The Nutrition Expert: 93% of Adults Have Metabolic Issues (What Your Body Is Trying to Tell You)

the more research the more spending the more Specialties the more drugs and the more surgery we do the sicker we are getting the confusion is the point that is so scary she is one of the world's foremost experts in metabolic Health Dr Casey means what is my body afraid of we have to be asking that question before we reach for the Advil something wild that very few people know is that hey everyone I've got some huge news to share with you in the last 90 days 79.4% of our audience came from viewers and listeners that

are not subscribed to this channel there's research that shows that if you want to create a habit make it easy to access by hitting the Subscribe button you're creating a habit of learning how to be happier healthier and more healed this would also mean the absolute world to me and help us make better better bigger brighter content for you in the world subscribe right now the number one Health and Wellness podcast Jett J shett the one the only Jett hey everyone welcome back to on purpose the place that you come to become happier healthier and

more healed today's guest is someone that I've been looking forward to have on the show for around a year now because I know that listening to this conversation is going to increase the good energy in your life if you're someone who wants to invite better energy better frequencies into your life this episode is for you if you're someone who wants to understand how you can improve your health both physical and mental this conversation is for you and if you're one of those people who started to think there's too much there's overwhelming information there's too much

data there's too much to digest this conversation is for you because we're going to simplify what our biggest health challenges are today I'm talking to the one and only Casey means MD a Stanford trained physician and co-founder of levels a health technology company with the mission of reversing the world's metabolic Health crisis Casey devotes her life to tackling the root cause of why Americans are sick she's been featured in The New York Times the New Yorker The Wall Street Journal Forbes Women's Health and many more today we're talking about Casey's book which is all about

metabolic Health called good energy if you don't have this book you're going to want to read it as you hear this conversation go and grab your copy right now welcome to on purpose Casey means Casey thank you so much for doing this thank you so much for having me Jay it's such a joy as I said I've been following your work for around a year probably even more now and I said to my team I was like I need to talk to Casey I feel like she has insights that we need to understand and I

want to dive straight into it you talk about you say this you say don't trust the doctors you say don't trust the science s and you say don't even trust me who do we trust the answer to that question is that we need to start trusting ourselves we are living in an environment right now in the United States where chronic illness is rampant across our children across adults across the elderly we know that something is not quite right we're spending over $4 trillion dollar on health care every year and our population is getting sicker we're

getting heavier we're getting more depressed we're even becoming more infertile life expectancy is going down and it seems that the more we do the sicker we're actually getting so my call to action for people is that we really need to start trusting ourselves and what do I what do I mean by that we are living in a time where there is information tools and technology that exists that can give every single person the power to understand their bodies in ways that has never been possible throughout all of human history there are Technologies that let us

see inside our bodies every single day like wearables and biosensors and direct consumer lab testing that can literally answer the question for us am I healthy what do I need to do differently to achieve Optimal Health and it can sometimes sound scary to say oh my gosh I shouldn't trust the Health Care System but we've produced Miracles but a key thing we need to understand is that a lot of the Miracles that we think of when we think of the Healthcare System they are for acute issues they are are things historically like infectious disease uh

and emergencies and traumas where that thing is going to kill you immediately and when the Health Care system intervenes in that situation it's miraculous and and when you look at the increase in life expectancy over the last 100 years it is very much predicated on cures for acute issues things like sanitation practices emergency surgeries antibiotics and the like but if you if you actually take those causes death out of the out of the equation life expectancy hasn't actually changed that much in the past 100 years unfortunately though in the past 50 years or so chronic

conditions these conditions that last for years and years and years they have gone up exponentially this is the things like cancer and heart disease and stroke and Alzheimer's dementia and depression and chronic pain that are just absolutely plaguing our country and our leading causes of death and unfortunately in the way our Healthcare System is designed right now as we actually spend more money and more effort on addressing and treating these conditions the rates of these conditions are actually going up so a chapter in my book is called trust yourself not your doctor and the point

of this is that when it comes to Chronic conditions unfortunately the Health Care system does not deserve our trust because the treatment of these chronic conditions has been an abject failure and I think the easiest way to kind of really paint the picture of all of this and how I've come to this somewhat radical conclusion is actually to just share a personal story if you don't mind it's actually about my mother and I think it really I think this story is something that most Americans can probably see themselves in um I think it really is

emblematic of why our Health Care system is broken and a path forward so my mother her story really starts when she was about 40 and she had me and I was actually a 12b baby I was born very very large one of the largest babies of the hospital i' ever seen and my mom had gained about 70 pounds during her pregnancy and in her 40s she had a lot of trouble losing the baby weight in her late 40s she went through Perry menopause and menopause it was very difficult for her she had hot flashes she

had sleep symptoms the doctor said there's very little we can do about this she moves into her 50s she starts develop high cholesterol high LDL the doctor says this is very normal for people your age gives her a Statin very common medication that's prescribed 200 million times per year in the United States later she gets into her late 50s she starts developing high blood pressure she gets an Ace inhibitor also very common it's almost like a right of passage these days to get a diagnosis of high blood pressure she moves into her 60s and her

blood her blood sugar starts Rising the doctor says you now meet the criteria for pre-diabetes but again this is very common it's it's a pre- disease and he gives her a prescription for metformin she takes it religiously again very common a medication that's prescribed 90 million times per year in the United States then she turns in 70 and she's 72 years old and she's taking a hike with my dad they took a nightly hike uh outside their home on the coast of Northern California and she has a really sharp pain in her belly and it

lasted for a few days so she went to the doctor and the doctor said this is pretty atypical for you you've never had this before let's get a CT scam and later that night she gets a text message with the results of her CT scam and the result said that she had stage four widely metastatic pancreatic cancer and 13 days lat she was dead and this was almost 3 years ago to the day and at the time of her death she was seeing what people would arguably say are the best doctors in the country she

was getting executive physicals at Mayo Clinic she was seeing doctors at Stanford and paloalto Medical Foundation she was getting quote unquote the best care in the country and they looked at my family when this happened and they saidwe are so sorry this is so unlucky and the question I have is is it really unlucky and in our conventional Paradigm in our conventional Health Care system in the west the the system that I was trained in at Stanford Medical School it does seem unlucky the pancreatic cancer seems almost random and she had all these things crop

up and you know she was getting standard of care and actually excellent care she was getting what the guidelines said the medication she was taking them people were turning little knobs on her bi markers and then the cancer cropped up and it just seemed so out of the blue she was 72 and actually many doctors would have said she's healthy because she was on all her medications but the vision that I really you know want to put forward and the reason I think we need to start trusting ourselves more is that through a different framework

we actually see as we look at the underlying root cause physiologic connections between everything my mom was dealing with and so many other things that are plaguing Americans today in and torturing Our Lives they are fundamentally rooted in the same thing and that thing is what I present as what I call bad energy in the book otherwise known as metabolic dysfunction a fundamental problem with how our 40 trillion cells produce energy to let them do their work in the body and the beauty of why we can trust ourselves more in the healthcare system is because

we have tools now to our metabolic Health in great granularity for ourselves and unfortunately the Health Care system because it is focused on a siloed intervention based system based on really looking at all these diseases weeds that Croc up crop up that we play wack with um with drugs and interventions we focus on that instead of actually focusing on the underlying bad energy that's connecting so many of the conditions that we're facing today and this is sign science based this is based on the research when you really look at almost every uh chronic symptom chronic

disease facing Americans today they are directly linked back to metabolic dysfunction and that is something that each of us can understand um with simple tools and simple understanding in our lives now but unfortunately is not a paradigm in which the modern American Medical system operates so they are going to miss these early warning signs like my mom had the enormous baby literally called FAL fetal macrosomia big bodied baby that is a direct sign of metabolic dysfunction bad perimenopausal and menopausal symptoms inability to lose the baby weight high cholesterol high blood sugar uh high blood pressure

and ultimately Cancer all of them are connected so this is really a vision for healthcare about empowerment about learning to understand your own body about not waiting unfortunately for the Monumental size of the health your system to turn the arrow because right now unfortunately it's not incentivized to and so it's really up to us to understand this core physiology of our own bodies and work to improve it and it's actually so much simpler than people think it's something that each of us can do and it can really unleash that internal metabolic life force within ourselves

to help us reach our highest purpose absolutely thank you so much for sharing that story too I mean hearing that it's it's heartbreaking because I assume you believe it's avoidable I assume you believe and what you're sharing here the vision is that it didn't have to go that way and I can imagine with what you know now and what you're sharing that can be hard to deal with for anyone who's listening or watching right now who almost thinks it's gone too far how much can what you're sharing help reverse certain impacts I think one of

the best ways that I can actually address that question and the answer to the question is yes so much of this is reversible is to actually share a Dost statement which is that living beings are processes not entities so we have been very much I think in our honestly despir Western culture we've we've we look at the body as a thing a thing that is separate from everything else in the world and a thing that is static and thing that lives and dies and the reality of the biology and the chemistry is that that's just

could not be farther from the truth we are a dynamic swirl of matter that's constantly giving and exchanging and taking matter and energy from the environment in a constant process and the reason this is relevant to the reversal of chronic diseases that every single day we get the opportunity through our choices to rebuild the next version of this process and we literally eat 70 metric tons of food in our lifetime 70 metric tons and that is the material from the environment from the earth from the cosmos that we are taking in through eating and digestion

