Biohacks to Boost Longevity | JJ Virgin DSH #1117
Learn why prioritizing sleep, protein, and movement is non-negotiable, and how to navigate modern-day toxins and stress for a better you. JJ also reveals her top secrets on aging powerfully, debunking health myths, and finding balance in a world full of ultra-processed foods. π₯©ππ‘
Donβt miss out on this game-changing conversation! Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. πΊ Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more eye-opening stories on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! π
#biohackingtips #nutritionalgenomics #wellnessjourney #biohackingsecrets #personalizednutrition
CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Intro
00:50 - Biohacking Techniques
02:45 - Food Laws and Regulations
05:00 - Specialized Recruiting Group Insights
06:06 - Benefits of Fermented Foods
07:12 - Dangers of Toxic Tea Bags
07:48 - Advantages of Organic Band-Aids
08:40 - Health Benefits of Sauna Use
10:28 - Weight Lifting Importance for Women
14:00 - Significance of Grip Strength
16:50 - Importance of Sleep for Health
19:24 - Benefits of Creatine Supplementation
21:24 - Parasite Cleanse Explained
22:50 - Traveling for Healthy Food
24:30 - Insights from Blue Zones
27:55 - Misuse of GLP-1 Agonists
31:51 - Understanding Freaky Eaters
34:06 - Nutritional Benefits of Fruits
35:04 - Heavy Metals in Food Safety
37:00 - What's Next for JJ
37:37 - OUTRO
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Transcript
We had juice, we had cereal with milk, you know, Choosy's mothers chose Jif, all that garbage.
Yeah.
Yeah, milk is an interesting one.
I remember growing up, they said it was good for your bones and everything.
Oh, yeah.
Except that if you look at the research on milk and bone density, people who drink more milk have lower bone density because of the acidic nature of the milk.
Wow, it's acidic?
Yeah.
All right, guys, JJ Virgin here getting ready for the movie premiere.
Biohack yourself, right?
Yeah.
Big deal.
The Oscars of Longevity, they're calling it.
Yeah, I'm really excited.
It looks like you got the top of the top people.
Oh, I was looking at the list.
I'm like, first of all, you know, we are, they used to call us the health mafia.
It's a tight little crew of people.
So it's like all your friends are there.
So super fun.
All right.
Yeah.
Biohacking was, when it first came out, people were making fun of it, right?
It was kind of looked down on.
I think they were just making fun of Dave.
Dave got a lot of fun.
I can rib Dave.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dave was like the forefront of it, right?
10 years ago?
Yes, he was.
It was longer than that.
Yeah.
When did you get into it?
I would not call myself really a biohacker.
Okay.
So here's the thing.
This is my take on it.
I think these things are super cool, but I think they have to be put into the right order.
And I feel that sometimes with biohacking, people start to major in the minors before they've majored in the
majors.
So
you shouldn't be worried about, you know, are you getting the red light therapy you need if your food sucks, right?
Or you're not exercising, you're not sleeping well.
So I think everything has to be put into place.
And first you focus on food, exercise, I'm big on exercise, sleep relationships, spiritual wellness.
Then let's focus on sauna and red light and cold and all that.
And I do all the stuff, but again, I see people doing that stuff and they've like they're eating ultra-processed food.
Yeah, well, that's most of of the American diet, right?
Ultra processed food.
Apparently 70%
of our diet is now ultra-processed food.
That's disgusting.
Isn't that crazy?
And you go, we were in Europe this summer, we were walking through a supermarket, my husband goes, you know, you need to take a video of this because There's no, we had to go in the back of the supermarket to find the ultra-processed food.
Everything was in refrigerators, everything was fresh, it was completely different.
And you walk around the streets in other countries and you, you know you don't see 40 obesity and 70 overweight or obese right so like cause and effect maybe plus they're walking yeah yeah that's interesting i wonder why europe's just healthier than us overall you know
food laws have you seen the the um information online where they show foods that have been banned in your yeah yeah i mean just the glyphosate issue alone is that u.s only or is that everywhere you think though glyphosate yeah glyphosate i think is in canada as well i think canada anything bad we've done, Canada's kind of gotten a lot of it too.
But you can just tell the difference.
You know, we're so careful about what we eat here.
And then we go overseas and I go, why do I feel so much better here in Europe or in Asia than I felt in the U.S.?
Even though I'm doing all the right things in the U.S., you just can't avoid it.
I mean, think about it.
