Dr. Darshan Shah: Can’t Focus, Sleep, or Lose Weight — it Could be From the Toxins in Your Every Day Products! (Do These SIMPLE Daily Swaps to Undo the Damage NOW!)

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There's 150,000 plus toxins in our environment that have never been here before.

They do cause biological problems.

They do cause hormone dysregulation, plaque in our arteries.

These are all things that could eventually pile up and lead to chronic disease.

Dr.

Darshan Shah is a health and wellness specialist.

He's a board-certified surgeon, published author, entrepreneur.

Spent 25 years as a naval doctor at him with a deep knowledge in the areas of heart, cancer, trauma, and surgery.

What are the signs that we have too many toxins in our body?

Usually, you're just not feeling good.

Brain fog, allergy symptoms, your skin has eczema, fatigue, not sleeping well.

How do I avoid getting cancer?

And I always say cancer's biggest enemy is being diagnosed as stage one: poor metabolic health, inflammation, exposure to toxins.

Once you start doing something about those root causes, your personal cancer risk starts to go down.

Why are you seeing healthy people having heart attacks?

50% of people find out they have heart disease at their first heart attack.

Somewhere between 30 to 50% of that first heart attack is fatal.

There are people in their 40s getting heart attacks, and women are particularly susceptible.

If someone has toxins in their body, is it reversible or are they stuck?

Your liver can detoxify you from almost anything.

The problem is

the number one health and wellness podcast.

Jay Shetty.

Jay Shetty.

The one, the only Jay Shetty.

Hey, everyone.

Welcome back to On Purpose.

I am so grateful that you choose us to become healthier, happier, and more healed.

Today's guest is one of your favorites.

I know him very, very well because he's actually my doctor.

Please welcome back to On Purpose, Dr.

Darshan Shah, a board-certified surgeon, longevity expert, and founder of NextHealth, the world's first health optimization and longevity clinic.

With over 20,000 surgeries under his belt, Dr.

Shah has led innovations in wellness, tech, published extensively, and hosts his own podcast, the Extend podcast, educating people on how to add health span to your lifespan.

Please welcome back to On Purpose, Dr.

Darshan Shah.

So great to have you.

Darshan, it's great to have you back.

Literally, we were just talking about the last episode we did together.

It has helped so many people.

It has a million views, millions of downloads, so many great comments.

And as I was saying, what I love about your insight is that it's practical, it's easy, and it's simple.

Anyone can do it starting from now.

And that's how I want people to feel at the end of this episode.

Absolutely.

Well, I mean, this is my purpose in life now is to educate people on their health.

And I really appreciate you bringing me on to help me do achieve that purpose.

I love this.

I want to dive straight in.

I feel like today, everything from what we eat, to what we put on our skin to the air we breathe is full of toxins.

What is going on?

The media will have you convinced that everything is full of toxins.

The reality is that is not true.

But we do live in a world that's very different than our world was 60, 70 years ago.

We have many man-made chemicals that are now going into our environment, right?

And we're seeing evidence that this is causing people to get sicker quicker, right?

And so we need to be able to mitigate against these until the laws catch up and we stop dumping this stuff into our environment right so even though you're hearing a lot about toxins being everywhere the reality of the situation is it's not too late to modify your habits and your environment so you're not as exposed as you would normally be without some knowledge what are toxins because i feel these words get thrown around right what actually is a toxin okay so A toxin, my personal definition of a toxin is something that humans have made, that they've put into the environment through chemistry, through just manufacturing processes.

And these are now entering our bloodstream and our biology.

Now, thank God we are able to detoxify ourselves from a lot of these toxins that are put out there.

There could be toxins such as pesticides in our food, for example.

Microplastics could be considered a toxin.

There are toxins in plastics like BPA.

They're forever toxins that are.

put out there in our clothing.

So these are all things that are chemicals that were never in our environment before we started making them as humans.

Okay.

And so when we look at the breadth of toxins, there's 150,000 plus toxins in our environment that have never been here before.

And the reason we use the word toxin or toxic is because they do cause biological problems.

They do cause hormone dysregulation, for example.

They cause plaque in our arteries.

These are all things that could eventually pile up and lead to chronic disease.

And that's why we want to avoid them as much as possible.

What are the three most common ways we're exposed to toxins that are having that level of negative impact?

I'm going to give you four actually.

Okay.

I'm sorry.

Give me four.

Air, water, food, and skin.

And so we can talk about each and every one of those, all four of those, and what are some simple tactics that we can use to just reduce our exposure in those environments.

And I think it's really important to know, like our body, our biology is so good at detoxifying us.

It's just when the level of exposure exceeds our ability to detoxify that we start getting into trouble.

yeah let's talk about each of those because you know when i'm having this conversation with you i'm thinking about the fact that these are things we do every day like everything you just said this isn't something that you do once in a while so even if you breathe air all day long totally so even if there's still time to shift it the problem is these are things we do daily and therefore if you do something daily you can also go down downward spiraling as quick.

So let's start with whichever one I want to start with.

Right.

You can go downward spiraling if you don't perform certain actions to mitigate the exposure or you can do an upward spiral if you perform some of these actions so you can actually end up healthier in the future because you take little actions every day that stack up over time.

I think you've had James Clare on, right?

Yes.

Awesome.

Oh, no, I haven't had James on.

No, no, no.

Oh, you got to have him on.

He wrote Atomic Habits.

A 1% change every day adds up to a 3,700% change year over year.

It's massive.

So just make tiny little adjustments in your life every day, and this will add up over the course of the year.

You don't have to do it all in one day, right?

So let's talk about air, for example, okay?

Obviously, we're all breathing all day long, right?

But where do you spend the most time in your day?

Probably in your work environment for you might be this podcast studio and your bedroom at night where you sleep, right?

Most of us spend six to eight hours in our bedroom at night.

And the problem with air is when it gets localized into one area and doesn't have a way to escape into the environment, there's no way for it to clean itself.

Okay.

So the best thing you can do in both of these environments is try to open a window.

All right.

The outside air is generally cleaner than the inside air.

And you can check this on your phone app.

It's on every weather app now, the air quality index.

Okay.

And so it's kind of hidden sometimes.

You can find it on your app.

And if the air quality index outside is green, you're probably safe to open your windows, right?

And how often do we open windows anymore in our life, right?

We assume that we need to live in this air-conditioned environment.

The reality is the air outside is actually making us healthier and it allows the toxins that are accumulating to go outside and get back out into the environment and get recycled.

So number one thing, open the windows.

Number two, if you're in a home or an office environment where there's air filters for a central air conditioning system, make sure those are changed regularly.

That's something that everyone should be doing.

I remember when I first heard about this, I was like, when was the last time I changed my air filters?

It'd been like two years.

And I called the people over over to change it.

And they look at the filter.

It's like a bunch of dust and stuff in the filter.

And a lot of people forget to do that.

A lot of employers forget to do that at work too.

So ask your HR department, like, are we changing these regularly?

Most employers do have contracts with HVAC people that'll change those regularly.

And that's it.

That's the Pareto principle.

The Pareto principle states the 20% of actions that you can do to achieve 80% of the result is where you should focus your energy.

Opening windows, changing air filters.

And lastly, lastly, if you're in an environment where you can't really open a window, for example, or the air quality index is not good, maybe you live in a city that's heavily polluted, there are fantastic portable air filters you can get that you can put in individual rooms for room size.

Some of these are $200, $300 and they can filter your air for you all day.

And there you go.

You've cleared the air.

Solved it.

Yeah.

And it's so simple.

Right.

Everything you just said, you could do it right now, today.

And the first couple of things you even said wouldn't cost us anything.

It's not going to be a habit that you have to develop.

It's immediately changeable.

I checked on my weather app right now.

It's 27, which says good.

It says air quality index is 27, which is similar to yesterday at about this time.

Right.

So

it opens the windows.

Yeah, sure.

I'm going to actually test that.

I'm going to.

Open the windows in this room.

when we leave because right now it's closed for sound and i'm going to see how the air quality changes it well it's not measuring it directly on your phone.

It's telling you what the weather department is telling you.

Now, there are devices you can buy.

They're also pretty inexpensive, $40, $50.

