is really just um it's. Knowing the numbers, really expanding on how well you can check in with yourself and understanding what biofeedback is, I think, are crucial.

01:23:37 - Darshan (Guest) Absolutely, and you know. I think another important fact to remember is living at a low testosterone whether you're symptomatic or not, especially after the age of 40, is going to increase your chance of chronic disease.

01:23:49 - Chase (Host) Well, okay. And skeletal muscle loss. So even if we're not symptomatic after that age of 40, low T, unchecked, prolonged periods of time we're actually doing ourselves a disservice.

01:23:59 - Darshan (Guest) Yes, exactly, it does lead to more levels of chronic disease. It's been shown in study after study that lower testosterone levels has increased rates of neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease, even cancer. So you know there's something there, for whatever reason, biology was. You know, evolution was done with us when we were 40 and it kind of shut off our systems for making hormones genetically. We're just genetically programmed to have less hormones and women go through menopause.

01:24:29 But you know we're living a lot longer than 40 now and so hopefully yeah and so I think that's one, one area that humans have kind of outgrown biologic evolution. Now we need to look at other methods of kind of maintaining good hormone levels over over time.

01:24:46 - Chase (Host) Right, so good, so good uh, I have a few other bullet points here. I want to kind of just run maybe like two more, uh, and then I want to kind of just have you share a little bit of your backstory. Sure, again, all of the information is going to be down in the show notes for everybody. But I mean this guy, what he has accomplished, it is well-earned, well-earned, thank you. So two other key areas of interest, I think for most people right now, are fertility health and Ozempic GLP-1. I think a lot of people are trying to become more aware of that. Fertility snapshot, men and women. And then also, just you can't go anywhere now and not hear the word Ozempic, I think. So fertility health how would you describe it to the general public? And what can a man and a woman both do to educate themselves first but then improve their chances of reproducing, maybe even not now, but just down the road? And then what in the world is going on with ozempic?

01:25:47 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, for sure. So, on the fertility point, what I would say is your fertility health is an indicator of your overall health and it's if, if you are having trouble getting pregnant, there's something definitely wrong in the overall health scenario here. Okay, other than other than other, like actual anatomical issues, that could occur, okay.

01:26:08 So if a male has low sperm count, if a woman is unable to get pregnant, we not only work with a fertility doctor to improve their fertility, and there's medications to increase sperm count. There's medications to increase ovarian function as well. There's biomarkers you can measure for fertility. Fertility doctors are excellent at that, and we work very, very hand in hand with a lot of fertility doctors to optimize a person's overall health from a functional standpoint. Okay, and so one of the one of the biggest kind of reasons that people have problems with their fertility is a low level of inflammation going on in their body.

01:26:46 - Chase (Host) I was not expecting that answer. Yes, yes.

01:26:47 - Darshan (Guest) Inflammation, and usually inflammation comes from like low levels of inflammation, comes from gut health disturbances right um oral health disturbances it makes sense, yeah, yeah yeah, and so, um, we'll find a lot of people, once we get their gut health organized either by, you know, going gluten-free, um, and fixing their, their gut barrier, fixing their microbiome their fertility will improve as well, and so there's a lot of examples like that. It's not just inflammation, there's also hormone disturbances, there's also metabolic health, which has massive implications to fertility as well. So once we get those things treated and once you get those things optimized, people immediately improve their fertility. And so if you're seeing a fertility doctor but you're not optimizing some of these other aspects your metabolic health, your gut health, your inflammation you're doing yourself a disservice. So you should be doing both concurrently.

01:27:49 - Chase (Host) I also want to get your opinion on advising someone who right now is not interested in reproducing, is not even sure if they ever want to from a health perspective, why should they care about the reproductive health?

01:28:10 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, Once again, I think it's one of my answers to that would just be it's a really good indicator of your overall health, right? And so if your reproductive health is off, there's something going on in your overall health as well. Other than that, I think you know, you never know if you want to get pregnant, as well, I agree, you know we do a lot of these conversations.

01:28:30 When we talk to anyone about hormone replacement therapy especially, you know men need to understand this will potentially reduce your chances of being able to reproduce for quite a while I froze my sperm years ago and I was even.

