Kind: captions
Language: en
If you're somebody who hasn't really
paid attention to your health for most
of your life and you feel kind of crummy
and you're like, I want to do something.
How do I do it? Which diet do I take?
You know, what supplement should I take?
What should I cut out of my life? What I
say is that what you got to realize is
that the body's hardwired with these
defenses. Shields up. What are the
things that take your shields down? What
are the things that turn off the smoke
alarm in your house that unlock the
doors? the bioactives and does amazing
things to your metabolism to your blood
vessels to lower inflammation and just
tip the odds in your favor towards
longevity with a simple cup of in the
morning. Something that was surprising
to us in the lab when we did this used
extracted from oats injected into a
wound. We also discovered that the wound
that healed was
[Music]
[Applause]
Okay. So, there's two kinds of body fat.
White fat and brown fat. White fat can
be subcutaneous. Subcutaneous means
under the skin, under your jaw, under
the skin of your jaw, under your arms,
on your thighs. That's subcutaneous.
White fat can also be visceral fat.
That's deep inside the tube of your
body. And then brown fat is not wiggly
jiggly like the other like white fat.
Brown fat is wafer thin and it's
plastered around our neck. It's behind
our breast bone, a little bit behind
between our shoulder blades, a little
bit in our belly. And brown fat actually
is metabolically active and it fires up
a process called thermogenesis to burn
down harmful visceral extra body fat. So
you can use good fat to burn down bad
fat, which is the amazing thing. Again,
fat is not universally bad. It's
actually quite good. One of the things
that I think is really important to know
is that when you've got too much
visceral fat, you got too much
inflammation, but you can actually use
your brown fat to try to um control that
to try to burn it down. Brown fat, by
the way, is activated by foods and
activated by cold temperatures. By the
way, brown fat was discovered in
hibernating animals. Um there was a
zoologologist uh who was looking at
plucked out a uh kind of a muskrat
looking animal from hibernation and
dissected it and found that there was
this brown lump that was between its
shoulder blades and nobody knew what it
was. They just and the more researchers
and biologists and zoologologists looked
at animals that were hibernating they
they found this very consistently. In
fact, they called that brown mass first
a
hibernoma. Hyper
hibernating a mass we don't know what it
does. Okay. Um a hibernoma. That's what
it was known until 1930s. In the 1930s
at UCLA, a researcher who in the
beginning we didn't have microscopes.
Then we had microscopes and we had
really great microscopes and all of a
sudden in 1930s the researcher uh at
UCLA said, you know, that hiburnoma is
actually made of fat cells. And those
fat cells are brown. And the reason
they're brown is because they have a lot
of mitochondria in it. Mitochondria
being the fuel cells of our body. Like
they're the batteries of our body.
They're packing the they're the energy
generators in our cell. And mitochondria
are very rich in iron. And when iron is
oxidized, it turns brown. Like a pile of
nails that you've put outside your door
and the outdoors. Silver nails will turn
brown.
Brown fat packed with mitochondria,
energy generating, packed with iron,
oxidizes, turns brown. That's why brown
fat is brown. And and so what happens is
that in cold temperatures, like in
hibernation, in winter, the brown fat
fires up and that's what keeps these
hibernating animals warm throughout the
winter so they don't freeze to death.
Now, humans, we can actually use that to
our advantage. We can actually activate
our brown fat. Cold bath will do it. um
sleeping in cold cooler warms will
actually start to activate it as well.
When that by the way that when those
mitochondria fire up, they are burning
energy. You know where they draw that
energy from? From your white fat, from
your visceral fat first. So you want
brown fat, good fat to burn down bad
fat, visceral fat, white fat. You want
to sleep in a cool room or you want to
go into a cold bath. And there are lots
of foods that will also you can eat
foods to activate your brown fat to burn
down harmful fat. Coffee is a beverage
made with coffee beans. Coffee beans are
plant-based foods. Coffee beans contain
many polyphenols including chlorogenic
acid. Chlorogenic acid is
anti-inflammatory. Chlorogenic acid also
turns on your brown fat. So it activates
it triggers your brown fat and it causes
your brown fat the mitochondria to fire
up undergo thermogenesis to burn down
harmful white fat or visceral fat. So
cup of coffee a day or actually the dose
is actually about three to four cups of
coffee a day will definitely cause your
brown fat, good fat to burn down your
bad fat, your harmful fat, your visceral
fat. There's a confusion saying uh
that's been translated into the Japanese
that they mantra which is harahachi
which means stop eating when you're 80%
full. The most dangerous fat,
inflammatory fat, is a fat that builds
up in the inside the tube of your body.
