The You Project#1655 Reconnecting With Your Body - Dr. Bill Sullivan
The human body is smart, incredibly adaptable and resilient, but it's not indestructible. And while it's always chatting with us (the human in the body) and doing its best to guide, inform and warn, sadly, we seem to be listening less and less, and drowning out the biological wisdom with a curious range of numbing agents and avoidance strategies; pain killers, anti-inflammatories, booze, junk food, recreational drugs and an ever-increasing choice of dopamine-providing distractions. *Bill Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of one of my favourite books; 'Pleased to Meet Me: Genes, Germs, and the Curious Forces That Make Us Who We Are'. Enjoy.
I get a team. I'm here with my favorite scientist, my favorite researcher, doctor Bill Sullivan, all the way across the other side of the world in the States.
Hi, mate, how are you doing great? Meat, Good to see you again.
Yeah, good to see you, buddy. We were just talking. I was just telling you, which is probably the world doesn't need to know this, But I have this weird thing that happens everyone, and that is I could be sitting at my computer like I am now, and I'm just chipping away at stuff and just doing it, and all things are kind of just status quo, just humming along. But then when I have to really focus on something, like I was saying to Bill, read an academic paper or something that for me is cognitively challenging, where it's extreme focus concentration, I've got to be fully present. I get hot and I usually have to take off Often I'll turn off the if the heat is on, even in the middle of winter, I'll open the door to my office, I'll take off a layer of clothing. I think maybe a lot of people don't realize that twenty percent of our energy expenditure is the brain built, which is a lot of energy for a tiny little thing sitting in the old skull.
Hey, yeah, and that's what they estimate happens with the brain at rest, So when you're using it, it ramps up even higher. So it's probably not surprising that your body's getting a little overheated reading some of those papers. So yeah, yeah, if you talk down on you and you're you're down to your underwear, we know what you've been doing, right, You've been reading academic papers.
Oh, look at him, he's in his boxes. Clearly he's studying.
Yeah, we'll go obviously obviously with.
That one hundred percent. It is funny though, like, so my body weight is eighty six kilos, what's that eighty four one seventy it's about one ninety pounds, and the brain weighs about one point three or four, which is kind of three pounds ish. That's a very small percentage of our body weight for a very high percentage about energy use, isn't it? That's wire is portionate.
Yeah, well, you know, if you think about it, that is the key organ that defines who we are, and it takes a lot of energy just to keep it running at a basal level, you know, just couch potatoes is still consuming twenty percent of your caloric intake. So if you happen to use it beyond couch potato, yeah, you're going to burn some more calories, which is kind of fun. You know, you can just sit around thinking and that's kind of an exercise, you know, it.
Is it is. I remember a sign outside a gym near where I live and it said something like thinking about going to the gym doesn't burn any calories. You've actually got to turn up or something. And I'm like, well, technically they're wrong.
You know, technically they're wrong. But you're probably not going to lose too much weight or increase your health parameters in a good way just by thinking too much. So I understand marginal game.
One hundred percent. Hey, I want to start with something weird today. Now I found this video. You I haven't told you. By the way, we did know prep. I do a little bit of prep everyone, and you know, it's solid three four minutes. But Doctor Bill and I literally chat for about one or two minutes before we go live, so he doesn't know this is coming. It's not anything weird, and I don't even know how we get away, but this is this is a video from Tucker Carlson was talking to a lady, some health expert. I apologize or couldn't find her name, but you'll find it everyone if you want to. So it's Tucker Carlson talking to this lady. I won't tell you what it's about. It only goes for about a minute. Mate. I want you to have a listen, and then I want to have a chat. Is that all right with you?
You want me to watch Tucker Carlson. You're gonna say I want you to watch I know, no, no, no, it's not about him.
I know you're probably a fan, but not a fan. But here we go, here we go.
Just give us the being slain condition of health in the nastase absolutely so. Seventy four percent of American adults now are overweight or obese. Close to fifty percent of children are overweight or obese. Seventy seven percent of young adults are unfit to serve in the military because of these issues like obesity.
Now, let's talk about diabetes.
Fifty percent full fifty percent of American adults have pre diabetes or type two diabetes, which is a fundamental issue in how ourselves contrasts the country Tucker have pre diabetes or type two diabetes, and thirty percent of teens now have pre diabetes. We have eighteen percent of teens with fatty liver disease, a disease that used to be in late stage alcoholics. Cancer rates are skyrocketing and the young and the elderly. Young adult cancers are up seventy nine percent, and this is the first year in American history We're estimated to have over two million cases of cancer. Twenty five percent of American women are on an antidepressant medication. Forty percent of eighteen year olds have a mental health diagnosis. We have the highest infant and maternal mortality rate in the entire developed world. Infertility is at peak rates. I mean, I don't know how this is not front page news. Infertility is going up one percent per year. Sperm counts are going down one percent per year since the nineteen seventies. Now, the thing that people need to understand is that all of these conditions are caused or driven by the exact same thing, which is metabolic dysfunction.
I would imagine, I would imagine that Australia is similar, not in terms of absolute numbers, because we have a smaller population, but you know, percentage wise, I wouldn't think we would be drastically different. What did you think about that?
Those are some pretty sobering statistics, and obviously I can't fact check all of them, but I can say that I've heard the same trends. You know, clearly our country and many many in the western developed world have problems with obesity, which spiral into problems with diabet There's also I believe what she said about fertility and sperm counts is also true. I've read similar articles to that effect as well, although I don't know that it's completely attributable to metabolic dysfunction. There are many other potential explanations that could factor into changes in fertility rates, some of which have nothing to do with biology at all, but just psychological trends, social trends. But yeah, a lot of what she's saying, those trends, at least I've heard similar statistics.
It's interesting that like, we've never been more educated, we've never had more resources, Like we've never been I was going to say, we've never been smarter. That's not true behaviorally, maybe we're stupid, who knows, But yeah, it seems that despite all of our technology and all of our research breakthroughs and everything that's happening in science. As a bunch of people living on a planet, from a physical wellness point of view, we seem to be going backwards, not forward.