If you're eating organic in the U.S., you still have glyphosate and all the crap in the soils because water flows, air blows, right?
Right.
You Can't get away from it.
100%.
You got to be careful with the bread here, right?
I just don't eat bread.
Not at all?
No.
Wow.
Bread's so good, though.
I grew up outside of San Francisco.
Like, I was born in San Francisco.
Sourdough is in my DNA, man.
Sourdough is so good.
My fiancΓ© makes it from scratch, so maybe that's the way to do it, right?
That is the way.
Well, what you do is you get einkorn wheat.
That is that special non-hybridized wheat.
What they did was they genetically engineered the wheat to dwarf it, to concentrate the gluten and to be able to produce a lot more of it.
And so if you get einkorn, which you actually can do, I've literally ordered sourdough einkorn pizza crusts from Etsy.
No way.
Yes.
Etsy?
Yes.
Isn't that wild?
I know they sold food on Etsy.
I thought I was going to be able to do it.
I know.
It's crazy.
And I, of course, from the business side, I'm like, how's this woman making money sending me a $20 pizza crust?
Like, this is really hard labor.
But yeah, einkorn wheat.
That's the deal.
Einkorn wheat.
Yeah, because all the other, I remember growing up, they said like whole grain was good for you.
Think about the things they said were good for you.
I mean, when I grew up, I was raised on Pop-Tarts.
I literally, my nickname was Poppy.
We had juice.
We had cereal with milk.
You know, Choosy's mothers chose Jif, all that garbage.
Yeah.
Yeah, milk is an interesting one.
I remember growing up, they said it was good for your bones and everything.
Oh, yeah.
Except that if you look at the research on milk and bone density, people who drink more milk have lower bone density because of the acidic nature of the milk.
Wow, it's acidic.
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Yeah, it reports the kidneys as acidic.
Now, if you did, say, Greek-style yogurt and fermented it, it's different.
Fermenting fixes a lot of things.
That's why sourdough bread is so awesome.
Especially if you treat einkorn wheat.
Yeah, I had Sean O'Mara on.
He talked about fermented foods.
Yeah, it's one of those things that if you go into any other culture, you will see.
Like we spent two summers ago, we were in Seoul.
South Korea, which is a fantastically cool place.
First of all, I saw one.
I didn't.
My husband saw one overweight person.
I like saw everyone is in shape walking.
They're 90 years old.
They're walking.
They're at the gym.
It's crazy.
But they all have fermented food is such a big mainstay of their diet.
But you think of any other culture, and fermented foods are part of it.
It's just not us.
Wow.
Yeah, kimchi, right?
Yeah.
You don't like kimchi?
Do you?
I do.
Really?
But it had to, it wasn't at first.
I had to force myself to like it.
One of those type of things.
But it's a lot, a lot of things are like that.
Like, no one likes Brussels sprouts the first time they eat it.
That's true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sometimes you just got to, you know, eat some veggies.
Just force yourself to live.
And you will over time.
Like green tea was not one of mine.
I lived in Japan for a while and I was like, at first, I went, this is disgusting.
You've lived there long enough.
You're like, this is amazing.
Yeah.
I love me some green tea, but did you see the study on the tea bags, how they're toxic, the plastic ones?
Yeah.
So just get yourself the really nice little ball.
Put the green tea leaves in there.
Or what I've been doing is just pick tea, peak tea, P-I-C-P-I-K-U-E.
I haven't heard of that one.
Yeah, well, what they did was they went, I don't know if they're Japanese or Korean, but they basically found the best green tea out there with the highest polyphenol catechin content, and then they make it into little powdered ones that you can add in.
Wow, I love that.
I'm definitely going to buy that.
Yeah, I'm big on tea.
I just found out with band-aids.
Did you see this?
No.
So band-aids are toxic now.
So they're getting into your bloodstream when you put the band-aid on.
Yeah, so I just had to buy organic band-aids.
Wow.
Yeah.
We have really, really messed things up.
Yep.
It's super concerning.
Even your toilet paper.
Huh.
You know, there's so many things you got to look out for these days.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
Dishwashing pods.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, we do everything.
Everything we can control, but the problem is we travel 70% of the time.
So I try to control my environment at home.
But here's the reality of all of that.
You could be doing everything as gray as possible.
You are still going to have toxins.
And we are bombarded with things that our body was never built to handle.
Like you think back of 10,000 years ago, they didn't have any of these forever chemicals.