It'll tell you the particular count of the air quality index of the actual room that you're in.

You don't need to do that, but if you're one of these curious people, I bought one and I used it for a little while.

And you'll be surprised how opening the windows, all of a sudden, it goes from red to green.

How is the air quality cleaner outside than inside?

Because I think most of us would assume that pollution is outside, inside's cleaner.

Yeah, that's the assumption that most people make.

But in reality, when air gets trapped in small rooms, the filtration is not good, that trapping of the air and the dust and the toxins in the environment just all end up staying in this little trap confined area.

And that's why air filtration devices work really well because it's constantly putting that air through a filter.

What was the second one?

Water,

right?

We all drink a lot of water.

We should be drinking a lot of water.

We should be staying hydrated.

If you're not drinking a lot of water and you're drinking a lot of like sugary beverages, sodas, for example, what I would say is try to drink a lot more water.

It's great for your detoxification systems.

But the water that comes from your tap in most municipalities has a lot of chemicals in it.

Okay.

And so there are ways that you can filter that water out of your tap.

So what I tell all my patients to do is look at where you get most of your water from.

That particular sink, if you can get a reverse osmosis filtration system, which again is about $200 or $300 and put it under your sink, you can install it yourself or you can have a plumber do it for about $100.

That will completely remove all of the heavy metals, the toxins, fluoride, et cetera, in the water so that whatever water you're drinking there is completely filtered.

Now, if you can't get a reverse osmosis system, there are, of course, those pitchers that you can buy that have a filter in them, the carbon filters.

And so that's another way that you can remove these toxins from the water but in general you want to be drinking filtered water as much as possible out of glass bottles so all the plastic bottles we're drinking out of there's a ton of microplastics especially if they're out in the heat that accumulate in that plastic bottle try not to drink out of plastic water bottles if at all possible get yourself a big glass water bottle fill it from a reverse osmosis or filtered system every day and once again where do you spend the most time at home where do you get most of your drinking water from at home?

Probably your kitchen sink.

You only need that one spot.

And at work, try to get your employer once again to get a reverse osmosis or some sort of filtration system in that work sink as well.

It's shocking to me the situation we have with plastic water bottles.

It's shocking.

Because I feel like 99% of us are drinking water.

from a plastic water bottle.

That's what's sold in every single store, every single brand, whether you're at the airport, whether you're at the grocery store, wherever you are, are, you barely will see a glassed water bottle.

It's just not that common until Ashton Hall did his Saratoga.

Did you see that with his morning routine?

No.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

There was a, there was a,

I think he's a former NFL athlete who recently did his morning routine and he had the Saratoga water bottle.

It's these blue water bottles.

Yes, yes.

And he uses that and it's like, it's gone crazy because

but it's interesting to me that plastic water bottles have just been the norm for so long.

They have been, yeah.

For someone who's sitting there going, Jay, I've been drinking out of a plastic water bowl for 10 years.

I'm fine.

What does a microplastic even do?

What is drinking, what is the big deal, Dr.

Shah, from drinking from a plastic water bottle?

What would you say?

I think microplastics, we don't really know yet what they're doing, but there's indicators in science that there is harm being done.

So for example, one of the indicators is they did a research study where they look at the blood vessels of people that have suffered strokes and heart attacks.

And you can actually see microplastics in the wall of the blood vessel.

And as we know, you know, that cholesterol can accumulate there.

That blood vessel can get blocked.

That can lead to a heart attack.

It can lead to stroke.

This is also happening in what's called the microvasculature, the tiny blood vessels that we can't even see with the naked eye.

Those are more easily blocked.

So we know every organ in our body needs blood to survive and to thrive.

And you're blocking those microvessels with microplastics.

This can can be a huge problem.

There's a lot of studies also done where we're finding microplastics accumulating in our testes and ovaries, also in our brain.

They've done studies of this, and it can't be good.

This is something that is blocking hormonal signals, is blocking neuronal signals, and we really got to mitigate our exposure.

Plastic, you know, wasn't in our environment to the degree it is now 100 years ago.

And we're just running this mass experiment across all of Western civil, all across the whole world, actually, on what are the effects of microplastics going to be.

And what we don't want to do is, for example, when you reach 100 years old and now all of a sudden a research study comes out that says microplastic accumulation leads to Alzheimer's disease, leads to cardiovascular disease.

We don't want to end up there, right?

So I don't want to say it's easy, but it's easier than you think it is.

to avoid microplastics.

Well, I think you've raised a really important point there because I think the challenge with us as humans is we wait for some conclusive evidence to make small changes that would only benefit us.

So as you said, there are already studies and research being done that point towards there being issues here.

Why take a risk?

Like it's not worth it, right?

It's not worth it.

What are some of the ways in which microplastics are hiding in our everyday life beyond water bottles?

For example, a lot of clothing have microplastics in them and also forever chemicals.

And so look at the tag of your clothing and see what it's made of.

If you're buying, you know, wool or if you're buying 100% cotton, chances are it's probably safe.

However, a lot of these synthetic blends can be a problem.

So you really want to do some research there on your clothing.

Even everything in our kitchen is made out of plastics now, cutting boards, the Tupperware that we store our food in, right?

And here's the worst situation with plastics.

When you heat up plastics in a microwave, for example, the plastics and the chemicals leach into your food at a very, very high degree.

So never warm up anything in the microwave in something plastic.

If you have a cutting board, for example, that's made out of plastic, look at what's happening to the cutting board.

You'll see little pieces of plastic after you've cut your vegetables.

Throw that away and get yourself a wooden cutting board, right?

Look at what you're stirring your food in when you're cooking.

A lot of those utensils that people use, they putting a plastic utensil inside of their food, heating it up, and basically it's melting into the food don't do that get a wooden spoon or metal something with metal all of these small minute changes it might seem overwhelming once again like oh i got to go through my whole kitchen and change everything out no you don't have to do it all today but over the next six months year as you're you know losing tupperware getting rid of it buy ceramic storage containers instead you know as you're replacing things get rid of the plastic and go more towards something that's more sustainable not only is it good for your biology, it's also great for the environment, right?

Yeah.

I actually am going to say, Dr.

Shah is being nice.

I'm not giving you six months.

I'm not giving you three months.

Today, go into your kitchen and remove everything that is plastic that connects with your food, whether it's the Tupperware, whether it's the spoon, whether it's the chopping board, get rid of the plastic from your kitchen.

It's just not worth it.

Right.

Right.

It's not worth it.

It's not worth it for your health.

Absolutely.

And, you know, I know there's a lot of controversy and talk about plastic straws, for example, plastic utensils.

All of this stuff, like when it comes in contact with heat, it becomes particularly dangerous.

And so the less you can use some of these things, the better.

How did companies get away with it for so long?

You know, unfortunately, the way our laws are structured is until something is proven unsafe, you can put it out into the environment.

And that's the problem.

It's the exact opposite of pharmaceuticals.

You have to do massive studies to make sure something is safe before you can put it out into the public, right?

Unfortunately, with every other chemical, until it's proven unsafe, you can't do anything about it.

Even the EPA is hamstrung.

They have to do a study to prove something is unsafe before they say, hey, let's hold off on this, getting out of the environment, you know?

So it's just this train that left the station a few decades ago and it can't be stopped now.

Before we started, we were talking about something else.

You're talking about coffee cups.

Yeah.

Talk to me about that.

Yeah.

So we have a mutual friend who came on my podcast and we measured some testing on him and we saw high levels of forever chemicals and plastics in his testing.

And I started to ask him, like, well, where is this coming from?

He's like, I'm pretty good about plastics.

I don't drink out of plastic water bottles.

But then I saw him grab a cup of coffee and take one of those paper cups and fill it with coffee.

Well, those paper cups are actually lined with a plastic liner.

You put hot coffee in there, guess what's happening?

It's melting.

If you use use those K cups, the ones that come in plastic, those are heat going right through a plastic cup.

You won't even believe this.

A lot of tea bags are made out of plastic.

I know tea bags are made out of plastic.

Tea bags are made out of plastic.

Yeah, believe it or not, it doesn't look like plastic.

It looks like cloth, but it's actually plastic.

So you have to be really careful about these things and start asking questions and have alternatives for yourself.