01:28:45 - Chase (Host) I mean, I was like I I know I want to have kids, yeah, but you just never know. You never know right, exactly. So you definitely want to have kids, but you just never know.

01:28:50 - Darshan (Guest) You never know Right Exactly, so you definitely want to keep. By the way, freezing your sperm is a great idea because your sperm at a younger age are going to be healthier and more able to Ran a test motility, morphology count.

01:29:02 - Chase (Host) Everything was great. So I was like cool, I got a great sample, let's freeze it.

01:29:05 - Darshan (Guest) I got a great option later, later, exactly should I need it yeah, and there's a lot of companies that'll just send you like a box and you send it.

01:29:11 - Chase (Host) Yeah, I did it all at home. Yeah, shout out, exactly yeah great idea.

01:29:13 - Darshan (Guest) So again, if you're in your 20s and you know this is something that you're looking to do and you can invest some money into this, I would definitely do that and in my opinion, it was pretty affordable for what you get.

01:29:23 - Chase (Host) It was, I think, like 200 bucks. Yeah, um came with a really expanded report. Even you get a call with somebody to kind of run through it and it's just peace of mind. Peace of mind knowing that, okay, check, that part of my health is good and that part of my future health is covered and also future kind of personal choice.

01:29:40 - Darshan (Guest) You know. It's so good you mentioned this right now too, because you know, as a society, for whatever reason, we're having children later and later in life, right, and so that's why there's such a crisis of fertility right now is people are deciding when they're 40 it's time to have children, and you know human beings are meant to have children in much, much earlier than that right, like half that age, exactly, exactly. So you never know what's going to happen in life and it's always good to hedge with technology like this getting all your biomarkers checked, getting your firm frozen, knowing your mobility, motility now all that stuff is so important, right man, if I was back, I wish I could go back to 2027.

01:30:17 - Chase (Host) Get these labs chase. Do this sperm count? Right? Um, okay, so now ozempic glp1. Uh, what, in your opinion? What's the best question here? What is it, what was it originally designed for and what is the general public you think using it for now, and should we be concerned?

01:30:36 - Darshan (Guest) Right, so um Ozempic. Let's just talk about semaglutide in general. Okay, this is a peptide. A peptide is um, an amino acid, segments of actual hormone that works somewhere in our body. Glp-1 is this particular one. So it's a little bit different than your typical chemical pharmaceuticals because you're actually using biomimicry. You're actually mimicking one of our natural hormones that's produced in our gut to control hunger.

01:31:07 All right, and so that's what this is. So I'm sure you're familiar with peptides. I'm sure a lot of your audience is familiar with peptides. I've used them off and on over the years. Yeah, exactly, and so peptides, traditionally, are compounded by a lot of pharmacies, so I've been using semaglutide for years actually. Um, it was originally developed as a potential treatment for metabolic disease, which obesity for diabetics, right, well, I don't obesity is For diabetics right.

01:31:32 Well, I don't say diabetics, because it's metabolic disease in general, right, and so the diabetic indication happened when Ozempic became a drug to treat a disease. I see, I see, right, you can't develop a drug unless you're treating a disease. Okay. However, semaglutide has been available way before, when we were just treating metabolic syndrome with this and part of metabolic syndrome is obesity for a lot of people and so we were actually using this way before it became a drug. So I mentioned that because I want people to understand that pharmaceutical companies now are kind of usurping all of these peptides, and the FDA recently came out and made a lot of peptides. And you know, the fda recently came out and made a lot of peptides unavailable they yanked bpc 157, my personal favorite.

01:32:16 - Chase (Host) I've had so much success with uh well-being and also um injury recovery why do you think they did that?

01:32:22 - Darshan (Guest) why do you think they yanked?

01:32:23 - Chase (Host) it, I think because they realize they're not making any money off of it and all these other compounding pharmacies and even telehealth companies are able to to lack of a better term get away with it.