To me, the thing that's not a biohack, that's a non-negotiable, is sauna.
I use it almost every day.
I actually have two.
Wow.
I have the fast heat one.
So we'll do the fast heat one where you can get in for like 10 to 15 minutes.
It goes up to 180 and then cold plunge.
And then we have the sunlighten so that we can do the infrared because the infrared apparently penetrates deeper where these toxins store in your fat, which is why people going on a weight loss diet better be good detoxifiers because if not, they are making themselves sick.
Really?
Yeah, well, think about it.
If you store all your toxins in your fat and you are not a good detoxifier, and maybe you do something like a juice cleanse, so now you don't even have the amino acids on board that you need to conjugate those toxins when they get freed up and get them out of your body.
So now you're speeding up the toxic release, but you're not eliminating it.
Wow.
Big problem.
It's in your body still.
Yeah, so
that's where saunas can be amazing.
Right, because it gets out through your sweat, right?
You're going to poop it, pee it, or sweat it.
Interesting.
Yeah, I use the infrared almost every day.
Yeah, good, good.
I don't know if that one's better than the 200-degree hot sauna.
Oh my gosh, there's such an argument over the both of these.
I think they're probably all great.
I think probably just the research is more done on all these finished hot saunas.
I do both of them.
It seems like there's it makes a lot of sense with the infrared and the being able to penetrate at a lower heat.
So I just have both.
Plus that fast heat one, because you know if you turn your sauna on and it takes a while, yeah.
Yeah, so if I forget to do that, I can jump in my fast heat one.
Is that the one where your head's sticking out of it?
Yeah.
So what my husband does is he puts this thing around his neck and a hat on.
I don't, because I've then will have to blow dry my hair.
He puts this hat on, neck thing, and that will make it even better.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm not on the plunge wave yet.
You think it's worth looking looking into plunges?
I think there's some definite benefits to it.
So the benefits for it, number one, it can beige your white fat.
So we have white fat and brown fat.
Brown fat's what the babies have where they shiver and it's very thermogenic and easy to burn.
So for someone, this is not you, definitely not your problem, but someone who says who has more visceral adipose tissue, more fat around their organs, more damaging fat and having trouble to lose it, that's where it could be helpful because it it helps create that shiver response.
I also love hormetic stresses that help your body handle things.
Like this is why I love weight training.
You go teach your body I can do hard things and recover.
So I hate cold plunging.
I hate being cold.
I lived in Florida.
I lived in Palm Springs before that.
Like I don't like being cold.
But I can get in there for a couple minutes.
It's great for recovery, but you have to be careful where you do it because if you go and do a really heavy weight training session and then go do cold plunging, you're basically going to block that inflammatory response in the muscle protein synthesis.
So you don't want to do
that way.
Yes.
So it's like, and that's the challenge of like, okay, where do you put it into your routine?
Because muscle protein synthesis can go on for a while.
But what I do is I'll do it in the morning pre-going to the gym.
That makes sense.
How important is weightlifting for women, you think?
I think weightlifting is the most important thing.
I think weightlifting and creatine and protein for women are the trifecta of what they have to do because
women tend to eat less protein.
They tend to try to shrink themselves and be small, right?
Thankfully, we're starting to move out of that and favor strong over skinny, but I'll tell you, back when I was growing up,
this is the same weight.
Literally, I put my cheerleading outfit on and it still fit.
This is like the weight I was in high school.
I was not quite as ripped in high school, but I was working out with the high school football team because they had no gyms for the girls.
And because I was six feet tall, they're like, you should be a model.
so i go to the modeling agency in san francisco and they go you need to lose 20 pounds yeah
so i came home and i put myself on a diet and i dropped 10 pounds and thankfully my coaches were like first of all my i couldn't do a thing uh you know in terms of i was doing track and gymnastics i couldn't i was like my performance tanked
But my coaches were like, are you anorexic?
You know, because I mean, I looked like one.
and i just realized at the time i could be strong or i could be skinny but i couldn't be strong and skinny and so i picked the strong
and i think of so many of my friends over the years it's skinny is celebrated in you know the female physique yeah for sure right
and no one ever wanted to get bulky i used to do nutrition consulting for the models down in south beach and go to all the modeling agencies and they like would not lift weights
because they had to stay a certain size a certain weight they were weighed in.
So, you know, we have to get past all of this, but sarcopenia is a real scary problem.
Having low muscle mass relative to your weight, it's a big deal.