So I went from, I had a curing machine at home, believe it or not, and I would use 50 of these plastic containers of coffee every month.

And I just switched out to using a French breast.

And now I never see plastic little containers.

Same thing with tea bags.

Now we use a special metal container that we put tea in and we do it this way.

It actually feels nicer.

You feel more in connection with your coffee and your tea because there's not this kind of plastic barrier between you and your tea and coffee.

And for your long-term health, it's probably the right thing to do.

Wow.

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Thanks for taking a moment for that.

Now back to the discussion.

So we did water, water.

We did air.

What's the next one?

We talked a lot about plastics, which is great.

Okay, so let's talk about your food.

Okay, so a lot of the chemicals that come to us in our food come from how we're growing our food in farms now.

We're spraying our foods with lots of chemicals.

Glyphosate is still not illegal in the United States.

So glyphosate that everyone's heard of is also another chemical that's found on foods.

I do a lot of testing on our patients in our clinic that are suffering from multiple problems and we can't figure out why do they have headaches and fatigue and brain fog and gut issues.

And we find massive levels of glyphosate in their system.

You don't have to do the testing to know this is a problem.

Okay.

And so glyphosate is sprayed on vegetables and fruits.

There are certain fruits and vegetables that are very susceptible to glyphosate spraying because they have very thin skins.

And so the glyphosate can actually penetrate into the skin into the fruit.

And so those are the ones, if you're not buying organic, you want to wash them really, really well before you eat them.

The Environmental Working Group is a great website, EWG.org.

They have what's called the Dirty Dozen on their website.

And these are 12 foods every year they test that have high levels of pesticides on them.

And those are the foods you want to either avoid.

What are they?

Sometimes it's blueberries.

Sometimes it's apples.

It's like anything with a thin shell on it.

And so you want to be really careful about those types of foods and having having a good washing routine.

And then, you know, trying to buy organic if at all possible.

I think there's this misconception out there that buying organic is super expensive.

Actually, if you go to farmers markets, a lot of them are willing to deal with you and

give you a good price on things, sometimes better than your supermarket.

I found this myself where I can find better pricing at the roadside stand or at an organic farm than I can at my own supermarket.

And so I think if you try to get organic, if you can, and if you can't, look at that list on the website, ewg.org.

Try to avoid those and at least look up a YouTube video on how to wash your fruits and vegetables effectively.

Yeah, it's so hard because you're like, hey, I'm being healthy.

I'm eating blueberries.

I'm eating apples.

And then you're stuck with this side of it where it's like,

I thought I was making a healthy choice.

Like you're not eating past foods.

You're eating fruits.

You are.

Yeah.

But then there's something in it.

So you got to be even more careful.

I think, you know, the way to think about it is, absolutely.

You want to eat blueberries over, you know,

Twinkie, for example, right?

But even those blueberries, you want to be careful about what you're putting into your system.

And, you know, I think that we've gotten so used to this lifestyle of convenience where you just go to the supermarket, you're in and out in 30 minutes.

You don't even have to think about what you're getting.

You just pick it up, throw it in your cart, and you zoom out of there, right?

And I think...

We need to go back to a time period where humans lived where we were much more mindful about what we were putting in our body.

We respected food.

We thought about our food before we ate it and we enjoyed the meal.

And so you cooked at home more.

I think we need to go back to a lifestyle where we have more of a connection with our food.

And then all of this stuff becomes more automatic.

One of the biggest things I'm constantly trying to work on is just eating slower.

Yeah.

Right.

I find like it's so easy.

I was thinking about this where it started.

So when I was a kid, I ate fast in school because my mom would make me an Indian-packed lunch sometimes.

And I'd be embarrassed of it.

So I'd eat it really fast.

And then when I worked in the corporate world, if you took took a lunch break, you were just not hustling, like you weren't effective enough.

So then I'd eat really, really fast.

When I was a monk, we ate very, very slow, but we only ate like one meal a day.

So it was very limited practice.

And then when I left again, I went back to the corporate world and working world and you're eating fast again.

And I find when I'm eating slow, my digestion is better.

My stress is better.

Everything's better.

And when I'm eating fast, it's almost like you're bloated.

You've got indigestion, like everything just from such a simple habit.

Yeah, you bring up a really good point there, Jay, because this is the balance between your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system.

When you eat, you're supposed to be in a state of rest and relaxation.

That's the parasympathetic state.

But like you said, most of us eat in the sympathetic state where we're stressed out, just trying to get through the meal.

Sometimes we're on our computer or our phone while we're eating.

And we never allow our bodies to go into this parasympathetic state.

And we spend 90% of our life in sympathetic and 10% in parasympathetic.

And it's the exact opposite of how our caveman ancestors used to live.

They used to rest and relax all day long.

They would walk around.

The only stressful times they had is if they were being attacked by an animal or another, you know.

So, so we need to get back to taking time to eating our food, just not only for our digestion, but also for our parasympathetic state, to have just an opportunity to spend some time with us.

It's so good to, it's so good to understand that.

I mean, that, I remember, yeah, that, that flip of how quickly society has changed from the way we used to live to the way we live now and how we all don't have enough time to do the simple things that our bodies need right is is huge when you think about it like that like the comparison yeah the flip it's pretty insane yeah you know i talked to a lot of my patients and i'm like you have to give yourself some time to self-care and think i don't have any time to self-care you want me to build in a six-hour self-care routine like no no no self-care means giving yourself 20 minutes to eat instead of five minutes to see.

That is practicing self-care.

That allows you to downshift from this high sympathetic state into parasympathetic.

And when you're in that state, you do have time that your body is able to recover.

And all your body needs, your body doesn't need a lot of time to recover, but it does need some time to recover.

And meals is a perfect time for that.

And the fourth one is skin.

Skin.

Yeah.

Okay.

So women on average use between 10 to 12 products on their skin every day, and men use between six to eight products on their skin every day.

And most of us don't even think about it, right?

We go to CVS or we go to the supermarket and we buy our skincare products right off the shelf.

We need a lotion, we need a perfume, a hair wash, we just buy it, right?

The reality is.

a lot of that stuff over 90% of the stuff that we buy in our supermarkets is filled with toxins.

If you ever look at the label on it, you're like, you can't even pronounce 90% of the words on there, right?

And just because you can't pronounce them doesn't mean it's a toxin.

But the minute you start looking them up, you're like, oh my gosh, there's some bad stuff in here.

Thank goodness there are apps and there are websites now that can help us to

understand what's inside of these products because it's hard for the average Joe to really understand all these chemicals and if they're bad or good for you.

And so you can scan these products.

And we mentioned this on the last podcast.

There's an app called Think Dirty.

It's an app called Skin Deep.

There's a few of them out there that people can use.

The beauty of this is you only need to do it one time, right?

Like how many times have you changed toothpaste in your life?

Rarely.

Rarely.

Yeah.

Scan it once.

You're like, oh, wait a minute.

That's at the red level.

I probably shouldn't be buying that.

Let me see what the alternatives are.

Okay.

Here's something that's green and it's affordable to me and I can switch to that.

And then once you switch to it, that's it.

You made that 1% change that day.

And this is going to stack up to 3,700% change for the rest of the year for you.

Yeah.

Year after year after year, right?

Same thing with your skin products that you use, your lotion, your hair wash.

You also want to try to minimize amount of perfumes that you use your deodorants all of it you want to kind of look at there are perfumes out there that are considered non-toxic like essential oils and things like that but still our skin is an incredible barrier to the outside environment right you want to protect it you want to be able to give it only has a certain amount of also barrier capacity right and the more you keep putting on it the harder it is for your skin to delineate what's a toxin and what's not okay and so just using detoxified products, it will allow your skin to function better in the long run.

One other quick hint I have on this, I'll give to you, just also for better hair care for people.

I think we're convinced by advertisements on TV that we need to wash our hair every day.

Right.

And the reality is the more you wash your hair, the more you're drying your skin, the more you're killing the microbiome of your hair.

And your hair becomes more and more unhealthy.

That's why every time you shampoo, you need a conditioner because your shampoo is drying your scalp.

In reality, especially for men, if you wash your hair once a week or once every week, you mean wash your hair with shampoo, right?

With shampoo, right.

