You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon.
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Jay Shetty sits down with Shawn Stevenson to talk about the amount of control we have over our body. Studies have shown that our thoughts are powerful enough to motivate us to move, to thrive, and to succeed. The same goes for our determination to improve ourselves. If we use the strength of our mind to push ourselves and our body to exceed what society deems as our limits, we can achieve far greater things.
Shawn Stevenson is the author of the USA Today National bestseller Eat Smarter and the international bestselling book Sleep Smarter. He’s also creator of The Model Health Show, featured as the number #1 health podcast in the U.S. with millions of listener downloads each year. A graduate of the University of Missouri–St. Louis, Shawn studied business, biology, and nutritional science and became the cofounder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance. Shawn has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, The New York Times, Muscle & Fitness, ABC News, ESPN, and many other major media outlets.
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What We Discuss:
Episode Resources
On paper, we're supposed to be more evolved and intelligent than we've ever been. And people were like, well, we're living longer though. No, No, we're the first generation in recorded human history that is not going to outlive the generation before us. It is now reversed. By treating symptoms, we can keep people alive. And what's happening is we're not really living longer, We're dying longer. We're extending the suffering. Hey everyone, welcome back to on Purpose. I am so excited to be talking to you today. I can't believe it. My new book Eight Rules of Love is out and I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so so excited for you to read this book, for you to listen to this book. I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to eight Rules of Love dot com. It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep, or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up, or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book. And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour Love Rules. Go to Ja Shettytour dot com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences, and more. I can't wait to see you this year. I am so excited to share today's episode with you. This is a guest that I've been messaging, connecting with for a while. We're finally here. So it's always a great feeling when you're finally sitting in the studio with someone that you've wanted to talk to, interview, gained their insights for a long time. And he's a real expert. He's a true deep expert. And you know how much I love mining the mind and the energy of someone who's so deeply rooted in the work they do. And today's guest is none other than Sean Stevenson, the author of the USA Today national bestseller Eat Smarter and the international best selling book Sleep Smarter. He's also the creation of The Model Health Show, featured as the number one health podcast in the US with millions of listeners downloads each year. A graduate of the University of Missouri Saint Louis, Sean studied business biology and nutritional science and became the co founder of Advanced Integrative Health Alliance. Sean has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, The New York Times, Muscle and Fitness, ABC News, ESPN, and many other major media outlets. Today, I'm excited to speak to him and buy his book, Eat Smarter and His Journey. You can order the book as we're speaking. If you're someone who's been focusing on your diet to improve it for your body, your mind, your relationships, your brain, then this is the episode for you. Sean. Welcome to On Purpose. Thank you for being here, and thank you for writing this book. It's such an honor to be here. You make everything sound so much better as well, you had to live it, so you know it's been amazing. But I mean, we've been messaging, we've been wanting to get together where we're finally here, and I was just saying to you offline that my physical health journey has been very interesting because I almost ignored it for a long time because I was so focused on the mind and the soul and the heart. And my wife was my educator and my coach when it came to my physical health. And so whenever I'm sitting with someone who deeply understands food and nutrition, I'm very fascinated and open book because I know there's something I can improve about my health, whether it's through my gut or my brain. But I want to start with a bit about you. And you know, when you were younger, you were diagnosed and I won't give it away, you can share about it, but you were diagnosed and told that there might not be a way of fixing or solving something. Now, I can't imagine what that feels like hearing that when you're younger, and I'm guessing at that time you didn't have the skills you have today. So can you take us back to that moment and just explain to us what you went through and how that sparked your journey. Yeah? Absolutely, Yeah. So we were a product of our environment, but we're also creators of our environment once we become aware of it. And so I was just replicating what I was seeing around me, which was a lot of dysfunction, which was a lot of ill health, and I kind of was like the one in my family that had the potential to make it. And what it was was in the environment that I was in, in the inner city and being in poverty, which Evan say that kind of with the parentheses. Here in the United States, poverty is very different. You still probably have a TV A card, you know, when much of the world is living on a couple dollars a day. But you know, we were struggling to get by in this environment. All I saw was the opportunity for me to go to college, which I never met anybody that went to college, let alone graduated except my teachers. Was through athletics, and so I did really well in school, but I just saw sports was going to be my way to get a scholarship. And when I was fifteen years old, I ran a four to five forty, which is like NFL combine caliber, you know, and I was doing really great in track as well, but fate had other plans for me. It was actually at track practice when I had the first glimpse of what was to come. And so I was doing a two hundred meter time trial, which two hundred meters is half the track, and the time trials just me and my coach, and I took off and I was coming around the curve of the track into the straight away and my hip broke and I didn't realize it at the time because I just kind of came up limping. I thought maybe I pulled a muscle. I'd never really been injured before. But it took a couple of days and when I got a scan down because I just couldn't turn my legs over. I went to see a pt and a physician and they put the scan up, the X ray and it's just my iliat crest bone was just floating off in space. It's like, oh, that's the problem right there. And what I went through was something called standard of care. All right, standard of care, which is not really looking at what is the cause of this thing, but let's treat these symptoms, right. So I got some insid some nonsteroidal into inflammatories. I got some crutches, which was cool. I got to get out of class early and take the school elevator. But nobody stopped to ask, how did the kid break his hip from running? And fast forward. I experienced almost a dozen more injuries the next two years. I just couldn't stay on the football field or on the track, and my body was just breaking down, and so my vision of playing at the next level was just vanquished. Fortunately, academically, I got a bunch of scholarships. I got to go to school that I went to go to. I was gonna walk on and red shirt in football. But this is where I get that diagnosis. So I was twenty years old and I was diagnosed with something called degenerative disc disease and degenerative bone disease, so basically an advanced arthritic condition of my spine, and this is usually reserved for people who are much older. And so I was nineteen twenty years old. The reason that I went into the doctor was I just couldn't. I couldn't extend my leg. I was always in a lot of pain, and whenever I was stand up, I would get this like four lightning bolt shooting down my leg and it was just miserable. And if you can imagine this when you're in pain when you stand up, how about you just don't stand up right? So I was doing everything I could to avoid standing up, and so I sat a lot. I was constantly laying down or playing video games. I was in college still, and it just got progressively worse because your body really works on this use it or lose it basis. So not only was my spine deteriorating, the rest of me was atrophing as well. And so, to really put the icing on the cake of the story, when I went in and see my physician and he gave me this diagnosis. He looked me right in my eyes and he told me that this situation was incurable. Right because for me being an athlete, I was just like, all right, what do we do to fix this? And he put his hand on my shoulders like I'm sorry, son, this is something that just happens, and I'm sorry it happened to you, and that on my shoulders like I'm sorry, son, this is something that just happens, and I'm sorry it happened to you. And that today I realized that goes against basic laws of physics, like there's nothing that just happens. You know, there's a cause and effect. And I didn't. It didn't register to me when he first said it. It didn't. It didn't make sense. So I rejected it, and I asked him this specific question. Jay and I have no grounds for asking him this question, but I asked him, does this have anything to do with what I'm eating? Should I change the way that I'm exercising? And he looked at me like I was from another planet. He was like, this has nothing to do with what you're eating. This is something that just happens, and a little sidebar, and I didn't talk about this for many years. But you know, my physician, he was he was obese, and he was clearly struggling with his own health. Not to say that he wasn't qualified to give me advice, but he was clearly struggling himself. But I took his advice because he was the expert in him saying that this was my lot in life. What he invoked with something called a no Cbo effect, which we can come back and talk about in a moment, but the bottom line was he said that this has nothing to do with what I'm eating. But he wrote me a prescription to eat some pills. Right, This has nothing to do with what you're putting in your mouth. Go ahead and put these in your mouth. Right. And so that was the level of thinking that I was dealing with. Fast forward the story. After leaving there, I went from a nuisance of a pain to chronic, debilitating pain. Right, because now I know that I have this thing, this is my identity. I'm this sick person. I'm going to be in pain for the rest of my life. He told me that. And so for the next two years, I did as little as I possibly could, and he told me, he gave me permission. That's the big thing. People don't realize. If if you've been struggling your whole life and somebody gives you permission to stop struggling, nobody's gonna blame you. You got this bad thing that happened, just take this free pass, this hall pass, and just ride it out. It took two years, which you know, some people never get it, and some people get it a little bit faster. But it took me two years. And over these two years, eating what I called the tough diet, a typical universe the food, I was continuing the same behaviors, and I gained a bunch of weight now because not only was I eating the same things, but now I'm inactive, and so I became much fluffier, i'd lovingly say, version of myself. And I didn't recognize