to literally 3D print the next version of our body and when we 3D print a body that has what it needs that has the right building blocks the right chemical molecular Messengers and food to essentially Express a healthy version of the body we have that and so I think thinking of ourselves as a process a process that is constantly making choices to build a healthier version of the body we realize that we are we can absolutely have a different vision for our future than what we have today our our genetic code is and our cells

are there to build and produce and express the healthiest version of ourself possible but health is fun fundamentally a matching problem if we match the needs and expectations of the cells with what we are giving them through molecular information of food through energetic information through sunlight through the words we expose ourselves to um through how we interact with those around us and how and the physical signals of exercise and movement if we give the cells what they're needing we can express health so um so the answer is absolutely yes and when you look at the

data what you actually see is that many many people who are learning about the science of metabolic health and ways that we can shape our diet and lifestyle to improve our health what we find is that people are putting their type 2 diabetes into emission people are slowing the rate of uh how quickly Alzheimer's is developing uh people can of course reverse obesity and so it's really about um giving yourselves what they need and expect to essentially build the healthiest version of themsel uh moving forward and I would also just add when I was in

medical school one of the most impactful things that I saw was our histology class which is the science of basically taking sections of the body like cut up sections of the body and putting them on slides and looking on the microscope and what you find there is that this concept of like we live and then we die is actually so false because when you look at a tissue a human tissue under the microscope what you actually see is that in one piece of tissue there are cells being born there are cells dying there are cells

that are aging it's all happening and and I think that's actually really hopeful because I think there's this um there's an existential grip of anxiety that lives within us as westerners um and it's an existential anxiety about death like unlike so many other cultures Eastern cultures indigenous American cultures so many other cultures we are petrified of death we don't have a curiosity about it and I think the Health Care System actually really weaponizes our our profound fear of death against us because if you can convince people that you live and you die and that's it

you can essentially get them do to do anything to avoid that fate which is unavoidable and it's also just happening kind of all the time and if you can hold a pill or a surgery or something in front of them that makes them think you know this is my salvation you can get them to do anything and another message that I have in the book is that part of our journey in health and our journey in healing is actually to unlock ourself from that existential anxiety and to sort of see what the system is using

and what it's using against us to control us to turn us into desperate consumers looking for anything to amarate our existential suffering and when we rise above that and have curiosity with it um I think we actually make much better health decisions um because we realize that fundamentally I think we are Eternal Limitless processes in constant continuity with everything else in the universe and I think frankly that's just the material reality of it but I think there's also a spiritual Dimension to it too that can help us really unlock our health from a sense of

abundance rather than from Fear I mean that's such a fascinating perspective and obviously one that I so deeply feel connected to and aligned with whether it's the philosophies of reincarnation or past lives or whether it's karma whether it's even the simple understanding of as energetic beings we're constantly as you're saying a cell is in motion and and I want to get to that but I wanted to just clarify because I think you were doing it there but I want to clarify for anyone who's listening and thinking Jay what is metabolic health and how does it

make sense in my daily life like I think we've heard the term metabolism and most of us think about think about it as like how quickly we burn energy but it's like what is metabolic Health in a very simple way and how can we make sense of it as someone who's not educated in the field yeah metabolic health is fundamentally how we convert food energy to Cellular energy so we have again like 40 ion human cells and every single one of those cells needs cellular energy to function we have 40 trillion cells each of those

cells is doing like trillions of chemical reactions every second and all of those need to be paid for and they need to be paid for with energy and that's energy that we convert from food energy through our mitochondria to Cellular energy which is called ATP and the bubbling up of all of those chemical reactions all of which require energy to happen the bubbling up of that is our lives that's what it is death is the absence of metabolism without that underlying life force in ourselves we'd literally just fall apart and melt that's what death is

so anything that hurts our mitochondria hurts our metabolic functioning is like essentially inching closer to the Grave it's like being a little bit dead while we're alive and unfortunately right now 93% of American adults are dealing with metabolic dysfunction the modern world has changed so much in the past 100 years on every level industrialized ultr processed food making up 70% of our calories we're getting two hours less per sleep two hours less of sleep per night than we were 100 years ago we are Outdoors about 7% of our time in a 24-hour period we are

sitting the vast majority of our time there are 80,000 or more synthetic chemicals that have entered our food water Air Supply personal care products we're also living in this Thermon neutral existence now with no big swings in temperature so that thermal energy signal to our cells has completely been cut off we have really little heat really little cold we like it at 72 degrees so every Vector of the environment in which our cells are living in has changed and the message that I want to share is that when you really dig deep into the science

the way that all those changes in our environment are actually harming our health is by directly hurting the mitochondria that beautiful part of our cell that converts food energy to Cellular energy to power our lives so metabolism is our life force metabolism is the process of creating the energy that powers everything we do how we move how we love how we think all of it and I like to think of it actually in like a bigger picture to and a picture that inspires me so much to want to share about the mitochondria share about metabolism

which is that if we think of food as the environment and we think of food as this sort of structure in the cosmos and we also think of food for what it really is which is which is plant matter that has taken photons that have travel traveled 92 million miles through space from a star hit the Chlor inside of plants and then has been converted that Photon that light energy has been converted into the carboncarbon bonds of plants it's literally stored light in these bonds of plants we either eat that or animals we eat eat

that and fundamentally it channels into US unlocking the Sun's light energy in our mitochondria so that we can have the thoughts feelings the cre creativity to spread our light in this world our personal light and to reach our highest purpose and so we are the mitochondria the metabolic Machinery is fundamentally the end product the the the machine that unlocks the sun's energy within us and something wild that very few people know is that mitochondria are actually light emitting organel if you take receptors and put them near the mitochondria they actually release weak Photon energy so

we are emitting light and what is so devastating about the chronic disease epidemic that is almost entirely rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction bad energy metabolic dysfunction insulin resistance all the same thing is that in a sense it's blocking what I think one of our core miraculous purposes is as humans to unlock light and have the energy and the internal life force to reach our highest purpose so we can talk all day about you know insulin resistance and and these sort of very clinical terms but I think it's really important to back up and sort of see

that this chronic disease epidemic which is fueled by our bodies not being able to handle the changes in modernity and a Health Care System unfortunately that is fully financially incentivized to not focus on root cause physiology and instead focused on waca medicine it's not only hurting us making us have shorter lives Mak us have sicker lives it's actually stopping us from being converters of light and I think the natural reaction when everyone hears that going back to your earlier point is that is so scary yeah because if I can't trust the system if the food

has changed as you said it rightly has our modern lives with sleep and social media and Technology have taken over and so I think fear becomes the natural reaction and I don't think that anyone would be seen as weak for having that fear because it feels like the most natural reaction and response to the State of Affairs and so when someone's feeling this and they're hearing this and they're thinking I'm scared I remember when I was working with the client and something I do when I'm coaching clients is I make sure that we've had all

their biomarkers tested they're working with a holistic health coach I don't don't believe that they should be working on their Mental Health in a silo and some clients will say to me they'll say I don't want to know like I I don't want to know and I'll ask them why and they'll say because I'm scared what I'm going to find out and it's a really interesting part of our society like you're saying in the extreme case that ultimately we're scared of death but our fear of death makes us fearful of trying to live healthy because

we don't even want to know that we might have an early stage of a chronic disease or a terminal illness and so where do we start assessing and reconstructing our relationship with that fear and with that anxiety that comes with just I don't know where to start well a key message I want to share with people is that it's actually so much so much simpler than we've been led to believe and the system actually benefits so much from us being confused and thinking that this is complicated that it paralyzes us there's been research that shows

that close to 60% of Americans totally doubt their choices about the nutritional intake because they are so confused every day on social media I get people saying I literally have no idea what is safe to eat they say kale is not safe to eat oats are not safe to eat obviously meat is not safe to eat basically there's nothing left and what we need to realize is the confusion is intentional the confusion is intentional because the confusion essentially asks us to abdicate our internal knowing about what's right to us what's right for us to experts

and that's not working right because like I said The more we spend on Healthcare the more research we publish on disease on nutrition on exercise the more medical Subs Specialties we invent there are now over over 42 Medical subp Specialties so the more research the more spending the more Specialties the more drugs and the more surgery we do the sicker we are getting the confusion is the point and so the more we're doing the more confused we're getting and meanwhile we are being asked to essentially be divorced from our internal knowing and our common sense

about what is right for us if you sit down at a dinner table in front of a beautiful meal prepared with love with people you love and it's from the farmers market and it's freshly prepared you know that is healthy you know that is good for you we are now being so confused that we sit down and we might see the kale and think oh my God but the oxalates that might hurt me you know and you get good sleep you feel incredible the next day you walk outside first thing in the morning instead of

getting straight on your computer you feel incredible we actually know what is healthy but we have been so put through the washing machine of you know the cult of evidence-based medicine and you know trust the experts trust the science that we are so petrified to trust ourselves all you need to all you need to do is look at the wild there is no chronic disease epidemic or obesity epidemic amongst any other animal species in the world and they have no experts no research no doctors no chronic disase epidemics and it's because there's an intuitive sense