And starting around age 30, we lose up to 1% of our muscle mass each year.
Twice as much strength, three times as much power.
And your strength is directly correlated with all-cause mortality.
And the way we test that is grip strength.
People with the lowest grip strength have the highest risk of death.
Really?
Yep.
Grip strength.
Grip strength.
I never realized how important that was.
Yeah.
Well, grip strength is a proxy for overall strength.
It doesn't mean like
I was doing a podcast yesterday and the guy goes, yeah, so I've been doing that, you know, those hand exercises.
I go, that's not the point.
If your grip strength's low, that means you need to be doing pull-ups and farmers carries and the things that make you have to use this functionally because you're not training to get better at training.
Yeah.
I had the same issue.
I was super skinny growing up, like super skinny.
I was a distance runner.
I was like 140, 150 pounds, six foot five.
Wow.
I couldn't even do a pull-up or a push-up in high school.
I was that weak.
Wow, wow.
Yeah.
So I had to train myself.
Now I could do like 50 push-ups and a few pull-ups.
What about that grandma that's doing 1,564 push-ups in an hour?
I didn't see that.
Oh my gosh.
It was all over social.
It was so funny.
She's like, you know, grandma, she's 70.
Anyway, she's the one that did the plank.
She planked for like a couple hours.
What?
Yeah.
And then she did, you got to check this woman out.
Then she did,
so this is what's so crazy.
She does 1,564 push-ups in an hour or something like that.
And of course, the comments in the feed are like, her form's off.
I'm like,
really?
That's what you have to say.
Her form's off.
Yeah, she might be on some hormone therapy or something, too.
Well, I would hope she's on hormone therapy.
I think that's another big one for women when they go through menopause.
But she didn't look like she was on.
hormones like steroids.
Now, you can tell the difference.
I can show you a picture of me standing next to Mrs.
Olympia.
Yeah.
You'll go, oh, you know,
is that where you draw the line, steroids?
Well, steroids are like the antithesis of healthy.
Right.
Like, you know, want to rip tendons, take steroids.
Yeah, the long-term effects don't seem to be worth the short-term results.
No, not at all.
I mean, aka Phlojo, you know?
No.
Yeah,
I think I could get on board with like testosterone and stuff, you know?
Well, when you get to the point where you actually need it, which is years down the line,
Men tend to have a big drop in testosterone naturally in their late 50s.
Anything prior to that, you got to look at what the heck's going on in life that's doing that.
Is it the estrogens from the plastic?
Is it the tremendous amount of stress?
So stress and toxins, those two things, think about 10,000 years ago.
You were under either acute stress
and you died or you made it through.
There wasn't chronic stress and you didn't have the toxins.
Wow.
So these two things are destroying destroying man's testosterone no emf and wi-fi back then too
well and also just think of what they did with sleep yeah i mean basically you had to follow a circadian rhythm sun goes up and down right that's when they slept back then yeah now people are staying up till midnight 1 a.m 2 a.m yeah
i got an eight sleep mattress oh i'm i'm so interested in that it's been really useful oh i love it my sleep was terrible at first but now um i'm I'm getting like above 90 every night.
Wow.
So what does it do?
It gives you analytics.
So like you fall asleep.
It tells you how long you snored.
It tells you how long you're in REM sleep, deep sleep, all that.
And then you could see patterns.
So like you kind of log what you eat before you sleep and then it'll be like, oh, maybe you shouldn't eat that before you sleep because your sleep was worse.
Well, the biggest thing is don't eat two to four hours before bed.
Right.
And longer is better.
Yeah.
You don't want to get to the point where you're hungry going to bed because that's going to be a problem too.
But like you want to hit a very, I call it the hormonal home run meal before bed of protein fat fiber.
But if you can do it two to four hours before, because you don't want to be dealing with, as you were getting ready for bed and our cortisols dropped, so our melatonin can come up, which is then basically telling your pancreas, you know, your organs, we can sleep, so you're not producing insulin.
So most people before bed, they eat like a high carb hit, but they don't have the insulin for it.
So now they have elevated blood sugar, which is how you'll you'll wake up in the morning and your aura ring will go, it looks like you ate late last night.
What the heck happened?
Yeah.
Right?
You can't produce growth hormone, so you need to stop eating a couple hours before bed.
That makes sense.
Sleep's super important.
I remember when I was younger, I could get away with sleeping like four or five hours, but these days it's tough.