Stock Oh yeah, I totally agree with that. And it's like we're a victim of our own success. I mean, the human species has been so successful around the world in creating a lifestyle where we have easy access to high caloric foods, which we used to struggle obtaining a long time ago, you know, on the African savannah. So now we have a bounty of those high calorie foods and our brain is wired to lust after them. Okay, our brain is wired to crave them, and they're in abundance. So there's a mismatch between how our brain reacts to these foods and drives our behavior and the environ in which we've currently in which we currently live. And I say we're a victim of our own success, because you know, humanity as a collective species has done a marvelous job utilizing agriculture, domesticating animals, creating foods that can deliver a high amount of the you know, nutrition, but also a high amount of the bad things that we need to get out of our diet if we want to get back to a healthy lifestyle. You also couple that to our intelligence in creating machinery and industries that can do hard labor for us. So the amount of physical labor that most human beings on the planet have to engage in has gone way down, and in fact, most jobs are sedentary. You know, you're just sitting on your butt all day and there's not a lot of time left for exercise and activity, which again, back in All D's on the African savannah, we were always hunting, foraging, moving around. You know, we were more of a nomad species, relocating from place to police. Yeah, long story short, we were getting a lot of physical activity that we simply don't obtain today.
I heard something. It's it's probably not an accurate stat but I think it couldn't. It might be somewhere in the ballpark, But the average Australian expends about eight hundred calories a day, which is a lot of calories, but eight hundred calories a day less than fifty years ago. And you know, we're the sit down generation like we've never in the history of our species, we've never sat more than we currently sit because you know, I would assume ninety percent of jobs are done seated or I don't know what percentage, but a lot, you know. So it's not only our we're eating more. So the volume is up, the quality of food depending on you know who and where, but the quality of food arguably is down or the crap, you know, more more processed food, less nutritional value, all of those things. But yeah, overall, we just don't like incidental and occupational activity as we call us ex sized scientists call it incidental and occupational activity is down. So in general terms, we just don't move as much as we used to move fifty years ago, one hundred years ago, and especially hundreds of years ago, when you know you would think a lot of people moved a lot.
Yeah, absolutely, and then you know that's that's good news bad news. I mean, we know these are the problems that are leading to obesity and diabetes. We know it's poor diet, we know it's not enough exercise, and you know we should throw stress into that equation too. Remarkably, it goes back to the paradise you alluded to earlier. Craig in that we live in a tremendously wonderful time. I mean, a lot of our basic needs are met. Okay, even if you don't do a great deal of work or make a lot of money, you can live a pretty comfortable lifestyle. But we generate an extraordinary amount of unnecessary stress and pressure and anxiety, and I think that feeds back into making many of us miserable, which drives appetite and discourages people from wanting to move around and exercise. So I think, ironically we have a higher level of stress than maybe our evolutionary ancestors even did.
Yeah, that's interesting. I often think this. Imagine going back a couple of hundred years and just like being there for a day and you say, guess what. In the future, you're just gonna like, if you're hot, you're just going to push a button. And I'll go, what's a button? We have to explain that you're going to push a button on a wall and the room's going to get cool, and then when you're cold, you push another button, then the room will get warm. And by the way, you're just going to have this thing where it's going to have all this food in it that's fresh all the time and it keeps it cool. And then you're going to have this other thing that you can cook food in about ninety seconds. It's called a microwave ove. And and then you're going to have this thing you can just turn and cold fresh water comes out like as much as you want. Like they'd be like, that's bullshit, that's or you know, you know what.
Would happen to you if you were to go back to the middle you would be burned at the steak as a heretic and loon. That's what you would be, you know, that's what they would do to you. Well, Craig on the barbie.
But even imagine like when I was born, you know, in the sixties. Imagine if you said, in the not too distant future, you're going to have you know, that telephone on the wall with the bloody rotary do siling system. Well, you're going to have a phone in your pocket that's you know, like the size of a pack of cigarettes or smaller, because that's what they had in their pocket in those days. And not only not only will you be able to talk to anyone anywhere in the world, it'll also basically have more information than you know all the Encyclopedia Britannicas, which were also big in the sixties, put together times a billion in your pocket and you can just ask it a question and it will tell you the answer to any like a game. And it's not like that was a thousand years ago, that was last week. In terms of the evolutionary you know timeline.
Yeah, it's crazy to think about, and it would be a fun experiment to be able to go back and see what those individuals thought. I mean, you could even like go back in time to the Middle Ages and see, you know, you're not feeling well, not because of bad error or because of demons or you know, gods that are angry at you, it's because of this tiny germ. Oh, we'll show it to me. Well, we need a microscope to see it. What's a microscope? And so we're going to have medicines one day that can get rid of these germs and make people well. And yeah, they'll just be looking at you like you're crazy. And it makes you think, twenty forty one hundred years from now, what are humans going to come up with that we can't even imagine today. Yeah, you know, you know, I'm assuming we last that long, what are they going to come up with that'll just blow us away? It's it's fun to philosophize and think about those sorts of things.
And it's amazing. Like we look back at the science in inverted commas from you know, twenty thirty forty years ago, and some of it was solid and some of it were like, how on earth? How on earth? You know? Even for example, with the food pyramid is one that I speak about too much, but you know, that was absolute, that was break groundbreaking research and we found out that it isn't and it's bullshit, but you know, but at the time, everyone was like, this is the way to eat. Low fat eating equals low fat humans, and off we go. And yeah, it makes you wonder in fifty years what they're going to talk about that was science in inverted commas in twenty twenty four, That to them will be laughable.
You know, I'm going to make a prediction because I won't be here to verify it or not. I won't care if I'm right or wrong, but I'll make a prediction that we are obsessed way too much with the individual components of of you know, what types of bats and how much sugar and all this other stuff that are in foods. We're too obsessed with that. And you know, to an extent, we do need to pay attention to how much sugar, salt, and fat are in there. But what that misses, What that misses or all the chemicals that are put into food, all these preserved and all these other chemicals that we have no idea what they might be doing in our body, either alone or in combination, because they're not sufficiently tested before they're utilized in food products. Europe is a little better about this, and lo and behold, Craig. They don't have a huge obesity problem.
Wow.