of what to do that we have been told hold to distrust so I think there's two main things that people can do to really get back to understanding what their body is saying so the first is free it involves no weables no Tech you know no lab tests it's literally just reorienting to realize that symptoms are a gift every symptom you're feeling is a signal from the body it is a way of the body communicating with you to tell you that it needs something different when the needs of the cells are met we have health

and when we do not meet the needs of the cells or we overburden them with toxins or things that they can't handle we get illness so we have been told to smash symptoms if you have a headache take an Advil if you have indigestion take an ad acid you know if your knee hurts grab an anti-inflammatory medication migraine take it's all about killing symptoms instead of looking at them with curiosity we really need to realize that all symptoms necessarily and fundamentally come from cellular dysfunction they can't arise out of thin air they are a result

of cells not functioning properly so when you have a symptom you need to basically just ask yourself what is my body trying to tell me what is my body trying to tell me and then realize that it's a pretty limited set of things that we can actually go to to meet the needs of the cells and one of the Frameworks I love is to think of my 40 trillion cells as like my babies they're like my children and I'm the mother like the whole me is the mother and the cells are all my little children

and together somehow they make up me but babies can't speak to you with words so they they cry when they need something and like any mother or father knows you just will quickly run through your checklist if the baby's crying does it need a diaper change does it need milk does it need to sleep is the temperature off you fix those things you run to the checklist it's not an infinite list and then the crying stops and the way that our cells are crying is through these chronic symptoms and diseases that we have and the

way that we approach the cells is through the simple things that we can do every day it's how has the food been are we eating the most nutritious unprocessed real food that is organic and not covered in pesticides are we avoiding the Unholy Trinity of foods that Crush our cellular function sugar refined Ultra processed grains refined industrial seed oils food got it okay how's my food been sleep am I getting enough sleep am I getting enough quality quantity and consistency of sleep movement have I been moving have I been moving my body regular throughout the

day or have I been stuck in a chair chair yesterday today just planted and not moving my body how's my stress have I been expressing good boundaries have I been controlling what I'm looking at on social media have I been letting lots of fear inducing sensationalist media into my eyes have I gone to therapy this week have I been reading my sacred or inspirational texts that keep me grounded toxins have I been exposing myself to toxins have I been using you know the synthetic air fresheners and putting all the scented lotions on my body and

eating non-organic food and not filtering my water and being around a lot of air pollution take stock of that so you look at really these these five main controllable pillars of food sleep exercise stress toxins and take stock take honest stock how are you treating your C and why are they why are they crying with these symptoms so number one is look at your symptoms as a gift start to interpret how your body is talking to you how your cells are talking to take honest stock of how you're living and then change course and I

think many people will find that when you do that you realize oh my God there's actually a lot of little things I could be doing I need to get a good night's sleep I need drink some water I need have a nutritious meal I need to take a few deep breaths and a lot of things actually will get a lot better with that the second piece is a little more Technical and this is hearing your body through tools and Technology that's only been available to us for like the past two to three years incredible technology

that can tell us more about our body and the inner workings of ourselves than our doctors have ever even been able to know about us so this includes things like wearables that can tell us about our heart rate variability our step count our heart rate and our sleep this is biosensors which are brand new in our world and and accessible for the first time ever and right now there's really only one main biosensor which is called a continuous glucose monitor there will be more in the future but this can literally tell us an internal lab

test of our body show it to us on our phone our glucose levels 24 hours a day and tell us exactly how the foods are eating and the way we're living and how we're sleeping is affecting this key metabolic biomarker and then we now have direct consumer lab testing where we can see like a hypergranular picture of our metabolic Health without even having to like beg our doctor for these tests so you can really get a sense of whether your body is is expressing bad energy and do that through the few a few clicks of

buttons on the computer so I would argue that it's actually the most exciting time to be alive and I have nothing but optimism about the future of Health for everyone every single person living because through the framework of seeing your symptoms as a gift and understanding the modern tools and Technology uh that exists today and that we have access to we have the potential to actually live the longest happiest most vibrant lives I think in human history I'm glad you I'm glad you went in that direction it's it's definitely uplifting and and energizing and but

going back to the first one talking about killing the symptoms I I think you're spot on there like hearing you talk about that I'm thinking how easy it is to reach for a painkiller how easy it is to kill the symptom as you said how what is actually happening when we take an Advil like what actually happens oh great question so an Advil is a what's called an nid a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medication and essentially what it's doing is it is decreasing the levels of some of these Downstream inflammatory molecules in our body specifically things like

called prostaglandins and um the details actually aren't that necessary to know but it's essentially inhibiting an enzyme called a enzyme that produces these chemicals in the body that are inflammatory and because inflammation is a process in the body that can uh that can create the sensation of pain in our nerves Um this can then help and I actually think I'm so I'm so glad you asked this question because when we're thinking about symptoms as gifts so often the thing we reach for to kill symptoms is an anti-inflammatory medication it is the Advil it is the

the Tylenol or the Flexeril or whatever it is yeah the Motrin and I really want people to step back and think about the concept of inflammation for a second inflammation is the immune cells of the body revving up a huge response essentially a war in the body in response to some type of threat inflammation fundamentally is biochemical fear and inflammatory conditions are totally overlapped with metabolic conditions in a way I talk about in my book The the trifecta of bad energy the things that actually lead to metabolic and dysfunction in the body are three things

that I talk about in the book which are chronic inflammation mitochondrial dysfunction and what's called oxidative stress which is reactive damaging molecules in the body together those all work together to create metabolic dysfunction and chronic inflammation is one of those things and if we think of inflammation for what it is which is the cells of the body being afraid of something what we have to ask ourselves as individuals is what is my body afraid of we have to be asking that question before we reach for the Advil because we can often identify it very quickly

maybe it's afraid of the fact that it's staring at War imagery on this device in your hand like literally 10 hours a day that we are literally having to internalize the the suffering of 8 billion people through a device that we hold in our hands in our bed we know that that imagery literally creates chronic inflammation in the body you talked about this with Michelle Obama about how we're we're like we're having to process like what was it like terabytes of day so could inflammation but then going through the rest of the list is the

fear maybe the synthetic toxic glyphosate pesticide that's covering the food the Cheerios that you're eating is it the fact that you got 5 hours of sleep last night and your body's like holy crap like I'm so tired this is what is wrong what is going on is it the toxins in the environment so if we think of inflammation as biochemical fear and we ask ourselves why am I taking this anti-inflammatory medication instead of just asking myself what is causing my body fear right now it will lead us down such a more empowering path of truly

with compassion giving the body what it needs to feel safe as opposed to hitting this system that is trying to help us over the head with a hammer of medication that will not take the fear away it will only numb the reaction the body is happening is having to something very real that's that's a fantastic answer I'm so glad I asked it as well because I think I think that's the challenge right it's become such a habit it's become such a automated response to just reach for it and what's even more worrying about it is

this idea that we are disconnecting every time from from our intuition from our communication with our body to communication with all the cells and what they're trying to say and the more we disconnect the harder it is to reconnect every single day when you're having that experience and I feel like we've tried as time has gone on to treat our body like technology so if my phone is glitching out I'm not trying to deduce why that is I'll just refresh the app and I know if I shut off this app and I reset it and

switch it on again it's going to hopefully go back to normal and so there's very little areas in our life these days that we ever try to consider the root of the issue because we don't have to in so many areas anymore what about antibiotics and our gut microbiome as well because I believe there's a connection there and I wanted to know for people and maybe there's others like I think Advil is very common and the generics in the United States are very common but what are are those other easy generic meds that we're kind

of dialing into that the majority of Americans are that you think are causing this disconnection as well Advil is obviously one of the popular ones what are the other ones antibiotics came to my mind but they may not be the ones in a sense I would argue that almost every medication that we're prescribing for chronic conditions is representing this disconnect that we're having right now and I'm not anti- medication but it's the framework that we have it's the framework that we have that's causing the problem and that actually feeds straight into the pharmaceutical company's bottom

lines but not necessarily into the bottom line of human thriving and I think all you have to do is just look at the reality of what is happening which is that how does the healthare system work if you have depression you see a psychiatrist and you get an SSRI if you have polycystic ovarian syndrome you see the OB OBGYN and you either get colam or uh birth control pills if you have high cholesterol you see the cardiologist you get a Statin if you have high blood pressure you see the cardiologist you get an Ace inhibitor

if you have obesity you see the Obesity specialist you get wovi it goes on and on and on if you have diabetes you see the endocrinologist you get metformin and so the thing that people need to internalize is that in that system the more of those drugs we're prescribing for those symptoms the rates of all those conditions are increasing as we prescribe those medications this is the definition of unsustainability this is the definition of at a societal level this approach not working absolutely for individuals some of those medications will help them there's no question there

are people I know who have depression who got on SSRI and they felt a lot better and it gave them the motivation they needed to make the other changes but because these drugs do not actually affect the physiology that leads to the disease they just manage the downstream manifestation of the physiology in a symptom specific way they don't actually help us solve the real problem and in every one of those cases we know that dietary and lifestyle interventions which actually get at the trifecta of bad energy which actually quell and meet the quell those issues