01:32:33 - Darshan (Guest) Right, and so a pharmaceutical company took a peptide, made it Ozempic and made it the most valuable pharmaceutical the world has ever seen. Why not do that again with BPC-157? Why not do that again with all the peptides? So that's what we're seeing now, which is a super unfortunate reality, once again, of the health care system that we live in. Anyway, all that being said, I think semaglutide is a very valuable peptide medication and it's come to the forefront by pharmaceutical companies selling it for people to lose weight and, unfortunately, whenever something like this happens, it's going to be a lot of misuse right and so you know, you have these lots of memes on the internet of hollywood celebrities saying I have this new workout plan.

01:33:20 Nope, that was a zempik right, so you see this all over the place, maybe that's why my smoothies are over 12.

01:33:26 - Chase (Host) They've got like a zempik in there now exactly exactly.

01:33:30 - Darshan (Guest) You can get it at the smoothie bar I go to.

01:33:30 - Chase (Host) They've got like a zempic in there now, exactly exactly. You can get it at the smoothie bar I go to. They've got like a little wellness clinic you can pop and get a smoothie.

01:33:34 - Darshan (Guest) Go get a glp1 oh my gosh, that's incredible. That's just mind-blowing. So so what I would say is I think it's a very valuable medication that's been out for a long time. Um, I think that, um, it's good that it's coming to like on the forefront of the public knowledge now. You know, like it or not, we're in an obesity crisis in the entire Western world that we need to reverse, one way or the other, the problem with the misuse of it and the overuse of it and the overprescribing of it just like what happened with Crestor and Lip, you know, and and Lipitor and lowering cholesterol medication yeah, exactly, lowering LDL level is that. This is like knee jerk reaction. To prescribe it. You're obese. Here's some Ozempic get skinny Right, and that's.

01:34:20 It involves so much more care and investigation than that.

01:34:24 It involves a lot more education, okay, so what I always say to my patients is obesity is not just being over fat, it's also being under muscled right, and so if you just take ozempic by itself, you're gonna lose fat, but you're also gonna get even more under muscled, making your metabolic disease even worse.

01:34:45 Yes, so you need to make sure that we're using this for the right reason, which is, yes, we want to control your appetite for a certain amount of time, during which time we're going to re-educate you on how to eat right. We're going to improve the food that you're going to be eating. It's going to be mostly protein because we want to maintain your muscle mass. I'm going to get you into a strength training program and we're going to have a goal weight weight. I'm gonna get you off of this, yeah, when you reach that goal weight right now. The other kind of thing that people need to really understand that's coming is ozempic, and I'm sorry I said ozempic, but I meant semaglutide. Semaglutide is also going to be very valuable for treating lots of other disease processes.

01:35:28 - Chase (Host) So it's actually, you know, it's actually showing lower rates of cardiovascular disease with this, because all disease is rooted in metabolic disease yeah, I was going to kind of piggyback this question off and ask because I've heard this exact term now being used by I won't say names, but very prominent health and wellness fitness experts, influencers, talking about how we should be quote more or less microdosing semaglutide, microdosing GLB-1 and using Ozempic as a an optimization tool. It's just broadly speaking.

01:36:01 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, I think, I think the the science and the claims on that is just way that, that's way overstated right now. I think it's very early, I think it's way too early to be saying that and once again, we just really have to realize like everyone's a different person, like you have zero metabolic disease right now. For you to start microdosing Ozempic right now it's going to, it's not the right thing to do.

01:36:21 It's going to be at the very worst it's a waste of money and time. At the at the very you know, I'm sorry the very best, but at the very worst you could be causing gastroparesis, you cause other type of problems, and so you have to be very careful in those types of things. There is going to be a situation where someone should be microdosing semaglutide.

01:36:42 - Chase (Host) Okay, and so we don't know what might that look like? Yeah?

01:36:45 - Darshan (Guest) exactly. So these are people that are trending towards metabolic disease, no matter what they eat, no matter what they do.

01:36:56 These are people that um potentially have other diseases that we can show ozempic a lot of comorbidities, exactly comorbidities, even, like it's actually being shown to help some autoimmune diseases as well, so maybe those people can also um be treated with with ozempic. So so we, we just really got there's a lot more science that needs to be done and, um, there's a there's be done, and there's a lot of individual patient treatment programs that need to be created for individual diseases, and we're just not there yet.