a person I saw in the mirror. And that was one of those breaking moments for me. It's just like I didn't even recognize who I was. And after those two years, it's usually an event or a person or something that becomes a catalyst for that change, and for me, it was my grandmother, you know, and she was always checking on me those two years. And if you're a young kid, just like I'm fine, Grandma, you know, but I wasn't fine, and she knew it. She was the one who really advocated for me. She's the one who believed in me more than anybody, that I was going to do something great. And here I was living in Ferguson, Missouri, in his one bedroom apartment, sleeping on the mattress on the floor, overweight in chronic pain, can't sleep at night, and my life didn't match up to my blueprint of what success was to look like. And so it was in that moment that I decided to get well. And most people don't really get that, Jay, It's just like it sounds so simple, right, But the reality is oftentimes we don't decide. It's more like we'll see what happens. It's like wishful thinking. It's like, you know, I wish you know this would happen. But when you decide something, you really cut away the possibility that of anything else but that thing. And even the word if you break it down, day meaning from and kaider, which means to cut right. So you cut away the possibility of anything else but that thing. And I decided to get well. And so the last little part we could talk about how I did this, but it was from six weeks from that moment of decision, and I had lost about eighteen pounds, which is not typical. But I was always kind of the skinny kid in my family, so my fat gene is definitely kicked on. But you know, the weight just came off of me once I started to implore a few really foundational principles, you know, with my nutrition, with movement, and the pain I've been experiencing that had me in terror for two years was gone. And it was about nine months later when I got a scan done and I completely reversed the degeneration. My two herniated disc had retracted on their own. My bone density was normal, and it was as if the thing had never happened. So and by that experience happening to me and seeing the stories of people coming up to me at my university asking me to help them because they saw the change. You know, I didn't look like a guy who lost wait. I looked like somebody who's really healthy. And to hear their stories, like people saying telling them, you're going to live with this disease forever diabetes or heart disease, you're you're gonna be on the stat and whatever the case might be. And I had this experience where I was told this negative thing was going to be your story and to no longer have that as my story. I had this level of authority that I couldn't really put a finger on, and people were attracted to that. So my life just went from being very self centered in my pain to being other centered and being of service. And I found every way that I could to help others, and it landed me here with you. That's a beautiful man. Thank you for I know how hard it is to synthesize a life's work in a few minutes. And of course I'm hoping that everyone who's listening and watching is going to get better acquainted with you if they're not already listeners. But I'm intrigued by when you made that decision? What was the first thing you did? Because I often find that, first of all, it's hard to make the decision. When you've made the decision, then the first thing you do has such a big impact on momentum and acceleration. What was the first thing you did that's so powerful? Jay because the decision is instantaneous, but what takes long is getting ourselves to the place where we make the decision right. And so the first decision that I made, which I didn't realize this consciously two years later, is I changed the habitual question that I was asking. And today I know that there's this really phenomenal process of the brain evokes called instinctual elaboration. The human brain is always trying to answer questions that we pose. It it's just automatic. Our mutual friend Jim Quick, We've talked about this many times. And the question that I was asking, was unconscious all the time, was why me? Why is this happening to me? Why won't somebody help me? And so my brain is constantly scanning my internal and external environment to affirm why me, Why I'm unhelpable, why I'm not deserving of being healthy? Right, So I'm just getting all this data in as to why my life sucks because I'm looking for it. And so in that moment of decision, and again I wasn't aware, I wasn't consciously aware of this, but I just asked this question, very simple ask. Instead of asking why, I asked what can I do to feel better because I just saw a series of other doctors, which I highly encourage people to if you get a bad bill of goods like that, get a second third opinion before taking any drastic action. Because I was just talking with Tony Robbins about this recently. But there was a big meta analysis done by the Mayo Clinic and they found that when you get that initial diagnosis, it's only the same. Less than twenty percent of the time is the second diagnosis the same as the first diagnosis, And often it's radically different, all right, So it's somewhere in the ballpark of like eighteen percent of the time it's the same. So that being said, you also want to seek counsel from somebody who's not in the same line of thinking as well. You know, somebody all ideally who has the same goal as you, Like, if you're diagnosed with this thing and you don't want to have this thing, maybe that's the person you need to go and talk to. But I was seeking counsel from the same type of thinker. I asked this question, what is it that I can do to feel better? What is it that I can do? And this was kind of an audacious thing to be healthier than I've ever been. That night was the first night that I slept through the night without medication in those two years. I just felt this peace, you know, when I woke up, and this is the thing too, It's not like again, like a unicorn came out and like the clouds parted and you know, it's happily. Ever after, I put a plan together, and that plan unentailed three specific things. The first thing was changing my nutrition. I knew just on a very rudimentary level that I needed to quote lose weight, right because I was just like, logically, if I'm having this pressure on my disk, let me take some of this pressure off by losing some of this mass. And I'm carrying. But I'll be honest with you, j the first thing that I did was slim fast, right, So because of marketing, like I saw the TV, that's what I was acclimated to. So it's like a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, a sensible dinner, right. And it was disgusting, all right, it was terrible. It only worked for a couple of days that I did it. But by me asking the questions, the right people, the right situations, the right books start to show up and oftentimes those things have been there the whole time, but I just wasn't a tune to them. And I had a friend of mine that I had known her for years, and she was in chiropractic college and we just like kicked it, you know. But and I just thought she was weird, you know, with her and her friends, you know. And she took me to wild oats, right, which has since been brought up by Whole Foods. And so now I'm in this environment where I'm seeing all these different supplements and foods and there's like grass inside. I'm like, why is there grass inside? You know, a sweet grass. But there was a book there, a nutrition prescription, and it had all these peer of viewed And I was in college, so I'm versed in research, especially doing what I was doing in college. And there was peer of viewed data on regenerating her nations and degenerative disc disease. And there are all these nutrients that I had never even heard of. Like all I knew about for bone density, for example, was calcium. Because of marketing. There was like a mega threes sulfur bearing, amino acid, silica, all these other things that I wasn't getting anywhere in my drive through diet, and so I started to again. I went from slim fast to being a natural pill popper. Right, So it's just like I need these nutrients. Let me just take these supplements again missing the market's taking steps towards it, and ultimately, of course that's very expensive. But I finally realize, like, what if humans been doing the longest. We're getting these nutrients through food, not synthetic, isolated versions of those things. So I started to seek out all the foods that had these nutrients and just begin to like flood my system with these foods. So that was number one. I changed what I was eating and literally and there's a I've got to share this now, but we'll probably circle back to this as one of the most important tenants. Every single cell in our body is made from the food that we eat, every cell, and so we have the ability to make our bodies out of really low quality materials or out of the best stuff possible, you know. And so I was making my tissues out of absolute garbage. I'm not exaggerating the slightest. I fast food every day every day because again I lived in Ferguson Missouri. I was surrounded by low quality food and processed food and liquor stores, and that's all I knew, right, And it was cheap. Again, being on a college budget, that's what I could afford, which we got to talk about that the economy is a scale too. So anyway, so I'm flooding my tissues with really high quality stuff now. And the body is so intelligent once you give it the right materials, it knows what to do. It's often just us getting out of the way. And so that was one number two. The low hanging fruit for me that I had some education on was movement and exercise and being in pain. The worst thing to do is to do nothing. There is a time when you know you have a state of inflammation, like if I have these two hernated disks, I'm not going to go in deadlift, you know, three fifteen. That's not a good idea. But after a couple of days and I'm functional, I need to do something because the body movement is one of the primary drivers of healing, of assimilation of nutrients, of elimination of metabolic waste products. All these different things require movement, right, Life is movement, and so I just went to the gym at the university gym. Just did what I can, which was I started off on a stationary bike. A week later, I started doing a little bit walking on the treadmill. A week later I picked up a couple of weights, and all of that was driving the good nutrition I was bringing in deeper into my cells. Right. And the third thing was my biggest struggle that two years was sleeping at night. And I was just like, I gotta find a way to get some rest because I was chronically tired, and I didn't have to try to do that. One A principle from my first book, Sleep Morner, is that a great night of sleep starts the moment you wake up in the morning. Right. So all these good things I was doing, exercising, changing my nutrition and getting access to sunlight, all these really simple things led to me sleeping better in the evening. And once I started sleeping, I got better so fast. Because it is the most anabolic stage that a human being can be in outside of meditation. Everything else is really catabolic. If you're up and active, you're catabolic. And so this is where your body's producing all these regenerative hormones and HGH and reparative enzymes, you know, once my sleep improved, and my movement practice. But of course the biggest thing was my mind, you know, my change and perception of all these things. But that's really what the first domino was, was changing the question and the right stuff that was already there. I can now see. I love how you've simplified it into the diet and nutrition, the