and meet the needs of the cell that in many cases those work as well or better than the medication themselves there is good research in Cochran reviews which is a an organization that does huge metaanalyses of of research that shows that simply exercising 150 minutes per week is equivalent to an SSRI for the treatment of depression and instead of having a 20 plus per side effect profile of ssris there's a less than 2% side effect profile with exercise which is also kind of amusing to think about that the side effect profile is like you know

feeling sore right but it's not like something like gaining a bunch of weight or losing your libido like what you might have with SSRI so you there are different approaches for these things that actually would not only get at those diseases but also ease the physiology that's leading to these other things and I think what people it's both empowering and scary to realize that a lot of the smaller annoying symptoms that we deal with when we're younger like the the PCOS which is the leading cause of infertility in the United States so many people I'm

sure this is happening in your friend group too like so many people are dealing with infertility and getting IVF erectile dysfunction gout migraine chronic pain depression anxiety these sort of annoying but non-lethal symptoms are often they often can be the warning signs of that physiology happening that will become louder cries later it will become the things the real diagnoses like the high cholesterol and the high blood pressure and the high glucose that then can be the loudest cries of all later in life which are the things that kill us which is the stroke the actual

heart attack the Alzheimer's dementia the cancer The Chronic liver disease the chronic kidney disease the chronic lower respiratory infections these things all of which are on the spectrum they are either caused by or accelerated by metabolic dysfunction that's a statement of scientific fact that our system in its intervention-based model conveniently ignores and I think two things I would just mention to kind of help people really internalize this so people might say like okay you're saying a lot here like you're saying that gout and Alzheimer's are on the same spectrum and or that cancer and PCOS

are on the same Spectrum but what we need to realize is that the the body has over 200 cell types we have over 200 I think it's 221 different types of cells in the body we've got um we've got the retinal cell we've got the gal cell in the brain the asites in the brain we've got endothelial cells that line in our blood vessels we've got hepatocytes in the liver we've got ovarian Thea cells in the ovaries we've got all these different cell types which very amazingly all came from one cell which is awesome um

and differentiated into these different cell types and like I said earlier every single cell needs energy to function properly so if mitochondrial dysfunction by because of our environment is happening in the body based on which cell type it's happening in the ovarian cell the asite and the brain the endothelial cell in the penis the retinal cell it can look like almost anything it's like the great mascor because an underpowered cell in the brain can look like Alzheimer's chronic pain depression uh mayrain uh depression uh uh anxiety a underpowered cell in the liver can look like

fatty liver disease an underpowered cell in the ovary can look can express as infertility an underpowered cell in the endothelial lining of the penile artery can look like erectile dysfunction a dysfunctional cell can look like a million different things but these are branches of fundamentally the same tree and the secret is which is the secret that I'm on this planet to share is that if we focus our energy on healing that underlying process it actually would make things so much simpler unfortunately it would very much change the economic reality of the healthcare system which is

why this isn't being adopted and not happening um but that's not a problem we need to take on we have the tools to actually outside of the system by trusting ourselves get at that root cause which the system unfortunately because it is so large has no incentive to do and if you're open I I'd love to speak to that for just one second like why the system because I think people might say like doctors are good people and wouldn't the Healthcare System want us to be healthy and I think it it's it's really again this

is not meant to be scary it's meant to help people understand why they need to take ownership of their own health at this moment in time and I think it goes back to when I was in my surgical residency I was training to become a head anex surgeon nine years into medical school and training and I was heading out to start my private practice and the Mantra that everyone said to me in the hospital from my senior doctors was get ready because you eat what you kill and what that means this very grotesque Mantra it's

a euphemism that means your livelihood is dependent on how many surgeries you book and do you eat what you kill so you obviously aren't killing but your your your bottom line your entire income is just based on how many surgeries you will do and how many patients you can see and right now the healthcare industry is a is a for trillion doll industry it is the largest and fastest growing industry in the United States and it is a business it's a business that's designed to grow and based on the way that Healthcare is financed right

now which is that we make money when we uh have more people in the system for a longer period of time having more things done to them chronic disease is the ultimate Cash Cow for our system they is literally no Financial incentive to get a chronically ill patient out of the system which is why Wow wilded acute illnesses are no longer like those they're in and out right but a chronic disease and especially a chronic disease that starts in childhood which is now what we're seeing so much more the most lucrative thing for the largest

industry and the fastest growing industry in the United States is a chronically ill child which we are seeing those rates go up monumentally 30% of young adults now have pre-diabetes this is a disease that no pediatrician in their entire career would see 75 years ago 20% of kids have fatty liver disease this was a disease we only used to see in in older alcoholics it's now the leading cause of liver transplants you know kids of course are dealing with Monumental mental health and behavioral crisis the thing to to to note though here is that I

know probably at this point hundreds of doctors that I've worked with and there's not a single bad person I've ever really met in medicine like every single person I know who went through all this training they all went into the system to help people they all went into the system to do good work and to cure and had the best intentions but the Stark economic reality is that the largest industry in United States which is designed to grow makes more money when we are sick and makes less money when we are healthy and what that

does is create an in visible Hand That clouds every element of how we practice medicine the United States and actually gets all of us and me in the past believing that it's all the right way and it's the best healthc care system in the country it clouds everything from how research is done how research studies are set up to how doctors practice to what we're learning in medical school to how residency training happens and and how the guidelines are written and so fundamentally I think just having real eyes open with what underlies every element of

the system and how your doctor might not even realize how they're playing a a part in this fundamentally intervention-based system is step one for making the decision to take matters a little bit more into your own hands and maybe bring your doctor along with you on the journey but the reality is is that we have an intervention-based system the system profits when we're sick metabolic dysfunction is the root of most of our syndroms and diseases in the modern American world and it's quite simple to fix talking about young people and I think that is a

great place to stop and focus on because I think we would hope that with all of the technological advancement and Healthcare advancement that we'd be setting up the future generation for success and in some of the research you Shar in the book you also went on to share that 45% of teens are overweight or obese and 77% of Young Americans are too unfit to join the military and this point really stood out to me the generation born today is not on track to outlive their parents and that is a clear sign that there's an issue

because with all the other advancement that should be clear that we should be able to outlive the previous generations and you talk about how there's seven policy changes that you think could be executive orders that would start to fix things tomorrow and I wanted to highlight a couple of them that I think we could talk about because I think that it almost even if we realize that currently it's in the individual realm of influence that we need to shift it's healthy for us to understand what those big challenges are so one of I mean the

first one is Ban farmer ads on news outlets currently 60% of I'll let you say number one ban farmer ads on news outlets it's hard to overstate how important it would be for the president the next president coming in into office to just sign an executive order that says ban pharmaceutical spending towards advertisement on TV the reason for this is very simple 60% of the advertising dollars that come into mainstream media are from the pharmaceutical industry and this is this this is the point that just really keeps me up at night the customer of the

people making the news is not you it's the pharmaceutical company they are paying the bills they are the customer you are the product and so because the pharmaceutical company is is the customer the information that we are getting from our news sources is going to be shaped to have a favorable message about that industry and that trickles down into culture that trickles down into what we believe and what we think is normal normal and so unlike so many other countries in the world that do not allow pharmaceutical advertising on TV that simple shift would change

the way we're seeing and getting information a and they could still of course share about medical Innovation and drugs but not with a strangle hold on their neck of their livelihood of the dollars that produce the show and I think a fascinating thing that you you notice in culture recently is that Independent Media so people like you people like Joe Rogan Barry Weiss people who have independent platforms what are those platforms talking about foundational Health they were the ones during covid who are talking about the things we can do to increase the resilience of the

body and they are listened to by way more people than the mainstream media but what's coming out on the main media that's funded by Pharma is a very pro- Fara message very little curiosity about what types of dietary and lifestyle strategies could improve our biologic resilience against things like a virus or otherwise so it's fascinating to see how Independent Media is focusing on empowering Health message and tens of millions of people are flocking to it and it is in many cases I mean you look at Joe Rogan and others like just being absolutely demonized and

called all sorts of names and then you look at mainstream media and it's one message every day all the time which is that salvation comes outside of us salvation comes in an injection salvation comes in a pill and it's actually anti-science to think that the little things you might Dilly dle with like be out in the sunshine or sleep or eat healthy food could actually help you that's the message we're getting and that's because the customer is one of the largest Industries in the entire in the entire world I mean when I moved to the

states I was absolutely shocked at the advertising and I generally I mean I don't really watch TV but when I was looking at some of the ads it was almost a parody like I was like this has to be a parody like this this has to be satire this can't be real because how can you talk about all the benefits and then when you walk through all of the side effects and all of the potential consequences may cause death may cause this may caused that and I'm like this has to be a joke like this

this can't be serious like Ryan Reynolds must be at the end of this advert and it must be something funny like it can't be real and it's fascinating to me that it is real and that you it has been gotten away with for this long I wonder have you ever looked at how and and again I'm not expecting you to know this I'm just intrigued by it but have you ever looked at if that happen so if we ban farmer ads on news outlets and those 60% of AD spots disappear or reappear with opportunities have

you looked at how that would affect the economy I'm just fascinated by what a dent it would have on the GDP and the economy and and all of that because I I wonder the cost that they're weighing up in their heads if if based on what everything else you've said there will have to be a economic adjustment if and when we hopefully adopt a good energy framework for the future of healthcare because right now there's a there's a devil's bargain happening between over1 trillion dollar of Industry the $4 trillion of Health Care Health Care Sick