Once a week or once every other week, it's much better for your scalp, much better for your hair, less exposure to toxins.

Your microbiome can flourish.

When I learned this, it completely changed the quality of my scalp from, you know, having dandruff and having lots of dry scalp issues, itchiness all day long to having a great head of hair and no scalp issues.

So

washing your hair with water is fine.

It's fine.

But it's wetting your hair with shampoo and conditioner every day or every other day.

And you're saying once a week.

Once a week.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

Your hair will

be staying cleaner.

Your hair will stay cleaner and your hair will retain the natural oils that'll keep it healthy.

I've almost been trained to believe that when I use shampoo or conditioner, obviously it smells better, you feel better, but you can actually be clean without that.

Like your hair will be clean without that.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

We've evolved for millennia to keep our scalp healthy.

And now we've never needed chemicals to keep our scalp healthy.

How, how come all of a sudden, last 50 years, we've been convinced that we need all these chemicals in our scalp to keep it healthy?

It's not true.

The opposite is true.

It's crazy when you say it like that.

Right.

When you think about it, like you're like, what are we all doing?

Look at pictures of people from back in the 30s and 40s and 50s when they didn't have all these products.

Their hair looks incredible.

Like you rarely see male pattern balding or women with thinning hair is because they didn't wash their hair like this every day, you know, with every shower.

Wow.

Yeah.

I'm literally mind-blown right now.

I'm like, these are such, there's such, again, simple changes, simple steps, and we're protecting ourselves with ease, right?

It's super easy.

Absolutely.

You know, we've been convinced through marketing that we need to do more and more and more and more.

And the reality is you need less.

You just have to know where to cut back, right?

And know what's, let your body keep you healthy.

Your biology is an incredible system.

Like I keep saying, it's evolved over millennia to keep you healthy.

Give it a chance to do it.

And you have a three-ingredient skincare routine we can create ourselves, right?

I've always been talking about that with multiple dermatologists and things like that.

I think the simpler, the better.

But yes, we can do stuff like that.

What is it?

I haven't developed it yet.

We'll talk about it one of these days.

Is our environment aging us faster than our genetics?

Yes, it's definitely more about our environment than it is our genetics.

It's so funny.

You know, this whole,

we have this human genome project that went on for about five plus years, an incredible project where some incredible scientists decoded our entire genome.

And we thought this was going to be the answer to disease.

This was going to be the answer to reversing chronic disease, keeping us alive longer.

And what we're learning since then, then more and more is it's not in the DNA.

It's more about how our environment turns on and turns off segments of our DNA to either keep us healthy or develop in the opposite direction.

And so we used to say even just five years ago that your DNA is really only 20% of the equation.

Now we're saying your DNA code is actually probably 10% or less of the equation.

Which DNA segments are turned on and off, that's totally your environment.

What are the signs that we have too many toxins in our body?

How do we know?

It's usually you're just not feeling good.

Okay.

And one thing I do want to emphasize is that our body is incredibly resilient.

By the time you feel something, it's usually later on in the process of accumulation.

Okay.

So you don't want to wait till you start feeling something.

You want to start making these mini changes now so you stay healthier for the long term.

Some of the symptoms of toxin accumulation include brain fog, include allergy symptoms.

Your skin has eczema, for example.

You can have fatigue, not sleeping well.

These are all symptoms that if you go to a doctor, they're like, I don't really know what's going on.

Really, toxin accumulation needs to be the fourth leg of that stool that we always talk about of health, right?

We have sleep, we have exercise, we have our nutrition.

Toxins is that fourth leg that we need to start mitigating on so that we stay healthy for the the long term.

If someone has toxins in their body,

is it reversible or are they stuck?

No, absolutely reversible.

Your body has a tremendous ability to detoxify.

Your liver is this incredible organ.

Do you know the liver is the only organ in our body that we do not have a medical device to replicate what it does?

Wow, I did not know that.

We can replace your kidneys with dialysis, you know, your heart.

We even have heart-lung machines, for example.

But your liver has chemical processes that cannot be replaced.

And that's because it's incredibly complex.

It can detoxify you from almost anything.

The problem is when the level of accumulation occurs faster than the rate of detoxification.

And then the toxins end up in your plasma, your bloodstream, and deposit into your organs.

Doesn't mean that the game is lost or it's too late.

You just have to start.

somewhere at some time to start decreasing your exposure so your body can catch up.

Okay.

And we've talked about all the strategies you can do that, right?

I think there's one more strategy I think people need to think about.

We think that we need to live in this super clean environment, and we buy eight different cleaners for all the things that we clean in our house, right?

You have a spray bottle for your windows, you have a spray bottle for your cabinets, you have one for the toilets, and then you have different products to mop your floor with and air fresheners, for example.

You don't need any of that stuff.

Okay.

You need very few products just diluted at different levels to clean things.

And so soap is extremely effective.

There's a great company.

I have no financial affiliation with them called Branch Basics.

And I've gotten to know the founder.

She makes one product that's non-toxic.

You buy a big bottle.

It'll last you for months.

And you just dilute it.

to different levels for your windows, for your toilets, for your floor.

And that's all you need.

It's actually simpler and cheaper to do it that way.

You know, she's changed how we clean our house completely because now we spend less money less time cleaning our house and it's not using toxic chemicals i'm thinking about it i'm thinking there are so many places in our home where we're exposed to chemicals yeah and as you said if we just spend this weekend just going i'm just gonna look through my apartment i'm gonna look through my home and i'm just gonna get rid of all of this stuff i'm gonna find really easy replacements like you said you only have to do it once yeah it's not something you have to keep doing absolutely i have a list on my website actually maybe we can link to it in the show notes absolutely of 50 actions you can take.

And if you just check off one a week in a year, you're done.

I like that.

I like that.

That's really strong.

There you go, right?

That's really strong.

Yeah.

Darshan, we've talked a lot about toxins.

We've talked a lot about microplastics.

But I think this is really important right now.

I want to talk to you about the top three causes of death in the United States.

Wow.

Because I don't think we're as aware as we should be.

But I think we're all experiencing, whether that be with friends or family.

So could you take us through the top three?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think it's an important topic for us to all talk about because, you know, I want to put some positivity into this conversation.

We are living in an incredible time in history right now.

The founder of NVIDIA, the founders of Google, they are all telling us, look, what we're seeing is we're going to be able to apply the power of artificial intelligence and quantum computing to the problem of disease.

And there is not a zero chance that during our lifetimes, we'll be able to cure most disease using this incredible power that's coming, right?

We're not there yet, but there's a lot coming.

So it's a really amazing idea to think about this, right?

And it might sound like science fiction to some people, but my iPhone sounded like science fiction 10 years ago, right?

So what I want people to know is that just stay healthy and alive long enough to experience this technological revolution.

Now, that being said, if you go to the CDC's website, they publish every single year the top 10 causes of death.

Number one is heart disease.

In the top five are cancer and also Alzheimer's disease.

And metabolic disease is also in the top 10, but metabolic disease is one of the root causes of cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and heart disease.

So we can talk about all of those four because I think they're important to touch on.

And the reason is people might think that it's outsourced to their doctor to prevent them from getting these diseases, from getting these chronic diseases, but really the Western medical system is not well equipped to prevent and to turn around these chronic diseases.

But we, through our habits and through our routines, we absolutely can make these diseases a possible non-entity during our lifetimes.

I read a incredible statistic.

It said more than half of U.S.

adults don't know heart disease is the leading cause of death.

Wow.

Despite its 100-year reign.

So that's been true for 100 years.

Yeah.

But we're not aware of it.

And even when you say the word heart disease, I'm like, how does someone even get that?

I'll give you a couple more statistics.

50% of people find out they have heart disease at their first heart attack.

Somewhere between 30 to 50% of that first heart attack is fatal.

Right.

And that's when people are finding out.

And I just read this morning, it's happening at a younger and younger age.

So we thought heart attacks is a disease of old men and women, right?

Or just old men, most people thought.

The reality of the situation is there are people in their 40s getting heart attacks and women are particularly susceptible.

And the reason is women don't have the same symptoms men have.

Women's symptoms are more symptoms such as fatigue, brain fog, inability to get their day done.