I just came back from a from a tour of the Mediterranean, Okay, and it's striking the difference of how thin people are, how lean people are in general over there compared to almost anywhere you put yourself into in America. There's it's a striking difference. But one thing that is not different when you go to the Mediterranean, it is full of cafes, pastries, canola's, gelato. There's all kinds of sweets, pastas, carbs, everything. Right, The diet doesn't strike me as being ridiculously different. Maybe the portions are smaller, and there's there's more fruits and vegetables and stuff. But the thing that struck me was the freshness of the foods. Okay, people like go out to the market and or their gardens and grab what they want to eat right then and there, right off the vine, so to speak. Okay, it's all fresh. There's no chemicals, there's no preservatives, and maybe the stuff that we're putting into food in order to process it or ultra process it, maybe those are the real culprits. And fifty years from now, my prediction is that we are going to sort some of that out and we're going to look back and say, oh, why were we so obsessed with a little too much sugar? It was these chemicals that were making everybody so large.
That is a very very interesting hypothesis. Stock I don't disagree with you. And you know, further to that, when you have I always talk to people about you know, packaging and food labeling. And you know what's written on the front of the box or the can or the packet is advertising. And the tiny little box, the tiny little square down the bottom of the back of the package with the teeny tiny writing that you really, I can't read it because my eyes are shit and I'm old. But there's a reason that it's hidden away down the bottom at the back, and there's a reason that the writing is so small, and there's a reason that they're trying to make it is as obscure as possible, because they don't want you to pay attention to that, you know. And it's funny when you look at something like and this is ironic, but a protein bar, you go, I might have a protein bar that's better than a Mars baruck. Probably not. I mean some of them, like some of those protein bars in inverted commas, which sell like hotcakes in Australia because ironically hotcakes, we think, you know, that's a healthy option. Some of them have got fifty ingredients and forty of the ingredients you don't know what they are.
Yeah, And we have the same trends over here, people gobbling these things down like their candy, and they're marketed as if they're not candy. Yeah, you know, and it's kind of goofy to me. I think one of the manufacturers of these bars got sued because they were making health cleans, when in fact they were just a glorified candy bar.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, I mean, I don't know how it is in the States, but there's a I think it's called the Heart Foundation in Australia where you can buy what's called a healthy Heart tick or something like that. So companies pay. It's all about just a transaction to get this tick of approval from the Heart Foundation on the front of their product. And it doesn't it's not because it meets some criteria. I could be wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure. Maybe it's got to meet some very low level criteria. But for the most part, my understanding is it's something that companies pay for, which is good for the Heart Foundation, I guess, because it gives them money in the bank. But it seemed to be some kind of, you know, brand improving kind of strategy. Do you think that like talking about the past and the now. I always feel like we have become disconnected from the wisdom of our body. And I know that sounds fluffy, but you know, like our body is so smart now. Bio is a biofeedback system that's always talking to us. But you know, in the days of instant gratification and fast food and basically dopamine at will, you know, or dopamine providers of sorts, you know, like where we can just push that button and get a quick fix. I feel like we've disconnected from our body in a way.
We are totally disconnected. There's a scientific term for these phenomenon, and it's called evolutionary mismatch, and it's basically that we are not born for this time. We are not born for the modern environment that we have created. We are born to literally be hunters and gatherers and small tribes on the African savannah. That's what we've evolved to be for tens of millions of years. So that is deeply, deeply wired into our brain and that's just how things are, that's our history. But you put us in. You put an animal like that into the modern world where it's a veritable candy land and you don't have to move around as much. You know, you sit and watch television passively for hours. You have an animal that is ill suited for its environment, and there's negative health consequences that start to accumulate over time with that lifestyle. And it's a catch twenty two with our brain because back in our old evolutionary days, you know, millions of years ago, when it was hard to come by something sweet or something fatty, our brain would go absolutely nuts when it finally tasted something that had something that had a sweet flavor or a fatty flavor, it would just go nuts. Dopamine would be surging because it's a substantial reward, and it would induce us to move our bodies to go find those foods as much as we can. But they were quite rare, so they were they were rare treats. But now we can just sit and hit the dopamine button all day long, popping in crisp after crisp, you know, candy bar after candy bar, and you know that our body was not built to handle that level of sugar, fat, and salt. It just simply is not. And then you couple that on top of the fact that many of these, you know, these these candies and potato chips and pretzels and so on, are highly processed foods with all sorts of other chemicals added into that. You just have an incredibly artificial nutritional source that our body has not evolved to metabolize properly. Okay, it's evolved to enjoy the taste and the texture, but it's not evolved to translate it into something nutritionally valuable.
Yeah, And I think like one of the challenges is, you know that you can push the dopamine button and go all right, I'm going to eat the cake, or I'm going to eat the candy bar, or I'm gonna eat the crisps, or I'm going to eat whatever it is that thing that while simultaneously being in a body that isn't working well, you know, and simultaneously thinking I want to get in shape. I want to change my body composition, lose fat, lose weight, be healthier, have more energy, have more function, improve my immune system, create a longer health span, all that stuff. But for the moment, I'm going to eat this cake because when I eat this cake, I get instant gratification. But if I don't eat the cake, then I don't get instant transformation. And so I'll eat the cake today, but I'll start tomorrow. And that becomes a twenty year in a dialogue. And now I'm fifty two and now I'm morbidly obese. My back hurts, I've got high blood pressure, I'm diabetic, and I've almost been changing my operating system since I was thirty, and that is I think that is the hard thing about delaying gratification is that they're you know, the point of the point is that we love that fix that whatever right now, and when we say no, you just left in this kind of space of well, this is not much fun. And the worst thing I've put that in inverted commas is that you've got to have quite a lot of those days to actually see real shift, and then you've got a string years together to actually change your you know, your hardwired operating system. And this is you know, when you've been eating and thinking and behaving and socializing and living a certain way for twenty five years, you're not going to fix that by next Tuesday. You know.
No, it's a step wise process and it's not something This is a misconception that a lot of people have, and that's why fad diets are so popular. Everybody's looking for a quick fix, just like you know, the satisfaction you get from a piece of cake. They want to get a quick fix out of a dietary program. And that's not going to happen. That's not how these things work. Yes, these are more like lifelong changes. Lifestyle changes. You have to program your brain to resist instant gratification, keeping in mind the long term goal and the long term satisfaction that will come with a healthier you know, with a healthier body. So it's hard for human beings to think like that because again we're not evolutionarily designed to think in the long term. Our lives used to be much shorter, okay, and resources were much more scarce, so we operated on a very here and now level okay. And again that kind of behavior is deeply ingrained into our brain. It's deeply hardwired there. So you really do have to put forth substantial effort. And that's why this is not easy. Crazy. This is why so many people fail when they try. Is you have to put forth a daily effort to try to resist the instant gratification, keeping in mind the real prize is down the road, and it's full of hurdles to get there, but it's worth getting there.