So, if you think of your body like a
poster tube, okay, inside that tube, if
you were to slice this body in half and
look at a cross-section, all right, it's
a tube. You can fill all you any of
these uh interstitial areas between
organs, you can pack with fat. So, think
about you're going to FedEx something to
somebody overnight mail a vase or or a
glass or bottle wine or whatever. You're
going to pack it full of peanuts and
you're going to put into a package.
Well, look, you can get a big box and
put a lot more peanuts on or you can
take a skinny box that will just fit it
and you'll put it in. So, it doesn't
really matter the size of your tube. You
could be a skinny person and you could
pack it with a lot of peanuts, in this
case, visceral fat. And that's what
you're talking about in a skinny person
with too much visceral fat, too many
peanuts packed in there. And that is a
result of overconumption of calories,
that fat, that energy, the fuel tanks
building up within a skinny body. Yeah.
And that's what we call skinny fat.
Fasting is good and fasting is very old.
It's not just a recent trend. Uh if you
go back thousands of years, I mean, if
you look at some of mo some of the
oldest religions in the world, fasting
was part of their ritual that would
happen, you know, throughout the year.
Now, people go, "Well, what about
intermittent fasting? How long should I
fast?" I try to tell people there is no
magic formula for success for fasting
because we're all different and our
bodies are different, our lifestyles are
different. There's no universal fasting
protocol that's going to be
one-sizefits-all. However, I will tell
you an easy way to fast because fasting
is very natural to us is just paying
attention to what you do every day and
be mindful. So, when you're sleeping,
you're not eating. When you're not
eating, you're fasting. So, I try to be
reassuring. So, guess what? You're
fasting every day anyway. When you fall
asleep, you're fasting. All right? And
the longer you're not eating and
sleeping, the more time your metabolism,
the Ferrari of your of your metabolism
of your body can switch gears to burn
down any extra fat that's accumulated.
Now, if you've been eating whatever you
want over time, you probably built up a
lot of extra fat. Now, from your scans,
apparently not. You don't have too much.
All right? But you if you you're fasting
regularly, you're burning down all that
extra stuff. Okay? And so then how do
you optimize that without having to
calendarize your fast and figure out,
you know, how to uh schedule your meals?
I try to make things
um as scientific but as practical as
possible. And so I tell people you want
to really get involved in intermittent
fasting. Easiest way is take advantage
of what you're doing already. And that
is if you're sleeping, try to sleep
eight hours a day. So how do you sleep
eight hours a day? I don't know. I said
if you go to bed at 11 o'clock, get up
at seven o'clock, you get to eight hours
of sleep. All right, we know that that's
the m the sweet spot for your brain, for
your metabolism, for you know, for
burning out harmful body fat. How do you
get more out of that? How do you turn
that eight hours of fasting into more?
Well, what I say is that the night
before when you're eating dinner, let's
say you eat from 7 to 8:00 in the
evening, what I say is that when you
finish dinner and you put your dishes
away in the sink or in the dishwasher,
that's it. No more eating. Stop eating.
Nothing until the next day. Um, if
you're going to have dessert or
whatever, squeeze it in there. Don't
take a snack with you and sit by the
television or, you know, absent some
minily gobble food and don't before you
be you go to bed eat a big chunk of
whatever. Okay, now you got 3 hours
before you go to bed at 11:00. Again,
this is all a theoretical model. 3 hours
of not eating. Your blood sugar goes
down. Your your insulin goes down
because your blood you're not eating
anymore. All right. Now, your metabolism
shifts gears 3 hours earlier. Okay. Now
you've got those eight hours plus three
hours, you got 11 hours. Now when you
get up in the morning, okay, let's say
you get up at 7 in the morning, don't do
what our moms told us to do, right? So
when if you were like me growing up, my
mom when I got up like hurry up and get
to breakfast and eat something so you
have enough energy to actually go to
school and learn something. All right?
So that's I I developed this instinct of
actually just getting up and eating as
quickly as I can, getting some breakfast
in. What if I told you that what I do
now when I get up in the morning, I
deliberately don't do what my mother
told me to do. I get up, I take my time
getting ready, uh, I get dressed, um, I
don't eat anything right away. In fact,
if I'm dressed and I'm ready for the
day, I might go check it out. I might go
outside and take a look at the outside.
I might go for a quick walk or check my
emails or I might read a chapter of a
book or read a few pages of a book. I
wait at least an hour before I eat
anything. Now, let's do the math. Uh,
Stephen, 8 o'clock, stop eating. 11
o'clock, go to bed. Three hours. 11 to
7, 8 hours. 3 + 8 is equal to 11 hours.