You could get away with it, but it doesn't mean it was good for you.
Right.
But these days, I feel a difference, like it's noticeable, you know?
Yeah.
Like if I podcast on a day where I didn't sleep well the night before, I notice how off I am.
It's non-negotiable.
That's why I was stressed about this.
It was like, oh, it's at a studio.
I'm like, I was looking at my sleep hours when I was flying in.
That was my flight came in early because I was like, I'm very careful about sleep, especially when I travel.
But I have a hack for jet lag that's been amazing, which is creatine.
That helps with sleep.
So here's what's super cool.
I found this out.
I was looking at how they were using it in periods of sleep deprivation.
with like Navy SEALs.
I thought, well, I mean, what's sleep deprivation?
Jet lag totally is a nightmare for this.
And so last summer, I had all these crazy trips back and forth, like Europe, US, Europe, US, then over to Canada.
And it was like just big swings.
And I used creatine the whole time.
I basically tripled my dose because I take it every day.
No jet lag at all.
And I've always thought of myself as a, you know, I suffer from jet lag.
I also stopped the I suffer from jet lag.
I'm like, I don't do jet lag.
Right.
And, but creatine changed everything.
Interesting.
Yeah.
I don't take any right now.
Maybe I should look into it.
I think creatine is one of the greatest things on the planet.
Wow.
Well, Well, first of all, so here's the reality with it.
Most studied supplement ever.
You know, totally safe.
But our body produces a gram of it every day in our liver and kidneys.
And then we need to consume one to two more grams a day.
We have 120 to 140 grams stored in our body, and so we turn over like, you know, three grams or so a day.
It's needed to produce energy, to produce ATP in the body, 95% in the muscles, 5% in the brain, but there's really cool research now on it for TBIs and cognition and mood.
But the reality is something like 65% of us are not getting enough dietarily because you'd have to eat a pound of meat that's basically super rare or two pounds that are well cooked.
So most people are just not getting it.
Yeah.
And
I'm a big meat eater, but still.
I also don't like rare meat.
Yeah.
I just saw some video on like the best
way to cook meat and he was saying medium rare or something.
Yeah, the less cooked, the better.
Yeah.
You know, then you just have to make sure you're doing parasite cleanse periodically.
Right.
Yeah, it was Paul Saladino.
He said medium rare is the best because you start cooking out all the nutrients, right?
Yeah.
Well, it's, it's interesting.
The minute I did this, I did a podcast interview with the guy who created creatine HCl, which creatine monohydrate, they all talk about it being the most studied and the best absorbed.
The reality is 15% of it's absorbed and the rest rest is not, so it creates some bloating.
He was telling me about how we needed to eat for creatine.
So we got to dinner and they have carpaccio, so like, you know, two servings of carpaccio.
I'll eat carpaccio, but I don't like, I don't, I like meat pretty well cooked, which is not the best way to eat it.
The best way to eat it is, you know, as rare as possible.
So to his point, yes.
That's good to know.
Yeah, just got a parasite cleanse, like you said.
I'm on there now, actually.
Here's the thing.
You have to do that periodically.
I actually have a very cool friend who works with a medical school in Africa, and so they test your blood.
He'd be a great, great.
He tests your blood and stool, sends it to Africa, and then they give you a mixture of these African plant juices to kill off this stuff.
Wow.
It got rid of my son had Lyman Bartonella, which can be impossible to get rid of.
Gone.
That's nuts.
Tastes nasty.
Really nasty.
But if you think about it, like, doesn't that make sense where they're dealing with all of these different types of things in Africa and this is what they use?
Yeah, I love how he just gets right to the root cause of it, too.
He's like, oh, you have this?
Yeah.
Let me find out what kills.
Exactly.
Then they give you exactly what you need to do.
Yeah.
I try to do a cleanse like twice a year because, oh man, those are strong.
Well, I mean, you think about it, there's no way you're not getting hit with this stuff.
How could we not?
Yeah.
I mean, not eating as much.
I used to eat a lot of sushi, came back from Japan and was kind of obsessed with it and not eating as much.
But then you look at what they do in Japan is they're eating a lot of wasabi with it, like a ton, right?
And then some ginger for digestion, things that are going to help digest it and kill things off.
Oh, I didn't even look at it that way, but that makes sense.
The wasabi is there for a reason.
Like you look at these cultures and the foods they have and anything from the kimchi to the wasabi, they're there for a reason.
Yeah.