Men have severe chest pain a lot of times with heart attacks, right?

And so women get diagnosed later with heart disease and therefore they can't get treated for it.

So there's lots of of different types of heart disease.

The one that we're mostly focused on is development of what's called plaque in the blood vessels of your heart.

Plaque is a thickening of the blood vessel wall due to many different factors that cause it to close off.

Believe it or not, even though there's a lot of blood going through your heart, The blood vessels that supply your actual heart muscle to keep it alive are really kind of tiny.

I used to operate on these when I was a surgeon.

And you have to look under a microscope a lot of times to see these blood vessels to operate on them.

And so they get blocked pretty easily.

And that's what we're talking about.

And how do they get blocked?

There's a combination of factors.

I always say there's four factors that lead to heart disease.

Most people think it's LDL cholesterol.

That's not true.

The four factors that lead to heart disease are number one, metabolic disease.

And that's just a fancy way of saying that our body is unable to handle the amount of sugar that we have.

So our glucose levels are high all the time and our insulin levels get high all the time.

Second factor is inflammation, and we can dive into that a little bit more.

Third factor is damage to the wall of the blood vessel.

That's called the endothelium.

That happens when you have high blood pressure that's untreated for a long time, which over 50% of Americans have, and or high stress levels or even over-training.

And lastly, is an accumulation of cholesterol in your blood vessel wall, specifically a kind of cholesterol that's grouped under what's called APO-B.

And we can talk about that and why that's important.

Yeah, let's talk about all four of those, because I think, again, when you hear about that we're starting to have healthier conversations around glucose spikes and sugar but i still don't think we understand fully or maybe there's some denial that those things are connected to heart disease right in in our understanding at least right like i think we're still i mean i remember last week i was just doing a analysis of what products people eat on a day-to-day basis.

And I was in my hotel and I was just looking at the snack basket in the hotel.

I couldn't eat any of it because because most of it wasn't plant-based.

But I was looking on the back of it and there was a bag of a very famous chocolate, which the packet is only this big, like it's tiny.

Yeah.

And it has 60% of your daily sugars.

That's if you should even be eating that much sugar anyway.

But it's 60% of your daily sugars in a bag that I would as a kid finish in like three seconds, right?

And so it's worrying to think about the amount of sugar intake we're having without even knowing.

I don't think we're aware of how much sugar is in a packet of chips, a chocolate bar, the drinks that we're drinking every day.

Like there's no understanding of it.

So let's go through each of those as well.

Let's start with number one.

Yeah, let's start with metabolic disease, right?

So you've had Casey Means on here and a few experts on metabolic disease.

And the reality of the situation, it's not just the...

packages of candy, right?

A lot of people will say, I don't eat candy.

I don't eat desserts.

I'm fine.

The reality is sugar and fructose is hidden in a lot of different foods, specifically ultra-processed foods and refined grains.

Okay.

And so those can be particularly dangerous.

So even a sandwich, for example, you're like, sandwich, there's not, I'm not putting sugar in my sandwich.

Well, the refined white bread combined with the condiments like the ketchup and the mustard, there's a lot of sugar in there.

There's even sugars sometimes added to the meats that you're eating.

And so if you were like a continuous glucose monitor, a sandwich for a lot of people can cause a huge spike.

There are easy ways to mitigate this problem.

And one of them is, of course, avoiding refined grains, avoiding ultra-processed food, but also starting every meal with some fiber.

If you put fiber into your system first, your body's ability to absorb the sugar that follows it is much reduced.

That's one thing you could do.

And the second thing you can do is move around after every single meal.

All right.

So instead of you go to a restaurant, they give you a basket of bread or tortilla chips, say, I'm not going to have that, please.

Instead, I'll start with a side salad.

And as soon as you're done, instead of just going straight to your car or your couch, go for a little 5, 10, 15 minute walk.

Those two simple actions can completely change your body's relationship to sugar, in addition to avoiding ultra-processed food, sugary drinks, et cetera.

Yeah, I love that one.

That's been the big one for me.

Just I've been trying to structure my food eating in that way.

And the walking part is life-changing.

I found that if I sit on the couch to watch a show straight after dinner, I'm now getting some acid reflux.

I'm digesting food badly.

There's some sort of discomfort that I'm feeling.

Whereas just walking around for 10 minutes, all of a sudden I'm comfortable.

And that's it.

It's such a small, simple step that people can take.

It's a small, simple step.

And, you know, it doesn't take a lot, actually.

It really doesn't.

It just takes five, 10 minutes if you can do it.

What was the second cause?

Let's talk about high blood pressure because I think that this is affecting people at a much younger, younger age.

I'm seeing people in my clinic in their 20s with high blood pressure.

Let's define that.

High blood pressure is anything over 130 over 80 in my definition.

And there's huge research studies showing that for every 10 points that you have of your blood pressure being over 130 over 80, you have a 15% chance of having cardiovascular disease, an increase of 15% of having cardiovascular disease and complications from it.

So it's really important to manage your blood pressure, right?

The problem is most of us don't even know we have high blood pressure until it's way too late.

And the reason for that is where do you get your blood pressure measure, right?

Your doctor's office.

Yeah.

Right.

If you even go to a doctor, 50% of people don't even go to see a doctor, right?

Is that true?

Yeah.

50% of people don't see a primary care doctor.

All of their medicine is administered through urgent cares and emergency rooms.

That's crazy.

It's crazy right now.

It is really crazy.

If you talk to urgent care and ER doctors, they think it's 100% because they're seeing people all the time.

It's the busiest they've ever been since, you know, ERs and emergency rooms were even invented.

So anyhow, I think that even if you get your blood pressure measured at a doctor's office, usually it's a garbage measurement.

And the reason for that is you're doing one blood pressure measurement.

Usually it's the last person that was just hired at the...

doctor's office doing your blood pressure.

And also, you know, you're stressed out.

You might have white coat syndrome.

Usually that blood pressure is looked at.

It's like, oh, let's check it again next year, next time you're here.

And then it gets kind of ignored.

The best way to do this, I would do this even if you're in your 30s, is buy a blood pressure cup for your home.

Look up a good YouTube video on how to measure your blood pressure.

You want to do it first thing in the morning, sitting in a specific way.

You want to do it three times and you average those three readings.

You want to optimize for 120 over 70.

You want to try to be as close to that as possible.

If it's anything over 130 over 80, that should ring an alarm bell in your mind.

You want to try it again next week, do the same procedure.

Try it again the following week, do the same procedure.

If this keeps happening for three to four weeks in a row where it's over 130 over 80, you need to go see a doctor and bring them your blood pressure measurements and show them what you did.

Because We have a lot of different ways to control blood pressure.

It doesn't need to be just medication.

There's sleep issues like sleep apnea that can lead to high blood pressure.

There's dietary issues like too much salt in your diet, which I'm not saying salt is bad for you.

Salt is good.

Some people eat a lot of ultra-processed food with a lot of additional salt and sugar that can lead to high blood pressure.

Everything is very interrelated, as you can see, right?

So the key is knowing.

Once you know, you can mitigate for the bad effects of high blood pressure.

The problem is now we diagnose blood pressure issues five to 10 years too late.

Then it takes us five to 10 years of messing around trying to treat it before we finally get it right.

So people are living with high blood pressure for 10, 20, 30 years.

By then, a lot of damage has already been done.

Yeah.

So people just need to go get checked.

Exactly.

You just need to know now.

And monitor regularly.

Not go get checked.

Check it yourself.

Get a blood pressure cuff.

Check it yourself because going to get checked, a lot of times you get tricked into a false sense of comfort thinking it's normal or my doctor said everything's fine.

Right.

I think it's, I'm a big believer in empowering yourself with a few numbers about your health.

And one of them is definitely blood pressure.

So knowing your own blood pressure and checking yourself is a good idea, in my opinion.

It's so amazing how you could just miss it just just by a little bit.

But like you're saying, five to 10 years.

Five to ten years is not a little bit, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's not.

Yeah.

People ignore it a long time.

That's late.

Yeah.

If someone checks themselves right now and they have high blood pressure, what should they do?

First thing, don't freak out, right?

I mean, it's just one measurement or three averaged into one.

Check it again the following week and check it again the following week.