Yeah, I my listeners know this, but don't after you know, at doc, But I spent. I always had food issues when I was a kid because I was a fat kid and I had everything that wasn't niled down. And then I got in shape, lean strong, functional, and then towards my late twenties and early thirties, I had five businesses. Life was good, making lots go, you know, from the outside looking in, everything was good. But my volatile relationship with food kind of re emerged and I started to just I'll have a little bit of this, little bit of that, and that won't hurt you know, one piece won't kill me, that kind of idea, and of course one piece won't literally kill you generally. But then I looked up a minute later, which was probably a year later, and I was basically fat again. And I remember, so here I am. I'm this guy who's got quite a high profile in Australian fitness and workshops and seminars all around the country. I'm writing for magazines and news. I'm doing all this stuff and I'm lying. I'm lying to people about what I do, you know, And I'm wearing bigger and baggier workout so people won't know. Of course they won't. No, nobody could possibly tell, because these are magic clothes right right right Like for me, I don't know about you, but for me, like food was it really took until I was and even though I knew what to do. I had pretty good understanding, I was pretty educated all that. For me, it just took, I would say, until I was about thirty five before I got I would say almost the analogy would be clean and sober. Do you know what I mean? Where I wasn't pushing itself or others. Took me a long time.
I've heard psychologists talk in those terms about food addiction and john food addiction, treating it as such and people who can finally modify their habits as kind of a sobering up. I've heard that before. So it's a pretty apt analogy, I would say. And there's even been studies that show that sugar lates up to seeing parts of your brain cocaine will, So there are some parallels there. And everyone is well aware how hard it is to break addiction with substances like cocaine or alcohol. But what we don't appreciate very much is it's just as hard in many cases to break those addictions to sugar, fat, and salt as well. I applaud you for doing it, and I know a lot of people struggle with it because, like I said, we are evolutionarily hardwired to go after those types of foods so we're basically trying to put a break on the human spirit itself. We're trying to put a break on innate, impulsive actions, and that's really difficult to do, but it can be done. And what I found, you know, as I started to eat better and because you know, as you get older, your metabolism isn't what it used to be, and the same foods that you put into you start to pack on pounds rather than just magically, you know, disappear. So I noticed in my twenties I was gaining weight for like the first time in my life, but my diet wasn't changing much. But since my metabolism was changing because of age and I was a little more sedentary in those days, I had to make some changes in order to stay as lean as I used to be. And I wanted to do that because in my brain I knew it was healthy. You know, I'm here working in biomedical sciences, so I have to toe that line, right, you know, I have to practice what I preach, kind of like your story was alluding to. So I made those changes, and they were really difficult. You know, breaking habits and forming new ones. It's serious business, but it can be done. And the good news is that, at least in my experience, as you start to eat healthier and as you start to move around more and get more exercise, these sorts of activities become addictive as well. So you're trading off an addiction for junk food for an addiction with healthy behavior. Okay. I used to be addicted to mountain dew, doctor pepper, these sodas, okay, these are these sugar waters. I made a clean cold turkey break from those after realizing It's hard for me to fathom that. When I was younger, I did not appreciate how much sugar was in a single can of pop or soda. And once I learned that, once someone told me that, I'm like, holy crap, I really got to knock this stuff off. This is an easy way to start losing weight. Okay, So I quit them cold turkey. I just started drinking water. You know, water is plenty of refreshing for me. That was one of the biggest changes I saw. You know, in my history of dealing with weight issues, is that just dropping soda out of your life can work. Wonders. But then I'm like, you know, get addicted to all sorts of teas, you know, and you know there's other alternatives out there that you can find and enjoy with as much you know, passion as you did the other products. The big difference is they're healthier for you.
Yeah. One of the things I used to do doc when I owned gyms and I did you know my I was at the cold face of personal training forever. And when people would come in, we'd do an assessment, which would be, you know, there'd be a bit of formal stuff, a bit of hesting per se, you know, strength and fitness, and a few bits and pieces, but we'd have a really good chat and I would say to people. People would say, no, I've got to I eat too much, you know, I moved too little, all that kind of stuff. And I'd say, take me through a typical day of what you put in your body. And they'd tell me breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I'd go, yeah, but tell me about all the stuff you drink. And what was interesting was a bigger percentage of people than you might imagine drink about a thousand calories a day on top of their meals.
Right, they make coffees over here that are almost a thousand calories in one serving. It's insane.
Yeah, And that's what people don't realize. So I used to say to people, what we're going to do, Like if obviously this would be a collaboration, but I'd say, why don't we do this, Why don't we just cut out liquid calories for one month, Let's try that. Let's leave your food as it is, because my experience is the more things you try and change the more drastically, the less likely people are to maintain it over any length of time. Right, So, or we might even say, you know, like have one flat white or one latte a day or whatever it is, but we go from a thousand calories to two hundred calories of liquid. So that's eight hundred calories. You know, over thirty days is twenty four thousand calories we're cutting out without eating any less food. Just that one little hack or that one little protocol would absolutely create real change, you know, Like it doesn't need to be this overwhelming kind of massive global shift in your operating system. It might just be like, oh, you know, well, let's say you have one or two wines a night, and you have three coffees a day, and you have fruit juice in the morning, and then you have phil cream milk on your cereal and there's a thousand calories. Oh, there's more than a thousand calories.
So so I like that approach though, because it's kind of like taking baby steps. That approach, to me is pretty ingenious, and it's a good way to kind of get people to wade into the water of a healthy lifestyle because you're allowing them to continue to eat as they normally would, but you're strategically looking at the beverage factor, which is underappreciated and offmost people's radars. They don't realize how many calories are in the sodas and some of these you know, you know, these lattes and cappuccinos and stuff or you know, or milkshakes or whatever. Get those out of your life and maybe walk fifteen twenty minutes a day. You'll see a pretty revolutionary change just with those small modifications.