care and the six plus trillion dollars of processed food and Industrial agriculture which are a revolving door of financial support to each other you create people who are addicted to ultr processed foods that take them to their Bliss point they start eating themselves to death they become customers to the Health Care system and then the healthare system does nothing to actually change the root cause of what's hurting them and they go back to being you know going straight to the food and the chemicals associated with industrial agriculture the ultr processed food industry that's creating all

this Franken food in the healthcare industry is are in a devil's bargain that all are keeping hum sick and so yes I think that if we you really radically reimagined what it would look like to turn the arrow of humanity in a better Direction it's going to change a lot of these economics but what I'm really hopeful about is that there's so many incredible companies that are aligning profit with health absolutely that's totally possible and one of one of the reasons that I co-founded levels Health which is a company that allows access for people to

these continuous glucose monitors that help them understand exactly how the foods they're eating are affecting their own metabolic Health in real time is because it's an it's an example of a company that as we add more value to people in understanding their health and their own bodies that's good for the company and you see this across so many things you've got the Inc incredible sleep companies happening you've got eight sleep you've got really incredible food brands that are cropping up focus on regenerative good soil and low glycemic and no artificial chemicals you've got meditation apps

like Comm you've got so many things cropping up and I think it's just going to have to be a reimagination of um of what what the economics of this look like and I I will say like there have been efforts to try to to shift the Health Care System towards a model that aligns human health with um profit you may recall that under Obama um under President Obama there was the Affordable Care Act and there was this effort to create what was called value-based care and value the definition of value is it's an equation that

is outcomes over cost you want good outcomes for the lowest cost that would be a high value intervention and so the way they set this up which is amazing like because right now it's fee for service you get paid as a doctor for what you do that would have you get paid for adding value which is better outcomes over lower cost and there's nothing higher value in healthcare than eating real unprocessed organic food that's just the reality if if people eat real food healthcare costs plummet and do all the other things sleep and move Etc

so this is actually it's an unfortunate story that ends poorly but there was an effort to move towards value-based care where doctors would actually get paid significantly more by Medicaid and reimbursed more for their work if they provided good outcomes over low cost this program got corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry because when I look at good outcomes as a doctor good outcomes for health I'm thinking about one thing and one thing only which is are the cells of this person in front of me functioning better are they functioning properly is there a functional cellular biology

happening inside this patient because if that's the case they will not have symptoms or disease unfortunately quality in this program was defined by things like medication adherence so the outcome was actually co-opted to be actually how many of the patients on the doctor's panel were on the appropriate long-term medical therapy so for instance for asthma I remember one of the quality metrics that a doctor could report on was how what percentage of their patients with a diagnosis of asthma were on longterm albuterol therapy so quality got called basically like adherence to drug regimen as opposed

to what quality really is in health which is a body that is functioning properly and all doctors and all people need to realize that a body on medication is not that's not the that's not the outcome we want we want a body that is healed cells that have healed and that actually become functional and my mom is literally the definition of of this problem where everyone including her and all her doctors thought they were practicing good good outcome medicine where she was on all her medications and all her little biomarkers the little knobs were being

turned on her LDL and her glucose and her blood pressure but her cells never healed and therefore she ultimately got the cancer and she ultimately died very prematurely so so that's kind of um the framework I would I would say for for that yeah absolutely another one that I want to push out which I think is in line with what you're saying here is stop Federal funding for academic departments who take money from farma it is really wild the FDA which is a government agency and and many academic centers get up to 75% of their

budget from pharmaceutical companies so you you would think the FDA would be fully funded by taxpayer money and they would have taxpayer interest in mind but again it's no and they did a they did a report where they were over $181 million of conflicts of interests reported essentially research academic researchers taking money from industry and these are academic and NIH researchers and so right there it just changes who we're working for and so I think if people are going to accept federal dollars paid for by taxpayers to do research or to do anything touching Health

it it cannot also be taking money from industry because then you end up having split interests wow yeah I mean it it seems so obvious like it's almost so painful to even think that these basic measures that seem like easy easily drawn parallels can't be stopped yeah and and they haven't even got close well when you think about the the realities of it and why these things haven't happened in in almost every single state in the country the elected Representatives a huge percentage of their constituency is employed by food farming or Healthcare so anything to

rock that boat is not going to be politically advantageous and this is why someone like RFK I think is really gaining a lot of momentum the most popular independent candidate I think in the last hundred years because he's actually just saying a lot of this stuff plainly and I I genuinely don't think it's ever going to work to try and get some of these things through Congress because there's just so much compromised interests I think a lot of these things would have to be just straight executive orders from the president to say we're gonna make

these changes because the direction America is going is it is not good yeah it would be great for someone to do a real analysis on how you switch to build purposeful profitable companies and and what that looks like as an economy because I think people get so scared people who are motivated by money and and power and control get so scared by what happens if you suddenly switch it not realizing that there are so many purposeful powerful ways of doing the same thing and and ways that actually help people uh your the other one that

I wanted to pick out and there's seven here I'm only picking out a few the last one I wanted to pick out was to eliminate added sugar from the national school lunch program yes which feels like it should be an easy one because that doesn't really have any economic downside at all one of the most astonishing things that I think has happened in in public policy in the last 10 years is that when the 2020 to 2025 USDA food guidelines came up for Renewal they happen every 5 years the scientific Advisory Board to the USDA

made a strong recommendation to lower the percent of added sugar in the diet from a recommendation of 10% of calories coming from added sugar to 6% of calories coming from added sugar this seems minor but that's a Hu 10% of our calories to 6% of our calories is a big deal the USDA rejected their scientific advisory board's recommendation to lower saying that there was not enough scientific evidence and this has Monumental implications we are literally saying that 2-year-olds these tiny little bodies can get 10% of their total calories from added sugar in the face of

a world in which 50% of American adults have either pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes conditions directly related to sugar and our body's inability to process more sugar and 30% of young adults now have pre-diabetes and we're saying we're not only saying it's okay we're recommending that 10% of our calories can come from added sugar this is I mean truly I think this is shameful and I I don't understand why every endocrinologist in the country isn't using literally every platform they Poss to can to say this is crazy we need to be saying in America no

added sugar this does not mean fruit this means refined industrially processed sugar that's added to our food which is close to 60% of the things on our Shelf and that is absolutely wreaking havoc on our biology with that compassionate framework towards our cells if you think about what's happening with our mitochondria sugar which turns into blood glucose it floats around in the body and and the body has to do something with that the body has to process it and normally if you have the right amount of glucose in the body the cells would take it

up out of the bloodstream the mitochondria would convert it to Cellular energy to power our lives but because of all the factors in our in our environment that we've talked about that are ravaging the mitochondria not only is the mitochondria broken by all those things the Sleep the toxin the toxins the sedentary Behavior but we are overwhelming the body with like 50 times more sugar than it's ever to deal with in human history and so imagine someone coming to you and saying I need you to do 50 times more work today than you've ever had

to do and you're already going to be depleted because your structure great perspective yeah and that's what's happening to each of our cells every single day with this added sugar and so what does the body do with it the body says well the mitochondria can't process it so we're going to block the cell from taking that gluc glucose up we just need to block it that literally is insulin resistance the body saying we can't do it we are so broken and you are overwhelming us please stop that's insulin resistance the body blocking glucose coming to

the cell so of course then blood sugar level rise which is happening in 50% of American adults 30% of teens and and so many more than that but that's what we know that's the the ones that have been been diagnosed with pre-diabetes or type two diabetes and then with that extra sugar floating around that can't get into the cell what does the body do with that it has to do something so it does the best it can it converts it into fat it 3D prints that glucose into triglycerides and fat and now 74% of Americans

are overweight or obese so it all makes sense through this lens of we got to just get back to the basics and stop literally having public policy that's essentially the root cause of how we're just totally overwhelming our bodies with these things that they cannot process and they're saying it as loud as humanly possible 74% obesity overweight 50% type 2 Di and pre-diabetes why in God's name are we recommending 10% of calories to come from added sugar so that needs to be in executive order reduce it to ideally zero or 6% like the the scientific

Advisory Board said and absolutely do not serve it to children in ferally funded school lunches well said well said I mean I don't think there's anyone who could listen to this and not feel completely moved to want to shift in this Direction I mean you I I so deeply appreciate not only the energy with which you communicate but the poignancy of each and every one of the insights for me I'm listening just yeah again just feeling like I hope everyone who's listening and watching and this is definitely when you read Casey's book you'll realize this

this isn't to make you scared it isn't to make you feel F it's to make you feel empowered and pushed in the direction of change because everything we've been hearing for so long has been doing the opposite I wanted to talk to you about this because a lot of people have said this to me and I just invested in a company called function health I don't know if you've come across them love them I'm an investor we're both investors perfect so I just invested in a comical function Health I've known Dr Mark kman for a

few years um met the wonderful team and I was very passion about how they were allowing people to do I believe 200 biomarkers at $500 a year which to me felt like a great investment I think one of the things I want to help people with is what do you do with those 200 biomarkers results the blood test the bio senses like I think a lot of people again look at that list and you're like well where do I go from here like where do I start what do I do what does HDL mean what

does you know uh home I mean what does you know uric acid like what is all of this stuff it's so out of our vocabulary and like you said 99% of doctors in the book you talk about this 99% of doctors don't understand it or will say don't worry about it that's that's what I've been told as well many times before I was able to start getting tested by my holistic doctors all I was hearing is don't worry about it don't stress about it it's not a big deal you're young you're healthy and I'm like