Where's been your favorite places to travel for like food-wise and health-wise?
I loved Korean food.
Oh my gosh.
It is amazing.
amazing.
I love Korean food.
Good old Korean barbecue.
I also, oh, it's the best.
And
Istanbul, I love Turkish food.
I love Istanbul.
Istanbul's amazing food.
Oh, Turkish food.
I've never had it.
Oh.
Turkish food.
But you can have it here.
You can?
What is it?
What are some common foods?
It's like Mediterranean food.
Oh, maybe I have it.
It's like Greek food.
Okay.
It's along the same place.
Some mobs and stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, I might have had it then.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love traveling for food.
It's like my favorite part of traveling, actually.
Me too.
Oh, Spain this summer.
We went to Spain.
It's like a meat fest there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're big on meat.
I've always felt healthier.
It's funny for a brief time.
I grew up in Berkeley.
So for a brief time, I had to be a vegan.
And I remember at one point, and I was working out a ton.
And
my body fat sits really low, and it was double what it normally is.
And I know because we were in a PhD program and we had to to test all of our body fats and I was like what has happened here during my little trial in veganism but I was so sick sick all the time wow yeah so finally but this one doctor who was a client of mine took my blood and he goes you can either come into the hospital check you in or you can go eat a chicken it was that bad damn and I was doing all the things I was mixing all the things I mean I think you can do this if you're very committed, but like it's a lot of work.
You better be a very good food biochemist and you need to supplement.
Right.
Brian Johnson's pulling it off, but he's got the money to be able to do that.
Yeah, but I still don't really understand
why he's gone with that dogma.
It doesn't make sense to me.
What I love about Brian Johnson, first of all, is that he's sharing everything, but also that when you come down to it, what does he find out?
Diet, exercise, sleep, relationships.
Right.
You know, sunshine.
meditation.
Well, yeah, just study the blue zones.
They all do that, right?
Yeah.
Why would you try to do something else if it's already working?
It's interesting when you look at the blue zones, though,
because first of all, I don't buy the plant-based thing because, you know, I haven't seen in Italy where they're plant-based or Greece.
You know, it's like everyone does some dairy and some meats, cured meats and that kind of stuff, fish.
But I think with the blue zones, when you really look at what are the common factors, it's not diet.
Diet is in whole foods it is.
They're not eating processed foods.
But what it seems to be is that as you age, have an elevated status in the community as an elder, right?
Like you look at the U.S., as you age, you're considered, you get invisible, you're put into a liability at a point.
You know, who's going to take care of granny, right?
But in the blue zones, you're revered and you're active and you're still doing stuff.
You're still, you know, these people all seem to live in hilly areas where they're walking around.
Right.
Yeah.
So I think it's the exercise, the community that make the biggest difference of all.
I think you could probably eat a bunch of ultra-processed food, but have an amazing community, have a purpose.
And I'm not saying to do that, right?
Well, that purpose is huge because they've done studies on brains when people retire and how fast they age.
My dad died when he retired.
Right, when he retired.
It was like pretty closely afterwards.
He always was talking about his ship coming in.
And, you know, then the company sold and that's when everything went downhill.
You know, then he retires and he's gone.
Yeah, because not having that drive waking up every day, like something to work towards is much more.
Can you imagine?
Like, what?
Like, I look at this, I go, why would you want to retire?
Yeah.
I have so many things I'm, I'm more interested in stuff now than I was 20, 30 years ago.
100%.
Yeah.
And people base their whole lives around retirement.
Well, that's because they're doing something they hate, which is to me,
I believe that we have choices in all of this.
And I don't think that comes from an entitled position.
I think that, you know, because I basically have earned everything that I've gotten from scholarship to college on down.
But I think that you, you go and choose what you'd love to do.
You can do that.
Yeah.
And then whatever you're doing, like,
go for it.
Be the best at it.
You know?
You can monetize almost any passion these days with social media.
Like, you'll find people that are interested in what you're doing.
I've seen them craziest things.
Well, when I started, there was nothing, there was no career path in what I was doing at all.
Like, when I first started I was teaching aerobics at an aerobics studio someone wanted me to come to their house I came to their house I started helping people work out at their houses me as far as I can tell I've been talking to Mark about this Mark Sisson and
Body by Jake and me I think were the first personal trainers wow and then there wasn't anyone doing that and then for a nutrition you had to be a dietitian and work in a hospital So it's like all this stuff, I just started doing it because that's what I wanted to do.