One of the things that I think, I totally agree. One of the things I think that a lot of I can only talk from my industry or the industry that I came from, which is the fitness industry, is because a lot of people who work in the fitness industry are of course fit, strong, healthy, functional, and they not all of them, but a lot of them have a certain way of eating, and you know, by typical standards. You know. It's like I put up a post yesterday on Instagram which is essentially a reflection of I didn't intend to read this, I'm just going to bring it up right now, which is not very and so one of the things that I've been told a thousand times is but you've got to have a life, right And so people are inferring, you know, and I understand it doesn't make I completely understand why they say it, because when they look at my life through their lens, I'm the most boring person on the planet. I'm clearly malnourished, I clearly have no fun I have no you know, And so I understand this. But one of the things that trainers do sometimes also is they look at the client through their window and their lens and they try to take the client from this operating system at one end of the scale to the other end of the scale in a week, and it just never.
Works because you too much as you've just got to you.
Know what, this is a multi dimensional challenge. This is psychological, emotional, sociological, behavioral, physiological. You know, there are so many variables here. And what you're trying to do is work with Sally or John that for twenty five years have kind of been in this reality and now you're taking them over to Disneyland and going you've got to live here.
Now.
It just doesn't work like that. So being able to I mean, this is something that people roll their eyes at, but I remember I worked with a guy who used to smoke. This is not a lie over one hundred cigarettes a day. So basically from when he woke up to when he went to bed and he came to me and like, clearly so many things to deal with. But and so our goal in the first week, our goal was to smoke fifty cigarettes a day. And people are like, how on earth are you okay with that as a goal. I'm like, that is a smart goal, you know why, because that's half like me setting him a goal of zero or five. He's not going to do it. He's not going to do it.
Yeah, you need to frame it in terms of like a percentage. They say, I got this person to cut back fifty percent. That way, they're not here in the raw numbers, you know, but when you hear is that someone cut their habit in half, that's really admirable, you know, yeah, cut it in half again, and so on, and you know it's a reasonable approach. I think you're right. You know, it's a really good point that you raise in that there's no one stop shop for everybody when it comes to changing their habits. You really do have to factor in their holistic life. You know, what sort of experiences have they had to have led them to their current behaviors, and you have to work through those channels and see things through their eyes in order to design the most ideal program that's going to be effective in modifying behavior.
Yeah, spirit of mind, doc, trying to understand someone else's bog of right now? All right, I've got a few I've got a few Bill Sullivan questions for you. Firstly, I read that I read that Adam Alter wrote basically a testimony on your your book. So, doctor Bill's book, if you haven't heard of it, you should by now please to meet me. Jean's germs and the curious forces that make us who we are. But I read Adam Alter's book Drunk Tank Pink, I must have been ten years ago or eight or seven years ago. A long time ago now, but what a great book. Great book, and can you have you read it? Have you read it?
Like you It was about eight years ago or so when it first came out.
Yeah, so I remember the story that he tells doc of and maybe you can explain how this works. Right. So one of the things that they there was a a police station and they had these holding cells basically for drunk people. And so it was in this area I forget where it was, but really violent people and they'd put all these blokes essentially men in these holding cells overnight and there'd be punch ons and violence. It was one of the most violent, you know, kind of places in the States, or holding cells in any way. They they found out that through a range of different things, that if they painted the holding cells pink, that it completely changed the behavior of the prisoners or the people being held, and it totally affected their nervous system the way they communicated that the violence almost went to zero. Like, what an amazing thing to think that having like being basically in a pink room versus a gray room is going to change behavior that much.
There's been a lot of stuff that have looked at the behavioral effects of responding to different colors. You know, there's been some studies that show if a boxer has on red trunks, he tends to be perceived as much more aggressive than say a boxer who's wearing neutral or white trunks.
Wow.
There's been also studies and pharmaceutical companies do this where they you know, you know how pills get their colors. It's marketing. They give different colored pills to different people. And I forget some of the specifics, but like a yellow pill works fantastically better as an antidepressive depressant than an antidepressant that had no color or some kind of neutral color. But if you make it yellow, it seems to work even better. So it's like there's a placebo effect accompanying some of these drugs just because of the color of the pill. It's pretty remarkable. And people, if you want them to be more urgent, more productive, you put them in a red room as opposed to like a green room, because red has a more of an urgency about it, and people seem to work faster and harder in a red room and in a green room they're kind of more chill, but they can get more creative. So it's really interesting how those colors which we're not even thinking about, right, it's not on our conscious radar, but it is somehow affecting us at a subconscious level, and it's percolating up to change our behavior.
It's amazing the amount of different stimulile variables that can impact your psychological and or emotional system without you knowing or without you being super conscious in the moment. Like, I'm very affected by music, and the wrong music can make me agitated, and the right music, when I say right music for me can just literally make me happy.
Like well, as someone who in a is someone who works in a gym, you have to know that music can make a really big difference. If you're playing air supply in the background, you're not going to have a great workout.
Oh loud of love, God, how do you know is supply? How old are you?
Well? How you from Australia?
Yeah, that's good, dude. Well you're just got to mention the begs and in excess and.
There you know, But like you put on you put on survivors ay the Tiger, and it's a different story. Right, you're lifting twice as much as you used to be able to do when you were hearing lost, lost in Love or whatever their whatever air supplies, uh songs.
You're not helping You're not helping your brand by knowing that. I'm just going to say you that, I tell you that. Hey. So, one of the pieces of advice that I got it's not going to surprise you growing up, was that you need to control your emotions. My question is is that possible? Can we control our emotions or do we just respond to them? Or do our emotions control us? Or is there a better question?
Well, there's certainly a lot of variability, But let me ask you, do you think you control your emotions better than when you were two years old?
But most people that'd say, yes, I know you, I do, Yes, I do.
Well, Yeah, then we can control our emotions. We certainly can. So we have that capacity. Is it easy? No, No, it's not. Emotions are primal. They surge within us beyond our control. Okay. We can't control what emotions we feel, can't really control what sort of thoughts pop into our mind. But we can put a space in between those sensations that we feel and what we're going to do about them. Okay. That's what makes us human is we can insert this space, this pause in between our emotions and our actions, and we can take the time to evaluate the emotion and produce the corresponding reaction that is appropriate to it. Okay. The classic example is that and we're by we're strongly biased towards paying attention to our negative emotions. I think everyone is pretty aware of that. But that's a survival mechanism. Because if you're walking through the woods and you hear rustling in the bushes, okay, your first instinct is probably like, oh, this is an animal or a snake or something out to get me, and you might you might run and take off, but it could have just been the wind. Okay. So again, the beauty of being human is that we hear these noises, these suspicious noises, we can evaluate that emotion in the context of the situation and see if it's a real threat or not. If it's a threat, we'll run. If it's not, we can deal with it more rationally.