There's a lot of things you can do to lower your blood pressure naturally.

We talked about some of the dietary interventions.

There's also, you know, start listening to the daily J,

it's just some breath work, some meditation can be massively beneficial in reducing blood pressure naturally.

Going for a walk after meals, sleeping better, all of these things can be simple things.

Simple things, right?

It always comes down to the basics.

Yes, it really is.

It always comes down to the basics.

And then being really aware of these little nuances, I feel.

Like the more time I've spent with you, you realize, yeah, it's about these simple things like nutrition, your sleep, your exercise.

And then at the other end, it's about the microplastics, the toxins, that, and these are the more nuanced things that require a bit more organization and orchestration.

Right.

Inflammation is one of the root causes of heart disease.

Yes, and Alzheimer's.

And yeah, and cancer.

Okay.

So what is inflammation?

It's an overactivity of your immune system.

Your immune system is what keeps us healthy.

It fights off, we all know, viruses, bacteria, but it also fights off cancer cells.

It also has a major role in healing us from injuries throughout our body.

When your immune system is too busy, and this can happen for many different reasons, but there's one in particular,

it doesn't have the time or the ability to attend to all of its different roles, right?

So cancer cells get missed and you develop cancer.

Amyloid accumulates in your brain, you develop Alzheimer's disease.

These things happen because our immune system just literally doesn't have the capacity to do all the different jobs we're asking it to do.

So there's one place where most inflammation starts, and that's in your gut.

Okay.

Most of our immune system, 80 to 90% of our immune cells are located in our gut.

And when our gut is unhealthy, toxins are instantly absorbed through our gut into our bloodstream and our immune system is asked to fight these off.

And so it's really important to maintain a healthy gut so that our immune system is allowed some time to do its other jobs.

If you're someone who gets sick often or has a regular cough or sore throat, is that a sign that your immune system is weak?

Yeah, absolutely.

It could be for sure.

What should you be doing?

Because I feel like we just let it go.

I know a lot of people who just, every time I see them, they're like, oh, you know, I just got a cough, like, just got a sore throat.

I've just got sick again.

Like, you know, every month you're hearing about it.

Yeah.

And you kind of just live life that way.

Yeah, it's unfortunate.

We get used to it, right?

And so there's a lot of ways to keep your immune system healthy.

One is,

we keep going back to the basics, but I will say sleep is such an important factor in immune system health.

The less you sleep, the weaker your immune system gets.

And it's so predictable, you know?

And so having good deep sleep is very important.

We talked about toxins.

The less your immune system has to deal with toxins, the better it has the capacity to help detoxify you from viruses and fungi so you don't get sick.

And then lastly, I would say is keep your gut healthy.

You know, make sure you're eating a lot of fiber.

Make sure you're avoiding things like Advil and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs unless you absolutely need them.

Don't take antibiotics unless you absolutely need them.

That can kill your gut bacteria.

Keep your gut as healthy as possible.

Lots of fiber.

It's super important as well for your gut to be healthy.

What are the negative impacts of antibiotics and Advil?

They are like nuclear bombs to your gut bacteria.

You take an Advil, you take any non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug or an antibiotic especially,

your gut bacteria take a while to regenerate themselves.

It's really a tragedy in modern medicine because, you know, when I was in medical school, I was taught there's no downsize to antibiotics.

Why not just fling antibiotics at people?

I think people know better now for sure, but it's still, you know, doctors don't have time to sort through all these things.

And sometimes just writing someone a prescription for an antibiotic gets them out your door.

And people are seeking antibiotics all the time.

They want something.

They want a pill to they want a quick fix, a pill to take.

And I think that we have to be much more mindful because the same antibiotic that's killing your sinus problem is killing your gut bacteria, right?

So unless you absolutely need it, I would be very careful about taking antibiotics and non-steroidals.

I think now, you know, we've come to this age where we can buy these things over the counter in massive tubs of like 180 pills of Advil, right?

And the minute you have a little ache or sore, even people going to the gym, they take a little Advil before and to get a better workout.

It's a killer for your gut bacteria.

So you want to avoid these if at all possible.

What do you do for a headache instead?

Curcumin.

Yeah, there's lots of natural remedies for, you know, headaches, taking a nap.

Curcumin is a powerful anti-inflammatory, especially if you take it with papaverin, which increases its absorption.

Try that first.

You can even try this if you're having back pain, neck pain.

Look, I'm not telling people live with pain.

Absolutely not.

But don't also become a chronic user of Advil every single day.

Yeah, because the pain you're actually setting yourself up for is far worse.

Right.

And I think that's what we just don't see.

I think we've all been trained to believe that as long as I don't feel anything, I'm good.

Yes.

Not realizing that the numbing and the suppressing of that signal, that sign, that alert that's trying to say, hey, take a look at your gut or take a look at whatever it may be.

Yeah.

It's so easy to just kind of avoid it and hide it almost.

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Now let's dive back in.

This happens with all of disease, Jay, is that we cover up the symptoms with pharmaceuticals and we never look at what is the root cause of why we have that in the first place, right?

So if you're having pain, is your body screaming out saying, hey, there's a root cause issue going on here.

Help me figure this out so that we don't have long-term issues.

Instead, a pill will cover up the symptoms and it numbs you to that signal.

And that's the problem.

And what was the next one after inflammation?

Then we talked about cholesterol leading to heart disease.

So one point I want to make here is I think a lot of us are stuck in this mentality of LDL cholesterol leads to heart disease.

Explain that because I don't think most people even know what LDL cholesterol is.

Yeah, so if you get a cholesterol panel and your doctor tells you, oh, your total cholesterol is high, your LDL is high, I think you might need a statin to mitigate the effects of this so that you don't have heart vessel blockages in the future.

Well, we already know that it's not just cholesterol that leads to heart disease.

It's all the combination of things that we talked about.

If your doctor talks to you about LDL or if you're following your LDL, really that's 1980s, 1990s medicine now.

We have a new biomarker that everyone should know what this number is, especially once you hit the age of 40.

It's called APOB.

APOB is a protein wrapper around all the bad forms of cholesterol.

I'm doing air quotes here for your listeners, the bad forms, LDL, VLDL, LP little A, all these forms of cholesterol that are damaging to your heart.

So if you know what your Apo B level is, you want to continually improve your diet, improve your activity, your sleep, your exercise to get that lower and lower so that you don't deposit cholesterol into your arteries.

Why are you seeing healthy people?

having heart attacks.

You look, a lot of us look at an outward appearance of someone and we say, oh, that person must be healthy.

They look thin.

They look like they take care of themselves.

The reality is what's going on under the hood of our health is very different than what we can see on the outside.

I see a lot of athletes in our practice.

You know, these are people that are...

trained athletes that are the top of their profession.

And when I do some simple blood tests on them, I see they have a ton of inflammation.

They have metabolic disease.

They have high APOB, the cholesterol marker.

Their hormone levels are off.

And we have the technology now, very simply, to look at this.

We just don't because we look at the mirror and we say, well, I must be healthy.

I look okay.

How much of this is based on family history and how much of it is lifestyle?

Is it based on our genetics?

Is it based on something that we've inherited or is it something we're creating for ourselves?

I think family history and our genetics has a role, but it's much smaller than we think.

And even if you have a family history, that is not your destiny.

Your environment can turn off those genetic signals depending on the lifestyle and the environment that you live in.

I love that you have that perspective.

You always say that to me as well, because we talk a lot about our South Asian and Indian heritage and how some of the health markers that I have today, you'll always remind me that some of them are not my lifestyle, but based on the past.

But you feel very confident that we can actually shift that.

Yeah, you know, I don't worry too much with you because you live an incredibly healthy lifestyle.

So you're turning off the genes that

if you did not live an incredibly healthy lifestyle, they would be turned on, they would cause damage quickly.

And we're monitoring you, right?

We're doing some simple blood tests that everyone has access to.

They can ask their doctor for at any time to make sure that you're under close monitoring so that your genetics don't lead to an unhealthy destiny.

Yeah, I'm glad that you have that positive outlook because I think for a long time there was this feeling that like, if you have a family history of this, you're screwed.

Right.

Right.

It's over for you.

Right.