I got 11 hours of fasting. Now, I get up
and I don't eat for another hour. Boom.
12 hours of fasting. Just like that.
Okay. Now, if you really want to do that
16hour fasting, 168, just skip breakfast
and get to lunch. And as long as you
don't overeat at lunch, which does
require a little discipline after you go
for your fasting window that you don't
overeat and you're eating the right
foods, that's how you actually get to do
intermittent fasting in the most natural
way possible. simplicity is actually
something that seems to be a recurrent
theme in people who live long and live
well, you know, and so, you know, I love
the fact that you brought up this idea
of like the typical breakfast where, you
know, you're you're stacking the
drive-thru and, you know, we didn't even
talk about like how you get your uh
coffee, you know, with the with the
pumpkin flavor and all the whipped cream
and and you know, your uh um your
convection oven, you know, ultra
processed breakfast sandwich and all
that other kind of stuff that you know
we we see this all the time. I'll tell
you what I've seen. I've seen in some of
the healthiest people that come from the
healthy cultures, they live pretty
simple lives. A great example is the
people I've known from Greece, for
example, they start their breakfast with
basically a simple cup of coffee and
maybe a piece of fruit and that's it.
It's really really simple. All right?
It's and and maybe some Greek yogurt.
All right? But and not a lot of it. like
a little tiny cup of it with some uh
crushed um pistachios, maybe a little
bit of cut fruit into it and that's it.
And I actually embarked upon that myself
and found myself feeling so much better
by not loading in calories and loading
in additives and loading in all that
other stuff. Listen, I grew up like most
people who are probably watching or
listening to this, you know. Hey, it's
really great to have a big thing of big
topping of whipped cream with like all
these fancy things on it. Like it feels
like holidays, you know. But to be
honest with you, simple has always made
me feel better. I start the day with a
cup of coffee. Um, and by the way,
coffee, as I have continued to conclude,
it's one of the holy trinity beverages,
water, tea, and coffee. No matter what
field you're looking at, whether you're
looking at cancer, whether you're
looking at diabetes, whether you're
looking at longevity, um whether you're
looking at uh overall fitness, coffee
seems to be good for you. Okay? I was
told in medical school, you know, coffee
is not that great for the heart. You
know, it could actually give you
arrhythmias and there's too much
caffeine in it. The bioactives in
coffee, which you would find as a common
denominator from Ethiopia, which is
where we think coffee originally came
from, to Greek coffee, which is actually
Turkish coffee, is pretty loaded with
caffeine. So, you got to be careful
about that. But it's also loaded with
these polyphenols like chlorogenic acid.
And chlorogenic acid does amazing things
to your metabolism, to your blood
vessels, uh to lower inflammation and
just tip the odds in your favor towards
longevity with a simple cup of coffee in
the morning. Oatmeal uh which is you
know basically uh cooked or steamed or
boiled oats actually contains a lot of
bioactives u from oats and this is
recent research I've done. We presented
at our medical conferences where we took
whole oats, the kind you have in
aminoskin cream and the kind you would
have in oatmeal. Uh we've extracted out
a the concentration of the bioactives.
So what are the bioactives in oats?
Well, one of them is called
avenanthramide. Okay. The other one's
betalucan, which is the same thing you'd
find in mushrooms and barley. Two really
potent uh substances. And we decided to
do some medical research by testing what
can these oat bioactives do. So people
talk about inflammation and all that
stuff. I'm a scientist, so I wanted to
see for myself. So we collaborated with
a group out of the University of Arizona
um and a standard model to look at wound
healing. Now I I have a background in
biotech and wound healing is a big
problem in people with diabetes, in
nursing homes, in the intensive care
units. You got skin breakdown, bed
sores. Uh people with diabetes wind up
having wounds in their feet that lead to
they get gangrness and they have to get
amputated. So one of my passions but
also areas of expertise is how can we
support healing wound healing faster,
right? So we talk about healing, right?
So okay, oat bioactives if you inject
them into the wound in the border of a
wound and this is a lab experiment. We
were so surprised it doubled the rate of
healing. It zipped the wound shut. And
then when we did the medical research to
the food as medicine research, we did a
deep dive into the tissue that healed.
And what we found oat
bioactives completely suppressed
inflammation. Bingo. Box checked. Prove
it. Okay. I saw it myself. Number one.
Number two, it uh generated more healing
blood vessels. That's my wheelhouse.