Yes.
So it's just like the old stoic philosophers used to say, there's nothing wrong with emotions. It's natural to feel them. You shouldn't feel guilty or ashamed for feeling those emotions, but you are responsible for the behavior that was inspired by those emotions, and you have time, you have a space that you can put in there to evaluate the emotion and see what the appropriate response is going to be.
Do you think this is a very personal question, but do you think that you've gotten more courageous or more fearful as you've gotten older, or or neither you kind of status quo?
I think it probably depends a lot on the situation, right. You know, there are some things that I think I'm probably much more braver about, and then there's other things that I'm still very cautious about. So so yeah, it really depends on the nature of the specific situation. I would see.
So I watched you on a video and you're on You're on television, and you said, if you take intestinal bacteria from a brave mouse and you put it in a shy mouse, then the shy mouse becomes braver and less fearful. I think something like.
One of it's one of my favorite experiments. I mean what I mean, what what It's crazy, isn't it?
And is that? I mean? I know, can we could we make a race of super soldiers just by transplanting intestinal bacteria from great people.
I would I would, I would guess no, because in these studies, and you describe the study quite well, you know, mice have different personalities. Different strains of mice have different personalities. Some are more timid and some take greater risks. And just as you said, if you take the intestinal bacteria from the brave mouse and put it into the cowardly mouse, that cowardly mouse starts to become a little more brave. And we see these types of behavioral changes almost every time we do these sorts of intestinal microbiota transplant experiments. Okay, here's one that has been done in humans, and this one will blow your mind too. There are people who have certain type of cancer and they're all treated with the same type of chemotherapy. Some people respond to it, some people don't. But if you take the bacteria from the people who respond positively to the key chemotherapeutic treatment put it into the patients that aren't responding to it, those patients suddenly respond to the chemotherapy. Wow is crazy. So what this is telling us is there's something that the trillions of different bacteria in our guts are producing a metabolite of some kind, you know, basically a chemical at the end of the day that is bestowing upon us, you know, this magical property that we previously didn't have. And it can work in bad ways too. You know, there's there's people who have undergone fecal transplantation to actually treat a superinfection called sea diff. Okay, this is a colitis infection that many people who are on prolonged antibiotics suffer from, and this bacterial species called sea diff is naturally resistant to most antibiotics. What has what can cure ninety five percent of those cases is if you take intestinal bacteria from a healthy person put it into that person with the superinfection, superinfection has gone almost immediately. It's crazy that it works so well. However, there is a catch. The donors of this bacteria need to be screened very carefully because they can also transmit pathogens with these intestinal bacteria. And there's also a couple cases where allergies were transferred, and I think at least one case where depression was transferred. So, you know, it's a marvelous concept and I think it's going to be a really big piece of the future medical pie, if you will. I think this is going to be a mainstream therapy, maybe forty fifty years down the road, remodeling the microbiome, so to speak. But there are some caveats that are pretty serious we need to pay attention to if we're going to engage in this sort of therapeutic. But yeah, it's pretty fat. You know. Another thing that can make people take more risks is that parasite that we've talked about before called toxoplasma GANDHII that we study in my laboratory that has infected one. That's the one from cats. No, you get it. You get it from cat feces, not the urine. You can. You can drink all the cat urine you want, but it's the cat feces that that is dangerous.
So you just did our promo, Thanks for that.
Well, yeah, always happy to help. But yeah, the infected cats can spread it through their stool, okay, But you can also get it from raw under cooked meat, contaminated water, and there's multiple ways to get it. But the point I'm trying to make is that when you do get this, you don't really get sick. But the parasite will live in your brain for the rest of your life. And there are some really compelling studies that correlate the presence of that parasite in the brain to an increase in risk taking activity. You know, you're more brave, you're more reckless. So there's some really interesting things that are beyond genetics, because there's a genetic component to risk taking behavior as well that factor into the equation as to whether someone is timid or risk taking. But what in the world those bacteria are doing in that original experiment you described, We have no idea at the moment, but it opens the doors to some fascinating science.
Yeah, there's just so much we still I mean, there's so much we know now that we didn't, but there's still so much that we don't like. And it's interesting when we know what the out or what a potential outcome of some intervention or some treatment or whatever is, but we don't know the mechanism and we know you do this and this happens, but we don't know why. It's the That's the bit we need to get right, is the why.
But that's the great starting point, and that's why I love working in science because there is no end to the list of interesting observations that people have made, but each one opens up a whole new can of worms, a whole new you know, treasure trove of questions that we can then go address. And that's what's so endlessly fascinating about my job.
I know how many things have been discovered, you know. Accidentally I was talking to on the show today. We're recording this on the twenty third, which is Monday. I'm just blanking. What's it called? What's that I'm blanking? What's the erectile dysfunction drug called?
Oh? Viagra?
Yeah, viagra? Sorry. I was talking to Alex. Doctor Alex, who's a neurosurgeon, a friend of mine. He comes on the show. You two would have a great We should both get you on one day. But oh, he's great. He's great.
I love to pick the brain of a neuros scientists.
I say, what you did there, We'll put a whip cracking sound in there. But we were talking about how I mean that, like biographer example, was developed as I think a blood treasure pressure treatment or something similar, and it just had this weird byproduct that pharmaceutical companies went, hey, look what we did we just cured one of the greatest man problems of old time? Or not? Really right?
No, you're exactly right. It was a blood pressure medication. That was what it was designed to do. But as they started putting it into clinical trials, men started exhibiting this peculiar side effect of erections that would just appear spontaneously and wouldn't go away. And they started reporting these to the nurses that were taking care of them, and that obviously got back to phiser people, and I'm sure that people who were interested in high blood pressure were really disappointed. So geniuses in marketing or whatever department were like talk about, you know, taking lemons and making lemonade. My god, they turned into a blockbuster drug. They invented this, this syndrome that didn't even have a name in order to sell this pill that was going to go into the trash can because it was not doing what it was intended to do. Yeah. Wow, they ran away with that side effect.