sleep, and then of course the movement aspect, which you know, the three key tenants and then grouped by the mindset and the approach. I want to dive into some of those amazing insights that you share in this book, because I think, as you rightly said, our understanding of food, nutrients, vitamins, supplements has been so rudimentary for so long, and even today, I think, as you rightly said, there's so much being marketed at us that you kind of follow the latest trend or the latest diet or the latest fad, only to find that it's not sustainable or that it doesn't really cure how you're feeling. And I think we've started to realize that food can change how you feel. And I don't think we thought about it. We thought food is energy and you just keep putting it and I love the idea of how we're building ourselves through bad materials or good materials. Why is it important, as you talk about in the book, to use power of food to reboot your metabolism? What are the benefits of rebooting your metabolism? And what are methods through diet and nutrition that boost our metabolism? For everyone listening, it should always be what is the thing? Right, So when we hear these terms like metabolism, we often have a certain association with it, that's my point. Yeah, exactly, Yeah, So it's usually going to be tied to weight loss, and it's a huge mistake because metabolism is really every thing. There's a whole field of immunometabolism. You know, your immune system has its own metabolism, where it's building new immune cells, where it's functioning at a certain level, where there's cellular waste products, and the list goes on and on. All these things are metabolism. So life itself is driven by metabolism. But this is a huge mistake, even in the weight loss domain, when we're just thinking about food and nutrition and diet in terms of changing our metabolism. And this is why with the book, I gave people what they want, which again that's the on ramp, right, But food controls so much more than just our metabolism. It also controls our cognitive function. Our emotional intelligence is highly influenced by our nutrition. That's one of the main things I wanted to talk with you about as well. And also it affects our relationships and how we relate to other people. The list goes on and on. Food isn't just food, it's information, you know. And so as far as the metabolism side is concerned, what I wanted to do was break down how the process of metabolism actually works. How does weight loss work right? How does fat loss work? Where does fat go? Like when I quote lose weight, where the hell's the weight go? You know what I mean? So I'm taking people through that process and I use analogies to make it make sense. Because one of the things I learned from Tony was one of the fastest ways of learning, which I was doing this but I didn't realize it. It takes something that you don't know and connected to something that you do know, right, And so I use this analogy of going to the movies and using it as a cellular movie theater and how the process of fat loss actually works. And so we've got these key ushers that are making things happen. You know, you come into the movie theater and you've got these specific enzymes. So we've got hormone sensitive light paise for example, and hormone sensitive light paise is the enzyme required to actually open up your cell so that it releases stored energy. You know, try to list arise stored fat to be used for fuel. Nothing's happening without this usher, all right, So that's required. Then we've got another usher who's putting fat in the seats right, lightboprotein lightpase right, and so but then we've got the managers of the ushers, which are insulin and glucagon. Which there's so much more, but I'm just giving a little snapshot. This is great. I love this analogy. It's a brilliant analogy. So it's making it makes sense to me. So that's a good thing. I'm the dummy in the room, is Yeah. So insulin and glucagon they're actually brothers, right, So they're both from their loving mother, miss Pancreas. All right, So insulin is really about management and always looking for the worst possible scenario, right, So they're all about saving up for a rainy day, gets storing as much as possible so we're all safe and we're all good. Glucagon is more of a free thinker, more of a you know, go with the flow type of vibe, and it's cool with letting go of some of this store and energy, and so glucagon to make a summation of the So insulin is the biggest hormonal driver of us storing fat in our cells or storing energy in our cells. When people hear the word insulin, we often think about diabetes, right because a lack type one diabetes is a lack of producing insulin. The mother pancrea is the beta cells are not producing insulin, which is absolutely horrendous. This means your cells can't get energy and you'll literally just wither away. It's a terrible way to die. Type two diabetes, which is most prevalent here the United States. Right now in the United States, about one hundred and thirty million citizens here in the US have type two diabetes or pre diabetes. It's insane. But this is not a condition where you're no longer producing insulin. This is a condition where your insulin sensitivity, the ability of that cell to get the signal has been tampered down, right because insulin has been so abundant, because the blood sugar has been so abundant, right, And so it's but here's the thing, and it's a really beautiful thing that even a condition like that, it's the body adapting to keep you alive. So type two diabetes and we get this label that you have this chronic disease and you're no good or you know, you're tainted or you're broken, it's actually this really intelligent adaptation by the human body because it's adapting the way that your metabolism works under unideal circumstances. Right. So it's beautiful, it's amazing. The problem, however, is that we've been led to believe that that is the end story, that your body is stupid and it can't shift and create another expression. And so now it's common knowledge back in the day. I've been in this field almost twenty years. I'm about to hit my twenty year anniversary, and we couldn't publicly say even another friend Mark Hyman, like, you've got to be very careful saying cure diabetes. Right today, it's common knowledge that you can reverse this condition. So we've got insulin driving people into the seats, right, keeping the theater full, and we got gluca open up the doors to allow people to go out and kick it at an afterparty. Right. So these are two big hormonal drivers of metabolism. We've got some enzymatic ones I hit a little bit, but then we've got the internal cashier as well, which is your liver in many ways, so people don't think about these things, and this beautiful dance has taken place, like we just want to get that fat off, right, and oftentimes we associate that with like really working hard, right, restricting, cutting things away. You can't have deprivation, right, all those things. Those terms don't feel good, right, It's very against human nature. And on the other side, you have to abuse yourself. You have to exercise your face off, you've got to just you know this tenant that I was taught in my universe. I paid for this education Jay at a private at a private university. The first day of school in this big auditorium nutritional science class, the teacher told us that if you want to manage your metabolism, if you want to manage your body weight, just manage your calories. That's all you have to do is control the calories. Right, he was overweighted as well, by the way, all right, and now again it's not that he's trying to be in a fais. This is what he learned. And at the time, we were in the food pyramid, all right. So this is when I went to school back in this was ninety seven. It's changed a little bit, like we went from like the food pyramid to my plate, but still really the same principles. But to say that calories control everything about you or your metabolism or your ability to lose weight is very myopic. It's tunnel vision and people don't really realize. And that's what I spent the nice segment of the book really diving into the beautiful history behind calories and like, how is that a thing that people plant this flag? And I know this. I was one of them, right, being a nutritional scientist and also somebody who's working as a strength and conditioning coach at the university. I was just replicating and regurgitating what I was taught, and it worked for some people not for others. And so what I did was I brought to bear this new term. It's called epichloric right. So, and this was a pivot from my friend Bruce Lipton, doctor Bruce Lipton. I don't know if you've talked to him before, the biology of belief, right, So epigenetics, right, So this is he's the person more than anybody's pushing into popular culture. That means above genetic control, right, but epichloric control, it's above caloric control. There are certain principles that control your what your body does with the calories you consume. And this would be so logical if we think about it. And so just a couple of those. One of those is the quality of food itself. All right, So we hear this that not all calories are created equal, but we have really sound science on this. Now I share one of the studies in the book, and again this was a peer reviewed study, And what they did was they took test subjects and they wanted to see what would happen with their metabolism when they eat a meal of processed foods versus a meal of whole foods. Right, and so the process food they're both sandwiches, by the way, all right, So it's not like superglorified process versus. But the whole food sandwich was whole grain bread and cheddar cheese. The processed food sandwich was white bread and cheese product. And cheese product is what most people are eating. That's like craft. They can't legally call it cheese. It's called Kraft singles. There's not enough cheese and the cheese, you know, which is really messed up. Wow. Yeah. And so they consume each of these sandwiches and they track their caloric expenditure. Right. So, and this is something to get to just the end part of like where does the weight go? We breathe. Most of the weight that we lose out, we expel it through our lungs. Our lungs are on also excretion organ as well. We don't really think about that, but they are. And so anyways, so they're tracking the outgo of energy after eating these two sandwiches. And what they found was that people eating when they eat the processed food sandwich, there's a fifty percent reduction in their body's expenditure of calories. Something happened by eating that food that made their body hold onto more of the energy they just consumed. And what it really was a hormonal clog. To put it in a simple term, it changed the hormonal cascade, neurotransmitter cascade organ function in a way that made the body more stingy and holding onto this very abnormal energy that was coming in. And so again, fifty percent reduction is massive. And how often are people trying to lose weight counting calories but eating processed foods, counting the point system and all these things which can be wonderful, but we have to address the food quality. So this was publishing food and nutrition research. By the way, if yeah, that's fascinating, I'm so glad you shared that with me, because yeah, it's easy to be like this is healthy food, this is unhealthy food. But it's even deeper than that. And I think the gold standard, which I think you set, which I really identify with, is I just know I want to be healthier. Like what I've been saying is I want to be healthier. I want to be more informed because if something happens to me, I don't want it to be something that I can and will continue to want it to because I