And it's great for us to realize that we shouldn't live in that trap, that mindset trap that, hey, you're, you're destined for the same.

The place I see that the most is with Alzheimer's disease, right?

I talk to so many people that say, my mother got Alzheimer's, so I know I'm destined to get Alzheimer's.

And I tell them right off the bat that even if you, if even if we did a gene test for you, there's a gene test for Alzheimer's called ApoE.

Even if that comes up positive, that you have a higher risk of Alzheimer's, we know we have the technology now to reverse that trend and prevent Alzheimer's in you from ever occurring.

And in fact, we can keep you mentally sharp for the rest of your life if you just put into place simple lifestyle interventions.

Can we test for Alzheimer's disease?

Yeah, so this is a great question because it's a perfect example of this incredible age that we're living in.

So through the power of computation and computers, we have found protein signals in our blood that can tell us whether or not you're headed towards Alzheimer's disease now.

So now with a simple blood test, we can see how likely it is that you will get, and this is not genetic risk, this is actually developing Alzheimer's, okay?

So the old test for Alzheimer's was we would have to do a high radiation scan of your brain to see if you had potential Alzheimer's disease developing.

Because of the radiation and because of the complexity of the scan, no one would get it until you've had a lot of the signs and symptoms of Alzheimer's.

Now we can get this blood test that highly correlates with this scan.

It's called the PTAL 217 blood test.

It's just come out a few months ago, actually.

It's very new.

And I'm incredibly excited because now we can screen for Alzheimer's.

We can see if our treatments are working because this blood biomarker can go up or down.

It's actually a quantitative number.

It's not just a yes and no.

So we can actually see what direction you're headed and if the treatments are working.

Something you you mentioned i feel like so many people dr shah feel like this

fear of alzheimer's especially if they have a family history and you got to carry that fear around right and it's a hard way to live because you're scared it's going to happen there's data that proves it could be there what should you do if you are fearful that Alzheimer's runs in your family, it could happen for you.

What should you be changing?

It's a lot of the basics that we talked about, but the things that are going to make the most difference with Alzheimer's particularly is, number one, getting into a practice of giving your brain some time to relax, right?

And you talk a lot about this.

Breath work, meditation, all of this is so important.

We live in a state where our brain is hyperactive all the time.

And just turning down the noise in our brain.

once a day is incredibly powerful.

The second thing that you can do is a technique called mental reprocessing.

Our brain loves to work.

It loves to do something.

Specifically, what it loves to do is to learn new things, think about them, and then talk about them to somebody else without like an electronic device in front of you the whole time, right?

So reading, thinking about it, talking about that book to somebody else, very powerful.

This is why there's this huge study done on nuns that had genetic risk for Alzheimer's, but never got Alzheimer's, even into their 80s and 90s.

And the reason is, what were they doing?

They were constantly learning about religion through their Bible and talking about it and teaching it to people.

This is what kept their brains healthy.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's pretty fascinating.

I didn't know that one.

Uh-huh.

I love that one because I mean, that's why people love podcasts, because you can listen to something on a podcast.

You have a podcast too.

People can listen to something.

They can share it with someone.

Does that work as well if you're listening or does it have to be reading?

No.

Listening, learning, active learning is actually very, it works incredibly well.

So doing something with your hands and learning in that fashion, any type of learning, learning, thinking about it, talking about it, teaching it is the cycle called mental reprocessing that works incredibly well to keep your brain healthy.

I love that because I find that most of us, the challenge is if you're not learning, you're just thinking.

And then you're overthinking.

You're ruminating.

Exactly.

And you're thinking about something that isn't that useful.

So you're thinking about the person that cut you off in traffic or you're thinking about the person who who spoke to you badly at work or you're thinking about your boss or whatever it may be.

And none of those thoughts are learning or helping you or healing you or making you happier or making you healthier.

They're just spinning around in your mind.

Absolutely.

And as soon as you learn something, it interrupts that pattern.

And now you're like, oh, wait a minute, I learned this really cool thing today.

I'm going to share it with three people.

And all of a sudden, that's actually helping your brain.

Keeping your brain younger and healthier.

There's this chemical hormone in our brain called BDNF.

I think you and I have talked about it before, brain-derived neurotropic growth factor.

This chemical, when it's secreted in our brain, causes our neurons to connect.

And so our brain is nothing but a connection of the neurons that we're born with, right?

And the more connections we have, the more mentally sharp we are.

And as we age, those connections start to dissipate, unfortunately.

As you sleep less, as you expose yourself to more toxins, this is a problem.

The opposite of that is having good levels of BDNF.

Your BDNF increases, and you've seen these studies with meditation, increases with active learning, increases with exercise.

Walking increases BDNF levels.

Anything you can do to increase BDNF levels in your brain, you should be doing it every day.

Yeah, again, really, really accessible, practical steps.

That's why I love talking to you because the changes are always things any of us can do.

You don't have to learn a new habit.

You don't need to go build a new skill.

Just finding time for these really, really simple things you know you said something powerful to me and it resonated with me because it elicits an emotional reaction it's this fear of alzheimer's because you have a family member that has it right and so many people are living with this fear and whenever i see a patient that comes in with this fear i tell them all the things I talked about with you, but I also hand them a book that I think is very powerful.

Dr.

Dale Bredeson wrote a book called The End of Alzheimer's.

And it really gets your head wrapped around the multifactorial nature of Alzheimer's and all the different things that leads to it.

It is not just one gene.

It's not just amyloid for sure.

We know that as a fact.

And it empowers you to understand that there's a lot of things you can do to prevent Alzheimer's and even reverse it if you have signs of cognitive impairment.

So I think it's really important for the mindset.

shift to happen just for all of us as a population that this is not the destiny that we are going to be handed is Alzheimer's disease or being frail.

That does not have to happen.

We can all live vibrant, long, healthy lives.

And I'm a big believer in education.

There's certain books that I love.

We've talked about a few of them.

That's one that I think is very important if you have the fear of Alzheimer's.

I'm glad you talked about that.

I'm glad you responded to that because I think the other fear we all have is the fear of cancer.

I think I've lived my lifetime.

I think when I was young, it was one in four.

Then I saw it become one in three.

And now it's like one in two.

And so when you have those odds, we're sitting in this room thinking, well, that means one of us, right?

When you're with your friends, everyone's sitting there going, well, one of us is going to get it.

And that's a really sobering, painful experience, especially because so many people right now are losing people to cancer, even people who are quite young.

You know, I have friends losing people their age.

I have mentors.

I have uncles, aunts, whoever it may be.

It feels like everyone I know at a certain point has it.

How do I avoid getting cancer?

Right, right.

So I do want to say something about those statistics, though, because I think it's important to understand the nuance behind it.

Yes, there are more cancers being discovered for certain types of cancer.

For example, younger and younger people are getting colon cancer, and it's perplexing everybody.

You know, I think I know why, but

it's a big problem, right?

However, other cancers, because we have better screening for cancers, we're diagnosing more of them, but we're also treating more of them at a much earlier stage, right?

I always say cancer's biggest enemy is being diagnosed as stage one, right?

At stage one, you're talking cure.

At stage three or four, you're talking five-year survival rates.

But not to discount the issue that there is a higher incidence of cancer right now, and we do need to be more cognizant.

And I think there's a lot of reasons for that.

A lot of those reasons are at the root causes of health that we talked about.

poor metabolic health, inflammation, exposure to toxins.

Once you start understanding those are the root causes and you start start doing something about those root causes, your personal cancer risk starts to go down.

And I think that's important.

Yeah, I like the way you just brought that back because it's all connected.

It's all connected.

Right.

It's not like, oh, if you do toxins, it will get you this.

And if you do, you know, microplastics, it will get you this.

It's not like a...

flowchart.

It's literally like, no, this is all connected.

Yeah.

And each of it can spiral off in any way.

Those four factors we talked about with heart disease, guess what?

Those are also four factors that could potentially lead to cancer, right?

Inflammation, metabolic disease, high blood pressure, poor vascular.

Those are all things that lead to cancer, all things that lead to Alzheimer's.

That's all connected to these root causes of health.

Yeah.

And that actually is beneficial for us because it means we don't have to think about all of these things.

We just need to think about the basics and then the core principles you've spoken about today to actually help us with all of that.