It was.
It's quite a story.
And think about the potential, Like if it was efficient as a blood pressure treatment, they might have made one X, but with Viagra that made a thousand X, so probably a million X. You know, in terms of that. Yeah, exactly, lemons to lemonade a couple of quick questions. Have you got a little bit or have you got to go?
No, I'm good, this is fun.
So one of the realities of living in Australia. Well, this is my version. I've been here for a while now. Is that not all? But and maybe it's changing a little bit, but a lot of doctors hand out antibiotics like lollies.
Right, that's too bad.
This is not a good I'm not proud to say this, but I reckon I've been on antibiotics at least twenty times in my life, right, which is not I know that's not a great thing.
Well, that might not necessarily be a bad thing. Antibiotics are not evil per se, and sometimes they're life saving, but there is a tendency in Western civilization to over prescribe them.
Yeah, I feel that. So that's my point is just I don't I'm not asking a specific question, but I'd love you just to riff on antibiotics and give us like a bit of your thoughts on antibiotics. And yes, of course they obviously serve a very legitimate medical purpose. We know that, but in general, have a chat for us about that, if you would.
Yeah, yeah. I lecture on this to medical students every year. Antibiotics are some of the most precious drugs that have ever been developed. In fact, the first, well the one that most people ascribed to be the first, was penicillin, and it was literally called the miracle drug because it was saving people from fatal infections that we never had cure for before. These were truly miraculous treatments, and it's even been suggested that the advent of penicillin helped the Allies win World War Two. It was that important in order to save soldiers on the battlefield and soldiers from suffering from gangreen so they could get back on the not gangreen, gonorrhea. Actually they were suffering from gonorrhea. They wanted to clear that up so they can get them back onto the battlefield. But anyway, these are precious, precious drugs. But as Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, suggested during his Nobel Prize speech, if we're not careful with these drugs, the bacteria are going to evolve resistance to them, and boy was he right. Within five years of penicillin being on the market, we started seeing widespread resistance to that antibiotic, and that's a very scary thing. So antibiotic research exploded in the subsequent decades up until about the seventies, and then it started to taper off. And as a consequence, we had dozens and dozens of wonderful antibiotics that we could give patients and in many cases they cured their infection and in some cases it saved their lives. These are literally life saving drugs. So what's the problem if he over prescribed them. If we give them when they're not needed, a couple bad things happen. First of all, we create environments where bacteria can evolve resistance. Okay, the more often we use a drug, the higher the probability that the germ is going to develop resistance. And if it develops resistance to a series of antibiotics, we can literally run out of drugs to treat that pathogen. There will be nothing left in the medicine cabinet to get rid of that infection. So this leads to what's called the so called superbugs that are resistant to multiple antibiotics. That's a big problem. Right now. Sixty five thousand people die in the United States each year from these superinfections because doctors can only shrug their shoulders and say, we have no antibiotics left that will treat this infection. It's resistant to all of them, and unfortunately, pharmaceutical companies are not investing in new antibiotic research right now. So that's a whole other can of worms we can talk about later, but anti microbial resistance is one of the number one things we want to be aware of when we give antibiotics to people. The second problem relates to the microbiome that we talked about before, so there's been some suggestive studies. I don't want to say that this is decided science, but if we give antibiotics to infants and young children for prolonged periods of time, that disturbs their microbial environment in their gut, and this can lead to negative health consequences as they grow up. It's been linked to things like allergy, social behavior problems, inflammation, and things like that. So giving antibiotics, especially at a young age, can be life saving, but you want to make sure there are as short term as possible and that you're not giving them for a long time, just in case there are some long term effects associated with damage that the microbiotic receive. This can happen in adults too. I already mentioned earlier. People who are on prolonged antibiotics are more susceptible to see diff infections, and that's naturally resistant to antibiotics, and it takes some really drastic measures in order to treat this horrible infection. So those are some of the main reasons why we are a little more leery about giving antibiotics out liberally. They're life saving medicines, but we want to use them only when necessary. Antibiotics do nothing against viral infections, for example, So if you go to your doctor with your sneezing and sniffling and they don't know if it's a virus or a bacterial infection, antibiotics should not be given, Okay, it should. They should only be given if there's a high probability that the illness is in fact caused by a bacteria, Because if it's caused by a virus, those antibiotics are not going to do anything.
Wow, and we're just putting something in our body that that our body.
Doesn't Yeah, you're taking it unnecessarily and what goes into our body. Craig also goes into the sewer system, it goes into the waste which gets out into the environment. So a scientists have sampled many places around the environment, at least in the United States, and antibiotics, the ones that we make as human beings, are out there everywhere. And that's a really sad thing to see because if the antibiotics are out there in the environment, then there are germs out there that are resistant to those antibiotics, and then then when they start to infect animals and humans, we have a major problem on our hands.
Wow. Hey, one of the things that I've spoken about on this show, not with you, but with another regular guest. We have who's an Australian author and researcher, David Gillespie, who's a gun. He's written a book, a bunch of books, but he's obsessed with sociopathy, right, with sociopaths. And I wanted to ask you and this.
He should come over here and comment on our election.
Oh he's he's a genius, but he talks about toxic box bosses and a whole lot of stuff. But anyway, so if one end of that kind of spectrum, we've got sociopaths, psychopaths and At the other end of that scale, we've got, you know, compassion, people who are predisposed to being very kind, very compassionate. Do you think that Do you think that there's a genetic component to compassion and what we might broadly call morality and all that kind of stuff. Is that how moral someone is. Do you think that's more about whatever morality means or ethics, or do you think that's more about environment and upbringing or is there a genetic component to that?