want to be as healthy as I can continue to do my service in the world. Likes that's where my past, my intention goes. I know, one of the things that people are struggling with a lot right now is inflammation. Right, And you talk about the microbiome in the book as well in the Connection, But walk me through where inflammation is created from and how it connects to the microbiome in the book. Yeah, the term again, what is it? Yeah, inflammation? The term itself is derived from the word essentially meaning to set on fire. Right, So there's this fire taking place in the human body. And just to lean and connect inflammation to metabolism, let's do that. One of the studies that I referred to as well was looking at and this was published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, and they were looking at what was happening with inflammation in the brain leading to accelerated weight gain. Right now, this is another thing when people are trying to lose weight, nobody's telling them, we need to deal with the inflammation in your brain. And so what the researchers uncovered was that essentially inflammation in the brain was leading to more belly fhat accumulation and more disruption to their metabolism. But the key was more belly fat accumulation and obesity. Once people were venturing into obesity, it was leading to more brain inflammation. So this becomes this vicious circle, right, and again we're not looking at we need to address the inflammation in your brain. Why is this happening when your brain is controlling your body far more than anything else, and there's an internal thermostat that's even controlling your metabolic rate, which is based in your hypothalamus, which kind of considered the master gland of the body. And the hypothalamus not only is kind of like a thermostat for your metabolism, but also it's a thermostat for your body temperature, for your sleep cycles, and the list goes on. It's like a circadian controller, right, Circadian medicine is popping right out too, and so paying attention and so specifically the researchers were denoting hypothalamic inflammation leading to all these problems. So what's causing that brain inflammation. Obesity in and of itself is increasing the rate of inflammation. So right now in the United States, we're knocking on the door of two hundred and fifty million of our citizens being overweight or obese. Right, it's beyond epidemic. It's it's insane, rest assured. If we're venturing into obesity, your brain is suffering because of it. And I also noted in another study where we're seeing this correlation. I talked to Daniel Aman who wrote that, you know, keep it on the podcast twice. Yeah, I love him so much, but he's accumulated so much data. But there's also some period studies as well, looking at once our waist size is increasing is correlated with a decrease in our brain size. So as our wat circumference goes up, our brain size goes down the volume of our brain, which is not good at all. And so there's this huge connection with these two. But also what's driving this inflammation is the foods that we're eating obviously as well an obesity self. Just to give a little snapshot, like, how's that work? How's obesity creating more information? Our fat cells are pretty they're pretty damn amazing. If without our fat cells being as intelligent as they are, we wouldn't have made it as humanity. It enabled us to go through times of famine and still survive. But here's the thing. We live in a very different time now where more people are dying from excess than from deprivation, right, and so during this time of excess, our fat cells can actually grow. When thousand times their size rights it gets crazy. They're like, Wow, I don't want to disrespect them by calling little trash cans, but they're kind of like these internal trash cans that can keep collecting. Yeah, it's like these halfty, halfty cent sacks, like really good trash bags that are filling up. And as that happens, it's sending out a distress signal because the fat cells were never made to contain that much stored energy, and so it's sending out a kind of a false distress signal to your immune system thinking that you're infected. You know, your fat cells are chronically infected. This is why we see epidemic levels of inflammation measured by things like C reactive protein and folks as we venture into obesity. So the fat cells themselves are a big contributor to inflammation. But to lean into food a little bit one of the biggest culprits as being highlighted today. And there's with any of the stuff I talk about, Jay, there's always conflicting it from that and the average person doesn't though, you know, it's just like this is the end all be all. What I do is, I'm a research scientist. Primarily, I'll go and proactively look for things that rebuke what I believe, that prove what I'm saying other otherwise or other than. And you have it takes a lot of courage to go and look for things to prove you wrong. But what I'll do is I'll look at the variety of information and what is the majority of data that we have say that's a better place for us to stand on and educate from right. But one of the biggest culprits, and this is what the majority of data says is these highly refined mind oxidized seed oils that have become so prevalent in our food system. And again, I get to work with the best people in the world in these subjects, like doctor Kate Shanahan. It's really a pioneering voice in this field. And she's you know, she worked with the Lakers and help with Kobe Bryant, got him all these protocols, extending his career, all these great things, and so she has that fame and credibility there. But she's also a brilliant scientist and somebody who's very versed in metabolism. But one of the things that she shared with me was that this particular study, which was crazy, they looked at the biopsies, right, so you can actually go and look inside of what a fat cell contains back in the earlier part of the nineteen hundreds and saw what is the makeup of the average person's fat cell. And about two percent of our fat cells back then were made of these polyunsaturated fatty acids or poofaus. Right today, the amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids that make up the average person's fat cell is up to twenty five or even thirty percent. Went from two percent to twenty so literally the ingredients that make us as a species has changed dramatically. And what is it about these particular facts, Like how is so much of it making up the ingredients that make us up? And it's because they're in everything. They're very cheap, they're rancid oxidized oil, they have no choice but to be those things like getting the oil from corn, Like there's so little and if people saw the process, which I highly encourage people to do, there's lots of videos you could see the processing of canola oil or quote vegetable oil. I remember when my mom started using vegetable oil trying to get healthy because my family, again, I was the skinny kid in the family. Everybody pretty much everybody else in my family at least about eighty percent of folks world beats, and so she started using vegetable oil. Sounds healthy, but it's not asparagus oil or broccoli oil. These are highly refined seed oils, corn oil, soy oil, canola oil. And to extract those oils there, it kind of looks like just mud. It just looks disgusting. It looks like this um like kind of like almost like gasoline type vibe to it. And it has to use bleaching agents and deodorizers. And I cited a study in my book, and this was publishing the journal Inhalation Toxicology, and they found that just smelling those oils while cooking can damage your DNA. Crazy stuff smell, just inhaling the fumes from it let alone actually pretty head. Yes, yes, so it's crazy. It's so crazy. And so for me, it's just looking like this specific component your body has to go into this kind of pro inflammatory state to try to manage any insult. Inflammation is one of the most important things for our survival. It's kind of been given a bad name right now because we're dealing with chronic inflammation, but we need inflammation in order to to just heal for stuff you don't even know what's going on. There are cells right now in your body that are dying off and recycling. There's always an inflammatory component catabolic component, and that's okay. But once we venture into chronic inflamation, where these things are getting out of hand, that's where we start to see all manner of things go wrong. Wow, I mean you know what I've I find it so useful to be having this conversation with you because, and I hope everyone who's listening and watching, I'm trying to ask the questions that I think we skip. What does this actually mean? How does it actually affect us? Because right now we hear all these buzzwords and we look for the quick fix, or I have go inflammation, or I do this to you know, alcoholize it, I've got this, do this, it's like, and we're always looking at that quick fix, that quick when the quick solve, and actually, when I'm sitting here listening to you, I'm going, wow, there is just of course, naturally there's so much more to it, but we have to be so much more alert and vigilant, which is where we struggle because it's almost like there is no veniance now because there's all this information. Like you said, there's conflicting information. So if I'm listening to this show right now and I want to create more energy in my life, I want to create more vibrancy in how I feel. What are some of the things that were likely missing or that we're likely struggling with in our diet or nutritionally that we could add to help start that process of at least feeling a bit more positive, like we have a bit more control. We could stay right in the same lane and just swap out the oils that we're using with some intention. Researchers at Auburn found that olive oil OIO canthal rich extra virgin olive oil is one of the few things that's been found to be highly effective at reducing information of the brain right and also being able to help to heal the blood brain barrier. So what does this mean? The blood brain barrier is kind of like Matiokaku's kind of like a modern day Einstein, right. He was like, the human brain is the most complicated object in the known universe. That's big for him to say something like that. That's really remarkable. The human brain is the most complicated object in the known universe, right, And the cool thing is we all have one. We're never very good at using it, but we all have this really miraculous organ and your body is very protective of it because again, it's controlling everything about She's controlling your metabolism. For example. It's the only major organ is fully encased in hard in hard bone, right, So it's we've got this built in helmet to try to protect it. We've got the blood brain barrier, because everything that we eat. The last place to actually allow nutrient sane, it's going to be your brain, right, because it has a blood brain Barrier's kind of like an internal security system, or I like to think about it like a toll boot. Right, So certain certain nutrients get express pass. Right, if anybody ever has lived where they have tolls, and you get an express pass that can go right into the brain. Most other things they're going to meet the toll booth and they're not going to be able to get through because the guard there's like you know, Dwayne the Rock Johnson, it's like clones of him and Vin Diesel or whatever. So it's just like highly unlikely that you can get into the brain. It's very it's like an exclusive club. It's very exclusive. And so to make it into the brain, only specific things are able to do that. One of the big issues today leading to more information is the degradation. We're breaking down our own blood brain barrier, this