I know I'm young and healthy but I want to stay young and healthy and I believe that requires a bit more effort than me saying I'm young and healthy it doesn't matter and I've learned about early stages for me of LDL of uh my predisposition to diabetes because of my Heritage and you know there's so many things that I'm so happy I know about today which is reduced my intake of certain things that I love or I enjoy or I've been addicted to for years what whatever it may be so how do people make sense

what to do with those 200 biomarkers the first thing I want to say is that the system again benefits off you thinking it's really complicated it is not that complicated everything I learned about how to interpret lab testing I learned after medical school I learned it doing my own research and I think that every every American adult is totally capable of understanding their basic biomarkers and in fact we must and so what I would say is start simple and start free every year if you go to the doctor they're going to order a very basic

set of tests that usually involves a cholesterol panel and a fasting glucose test they're going to take your blood sugar your blood pressure as well so a lot of people might be asking how do I figure out if I have good energy or bad energy and it's very simple you start with five essentially free biomarkers fasting glucose triglycerides HDL cholesterol waist circumference and blood pressure they generally come standard on a physical and and if you have a fasting glucose less than 100 milligram de liter in HDL cholesterol above 40 for men or 50 for women

triglycerides less than 150 milligram per deciliter a blood pressure less than 130 over 85 and a waist circumference less than 35 for women or 40 for men and you're not on medication You by our standard criteria fit the category of essentially having good energ that is essentially saying you are metabolically healthy shockingly people who meet all five of those criteria not on medication currently comprise less than 6.8% of American adults 93.2% of American adults based on the most recent research have at least one of those metabolic biomarkers off or not in the optimal range so

that's just step one is just know where you stand and you can literally like log into your electronic health record right now and get a get a tape measure for your waist and and figure out those things and I think a simple way just I'll just simply say kind of what those those tests mean so fasting glucose like I mentioned if that's rising in the blood it's a symbol that deep inside your cells the mitochondria are overwhelmed the mitochondria overwhelmed from all the lifestyle things we talked about that are under our control and they are

saying we cannot process any more of this into energy therefore we are blocking it from coming into the cell therefore it rises in the bloodstream that's why fasting glucose matters it is a sign that deep inside the belly of your cell the cell is overwhelmed and is blocking the entry so it's rising in the blood triglycerides are totally related to that because when that glucose is high and has nowhere to go and isn't being converted in that miraculous Cosmic process to human energy it converts to Fat so it can be stored because the body does

not want the blood sugar to be super high high blood sugar is a problem in lots of ways it sticks to things and causes dysfunction it causes the body converts it to fat and stores it in within cells or in fat cells so that's what triglyceride means triglycerides is basically saying there is again damage within the cell the cell is overburdened and we are becoming metabolically dysfunctional so we have to print fat to take care of this excess that we can't process HDL is a helpful part of the cholesterol family highdensity lipoprotein cholesterol it's a

type of cholesterol uh lipoprotein so a molecule that floats around in the blood that actually takes cholesterol from the arteries back to the liver to be processed and excreted so it's it's a way of taking cholesterol from where it could be causing problems in the blood vessels and putting it back to the liver and unfortunately when the liver becomes dysfunctional because of the way we're living today and becomes filled with fat do the other do the do I just spoke about with triglycerides this process of creating the right amount of HDL gets dysfunctional and we

start to see HDL Decline and that's a problem so HDL is quote unquote good cholesterol and when it's low that's basically means that we can't pull the damaging cholesterol from the blood vessels back to the liver so simply put that's like that's a lot of what you need to know about metabolic biomarkers there are so so so many more but um and then waist circumference that one's kind of interesting because it's it's really a proxy metric waist circumference for how much fat is around your internal organs this is the type of fat that we're hearing

about more and more called visceral fat there's three types of fat subcutaneous fat which is the fat you can see it's the fat that you know we kind of try to get rid of because we don't look as good in a bathing suit it's actually not the fat that's going to kill us you know this fat it's not going to kill us then there's visceral fat which is the fat that is around our organs that makes the organs dysfunctional and then there's in cellular fat which is literally fat that's built up inside the cell that

causes massive dis dysfunction visceral fat and intracellular fat are the two types of fat that are going to shorten your lives your life and those are both driven by insulin resistance that process that we talked about that is fundamentally rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction so the waist circumference is just a way of basically telling you how much fat is around my organs and therefore how insulin resistant might I be and then the last one is the one that I spoke about which is blood pressure and blood pressure again it Roots right back to glucose and insulin

and Metabolism as our insulin levels in the body rise and they rise again just let's make it really simple the cell the mitochondria is broken it's not working properly it can't process the glucose it creates insulin resistant because insulin resistance because insulin is the hormone that's secreted to help glucose to get into the cell but if there's an insulin block essentially the insulin can't do that job and ose rises in the blood but this the the body's like oh no the glucose is rising we need to actually secrete more insulin to drive glucose into the

cell which of course adds more burden to the mitochondria so insulin levels rise well when insulin levels rise as a compensatory mechanism for this mitochondrial dysfunction and the rising glucose levels another impact it has is to block nitric oxide production and nitric oxide is the chemical in the blood that dilates our blood vessels and keeps our blood pressure under control so hopefully it's a little complex but those five things all link back to the exact same thing which is mitochondrial dysfunction which is caused by the lifestyle pillars we talked about so just to summarize those

five simple tests that usually come on every annual physical are the best place to start understand where you where you stand on those compared to the ranges I mentioned and that will give you a sense of of where you are and then it's really implementing the basic dietary and lifestyle strategies to give your body what it needs so we can free up the strain on the mitochondria and bring those things down they will all start coming back in a normal range as you free up the mitochondria to do better work which we do through our

daily choices just quickly speaking to function Health that is like the next level and that is if it's something that's accessible to you I recommend every single person in the world do this if they can cuz it's over 100 biomarkers like you said for less than $500 less than the co-pay that you would pay at the doctor's office for like 10 labs and what that will do is actually give you a hyper granular picture of what's going inside your body and your metabolism and I mentioned that there are three Hallmarks of bad energy there's chronic

inflammation there's oxitive stress and there's mitochondrial dysfunction and the beauty of the function Health test is that they actually have tests that will tell you about each of those so you can really know what's going on and beautiful functional medicine interpretations that actually help you understand what what they mean but I think I think something that's again hopefully empowering and not too scary is that at the best hospitals and medical schools in America like Stanford where I went to medical school doctors are not learning how to interpret lab test in a way that will help

you be empowered to live a healthier life we are only learning a very algorithmic way of looking at lab markers and isolation in order to prescribe medications if LDL is high prescribe a satin if glucose is high prescribe metformin and so on and so forth and what's really interesting is that for the biomarkers that we do not have a good drug for we ignore them like triglycerides you rarely hear about triglycerides even though they're more associated with heart disease than LDL we only hear about LDL because we have a medication for it if uric acid

is high here's alopurinol so we focus on the biomarkers that have a drug for them and what they don't learn is how to look at the labs in concert with each other to read the Tea Leaves of what the labs are saying together to tell you about your core physiology so what I just shared with you about fasting glucose triglycerides HDL blood pressure and waist circumference is frankly more than what we even learn in medical school of how they all relate back to metabolic dysfunction and so I think it's just really important for everyone to

find the resources like the book that explains it in clear detail and you can sit down with the book and your lab test and understand for yourself where you stand absolutely and and trust me it's like for anyone who's listening and feeling like it's challenging I've been learning all about this myself for the past couple of years and while could never explain it as well as Casey does or or even begin to try and understand it as deeply as you do I've noticed how some of these very simple lifestyle changes have shown me big changes

in how I feel and I wanted to focus on some of those with you that you break down one of the big ones that I've struggled with for a very long time because I remember feeling like I had to do this quick and fast forever you talk about eating slowly which I think sounds like the easiest simplest but underestimated habit so could you walk us through that incredible this is also my biggest challenge as well especially as a surgeon like I just would Woolf food down and research strongly shows that the people who eat the

slowest have a four times less likelihood of developing metabolic syndrome than people who eat the fastest so literally this has nothing to do with what you're eating it's how you're eating so this should be very empowering for people cuz it's like even if you don't want to change the actual food change the speed at which you're eating and that does change everything the average American family is eating fewer than three meals per week at a table with the family like this is this has become so normal now that we don't eat with other people we

eat in our cars we eat while we're walking we eat on the go and I think just the key message here is that the more you can invest in sitting down at a table and eating slowly and mindfully it's literally going to have a profound impact on your core metabolic Health another simple one I think we underestimate is walking when I saw these studies that you sent through in the research I was mindblown that simple Act of walking could make such a difference yeah yeah there's been research in some of the best journals in the

world like the Journal of the American Medical Association Jama one of the top five journals in the world that shows that simply walking 7,000 or more steps per day can literally slash our risk of premature mortality depression cancer diabetes obesity and heart disease and the the studies they vary a little bit some say above 7,000 steps some say between 8 and 12,000 steps but the the point is that is really key is that steps it's not just about the steps steps are a proxy metric for how much we are moving our body throughout the day