It's not like we have to have a different game plan for Alzheimer's and a different game plan for cancer and a different game plan for heart disease.

You can have the same game plan.

Yeah, very well said.

It's the same game plan.

It's just understanding what those key moves are, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And knowing how the strategy changes

when there's like, that's how I like to think about it.

If we're athletes preparing for a game, you can't predict what's going to happen in the game.

You can plan for the game.

And then based on your opponent's moves, you then strategically have to shift.

And the quicker you spot your opponent's shift in strategy, the better you can.

So the quicker we we spot cancer, the quicker we see signs of heart disease, the quicker we see signs of Alzheimer's, the quicker we can make progress.

Right.

How late or early are we spotting cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's?

Unfortunately, it's still too late.

And the way the current Western medical system is set up is we wait until things get to a danger zone before we start doing something about it.

Right.

And the reality is we have the technology to spot all of these things 20 to 30 years prior to getting a diagnosis.

We're just not doing it.

Right.

And so there are blood biomarkers like we talked about for metabolic health.

There are scans that you can do that are extremely preventative for cancer.

If everyone out there listening, if you're over the age of 40, you have not had a colonoscopy done, get it done.

These are things that your insurance cover.

Skin cancer is another great example of this.

There are apps now that you can scan moles and see if they're cancerous or not, right?

Most people wait until it's just way too late to go see a doctor and ask about it.

So I think there's some level of personal responsibility that we have to take here to be more proactive and understand what are some of these markers, what do they mean, and can we check them earlier?

And also, we have to challenge our medical professionals that we see.

Why are you not checking certain blood biomarkers?

We need to check these on a regular basis.

Every time you go to the doctor every year, I think it's important to ask your doctor to check for metabolic health, for inflammation, for APOB, the heart biomarker that we talked about.

Let's just list that for people.

Yeah.

If you could give people a list of everything they should check today to ensure that they have a healthy life, what should they be checking?

I'll give you the list, but I also have this on my website.

We can link to this in the show note.

There are 10 key biomarkers that I look at, and I empower my patients to follow these on their own.

That's the key.

No one's going to care more about your health than you do.

Everyone deals with a spreadsheet in one form or another.

Just make one with these 10 markers on it.

Put the dates on the top, the 10 markers on the left, and just start following them yourself, right?

And so, some of them are blood tests, some of them are simple tests to obtain at home, such as your blood pressure that we talked about.

And I can list a few of these for you, and then we can give people a resource, right?

Okay, so some blood tests that everyone needs to understand: hemoglobin A1C.

This is a three-month average of your blood glucose.

Your doctor won't raise an alarm until it gets to 5.7 or above.

That's pre-diabetes, 6.5 or above is diabetes.

You want to keep it as close to 5.2 or below.

That's optimal range.

If it starts ticking up to 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, now we have a problem.

We need to start making changes in our diet, in our movement to get it back in the right direction.

Inflammation is tracked by a biomarker called HSCRP, highly sensitive C-reactive protein.

This is a very simple, extremely inexpensive blood test.

Your insurance covers it.

You want this as close to zero as possible.

If it's over one or two, there's inflammation going on, most likely in your gut.

Your gut starts at your mouth.

You look at your oral health as well.

The next biomarker we talked about at length is APOB.

That's the one of your cardiac risk of all the bad forms of cholesterol.

I also like tracking vitamin D levels.

This is vitamin D is a hormone.

We track yours.

We know that, you know, we need to supplement with vitamin D sometimes.

It's hard to be out in the sun 30, 40 minutes a day, right?

Then there are markers that you can do at home, blood pressure.

There's a special kind of scale that I try to get everyone to buy.

It's a scale that goes way beyond weight.

Weight to me is not super useful.

What is useful is the amount of skeletal muscle mass you have and how much fat mass you have.

You always want to make sure that you have enough skeletal muscle so that you can live your day-to-day life, but also your metabolism lives in your muscle.

People that struggle with poor metabolic health often have a lack of good amounts of skeletal muscle.

And so, we can track this using what's called a bio-impotence scale.

These are like 20 bucks.

You can buy them, and you step on them with bare feet.

This is electrical current that you don't even feel goes through your body, and it tells you these numbers, and you see what direction you're headed in.

What's really important here is men after the age of 40, women after menopause, we start decreasing our skeletal muscle mass rapidly.

And you want to start increasing your protein intake and increasing your strength workouts to track the skeletal muscle mass as well.

So these are some of them.

There's a few more that are a little bit more technical, but easy to follow.

Once again, cheap, easy.

Insurance covers some of these things.

I think it's important to empower yourself with these numbers.

And where can people go to get them?

My website, drshaw.com.

And there's links right on there.

They're free.

I want everyone to have them.

You don't have to come to me as your doctor.

Bring this list to your doctor.

That's fantastic.

Dr.

Shah, you honestly, every time we talk, I walk away feeling lighter.

I feel clear.

And I feel so confident that I can actually make a change in my health.

And I'm so glad that you share things in such a concise, interesting and also optimistic lens

that people can go and live and make a change in their life.

And these resources are going to be huge for people.

I think this episode is going to be one that everyone's going to share with a friend, a family member, whether you're dealing with a fear, whether you're worried about a particular health challenge that you might have, or you're just trying to get the basics right and be on the lookout for toxins and microplastics.

I hope this episode has served you today.

Dr.

Shah, is there anything that I didn't ask you about that you really want to talk about or share with me and my audience?

Yeah, I think, you know, one important topic that you talk a lot about is how does mental health tie into all of this?

And I think it's so important.

And I'm seeing this more and more in my own clinical practice: that if I don't address mental health, the physical health sometimes struggles in following.

But also the opposite of true.

When I have patients that have struggling with mental health issue, whether it be depression, anxiety, attention deficit, bipolar, if we're not looking at the biomarkers and what's going on in your biology, we're never going to be able to make major changes.

up here, right?

And so a lot of people are on high doses of medication, sometimes multiple medications.

And guess what?

The minute we get their hormones fixed, their vitamin D fixed, they start reducing their dosage.

We get people off medications a lot of times.

So they're so interconnected.

So my reason for bringing that up is a lot of people, they feel physically fine, but they're struggling with mental health issues.

They still need to look under the hood and see what's going on in their biology.

I'm so glad you raised that.

I encourage my community to do the same because I think for a long time, mine was the other way around where I'd like figured out the mind and then had to focus focus on the body a little bit and you realize how interconnected they are and I couldn't agree with you more I think so much of what we're dealing with mentally could be solved with the right change in nutrition sleep diet supplements, vitamins, everything that you're talking about.

You could make so many shifts or at least positive improvements.

Yes.

And I would encourage anyone who's struggling with something mentally to also go and prioritize these things that seem very physical, but ultimately it's just health.

Exactly.

It's just one big thing.

Yeah, we're connected beings.

We don't have a cardiovascular system and a nervous system.

It's all one part of our being and our emotional health and our physical health are so interrelated.

Absolutely.

Everyone, subscribe to Dr.

Shah's podcast, Extend, if you want to hear more from him and the experts that he connects with.

As I said, Dr.

Shah is my doctor.

I trust him.

I work hard with him.

I'm always trying to figure out new ways to be better, healthier, and happier.

And I feel like you just, again, this is just another masterclass.

It was brilliant to have you back on.

And this is going to be one of those episodes I know people are going to get so much value from.

I hope so.

That's my purpose in life.

I want to empower each and every person, each and every one of your listeners to have full control of their health and feel like they have the power to avoid chronic disease and turn their health around.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

If this year you're trying to live longer, live happier, live healthier, go and check out my conversation with the world's biggest longevity doctor, Peter Attia, on how to slow down aging and why your emotional health is directly impacting your physical health.

Acknowledge that there is surprisingly little known about the relationship between nutrition and health.

And people are going to be shocked to hear that because I think most people think the exact opposite.

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Live in the Bay Area long enough and you know that this region is made up of many communities, each with its own people, stories, and local realities.

I'm Erica Cruz-Guevara, host of KQED's podcast, The Bay.

I sit down with reporters and the people who know this place best to connect the dots on why these stories matter to all of us.

Listen to The Bay, new episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

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