internal security system by eating all these abnormal foods. The blood brain barrier, a big aspect of its regulation is through the fast that we consume, right and so again eating these really low quality oils and making ourselves out of these things, we're degrading how our body functions. And so what the researchers found again was that extra virgin oleocanthal rich olive oil is one of those foods that's really healing and anti inflammatory and also can help to heal the blood brain barrier. That's crazy because for me, again, like I don't have a dog in the fight. I don't care if olive oil is cool or not. I it's I don't care. It's so miraculous. But then you just look at what if humans been doing the longest, and how do you make olive oil? You crush olives. That's it. It's not like the process that these other oils, these seed oils have to go through again with the deodor risers and the bleaching agents and the high heat. As a matter of fact, extra virgin olive oil that means that it's not heat processed all right, So it's even paying attention to the very volatile nature of those fats and it's stored in dark glass bottles because it's even photosensitive. It's light sensitive, can break down and degrade those oils, right. So and humans, we have documentation for thousands of years have been consuming olive oil, right, And so that's one of the great principles to lean back into, which is like, what if human's been doing the longest, let's do that, you know what got us here, because what we're doing now is not working. Right, So that's one of the great foods that can help to reduce inflammation. So swapping out those oils being intentional about it, the best way to consume these oils is going to be through like finishing dishes, like adding some olive oil on top or using it to make solids. Cooking with it, you can moderate heat is okay, But for cooking we need things that have more saturation, that are more stable so they're not giving off all of these these kind of pro inflammatory oxidative compounds. Right, So that would be like coconut oil or gee or grass fed butter Avocado oil is also rising in popularity now as well. But just to throw a couple more for reducing information, the cruciferous family of vegetables have been found to reduce information specifically in the brain. Broccoli. You know again, I put peer of viewed data to show that this food that's just like super common can help to reduce brain information. Right, So yeah, I can go on and on, but those are things. No, No, this is fantastic. And I want everyone who's listening and watching to know that all these reviews, the research is in the book Eat Smarter, which is what Sean's referencing. If you are listening and you don't see me holding the cover and holding the book, you can order it right now. And I deeply recommend that because the level of detail of insight that Sean has is so powerful it should not be underestimated. This isn't a new diet book or a fad book on like, you know, here's what you need to do, three things you need to do tomorrow. It's not like that. There is like deep research, reflection, introspection that Sean's done and study he's done, and so you know, I'm going in and allowing him to share depth on certain parts. But the book is full of these insights. Shan. I want to talk a bit about stress and the brain and then diet because you also talk about the impact of food on the brain. Brain on food, but also our emotional states. We all know what emotional eating is. We've all picked up a tub of ice cream or picked up sugars when we're lowing energy or you know, we've been there. We may even get drawn in that direction still today. One thing I find intriguing that I'd love to learn from you is how much is stress in the brain causing some of these challenges within the body, And can food be used to work backwards almost or distress need to be dealt with in different ways. Yeah, that's such a great question. Again, what is stress? We have to look at that, and we tend to put stress in this one box. Cognitively, most times people associated with like life, stress work, stress work is stressing me out, our relationship is stressing me out. But those are just a couple of factors that go into your overall stress load as a human being. So all of these inputs are stressors. And for example, exercise is a stressor, and it's known as a hermitic stressor, which that means that if you're able to recover from said exercise, you get benefit, right kind of like what doesn't kill me makes me stronger principle. Right. But if you put on intense exercise on top of relationship stress, work, stress, spiritual stress, right, feeling not on purpose or cut adrift or disconnected, you add that onto diet stress, the stress coming from the abnormal food you may be consuming. The environmental stress right right now, this is dope, Like we can record, We got all this technology, but all of these energies are just running in and out of ourselves at paces and degrees that we just don't it then yet, right, So we're all intermingling with these energies that we've never been exposed to again as humans. So the environment itself is going to be adding an additional stress. Gravity. Gravity's trying to kill you, like you literally is trying to weigh us down, you know in a sense if you want to look at it like that. But we are resilient. We've adapted to it, you know. But the John Carter, I don't know if you know about that. That that book, and that's that movie Disney. It didn't do very well, but I think it's on Disney plus John Carter. So this guy teleports accidentally, like from Civil War Vibes to being on Mars. And on Mars, he's like superhuman because gravity is different, so he's like jumping around, you know, like it's it's really cool to think about. Gravity has conditioned us in a certain way, and we were resilient against it. So environmental stress goes on there, and I can go on and on. All of these stress inputs create your overall stress load as a human being. Now, the issue is that, man, I've had to coortunity to work with so many people in a one on one context, but you know, groups and the books and all the stuff. But the most overlooked thing that I've seen when people are wanting to, you know, get off of their blood press pressure medication that the centepreals or the statins or you know, metform it for diabetes or their antidepressants, whatever it might be. The nutrition and the exercise can only go so far. The number one thing that I've seen that people overlook is the impact of stress. Because you can over eat your way into disease, you can undermove your way into disease. You can undersleep your way into these disease. You can also overstress your way into disease. The problem is that stress is invisible, you know, in a sense, like exercise, we know what that is, like, it's physical, we're interacting with it. Food is like you're putting stuff in like it's it's it's visceral, it's something you could touch. Because stress doesn't have that aspect, we negate it. But truly, and just to kind of loop back to the story with that physician and then bolt wow. So everybody's heard at this point of the placebo effect, you know, to some degree, I was going to come back to this. I'm glad you've gone and this it's amazing, right, it's amazing. So just on average, if we look at the breadth of pre viewed data that we have on average, placebos are about thirty percent effective in clinical trials. So fake drugs, sham surgeries, fake treatments are about thirty percent effective on average. Studies much higher, like eighty percent effective in some studies on antidepressants. People are not actually getting something that has a real treatment. They just believe that they're taking the drug. Now, this is very important. It has to becoming No, it doesn't. He doesn't have to. But in these trials are coming from an authority figure. Right. And so one of the things that I talk about in the book is the impact that your thoughts have on your body's metabolism. Right. So this was done by doctor Alia Crumb and her team at Stanford at the time, and it was the Milkshake Study. And so they blended up these milkshakes and they labeled them different different amounts of calories even though they were all the same. So some of them were the indulgent milkshakes they labeled like seven hundred calories, some were you the smart shakes, where they labeled they like two hundred calories, but all of them were really like four hundred and fifty calories or something like that. And so what they found was that people who believed they were having the indulgent milkshake, they had a much greater secretion or suppression of grillan, the hunger hormone. Right, so they're more satiated because they believe they're consuming something it has a lot more caloric energy. And on the other side, the people who thought they were eating the sense of Shake, the sensible milkshake, their grillan levels didn't budge at all, which means they're going to be hungry again very soon after having that milkshake. Right. So that's the power of the mind to literally manipulate your metabolit just in that one snapshot. And I've got so much more data, right, so your thoughts determine what's happening with your metabolism. So going back to the placebo effect, so placebo's being again, we've got data. A great book is Mind over Medicine doctor Lissa Rankin. So many studies in there, but we've got data on placebo's being effective and cancer treatments in surgeries for knees like MCL repair like we've got there's there's so many crazy studies where you know they'll because now you could even watch your surgery where there's somebody will be watching their own surgery, but what they're doing is they're playing a different video, right, So they'll cut the person's knee open and just seal it back up without doing any actual you know, a therapeutic change, and their knee problem will heal right, oftentimes better than the people who had the actual surgery, you know, the surgical change and intervention. So I know this sounds crazy, and these are things for me. I'm a very analytical, logical person, so I wouldn't believe it unless I saw the data myself. So that's the power of the human mind, just a snapshot. Now here's the other thing. I don't want to call them evil, but there's a there's an evil twin to the placebo effect. It's called a no cebo effect. This is when you get a negative injunction that something bad is going to happen. So Placebo is saying you're gonna get this therapeutic benefit. You're gonna take this, and your blood pressure is going to normalize, your depression is going to go away, your cancer is going to dissolve. A no Cbo effect is saying this is incurable. You have six weeks to live. You'll never walk again, right, So these injunctions from an authority figure. And there's another study I excited from Alia CROM's team. They did a skin prick test where they used a histamine, you know, a histamine stimulator to create a rash on people's skin, and then they had an inert cream and they told the test subjects either this cream is going to make your rash worse or this cream is going to make your rash better. It's different, people told different things. Now, what happened was and this was true for like ninety percent of the test subjects when they received that inert cream that had no therapeutic benefit and they told their rash would get worse. Within ten minutes, the rash got worse and spread. For other people within ten minutes, the rash got better and nearly went away from most people just within ten minutes of them getting this cream that does nothing. The biggest part of this was the benefit depended directly with how the person believed in the competence of the physician. Their rapport and belief in the person telling them about the thing impacted their