01:37:19 - Chase (Host) Incredible answers. You're a wealth of information. This has been an incredible experience. Thank you so much for kind of just really diving into the weeds with a lot of things, and I know you've addressed a lot of things at a pretty high level, thank you. But that was my intention for today's episode and, um, this is a great stepping stone for anybody listening watching to kind of go oh, that piqued my interest. It means something to me personally, or I'm working on. Let me then go dive deeper Right, so my kind of getting towards the end here. I want to kind of bring up you have a very strong passion for your health and wellbeing, for the lives of other people. You're an MD. You actually became a medical doctor at the age of 21, becoming one of the youngest MDs in the country at the time. What drove you so passionately to become a physician as such an accelerated cadence?

01:38:18 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, it's a great question. Unfortunately, the answer is not one of a passion. It was basically my dad told me either he become a doctor or a lawyer, and I really loved biology.

01:38:27 - Chase (Host) And was he then like and do it faster than anybody else as well?

01:38:30 - Darshan (Guest) Well, I think a lot of that just was circumstances. I was able to, you know, skip a couple of grades here and there. I switched high schools halfway through my high school career and then I had enough credits to skip a year of high school and then I went to the six-year medical program I got into at the University of Missouri, kansas City. That was one of the only programs that took people right out of high school into medical school and combined your bachelor's degree with your medical degree. So yeah, I was. I was lucky enough to finish by the time I was 21. I just think it was.

01:38:59 You know, I just worked hard back then. I kind of had no life except studying and doing this and yeah, and, and I did have a passion for biology. It's so super interesting and I remember as a kid I would put together all these like models of the human body and dissect pigs with my dad and stuff. But but yeah, it was also like you know, you got to do this. It's just part of our background. I come from an Indian heritage and so you know there's very few career options you have.

01:39:26 - Chase (Host) I know by proxy. My wife is Middle Eastern and so yeah, I'm very familiar with the with, with that mentality of doctor, lawyer be the best than anybody else, kind of thing.

01:39:35 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, yeah and so so. But you know, in medical school I discovered that I wanted to be a surgeon. Um, I just love the immediacy of just seeing the results, I just love the art artistry of it. And so I did surgery. Um, I did general surgery and trauma surgery for many years and then I decided I wanted to further specialize. So I went to the Mayo Clinic and I learned reconstructive surgery. And so after like big cancer removals, they would call us in to reconstruct the patient.

01:40:04 - Chase (Host) And so yeah, that's got to be pretty damn rewarding work as well it was incredible, and I did it for so long.

01:40:10 - Darshan (Guest) Some of the cases that we did um were mind blowing, and so we did some pretty even like I participated in um uh, the separation of conjoined twins, those kinds of things Incredible, incredible stuff.

01:40:24 - Chase (Host) Yeah, it was, it was uh, those hands have touched, this microphone. Everybody, Incredible Wow.

01:40:28 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, so I was able to do a lot of incredible surgery. I am also an entrepreneur and so I came to California. After all my training was done, I started opening surgical centers and clinics and did that for many years. But you know, just like most entrepreneurs out there, you know you end up prioritizing your business and then you get a family. Family becomes priority and what, who, what becomes a last, absolute last priority. You is you right.

01:40:55 So I got myself into a really bad place where I was at five disease diagnoses going on autoimmune disease, hypertension, diabetes, um. I was also had metabolic syndrome and found myself in a really horrible state of health about 10 years ago and at that moment my son was born and I quickly did the. I actually found this article the night my son was born at the doctor's lounge where I do surgery. My son was born in the LND and I went to the surgical lounge and there was an article there. It's like an omen from God. It was like the article was titled something like morbidity and mortality in people with multiple medical diagnoses. Basically, aka, darshan, pay attention, exactly, you are going to die in 15 years.

01:41:45 - Chase (Host) I mean I'm laughing, but it's not funny.