Angioenesis, how the body grows blood
vessels. Oats can actually stimulate
healing by nurturing those blood vessels
that we need for healing and lowering
inflammation. And then something that
was surprising to us is that in the lab
when we did this used extractive
promotes, injected into a wound, doubled
the healing. Um we also discovered that
the wound that healed was scarless. M
and scarless healing is a holy grail for
anybody, any surgeon, any medical device
company, any pharmaceutical company. We'
never seen this before. And we wouldn't
have discovered it if we didn't actually
take what mother nature had, pull it out
and put it into a standard medical test
system. This is what I, you know, like
people always, you know, talk about food
as medicine. I'm I'm one of the dudes
that actually does it. And so when we
looked at it, how could you get scarless
healing? I mean, like we looked under
the microscope and this baby had this
healed wound had no scar, no
inflammation, plenty of nourishing blood
vessels, but it had no scar. When you
actually looked at the collagen, and I
know this is the topic that, you know,
you you've also talked about, and we can
talk about it some more about collagen.
Collagen is normally in tissue. It's a
it's a beautiful woven pattern. You
know, if you've ever had a a beautiful
oriental rug or tapestry on your wall or
your window like that is that's weaving.
And when collagen is woven perfectly,
there's no scar. So, we looked at this.
There was no scar. The collagen was
woven perfectly in the healed wound with
more blood vessels and no inflammation.
Okay? And then we took it one step
further. We found that the oats
bioactives recruited stem cells. The
body's hardwired with these defenses.
shields up, right? That's what we want
to do because shields already normally
up. You want to raise them higher. But
what about what are the things that take
your shields down, right? What are the
things that turn off the smoke alarm in
your house that unlock the doors? Excess
sodium, too much salt, which it can be
present in a lot of restaurant foods.
People eat out a lot, go to restaurants
all the time. You ever you ever go to
the back of a kitchen of a restaurant to
see how they're salting seasoning their
food? patrons love salty food. It makes
food taste really great. There's a, you
know, our brains uh respond very well to
salty food. That high sodium levels
actually speeds up accelerates our
cellular aging. So, we actually age
faster, but it also um is a huge wear
and tear on our health defenses.
specifically our circulation, our our
blood vessels, our androgenesis system
is taken down by excess salt. While
you're sleeping really deeply, your
metabolism is also burning down fat. So,
you think that you're not working out
during the night? You're right. You're
not actually exercising. But in fact,
your metabolism is burning fat because
while you're sleeping and your insulin
levels don't need to be high because
you're not eating, insulin levels go
down. Your metabolism shifts gears. I I
sort of give people the analogy. It's
like your your body is a race car,
sports car, like a Ferrari. During the
day, you are in gear to drive,
accumulate speed, and and you're you're
revving your engines. At night, you
shift gears where you're actually
burning down fat. You don't need to
accumulate more fuel. Now, you're
burning down the fuel. So, when you're
sleeping, you're actually burning away
fat. But when you don't sleep well or
you don't sleep long enough, you're not
burning down that fuel. That fuel
accumulates. Day or two of not good
enough sleep, that's that's okay. Think
about flying overseas, getting some jet
lag. You got to catch up. Once you get
catch up, you feel better. All right,
but think about this like day in and day
out. Chronically stressed people are
never getting good sleep. Add a little
booze, alcohol to the to the equation.
You can kind of see the problems that
are going to build up. Your brain's
going to be foggy. Your metabolism is
going to be out of whack. You're not
burning as much fat from the calories
that you ate during the day. Now,
inflammation starts to uh rise in your
body. And that inflammation really takes
down your health defenses and now you're
much more vulnerable. So in your own
example of where chronic stress leads to
poor sleep and then you get sick, no
surprise. The Japanese uh demographics
uh show uh consistently some of the uh
oldest, longest living people, you know,
they tend first and foremost. Okay,
before we talk about what they eat, let
me tell you what they don't do. They
don't
overeat. And I'm giving a purposeful
pause there because
overeing caloric loading, okay, uh is
very damaging to our metabolism. It
actually counters uh our ability for
long to to live long. It actually speeds
up our cellular aging. It's it it sets
up inflammation. So, by cutting down on
your caloric intake every day, that's
one of the things is that the Japanese
culture, the the the culinary and
gastronomic approach to food in Japan
tends to uh favor modesty. Uh uh uh
undereating rather than overeating. And
one thing I want to do for anybody
listening to this is to try to bring a
little bit of of discipline and clarity
to this idea of the word of the use of
the word processed and ultra processed
because I think it I think we you know
those of us who talk about it all the
time um we understand what we're what
we're trying to say but I think for
people are listening sometimes there's
some confusion what's you know if if if
what's processed versus also processed
and what I tell people is that we very
rarely eat raw ingredients uh one at a
time maybe ancept ception is a salad
bar, you know, or or a fruit plate, you
know, you're eating one your every fork
full is like one thing. A little thing
of lettuce, a little tomato, a little
watermelon or a pineapple. Most of the
time the foods that we eat, the food I
enjoy is cooked, prepared, you know,
whether it's Chinese food, Indian food,
Mexican food, Spanish food, Italian
food, it's prepared. And that means that
you're taking raw ingredients and doing
something with it, which is processing
it. So, you ever see how they make
homemade pasta? Get a big amount of
flour, make a little hole in it, like a
volcano uh crater, crack a couple of
eggs, and then just use your fingertips
to start working it until it actually
firms up, and then you roll it out.