Also, I don't think it's in either. Org there's clearly genes that have been implicated in aggressive and violent behavior. Okay, this has been shown pretty convincingly in mouse models and in some human families where aggression seems to be hereditary. Think like the generations of psychopaths that are born in certain family lineages that can be traced to genetic defects. But what those genetic defects really mean is that there is a change in the brain structure or the brain chemistry in these individuals that make them abnormal. Okay, but there's many, many other reasons that people can snap and go psychopathic, which include any sort of damage to the brain which can be brought upon by infection, trauma like concussions, old age can do it. You know, dementia can sometimes make people violent. There's a whole host of things that can happen to the brain that have nothing to do with genetics, because the brain was perfectly fine before it got injured in some way and then it produced psychopathic behavior. So, and that's not to say that the environment is not important at all, Craig. There's the phenomenon of epigenetics, and it's been shown very clearly that children who are exposed to adverse childhood experiences or aces as they're known in psychology, have a propensity not always, but they have a propensity grow up with behavioral problems, you know, antisocial behaviors, sometimes violent and aggression. And this has been linked to epigenetic changes that happen because of the environment they grew up in. These adverse childhood experiences can modify the gene activity of the genes that are responsible for managing stress, and they, as a consequence, have lifelong problems managing stressful situations, and this can lead to anxiety and even violence later on in life. Yeah, I go again, many different variables in the equation.
Yes, yes, yes, it just seems like I meete a lot of people who it's like I met. The reason I asked that was I was talking to a mum and her daughter the other day, and they're both like the nicest people, like just genuinely loving, kind, compassionate. They do all this work and they just don't want anything. And I'm like, if I wonder if the daughters like the mum because she grew up in that kind of energy, in that environment and that mindset, or there's a genetic component to that.
But you know, we should do we will take the We should take the intestinal bacteria of hippies and put it into a violent criminal and see if that doesn't change their behavior.
Well, if any of you hippies who listened to this, and any of you violent also listened to this, want to be involved in doctor Bill's study, so I want to read you something. The symptoms of the proposed type three diabetes condition may include symptoms of dementia, such as seen in early Alzheimer's disease. According to the Alzheimer's Disease Association, these symptoms include memory lost, blah blah blah. So this this this term type three diabetes. Have you heard of that Is that a thing or is that just is that just bullshit?
To be honest, I've never heard it before. It could be a thing. I'm only familiar with Tape one and two.
Yeah, me too, And I don't know that it's Yeah, there's just that they're talking about. I heard somebody the other day, and I don't think this is solid science, but they were talking about how essentially dementia is an expression of or a consequence of type three diabetes. Anyway, I'll do some more research, maybe you'll have a reason. We might talk about it next time. My last question for you is this, are some people more genetically inclined to enjoy exercise. I've spoken a lot of people over the years who go, it's just not my thing. I just don't enjoy it. I hate it. And I wonder if that's again, if that's truly just who they are genetically, that's just that's just part of them, or if that's just because I grew up in a family where that wasn't encouraged or supported.
I think it's completely possible that there could be a genetic component to someone's inclination to exercise or not. But I think what's more likely is there's probably a genetic component into the type of exercise that someone might want to enjoy. I mean, there's the best study that I can think of within this realm would be like the genes that govern fast twitching of muscles, and it governs the recovery time of muscles. And basically, if you have one variation of this gene, you're really good at distance or marathon or endurance type sports, but you're really crappy at those that require a real sudden burst of energy. The other genetic variants the opposite. The other variant says you're really good at short bursts of activity, You're a great sprinter. You know, you have better abilities with returned in terms of strength. That genetic variation is one of the clearest cut that I've seen. But that really doesn't get to the heart of motivating people to exercise. And I think what is happening there is that some people might want to fall back on genetics as an excuse, and that's the last thing we want anyone to do. People need to keep in mind is that exercise can be fun. I mean, it can be. If you enjoy running, get out there and run or walk. If not, try swimming. If not, try playing basketball or football. You know there's something out there that you're going to enjoy that will give you the exercise that you need. And I know very few people who just can't go walk around the block a few times, and you can do lots of things while you do that. You can listen to the U Project podcast during this walk, and what better way to exercise and entertain yourself at the same time. And if you're not a fan, and that's the new promo, but if you're not a fan of Craig Harper, first why uh? And then second, turn on a different podcast, or listen to a book or some music, whatever, float your boat, do whatever it takes. Find a regiment that works for you that's going to allow you to get in the exercise you need. It's really important underdersent.
We'll finish with this as we as the world is watching on it. The fucking shit show that is the upcoming election. What are your thoughts.
Who's gonna win? Who's going to wing our election? Yeah? I think it's our election forty less than forty five days away?
What is it November five or is that it?
Yeah? So it's coming up in early November and all of this will be said and done, you know, a day or two after that, so we'll see what happens.
Who's going to win.
Really, it's a really interesting cycle. Oh that kind of prediction. I'm really hoping for Harris to tell you the truth. If it is Trump, I fear not just for the States but for the world.
Yeah. Wow, it's it's it's it's entertaining and terrifying to look on from afar, but anyway, it's probably more terrifying to be in the middle of it over there.
Well, what surprises me is that roughly half this country is perfectly fine with a convicted felon running for office. That's just unfathomable to me. I just can't get over that.
Yeah, it's almost like that's almost like he's superpower is that he doesn't.
He's teflon man, He's teflon. Everything bounces off of it. It just slides off. People just create excuses for this guy. He can't formulate a complete sentence, and then people are saying, well, that's part of his genius, Like, no, that's that's dementia talking dude.
Yes, yes, Wow, it's just crazy.
The twisted knots that people are putting themselves in so they can make excuses for this guy. It's unbelievable to me.
Conformation biased doc work like we just we live in the echo chamber. Don't let the facts get in the way. Doctor Bill Sullivan is the author, pleased to meet me, jeans, germs, and the curious forces that make us who we are. Do you want to point our audience in any other direction? Doc?
Is there anything else? If people want to learn more about the book, or follow up on some of the writings that I've done, or other appearances on the You Project and other podcasts, they can go to my website, Author Bill Sullivan dot com. There's also a mailing list option you can sign up for if you want to sign up for that.
I think it's time for a new book, bro, I think it's five years. I think you're getting a little tardier. I think you better just get a hurry along.
I'm still getting some good mileage out of this one, so I don't want to equipse that. Okay, but hey, you know, tell the major publishers to come knock on my door and we'll see what we can do.
A com believe they're not knocking, all right.
I got ideas, man, I got ideas.
Of course you do, all right mate. We appreciate you, love having you on the show, and yeah, I value your contribution greatly. Thanks so much again.
Hey, always a pleasure to look forward to next time.