And I didn't want to have to wear a suit and go to an office and work nine to five.
I knew that would suck the life out of me.
Yeah.
You were one of the first trainers ever.
That's crazy.
Isn't that funny?
Yeah, I thought that had been around for a while for some reason.
80s.
80s.
Wow.
That is fascinating.
Yeah.
Now there's a whole new wave of biohackers and energy healing, all this new stuff, right?
Well, energy healings
have been around for a long, long, long, long, long, long time.
Yeah, that's Eastern.
Yeah.
But now it's coming to the Western, which is exciting.
Thank God.
I like Eastern philosophies.
Yeah.
Well, when you think about
especially living in Asia, it was quite eye-opening to how things are and how different it is.
And so many of these things that we've done for, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of years, that all of a sudden they're like, there's not a clinical trial.
It's like, well,
how arrogant.
Man, the Sozempic stuff is crazy to me.
Well, so I have a different thought on all of that.
So first of all, it really depends on how you're looking at this.
So I think GLP once, here's the reality.
We are now over 70% of the population is overweight or obese.
You could look at it and go, is it the ultra-processed foods?
Is it the stress?
Is it the sedentary lifestyle?
Because only 20% of American adults are meeting the CDC guidelines for exercise.
And the CDC guidelines for exercise, come on, right?
Those are the lowest end.
Is it the toxins?
all these different things.
But we are where we're at.
And we're in a metabolic hole.
You have 93% of the population now who's considered metabolically unhealthy.
When you get to that point, you get weight loss resistant, where it's really hard for you to get out of that hole, right?
You're hungry all the time, you can't access stored fat for fuel, et cetera.
Now you have, and if you've got fatty liver, if you've got insulin resistance, if you've got obesity, your chances of being
GLP-1 deficient or GLP-1 resistant, just like we become insulin resistant, are probably 100%.
So you have a whole group of people who are insulin resistant, hungrier, right?
A lot of food noise, and now you're gonna say, just exercise and eat less.
I wish it could be that easy, but I think we have to give them a life raft to get them out of the hole.
And the challenge with Ozembic and Munjara, all the different big pharma names for it is they are taking a huge sledgehammer to hit an ant.
Instead of giving a little bit of a dose, just a leg up, just a little life raft, they're like sending in, you know, a big, huge military
boat, right?
So if we could use these things in small amounts and only use them if people are willing to commit to and track eating optimal protein, starting to move.
Now, some of them can't lift weights.
I'm working with someone who is 385 pounds.
People are like, just have them lift weights.
I'm like,
walking 3,000 steps a day was putting them over.
Like, you know, so you have to just meet people where they are and give them some tools to get them through this.
But if you have something that can turn off the food noise, improve insulin sensitivity, and drop the inflammation overnight and give them a little bit of a hand to get past it, if we'd use these correctly, it would be a game changer.
The way we're using them is a problem.
That makes sense.
Yeah, they're giving heavy doses.
Yeah.
More of the micro doses.
Without the guidance, without saying, hey, you know like
when i was on freaky eaters we had a gal who'd had bariatric surgery and she was addicted to ice cream bars
and we had like the craziest stuff we had to give her uh she was eating ice cream bars every hour she'd wake up all night long eating ice cream bars because because of her gastric bypass she could only eat an ice cream bar an hour that was her whole diet was crazy um
why am i bringing this up with you the what was i talking about how to get on the ice cream bars
the oatzempic
I don't remember.
Anyway.
I didn't even know that was a show.
Freaky Eaters.
Freaky Eaters.
So it was just people eating freaky things?
It was sort of like My Strange Addiction meets,
oh, God, what was that other show?
A Hoarders.
Hoarders.
And it was people who were totally addicted to a specific food, could not give that up.
And so a lot of people who wrote in it was French fries.
There was also, there was someone who was addicted to maple syrup.
He put it on everything.
There was someone who was addicted to cornstarch.
I mean, just shit pica, but I mean, just weird stuff.
So it was me and a psychologist, Dr.
Mike Dow, who would go in and intervene on this.
It was before I understood really the whole TV contract deal.
And I'd sign this deal, and I was like ending up in the craziest places, like at a motel.
Like, you know, stuck for weeks.
And I go, please cancel this.
That sounds crazy.
Were you guys able to help any of them?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Some we could.
Some, you know, some probably need a lot more help than that.
But what we would basically do is shock therapy.