and there's been all these headlines like sitting is the new smoking but I think it's really important to understand why our biology our cellular biology is actually totally different if we are in motion more time throughout the day even if it's something super low grade like walking compared to if we sit all day and then just work out for an hour or 2 hours at night the reason for this comes right back to the inside of the cell so in order to take blood sugar out of the bloodstream and use it have the mitochondria turn

into energy you actually have to move these channels these glucose channels from the inside of the cell to the cell membrane and one of the stimuluses for that moving of the the glucose channel from inside the cell to the membrane is insulin but another another signal for that is movement it's muscle contraction so as we contract our muscles we are basically constantly pushing these glucose channels to the cell membrane to take up the glucose and process it through the mitochondria we're stimulating the mitochondria to do work which they love to do they want to have

a push to do work and they want to then get the glucose in to process it so a body that's getting up every 20 30 minutes and walking for just a minute or two or doing a couple air squats or doing a couple catle ball swings or doing a push-up or two is constitutively keeping the glucose channels at the membrane and keeping the mitochondria active versus a person who sits all day at their desk job and then works out for an hour at the end of the day sure they're going to get that benefit of

pushing those glucose channels to the membrane of stimulating the mitochondria but the whole rest of the day they weren't that's fundamentally a different biologic reality in both those bodies so this is a yes and yes do your workout do your pel on and your hit workout or whatever it is but I would say more importantly is to realize that the human body is biologically programmed to move in a low-grade way pretty much all throughout the day and if we can give the stimulus of low-grade muscle contraction to the body it will keep our mitochondria and

our glucose control so so much better and then of course that feeds into these profound statistics that I just mentioned which is that just a simple amount of steps 7,000 steps that's like around 3 m a day 3.5 miles can literally cut our dementia obesity diabetes heart disease and premature death risk in half yeah no it's uh it was one of the biggest things when I was wearing my glucose monitor I found that walking after a meal was the best one for lowering my um the spike and I found that every time I walked after

eating there would be no Spike like it was as simple as that and it wasn't a long walk it wasn't 3 miles after it was just as you said a couple of minutes just to walk around just to get that mitochondria moving so I've definitely seen it as well and it was so empowering and just to give people a double dose of this uh stats from Casey's book 50% lower dementia risk 50 to 70% lower risk of premature death 44% lower risk of getting type 2 diabetes 31 % or more lower risk of obesity these

are high numbers like of reduction imagine if this was a pill yeah it I mean it would be Front Page News everywhere new drug lowers Alzheimer's Risk by 50% but it's walking and it makes us feel so good too when we move our bodies everyone feels better when they've walked more so it's it's not just the walking it's the it's it's it's really it's expressing our instinctual nature as animals and as humans as the only bipedal animal it's expressing that it's honoring that Miracle of our ability to move by doing it and we need to

absolutely one of the other ones that stood out to me that I loved was reduce social jet lag I love this one yeah I had not heard of this concept of social jet lag until I wrote the book but it's fascinating so social jet lag gets at sleep consistency which is one of the three very important aspects of sleep that we often forget so there's Sleep Quality there's sleep quantity and there's sleep consistency quality is basically how deep are we sleeping are we having Awakenings during the night from something like light or noise in the

room or sleep apnea sleep quantity is self-evident it's are we getting enough sleep and what seems to be the optimal amount for metabolic health is between seven and 8 hours per night but the third is sleep consistency so this is are we going to bed and getting up at consistent times dayto day this is another one like slow eating that I have really struggled with in the past and social jet lag is a measure of consistency so what we do is we look at the days of the week and you can split it between like

maybe days that you're working and days that you have more leisure time and you look at the start time and the end time of your sleep and you compare the midpoint of sleep between those two different phases so let's say during the work week my sleep is between uh 1:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. because I have to get up for work at 6:00 a.m. the midpoint of my sleep would be 2 a.m. and then on the weekends I stay up a little later and I sleep from let's say 12 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. the midpoint

of my sleep is 4:00 a.m. so the difference in those midpoints 2: a.m. and 4:00 a.m. is 2 hours and research has shown that social jet lag of 2 hours or more between different different nights of the week confers a doubling of the risk RK of metabolic syndrome type 2 diabetes than if that is a shorter window if we're actually it's huge it's huge so that sleep consistency and what it gets to I think is a really important point about our biology which is that we are on a 24-hour cycle as humans and our circadian

rhythms really dictate so much of our biology and our bodies are naturally on a 24-hour clock they have we have clock genes and but there are few ways through our behavior that we can entrain the natural clock of the body which then feeds into the proper expression of so many of our genes and hormones and cell signaling Pathways and there's three main ways that we can essentially tell the body what time it is the first is sleep consistency are we going to bed and getting up at essentially the same time every day that creates a

rhythm for the body that it can just like ease into that entrains essentially the clock for the body so that's why sleep consistency is so important the second is meal timing when are we eating each day we eat at Super erratic times during the day the average American actually has over 11 eating events per day over the course of 15 hours that's a lot of eating events so the body that's expecting maybe more regular times uh and definitely eating before dark is now getting food all the time totally confusing our clock the third is when

we view light so this is probably one of the most important ones which is if we you know our our body doesn't know if it's dark or light outside if it's day or night our cells don't have eyeballs and so we have to tell the body what time it is by exposing it to literal photons the photons go through our eye go through the vitus fluid in the eye they hit our retinal cells that transmit an electrical action potential to our supermatic nucleus which then translates into essentially telling our body it's morning that's how it

happens and so it is really our responsibility to show our retina cells direct Photon energy doesn't mean staring straight at the sun it means just being outdoors without a window or sunglasses and just being outdoors and that is a signal that entrains our 24-hour clock saying hey it's morning so so just to summarize here circadian rhythm is absolutely cral for our metabolic health because so many of our metabolic genes signaling Pathways and hormones are are on a 24-hour Rhythm and the way that we can essentially create less confusion for the body is by regular signals

of what time it is which we do by sun exposure in the morning and avoiding artificial blue light after the sun goes down regular meal times each day and sleep consistency meaning going to bed at at night at the same time and getting up in the morning at the same time which we can measure through the metric of social jet lag and we really want to keep that that social jet lag metric less than two hours you def that's my two hours mine is two hours I'm like already going oh gosh how do I solve

that on the weekend but Casey I mean you've given so many great practical insights today I think you've woken us up to the idea of of the challenges that exist in our society as well and what I love where you take this book is this idea of how this isn't just a physical Journey it's not just a mental Journey it's actually a spiritual journey of rising to fearlessness and I love that you do that because to me I think often what gets us started when it comes to our health is fear but it doesn't keep

us going right we may have the fear of I need to be healthy because I've got kids now I have the fear of I'm putting on weight I don't want to put on weight I have the fear of oh no I just got diagnosed with this thing and I really don't right so it's always fear that kind of gets us started but you're actually saying fear is not healthy for us even on a cellular level and you're actually encouraging us to rise to fearlessness how do we build that when some of us think we're manifesting

a unhealthy life for ourselves or we almost feel conditioned to believe that it's all going to end badly or we've had someone we've lost in our life early on and we now believe that will happen to us or maybe actually you're listening to this and you've been healthy so far and all of a sudden you go well maybe I'm not healthy and it's so easy to get into because of how a lot of this information is also pre presented is that we start to feel like we're just being scared how do we how do we

rise into fearlessness I'm a big believer that the best health arises when our cells are living in an ecosystem that feels safe safe and believes in abundance and is fun fundamentally rooted in joy and awe because ourselves hear every single thing that we're thinking through our hormones and through our neurotransmitters they know they know if there's a threat and they know if there's something to be afraid of so I think it's one of our greatest jobs as humans to create an environment just like we would for a baby of a sense of safety and I

think a lot of people might say oh my gosh that sounds impossible the world is crazy right now but this might you know sound dark but I actually think again it's like a very hopeful message like the reality is that we are all going to die that is unavoidable that is the only thing we can be certain of and so living in constant fear just doesn't really make sense like living with curiosity and awe and appreciation and actually really diving down that spiritual journey of of exploring what this life and this whole death thing really

means like to me that leads us to this sense of starting to really realize that like fundamentally we are we are part of this eternal infinite Limitless Cosmos we are not separate from it we are totally connected and that's like super a inspiring and if our health Journey can be rooted in that rooted in the sheer miraculousness of us being alive at at this moment of us having consciousness of the statistical near impossibility of being here and and wanting to honor that and I think I think that's where all really good choices come from in

many spiritual Frameworks we we talk about attachment as the root of suffering um being attached to things being a certain way is the root of suffering and it's interesting as this plays into sort of our americ culture like we think about what is one form of attachment is Cravings like Cravings are a form of attachment we want something we have this insatiable desire for something specific and we want to eat it but what so many spiritual Traditions throughout history have told us is that you know nothing in the material world can actually reduce our um

suffering ex except connecting essentially with source with God and and so and that's my framework that's what I I I do believe that and so some might say well if that's the perspective that just connecting with God and connecting with source and spirit whatever you want to call it and channeling sort of the divine within us that we are a part of and totally interconnected with if that then why do we have to do all this healthy stuff like why do we have to like eat healthy and this and that and I think it comes