physical response the most. So again, who are you listening to? You know? And so for me, I had that nicebo effect injunction, Like he told me this was incurable. I'll be in paying the rest of my life, you know, I'll never walk normally again, all these things, and I believed him. But thankfully again, just like sometimes going through these things and hitting rock bottom is a good place to stand up from, you know, and being able to access this is why people are such a gift, you know, Like my grandmother was like a guiding light, like a north star for me. I didn't realize it at the time. I just thought she was being annoying. But just knowing that there's somebody who believes in me, man, it just made the process so much easier. But the thing is, you don't need anybody else to believe in You can believe in yourself, you know. But it does take it does take some revelation. It does take a lot of work to be able to do that. But anyways, but just to put the icing on the cake with this, with stress and the impact that it can have on our bodies and our relationships. The reason that I don't talk about this off the jay, but the reason I wrote this book was to address how food is affecting how we communicate with each other because you probably have noticed we're living at a very divisive time right now. You know, there's so much divisiveness, there's so much agitation, there's so much in fighting, when on paper, we should be more connected than ever, Like we all have the same access to the same data. Why is there so much arguing about it? Right? And also people are becoming so polarized, like they're going and planting their flag at one end of the other end. But truth truthfully, most people are here in the middle, but they're listening to people at these outer ends. But what's not being talked about is the fact that, for example, there was a study done at the Ohio State University and it was looking at couples, you know, like I love my wife, she's my best friend, and but we also, you know what I'm saying, we have you know. And the thing is like we know our stuff now because we often attribute it to the person. But what they did was they use glucose monitors to see what happens when the person in the relationship when they have abnormal blood sugar, how they respond to their partner, yes, all right, And so what they found was when people have when their blood sugar was abnormal, you know, when they experienced a blood sugar crash for example, which is normal because again we're going hypoglycemic and then crashing because the way we eat today, the test subjects became much more aggressive towards their partner. Keyword aggressive. Right, And here's the biggest thing, because for me, it's just like okay, that's a quality. But what's the end result. End result is they were far less likely to resolve their relationship conflicts. So that's the outcome because your blood sugar's messed up. Now, we think about this with kids, like you know they're hyper or whatever, they're cranky. You're just a big adult baby, you know, you get the same hard wiring. And so when we tend to be in conflict is when we when our biological needs are off, you know, when we're tired, when we're hungry. These things we attribute to kids acting up like that, but we do that to each other, right, And so that was just one little glimpse into it, like this is somebody that you love. And so with the just a little sidebar in the study, they use like these dolls and poking pins in the doll. How if you are a madic or partner you are. So it's just kind of creepy like some people. So, but now here's how we branched this out globally. Researchers at Oxford University. They wanted to see what would happen by improving the nutrition of prison inmates. Right, so we have a certain psychological view of people who are in these conditions. Yeah, right, But for me, I have an experience with this because of the environment that I come from. You know, many of my friends and family end up in that situation. I could have been in that situation. And so what they did was and this is a randomized, placebo controlled trial, gold standard. This isn't just guessing. This isn't like the oh this thing, gold standard of clinical trial. They took a group of these prison inmates and they improved their nutrition just through getting in from Omega three fatti ascid supplements, which we've got to talk about that by the way, and then just increasing their amount of vitamins and minerals that they're consuming, right, so very rudimentary stuff. And then they have the cebo group who gets nothing. It's a four and a half month study and after compiling all the data, the test subjects. The prison inmates who received the improved nutrition had a thirty five percent drop in behavioral offenses versus the PACEBO group, and most notably, a thirty seven percent drop overall in violent offenses. Their proclivity towards hurting another person dropped by thirty seven percent by increasing their nutrition. What was in that nutrition, dude, basic vitamins, minerals, multi vitamin type stuff, omega threes, but the megathrees are critical. That's why I want to specifically talk about this. But that sounds so crazy because the very best programs in prison for rehabilitation come nowhere near those types of results. So some other researchers saw it and they were just like, that's impossible, and they replicated the study and almost got the exact same numbers. This was published in the journal Aggressive Behavior. There's so many journals that cover these things, and the data is available by getting people healthier, by giving them the basic The question should be how just your cells, your brain cells specifically, being able to talk to each other, you require key nutrients, and so one of those nutrients is omega three, fatty acids DHA and EPA specifically. The cool thing is that blood brain barrier. They got to express pass so they're able to cross the blood brain barrier because it's one of those essentials for the brain. Now, this is so crazy, but without these specific omega three's, your brain cells can't really efficiently talk to each other. It's something called they enable something called signal transduction, so your cells being able to talk. And also they're part of all of your cell membrains, so just the cell being sustainable itself. If you're deficient in these things, again, your body will try to do what it has to do, but it just degrades the way that your body works so much. And so a study this was published in the journal Neurology, one of the top journals looking at the brain, and they found that test subjects who consume less than two grams of omega threees per day had the highest rate of brain shrinkage. Yeah, and where are we getting omega threes from naturally? If we're even getting this. Yeah, this is so important because for years I made this mistake, all right, working in a clinical practice, seeing people every day and wanted to invoke more plants into people's diets. I would tell people, make sure you getting your cheese seeds, and you know your flax seeds. You got flax seeds or flax seed oil in a refrigerated section because it's volatile. But I was missing the mark because that's a LA. It's a different form of omega threees. It's the plant version, and it's not what your brain uses, all right, So your brain uses epa and dha. These are only found in animal foods. And we do have an option for people doing a vegan protocol, which is algae oil. All right, So we'll come back to that in just a second. But this is very important because your body can the plant omega three ala and converted into dha and epa, but you're gonna lose at least seventy five percent the conversion process, all right, So this is going to depend on your microbiome, your other metabolic factors, on who's efficient in converting this. So to say, for somebody that is doing a vegan or vegetarian protocol to just have chia seeds are cool, it's not. It's not cool. Literally, we're talking about your brain shrinking. This is not a joke. You need to make sure you're getting these dha and epa the whole food versions or sources that we've evolved having is going to be coming from fatty fish. Again, humans have been eating these foods for thousands of years. I don't want to get into religiosity about our nutrition and it creates all this divisiveness. I just want to talk about principles, right, and so fatty fish, grass fed beef, eggs. And then we've got as far as what most of the peer view studies are done on, it's done on fish oil, right, and it's just it is what it is now with I said, I believe that there are some other means for this. One of them, depending on where your ethics lie, could be krill oil. All right. So krill oil is one of the richest sources of astaxanthin, which is protective of those Omega three's, which is huge and of itself. But this is a microscopic keyword, microscopic shrimp. All right, you're probably just even like if you lick the air, you're going to be killing more sentient beings than you know what I mean, this microscopic shrimp. But it's a concentrated form of omega three's dha and epa. If that's where you sit, then we have algae oil, which is a plant source. The caveat here is that we don't have much period viewed data on its efficacy. We know the DHA and EPA is there, so I don't want everybody to wait. If you're doing a vegan protocol, please get yourself an algae oil today, Like today, get a specific so algae oil is going to be encapsulated, so which again I would love people to do food first, but in this situation, it's essential. It is absolutely essential. So we can still do our chia and our flax and our hemp seeds. Those are those are great for other things, but please don't mistake the fact that we need a mega threes for cognitive function. And again in this clinical trial they're using fish oil, So this is not a joke. Being able to reduce your proclivity towards violence, to improve your ability to perspective, take, and to be able to have more compassion and patience. We know this when we're when we're nutrient deprived, when we're even just hungry, we tend to be more irritable and less patient towards people we love, let alone people we don't know. So the biggest issue I believe Jay. And this isn't because I'm a nutritionist, Like I really examine this, Like I sat with this for a while. I was like, is this because my life has just been revolved around health? Like truly, I feel that the biggest underlying issue for our epidemic levels of divisiveness and very illogical behavior and the ability to see another human being and to want to do them harm, it's because we are unhealthy, you know. And the data indicates this, but my real my life indicates this, you know. Like I grew up in an environment man Like it was just it's an environment. It's so volatile. There's so much violence, you know, outside my door and in my own household. And to see how I've changed because I was a reflection of that environment. Something I didn't tell you about when I went to that private university. I got kicked out of that university for fighting. I got kicked out of high school for my entire junior year for fighting. And I I was in student advisory. I was teenage Health Consultant, which was this little health program. I was in in Roads, which I was able to take college credit. You know. It was the first year that it was popping off with Saint Louis University. I was a scholar, athlete, I was all these things. It didn't matter, you know. I got in this situation where I felt threatened, and I resorted to that behavior, you know. And every day in the morning, you know, going in getting the cereal and getting the you know, the pasteurized orange juice. I'm eating pizza pretty much every day of lunch with the oppressor with cheese, you know, and just like I'm making my body out of this really low quality material, right. And so the crazy thing was, once I got physically healthier, I started to see people differently, and I started to have so much more patience because I was replicating those behaviors. Like, you know, my daughter is my oldest I have three kids, and my mother, like she would say something once and then five seconds later, she's pissed off. Right, she doesn't want to repeat herself. She's just ready on fire, to be mad, to be irritated, to be aggressive towards you, and to have such a lack of patience. And so I was being that with my daughter. You know what, for me, I wanted her to be. Of course, most people want their children to be better than them, and so when she was in kindergarten, I was getting her like second and third grade work and we would sit around a table and all this stuff and just imagine like the lack of patience that I had. And she graduated with honors all that stuff, but you know, just what she had to deal with. And I'm even then of still it wasn't like bad, but still just like the level of patience that I have now from like my youngest son is ten, it's night and day. It is night and day because I'm physically healthier, and it's not a struggle. It's not a reach for me. Now here's the rub. It's not that we can't express compassion or the perspective take or to express patience when we're unhealthy. It's just harder. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think we've all experienced that, right, Like I think we all know that that when you're hungry, you react differently to everything. And I think we've all experienced the irritability when you feel like your body's like exhausted or you're going to be more irritable, you're going to be more agitated. I think we know that. Most people would say, yeah, I know exactly, what that feels like. And this is where I like the connection you're making and I agree with you even more is I've spent so long with people where they keep trying to solve the issue in their head. They're wondering why their energy is not right, they're wondering why they don't feel positive, they're wondering why they don't feel clear, and so much of it is diet related. Of course, there's meditation, and there's mindfulness and these beautiful practices. But if you're doing all of those but you're not solving your gut, you're making life harder, like you're working harder without using all the resources. And that's why at the beginning, when you said it's your diet, your sleep, and your movement, and then you have your mindset and your meditation and your mindful us, we've got to use all fours. Like you can't just use one. Like you can't just work out and say, oh, it doesn't matter what I eat, And you can't just eat right and say, oh it doesn't matter if I don't work out, and you can't just sleep right. And you're right, it's not about choosing either raw it's it's all of them. And that's what you present in this book about the connection between them. Yeah. Sure, you're such a wise, insightful twenty years studied. I mean when you mentioned them, like, I can tell it's it's phenomenal, and you can tell what a passion you have for this. If someone's listening today and you could simplify for them three things that they should try and learn more about and three things they should be very aware of that they may need to put aside, what would you say for each of those? For someone who's today going, wow, I need to read this book, Eat Smart, So I'm going to order that, But it's like, what are three things that I need to add and think about and research and learn more about, and what are three things that it maybe need to avoid and set aside. You know, this is a tenant throughout history. The number one thing for me is to know thyself, you know, really do a self assessment because oftentimes, you know, working as somebody who's I'm sitting across the table from a person and they've got twelve medications that they're on and they're wanting to make a change, and I have to be there and to look them in the eyes and say I got you, We're going to figure this out, and actually know with every five of my being that we're going to figure it out. To be able to do that, I have to evoke within that person and find what is a leverage point and help them to get honest about what landed them in this place that they're in to begin with. Right, So what I would find is that and this is a great secret for all the coaches out there, many people already probably know this who are doing this type of work. If you allow a person to speak, just ask them questions, they will often tell you the cause and the cure of what is ailing them they're being. They know it already, it's already within their mental and you know, cellular records. They know better than anybody, right, But you have to give people space to be able to speak. And so but oftentimes coaches, you know, we want to help people, and so we just want to give them our thing, right, but just actually be there, listen, be a space for this person. It's probably nobody's ever really listened to them, Like, just actually shut everything down to listen to them. Be that person, and they'll tell you the cause in cure. So know thyself is the tenant self assess, and there's different personality types that we can put people in. But we're infinite, you know, we really are. But there are people who tend to be people start things and stop things very quickly. You're right, they meet a little bit of resistance in there. That's okay. Then there are people who you know, swing for the fences. They go and they do so much like they go, they get all the things, they get all the equipment, They go so hard and they on themselves into the ground, right. And there are people who are just more balanced. Like there's different personality types and so really honing in on what your personality types is are And I talk about this a little bit in the book as well, So know thyself so you know what to shore up. And I don't like to talk in terms of strength and strength and weaknesses. You know, you have strengths and then you often have things that are foreign to you, right, And that's okay because like my strength is I know a lot about the human body. I don't know about cars, you know what I mean, Like I know Danna Kapatrick, Like I feel disrespected even saying car around. You know what I'm saying? And So it's just like being able to understand, like that's not my domain of excellence, or but I could learn I might, you know, because of my experience come into the car game, and like I can start seeing stuff other people aren't saying, you know, like, but that's not for me. So I understand my strengths and also where I don't have any credibility or experience, right. Number one is just a principle to know yourself and to know what things tend to hinder you. And I'll just share one little quick one because I saw it as a big consistent in my clinical practice. One of the biggest things that hinders people in getting in the progress that they want is blaming others. All right. I was literally I was right there listening to them, and I'm like, I can see after a while, I can see it coming out here. It comes you know, if my kids would just abid us, right, if my husband would, just if my wife would, just if my mom would just you know, like everybody else in their life is making it harder. Right, So they have this story and they're going to live and die by it, right, and so but the thing is, it's just a story, and it doesn't mean that it's not true. It doesn't mean that you don't experience more, you know, conflict or curveballs in your life because of your life experience. But listen, like it's all about perspective, you know. I've been through some crazy stuff in my life and to be here where I am, like the number one thing besides that moment of decision is taking responsibility for my life one hundred percent responsibility. Again, this is one of those things that you might you don't really do that, you know, And so that's without any wiggle room. I had to stop pointing the fingers. I had to stop blaming and catch myself whenever I do it and understand even if in a relationship conflict, it's not fifty fifty, it's one hundred one hundred, because if there's a miscommunication taking place, instead of me being like, why don't you understand this? I can think about how am I communicating this? Because there is a way to get through, right. But that's me taking responsibility. But sometimes we don't feel like it, you know. But also again, if you're physically unwell, it's harder, right, So being able to help people with that piece of like you've got to take responsibility here, stop blaming other people. There as a way, right, and what we do is and this is where I can answer more the question. It starts stacking conditions in your favor to make it easier, make it automatic. So the biggest issue today with people being able to go from where they are with their health, where we are severely sick society. I mentioned two hundred fifty million Americans overweight or obese, one hundred and thirty million Americans diabetic or pre diabetic. Sixty percent of Americans have some degree of heart disease right now. One hundred fifteen million Americans are regularly sleep deprived. Uppers of fifty million Americans experience in autommunic condition. I can go on and on and on. These are things that have never happened before. But if skyrocketed, depression, all time high ADHD, the list goes on and on, everything is worse. And here we are again on paper, we're supposed to be more evolved and intelligent than we've ever been. And people were like, well, we're living longer though, No, No, we're the first generation in recorded human history that is not going to outlive the generation before us. It is now reversed, which doesn't make sense. It should be continuing increase. But we've hit a threshold, you know, our quality of life is suffering because by treating symptoms, we can keep people alive. And what's happening is we're not really living longer, we're dying longer. We're extending the suffering, you know. So how do we get into this state? And the solution here? The number one thing is we live in a severely sick culture and so we're automatically going to pick up what's happening in our environment to be healthy. And a severely sick society is very it's weird, you know. So today you and your wife are weird as hell, Like you guys are super weird, and shout out to everybody else that's you're weird, you know, And that's okay. It's abnormal because normal right now is being unwell. And so a solution here is and this is my goal and it's what I do. This is what I dedicate my life to, is what gets me up in the morning, is to help to make a shift to where health is normalized, right to where it's easy to have access to the things that healthy. Right now, we have ease of access to things that make you sick, that degrade your health, that degrade your mental health. These are all close closely accessible, right, and so one of those things you know, again, being from Ferguson, Missouri, I was surrounded by fast food like absolutely, you name the place within a mile radius, all of them are just some surrounded by it. And the question is why is this so cheap? Right, because that's why I bought it? Yeah, the accessibility, the price, and the taste. Of course they got food scientists or brilliant at making you addicted to the foods. But the cost that the economies of scale here, and so how is it that I can go to McDonald's and get three cheeseburgers for the same amount that would cost me to buy one avocado? This avocado falls off the tree, like literally, this this cheese was are so cost intensive to make it makes no sense, right, the bread and the processing, the meat, the cheese, the condiments. Not to mention, even