Like the guy that had the maple syrup addiction, we took him to a dialysis unit and showed him what it would be like with if you had, you know, that's a lot of sugar, right?
Oh my gosh.
Maple syrup on everything?
Yeah, that's
hundreds of grams of sugar a day, probably.
Terrible.
Damn.
Yeah, I wonder if it's like a trauma thing.
They get tied to a certain food, so they just associate it with good memories or something.
There's so many different reasons this could be.
One of the things I was doing was genetic testing at the time just to see, like, did they have the super taster gene?
What was going on?
We had one guy, one guy who was addicted to raw meat.
Here's the crazy thing.
So we had one guy who would only eat meat and one guy who was addicted to raw meat.
And both of them had the best.
best profiles for their blood.
So I was like, you know, trying to make this case, I'm like, everything looks perfect here, you know, like early carnivore diet.
The only thing I could show is I did a parasite test.
I did a whole
biome not pretty at all.
And that's my thing.
I think diets can be amazing tools.
And
you have to look at what are you doing?
Why are you doing this diet?
What's the outcome you're looking for?
And then what's the next step?
Because this might be something that's going to help you get through like a food elimination process, get rid of food allergies, whatever the thing is, but it won't be the thing you need to do long term.
Like you might do, I think the carnivore diet's an amazing elimination diet, and it shuts off a lot of the noise and takes out a lot of the decisions.
And then at some point, come back in and let's get in some plants for the polyphenols, you know, and the fiber.
Yeah.
How do you feel about fruits?
I think berries are amazing.
I think fruit's amazing.
I'm not a fan of fruit juice.
You basically unwrapped the fruit and made it a soda.
I'm not a fan of dried fruit.
You basically turned it into candy or syrup, you know.
Yeah.
So, but fresh fruit, frozen fruit, peaked at the height of season, you still have to fruit's not a free food yeah you know yeah i'm a fan of fruit i've been uh i've been toning back on vegetables though i used to eat a lot of vegetables but just like now they're finding heavy metals and all the stuff in them it's like
you're gonna find heavy metals so you know i'm in the supplement industry and we have to report heavy metals on shakes and things and it's like well if you went and outlined all the food you'd see that it's in everything which is why we need to be doing detoxification on a regular basis you know so it's even in meat and stuff too Oh, animals.
Wow.
You're going to find it everywhere.
Yeah, because it's in the soil, right?
It's in the soil.
It's in all the different critters.
So if it's like wherever it is, whoever's got it, if it's in the soil, if it's in the plants, if it's in the algae, wherever it is, it's going to come.
Yeah.
So I don't know that you're going to be able, I mean,
look at like swordfish.
and the amount of heavy metals, mercury, and swordfish.
Yeah, I had to stop eating swordfish.
I stopped it in years.
That used to be be my favorite thing.
I used to love it.
I had Costco.
My mom would buy it.
Never, never touch it.
I pretty much, it's like wild salmon and halibuts and scallops.
Yeah.
I had to stop tuna, too.
Yeah, I literally got, so there was a while I was traveling, I was doing PBS shows, and so I was taking the little aseptic pack tuna because it was like one of the ways to get quick protein on the road.
And I jacked my mercury levels.
I could see that.
That happened to Tony Robbins, too.
I think he's eating a lot of sushi.
He almost had mercury poisoning.
He might have had mercury poison.
He did.
Yeah, he did.
Yeah, I used to eat sushi all the time, those sushi buffets.
No, because it's so easy.
You know, so easy and healthy and simple.
That was good.
And
I love wasabi.
Fresh wasabi, though.
Fresh.
That's fake stuff.
Oh, yeah, no, that's fine.
Yeah, that's fake call stuff.
No, no, no.
People don't even know real wasabi.
But just fresh wasabi, and I would just do hand rolls with fresh wasabi and fish and, you know, seaweed.
That's it.
No rice.
I love that.
Well, JJ, what are you working on next?
And where can people find you?
I am working on my powerful aging book.
That is my big, big thing that I'm totally fired up about.
Is it on my podcast?
It's not.
That's going to be a year out.
Right now, we're doing the case study, so we have people going through the program.
I'm training coaches in it.
I'm working on a brand new product line around it.
Everything so that women, especially, will lift weights, build their muscle, age powerfully instead of increasing.
I love it.
We'll link your podcast in the description.
Yeah, thanks for coming on.
Thank you.
Yep, thanks for watching, guys.