Okay, so that's like that's like grandma
in Italy making pasta the way it's been
done for thousands of years, right?
That's processed. You're processing the
food minimally processed. A lot of
minimally processed. But but the point
is that like homemade like that with
fresh ingredients could be technically
considered processed, but that's not
what we're talking about when we talk
about the foods that we should be more
careful about. Now, you know, there's so
much discussion about the food industry.
And I want to maybe touch on that just a
little bit, but ultrarocessed foods are
not the foods you make at home, you
know, like manipulate at home to cook
into turn into a meal. Those are the
ones are made in a big factory and um
where machines are extruding ingredients
and converting ingredients into forms
and shapes like animal crackers for
example that wouldn't naturally occur in
nature and then add lots of chemicals to
them. Emulsifiers, preservatives,
artificial coloring, artificial
flavoring, added sugar, that's another
one. Okay. Um and and this is all
transparently on the ingredient label
but hidden in plain sight to the
consumer. And so ultrarocessed foods are
a choice that many of us have been I
would say conditioned to make to reach
for because of how we grew up in our
society. Something out of a box that
tastes really great and it's sweet uh
and it's not very expensive. So maybe
your mom bought a lot of it and it's in
your pantry maybe for months and months
and months. Like food doesn't not
supposed to last that long. Okay. And
it's all engineered for convenience. Uh
uh shelf life longer it lasts. Better is
for consumers, so to speak. Um that's
what that's what they make us believe or
certainly for the grocery store. Um and
and it's cheap and it's available,
right? And then it's engineered to
really be make you crave it. When we are
born, we are all like laptops, new brand
new laptops you take out of the box. The
it's perfectly designed. They all look
the same. You plug it into the wall. The
when you start it up, the operating
system is supposed to work exactly the
same way. Okay? And yes, there are some
genetic differences, of course, but
lifestyle winds up being, you know, 80%
or more dictating our fate. And our fate
starts when we are young. So a lot of
these uh early exposures that we
actually have wind up not only
developing habits but also developing
cellular fingerprints that we carry with
us in the to the decades that we wind up
living. Now, the good news, it's never
too late to actually revert back to your
own operating system, which is the what
do you this is why I tell people, you
know, if if you're somebody who hasn't
really paid attention to your health for
most of your life and you feel kind of
crummy and you're like, you know what,
it's time to own up to this and I want
to actually change myself. I want to do
something. How do I do it? Which diet do
I take? You know, what supplement should
I take? Um, what should I cut out of my
life? I mean that's a typical thing that
I often hear from from somebody who's
desperate to improve their situation and
they're overwhelmed especially in
today's world u and then they and then
of course then they invoke like oh is
there a big conspiracy around me and I'm
trapped in a you know I'm trapped in
somebody else's nightmare. You know what
what I say is that it's a very complex
situation health and food. All right and
and you know you addressed uh you you
started to address some of the nuances
and complexities. What I say is that
what you got to realize is that we all
have it hardwired into in ourselves to
be able to have that operating system to
get back to health. Our metabolism knows
how to actually be healthy. We know how
to lose body fat. We know how to
actually regulate blood sugar for the
most part. We know how to actually keep
our joints healthy. We know how to keep
our brains healthy. That's actually what
comes out of the box. That's our
operating system. Now, over the course
of many years, we derail our operating
system. You know, it's like your laptop.
You keep it too hot. You drop it. You
download crazy things on it. It's got
some viruses on it. Listen, you might
keep your computer, your laptop in
perfect shape, if I'm careless and I
drop it and I do all those crazy things
to it. I don't have any kind of hygiene
on it. At some point, I'm going to
regret it. I'm going to say, you know
what? My laptop's running really slowly.
I got all these viruses. My screen
doesn't work so well. What can I do? I
feel overwhelmed. And what I always tell
people, like in your body, go back to
basics. Clean it up. Go back to the
operating system. All right. And start
from there. Hey, if you like that video,
then you're going to love this one.
Check it out.