if we use an avocado versus a happy meal, there's even a toy the packaging, right, all of these things are so pros intensive, right, the market, all of that, there's we don't have like Beyonce doing a thing for you know, avocados, Like if you could imagine that, you know, but you know what I'm saying, it's a really good point. But here's the thing. If you think about this, like how is this possible? And I answered this question because I had to, Like, not only did I answer the question, but I looked at what is the outcome? So a big driver of this is government subsidies. Right, So from the year nineteen ninety five to two ten alone, the United States government doled out almost two hundred million dollars in government subsidies to farmers who are growing these commodity crops that largely show up through the draft, through window and in process foods. Right, So corn, soy, various forms of where sugar we can extract some sugar. Wheat of course is big. And by the way, like if you look at a grocery store, most of the foods are made of those ingredients, right, some forms or versions of those things. So what happened was by giving this investment, almost nothing went to the pharmers who growing fruits and vegetables. Now here's the bottom line. I came across the studying and I dug I had to find what is the outcome from this. There's got to be somebody asking this question, because I'm asking it. And I found it in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the most prestigious journals in the world, and they looked at the consumption of government subsidized food and the outcomes of health and humans. Right, So, the people who are consuming the most government subsidized foods had almost a forty percent greater incidents of being obese. They had far higher waste circumference, so belly fat, and higher levels of blood sugar, and also depradations to their inflammation so measure they use see reactive protein to measure they had higher rates of inflammation. Right, So all of these terrible things, but key thing, almost a forty percent greater incidents of being obese. By consuming the food that our government is literally paying for to put into our society, we're literally feeding the problem. And it's not okay. And when I say the government, I mean us because that money is coming from us, but we don't understand our authority. We've outsourced it to other people who don't have our best interests at heart. And so I'm in an environment where sixty percent greater incidents of my aunts, you know, my family members, Black women sixty percent greater incidents of being obese than a Caucasian woman. That's the society that we're living in, and it's the environment, right. It's not that any of us are just by nature more likely to be unhealthy. Right, And so we can help the stack in aditions to unify each other, you know, unify our communities. But we've got to stand up for each other and not allow this insanity to happen. Because what's happening when we're feeding this problem is the higher rates of mental issues, of poverty. It's driving more crime, it's driving more divisiveness. Right, It's not our fault. I didn't want to be a quote bad person. I'm an environment where it is a bigger risk for me to go outside and play than for another kid because I literally might die, a bullet might hit me, you know. And that's again, it's it's not like this is a daily thing, but that stuff did happen, you know, and people don't understand that. So you look at people and they're like, just work harder. My mother worked overnight at a convenience store just to again, trying to make ends meet, and she was stabbed eight times by somebody trying to rob the convenience store. These are things people often again, they don't they're not subjected to. And she, my mother's a really tough human being. Like it's crazy, you know if you hears some of these stories about my mom. But when she she subdued the guy, the police came. Right, she's just man, she's she's kind of a badass. But when she survived and subdued that, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So when she got to the hospital and got the stitches, the physician told her that if you weren't overweight, you would have died. Your your body fat saved you. What do you think she's gonna do that cognitive association? My fat is my savior, it's protecting me. You think she's gonna do anything to lose his weight. She's she's going to be more acclimated to having more of it. It's my protection, it's my safety. Right, She sold her blood to put food on the table. You know, all these different things, you know. So, but it's a perpetual. It's the environment, it's the culture, and there is a way to transition out of that. But I'm I'm really the exception and not the rule, Like it took so many minor miracles for this to happen, But I look back in my life, it's just like, is there something remarkable about me? Like how did all of this happen? And the thing is, we're all remarkable. I just realized that I have some power. I realized that I have I have the ability to decide, to think what I want to think, and to respond the way that I want to respond, and to make choices in the world when I had just been outsourcing all of my choices to the environment around me, and I had this story about like I can't, I can't do it. So, you know, to drive that point home, a big solution here is for us to create conditions, and we can do that. We can start with our own culture, in our own household. If people see my son, for example, my son Jordan twenty one years old right now, he just launched a new fitness program yesterday, and you know, I never told him to work in this field, but he's just in the environment, right and so he's been personal training and serving. I get messages from people who their kids have bought his program, like in tears, just like your son helped myself. I didn't sign up for that. I had no idea. But we created a culture of fitness, of health, of connection intentionally. And it doesn't matter where you start. Because my son Jordan was there with me and Ferguson sleeping on an air mattress. He knows what it's like. He was there with me through all of it, and so he has that perspective. No matter where you are right now, where no matter where your kids are at, we can create conditions. And nobody said it's gonna be easy, though you know you're gonna there's gonna be resistance, especially if you've been just on the iPad all the time or watching TV all the time. But a solution is this is to add to a solution. We need to fill that space with something of greater or equal value. That's the trick, right, So if you can find a way to supplant the need to you know, for them to watch another show with something that is you know, involves movement, you know, maybe again like and you can recruit other people. You probably got friends in your network, you know, like maybe there's a dance class or maybe there's you know, feeling the blank. You Like, the greatest gift that I have in my life today is the resources and the people that I have, right, And I'm I'm a self professed lone wolf for sure. Like I definitely had that lone wolf energy. But now like every day in my meditation practice, I have a little segment where I do with gratitude and I run through all the you know, people I'm grateful for, and it's just like it blows my mind. Oftentimes, I you know, I go into tears, you know, thinking about it all the wonderful people. But that even that happens by you becoming the type of person that can invite in that kind of energy. Right. And so one of the big tricks that I've learned over the years too for people who are wanting you know who's blaming other people and wanting them to change, it's very difficult. There's a statement that you can't be a prophet in your own land. Yeah, invite and find other voices to do the thing. So I just came back on Sunday from speaking at an event in Mexico. Every year it's called Phenomenal Life, and it's Eric Thomas often considered like top motivational speaker in the world. So it's him, myself, CJ, this guy named Jamal who's just a brilliant guy as well. So we do this event. I'm not just gonna go to the event. I'm gonna bring my family so they can hear it from them rather than from me. Yeah. Right, So that's one of the things I realized. It's just like, if I have the opportunity, let me get the kids in this place. Even with fitness, what tends to happen is if somebody's working on their fitness, they leave their kids. They never really see them. Like Mom goes to this mystical place called the Gem and she comes back happier, sweaty like even that it's kind of freaky, actually, the thing like where are you going? Mom? But anyways, give your kids some of these inputs, like let them see you work out, invite them in, do some stuff with them. Right as soon as my oldest son was old enough to go to golds back in Saint Louis, he's twelve years old, and you know, he let twelve year olds in. I brought him to the gym with me and now like this, he's a beast like it's crazy, you know, it's just yeah, So start with your own household, creative culture intentionally. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's just about progress, you know. I know you ask for three things, but they're beautiful. Man. Sure you could drop the mic. Was that was so beautiful on so many levels because what I really appreciated about you is you're able to put the emphasis on taking responsibility. I'm designing your own destiny in and amongst all of the chaos, all of the divisive, all of the pain and challenges that you've experienced personally that you see around you, and you're saying, well, I've taken my own learning into my own hands. And I think that's empowering. I think it's encouraging and I think it's enlivening for everyone who's been listening and watching because we can hear your heart and I love today how you've connected the gut to the heart to the brain. You know, to see that three sixty degree approach to life through your truth is truly powerful to experience. To just sit in the presence of that and that just like flies off of you, like it just exudes from who you are, your eyes, your face, your body, your mind, your whole entire presence, like I've just been feeling it. So I want you to know that I see that, I feel that, and I want everyone who's listening and watching. If you haven't been able to see it because you're not in the room, I'm sure you can hear it. And I want everyone to go, you know, subscribe to Sean Show, grab the book, eats Smarter, follow Sean on social media because he's talking about the guy, but it's a way through to the heart and the soul as well. So Sean, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for joining us as a guest on our purpose, for putting your heart into this book and the work that you continue to do. And I know this would be the first of many more conversations. Thank you, James than I received that. Thank you so much. I want to make sure everyone's been listening and watching. What I'd love you to do is tag me and Sean to let us know what you learned, what you took away. There were so many phenomenal insights today on so many different levels, right whether it's mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, family, societal, economical, Like we've really went everywhere, and what we discovered, ultimately Sean said was we've got to take charge. We can't outsourcepiness, can't outsource our health. Got to take that charge, just as he has, just as he continues to try to do and serve and support us as well. So I can't wait to see what you've learned. I can't wait to see your feedback. Big thank you to Shan again, and a big thank you to each and every one of you that are investing in your health and happiness as you listen to on purpose. Thanks everyone, Thank you Shan