01:41:46 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, yeah, I was. I was like really shocked that I had like an almost a 50% chance of dying before my son graduated from high school. That was nuts. And so I decided that moment that I would make a massive change. And so I was lucky enough I was able to take some time off of work and learn about functional medicine. I kind of fell into functional medicine and just really understood what root cause medicine was, and so I made my own changes, just for my own personal wellbeing. But I was also seeing surgical patients and I was telling them, like what I'm doing? Cause they're like, dr Shah, you're like losing weight, like how are you doing? And I'm like, oh, let me tell you about gut health, you know.

01:42:23 - Chase (Host) Let me tell you about protein. Let me tell all you doctors about gut health and protein. Wow, right, wow.

01:42:29 - Darshan (Guest) Right, yeah, so, and then patients were losing weight and not needing surgery actually, and so I considered that a win and I'm like you know what. This is the kind of medicine I want to practice. So I, over time, exited surgery and went into health optimization. Longevity started a new business.

01:42:46 - Chase (Host) Shout out Next Health, next Health.

01:42:48 - Darshan (Guest) Right, and that's been my passion now for the last eight years.

01:42:52 - Chase (Host) Incredible no-transcript. So to ask you directly my last question ever forward what do those two words mean to you?

01:43:23 - Darshan (Guest) For me, it really means that there's never really a moment in time that we should ever think that we're done. You should always be learning, you should always be teaching and you should always be moving the life of yourself and your family and your friends forward and through that society. So in my own personal life, I'm writing a book right now. I'm just putting my protocols in on paper that we use for all of our patients right now, and I think you know that's that's a passion project of mine right now.

01:43:53 I don't even you know like I'm not doing it for the money. You know I'm doing it because I really feel like, um, I've helped a lot of people with this, with what we've put into place for them, so why not put in a book and bring this information forward? Um, and I'm going to keep doing that forever. I'm going to keep speaking, um, until my last breath. I'm going to keep spreading the information, um, not for any other reason other than, like you, help other people make their lives better, and I think that's. I think if everyone just did that, what an incredible world this would be.

01:44:24 - Chase (Host) Well, don't stop, please don't stop. I don't see it stopping for you anytime soon. Uh, where can my audience go to connect with you directly and learn more about your speaking Next, health, all that stuff.

01:44:34 - Darshan (Guest) Yeah, next Health's website is wwwnext-healthcom, so we have a lot of practitioners that do exactly this protocol. You can find them there.

01:44:43 - Chase (Host) And please, I didn't really kind of expand on it. You know quickly high level, what is Next? Health?

01:44:47 - Darshan (Guest) So Next Health is a health optimization and longevity center, we call it. We have it's actually like a four-wall business where you can go in and you can get your biomarkers done. You can visit with a practitioner that'll go over all the results with you, and then we actually have all of this technology on site Things like LED, infrared therapy, cryo sauna plasma exchange Been in many a time.

01:45:10 - Chase (Host) Yeah.

01:45:12 - Darshan (Guest) So it's a place where you can go. If you don't have this stuff at home or in your gym, there's another place you can go to participate in all of this, and so we have locations right now in new york and la, but we're expanding all over the country. We'll have 30 plus locations the next three years, everywhere.

01:45:24 - Chase (Host) So apparently everywhere I go. Expanding operation podcast you go too I walk out of. I walk out of nashville and there's next health right there and apparently other places too, and yeah, so that's incredible congratulations thank you.

01:45:36 - Darshan (Guest) It's so incredible to see what um, what what's happened with the business and what the team has done with this mind-blowing and then my social media is at darshan shah md.

01:45:45 - Chase (Host) So that's amazing, and he's got great information um very high level, but also kind of, I'll say, day-to-day information that I think anybody can understand but, more importantly, apply, and then you can kind of choose your own adventure Right A little bit. Yeah, absolutely Well, this has been great. Thank you so much.

01:45:59 - Darshan (Guest) Thank you so much for having me.

01:46:00 - Chase (Host) Can't wait to do this again with you one of these days, absolutely yeah. I can't have you come back more than the book. For more information on everything you just heard, make sure to check this episode's show notes or head to everforwardradio.com