down to the fact that as we make the healthy choices as we eat the healthy food as we get the sleep as we move our bodies we are creating the form of the body the structure of the body that I think has an easier time connecting with Source Andes if we are essentially channeling that Source energy and Duality Duality is the root of the suffering Duality is that we were part of the spirit world and we came into this body and we forgot we forgot that we are part of that we forgot that we are

pure love we forgot that we are a peace of God if the forgetting is from that Duality when we were born and the purpose of of getting back to essentially Bliss is remembering I think it's I personally think it is easier to remember when we have a body that is really functioning properly and so my spiritual journey is rooted in the choices every day that build this radio tower I am the radio tower the sensor to try to connect with that and when I'm doing the healthy habits and the biohacks and the protocols and all

this stuff like whatever you want to call it it's actually in service of building a structure that can channel that in the most open and clear way absolutely and I think that that's just my perspective and and I think that but I think it's just really realizing that it's it's bigger than just these these like the books and the hacks and and the optimization and the the micro things and you know how much Zone 2 training to do every day and all these things like if we root this journey in a bigger picture of basically

striving for this Bliss um I think that it can really help motivate us and then remembering that dowst principle that we're a process not an entity this is why we actually have to do the health behaviors every day because we're every day we're rebuilding that radio tower that con can connect with Source every day we're building that sensor and so you want to keep doing the habits with good food and good sleep and movement and reducing the toxic stress and the toxins in the environment because you're rebuilding that half of The Duality the body every

single day and when that structure gets hurt and dysfunctional we get the depression and we get the anxiety and we get the fear and we get the diseases and it ends up being distracting you know from this so so that's something that really motivates me when it comes to and that and that alleviates a lot of the fear for me um but I think we just all need to understand that when we are emotionally sensing fear in the body from any Source from the news from our childhood trauma uh from the email we got whatever

the fear is anytime we're experiencing emotional fear it's translated biochemically into the body through hormones neurotransmitters that fundamentally the body has to respond to the body is going to respond to that fear even if it's emotional and that will divert our resources towards defense rather than thriving so each of us needs to take honest stock of what emotionally psychologically is causing fear in our lives and work to set the boundaries to limit it whether it's our fear of death our fear of some inner wound that happened in childhood intergenerational wounds whether it's your relationship with

your co-workers whether it's the news that you're watching of Wars thousands of miles away and you must work to limit it because the more fear that your body is experiencing the more you're diverting resources away from thriving in the book I talk about the true biochemistry of this and how actually fear and loneliness directly in scientific studies leads to all three Hallmarks of bad energy oxitive stress chronic inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction so that's our job as humans our job is to overcome the fear we want to have healthy fear we don't want to walk across

the street without looking we want to have healthy acute fear we do not want to have chronic fear and the world we're living in wants us to be afraid profits off of us being afraid because afraid people are going to hide they're going to be quiet they're going to look for salvation outside of themselves in industry and they are certainly going to buy any product that they think it's going to alleviate that fear so it's our job to take stock of that and do the work to create a sense of safety for all those cells

inside our body Casey thank you so much it's been such a joy talking to you today and uh I hope that everyone who's been listening grabs a copy of good energy the surprising connection between metabolism and Limitless health I want you all to have a happier healthier more healed life and this book will unlock that fearlessness which I think is such a core yet unique aspect of what we're all missing uh I hope that this is an episode that you'll revisit I hope it's an episode you'll share with friends and family maybe you'll listen to

it together again and deduce which insights I'm moving away from this episode feeling extremely inspired to recommit to my health Journey there are so many things I'm thinking about over the last couple of weeks that maybe I haven't been as mindful with maybe I have made mistakes on and want to reconnect with and Casey we end every episode of on purpose with a final five or a Fast Five these ones have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum Casey here's your final five what is the best advice you've ever received or heard

what I think of when I think of best advice is actually it was the motto of my high school which was an all girls school and the advice or the Mantra was every girl has something to say and I would like to in that to every person has something to say I think that we're living in a world again rooted in fear where people are self censoring themselves and stopping themselves from expressing what is deep inside their heart because they are afraid of the repercussions of rejection of being cancelled of being of having mean comments

online and fundamentally this self censorship that I'm seeing really ramp it's root in a scarcity mindset and it is a it is it is representative of a block of flow of energy and inspiration through us and I think that in many ways it's blocks of energy flowing through us that is fundamentally the root of so much of the health issues that we're facing today literally metabolic dysfunction is the block of that sun energy flowing through our cells to create human energy and so anything we can do to keep the flow open through the healthy good

energy habits to improve metabolic Health through speaking authentically in what's our hearts whether it's in a journal or to your loved ones or doing things to just move flow through our body our blood dance you know move Shake do whatever you need to do to get things moving but I think that Mantra every girl every person has something to say feels really resonant now where I see a lot of people hiding the truth in their hearts because they're afraid of the repercussions because of the public dig world that we live in well said uh second

question what is the worst advice you ever heard or received the worst advice I've ever heard is all good things in moderation I think that this phrase that has become so ubiquitous is actually representative of a real leak in principles there are things that we do not want in moderation in our bodies in our Temple especially in our children's body bodies refined sugar pesticide covered Ultra refined grains the 80,000 synthetic toxins that are in our food water and air that might be in products that we think are good all good things in moderation I think

we need an intense reinvigoration of Courage of people saying what's right and what's wrong we're afraid to say what's wrong right now while literally around us Rome is burning our population is getting increasingly sick at every age and as adults we need to have the moral Clarity to say Don't eat this don't put this in your body it's not good for you and people are becoming afraid of that and so I think all good things in moderation is representative of lack of clarity that is hurting us uh question three what's the first thing you do

in the morning and last thing you do at night well to be totally honest the first thing I do in the morning and at the end of the day every single day is I I roll over and I tell my partner how much I love him I love that every single day I'm just being totally honest and I think that's beautiful um I think starting every day with love fundamentally you know gets me tied into what I think our true nature as humans are as part of this Incredible Universe which I think the core frequency

of the universe is love and so I think anything we can do to start our days with love whether you have a partner or not a pet or not it's expressing love in some way whether it's to a person gratitude for this beautiful life that we have something that expresses the vibration of Love which I think fundamentally is is the vibration that keeps us as healthy as possible beautiful uh question number four what's a lesson you wished you learned earlier the lesson that I wish I'd learned earlier is to make decisions with my body instead

of with my brain that's great in the western culture we are so focused on thinking our way to decisions and I think my life has transformed when I have more felt my way to decisions I think the body has such intense innate wisdom and intuition and connection with all of source but we need to slow down from the distraction industrial complex of our world to be able to hear it and once I've tuned in to what my body is telling me every day through that upset stomach that little that little sense of what's right and

wrong everything has become easier it's fantastic uh Fifth and final question if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be I think the law that would help bring to fruition the world that I really want to see is to create widespread economic incentives to return to more natural form of Agriculture and farming so eliminating the pesticides and creating an incentive structure for Farmers that allows them to cultivate the Earth our you know our mother the the soil that we come from in a way that is respectful

and really respects the complexity of the ecosystem which humans live which soil which all the microbes in the soil live we've we've decimated our soil we've killed soil soil is a a lifegiving and living organism that is now dead because of the ways that we have managed the Earth since World War II with industrial agriculture with mechanized tilling with synthetic pesticides and synthetic fertilizers and because we've killed the soil we're actually killing ourselves and I think that gets to like the broader point which is I think maybe the key point I would want to leave

the listeners with which is that it's that connection that really is what's going to heal all of us like we are living in a system that promotes silos and that's not working because we actually are in not only an interdependent living system between soil plants animals and humans but we're in an interdependent Cosmos and so as we move and create hopefully laws like this that move us from silos connection I think we are going to get so much healthy we need healthier we need to realize and really internalize the connection between most all of the

symptoms and conditions we're facing today and their fundamental connected rooting and metabolic dysfunction we need to realize the totally interdependent connection between soil humans Air Water and Light and the the foundation of planetary healing is not going to be carbon captur it's going to be respecting the interdependent relationships between all things on the earth third we need to realize the connection between humans in loving in-person relationships and that that is a foundation of the safety ourselves need to be as healthy as possible and I think lastly I would just say we need to understand that

connection between life and death and an internal process that we are a part of and that is nothing to fear so fundamentally laws that promote the idea of connection reduce the siline that's hurting us and ultimately help us Thrive from within beautiful Casey thank you so much for joining me on purpose today uh everyone who's been listening or watching make sure you tag both KC and I on Instagram on Tik Tok on X whatever platform you're using with your key highlights the practices you're trying out the habits you're going to implement the shifts and changes

you're making in the lives of your own and the people that you love uh Casey thank you once again it's been a joy and an honor and I am so happy that you're leading this Mission and pushing in the way you are it's so powerful and very grateful that we spend this time together today thank you for all all the light and incredible good energy that you are spreading in the world I so look up to you Jay and I'm so grateful to have been here thank you thank you JY thank you so much if

you love this episode you'll love my interview with Dr gabo mate on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past everything in nature grows only where is vulnerable so uh a tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick does it it goes where it's soft and green and vulnerable