The Food Doctor: The 4 Foods You MUST Avoid If You Want To Be Healthy! - Dr. Will Cole
嘉宾：Dr. Will Cole
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§01Transcript — part 1
If you care about mental health, you care about your weight and your energy levels, you have to care about the . Because if it's not healthy, you're not healthy. Dr. Will Cole, best-selling author, one of the top 50 functional medicine practitioners, and is a health expert for the world's largest wellness brands such as Goop. There's so much medical gaslighting going on. The average conventional doctor would fail a basic nutrition test. And I find that to be problematic because you have the worst healthcare system, yet you're criticizing people that are trying to do something different.
You define yourself as a functional medicine doctor? The differences between mainstream medicine and functional medicine is they are trained to diagnose a disease and match it with the medication. But I think a nutrition forward approach to healthcare is vastly important. Why? Because the vast majority of health problems are lifestyle driven. Foods we eat, exposure to toxins, these lifestyle things are really what's plaguing our society. 60 to 80% of all Western countries are dealing with some massive metabolic issues.
in part fed by chronic stress. Part of our trauma in our life has to do with the trauma that our ancestors have gone through. It's sound science fiction, but looking at how trauma is literally stored in the cells and then passed through family lines is very much science. Are you optimistic that there's things we can do to change it? As trauma can be inherited, so can healing. There's three main things. First thing is number two. The third would be Dr. Will.
My friend. Thanks for having me. I'm going to start this conversation where I started it quite recently when I spoke to Max, who I think you're familiar with, which is what you do and why do you do it? I've always been a health nerd, I guess you could call it. And in hindsight, I now look back and think of how, what a weird kid I was. My first job was at the finish line, but I don't know if you have those in the UK, but the basically tennis shoes, like sneaker stores.
And I'd use my paycheck at 16 years old to go to the health food store and buy the latest superfood that I'd see research on, the latest supplement. And that was always fascinating to me. How could you optimize your health using natural things, using things that are of the planet and food to feel great? And needless to say, I was packing my lunch in the brown bags with the peppers and bananas and these whole grain, the crunchy things in the 90s.
And my friends weren't doing that. So that evolved in me being interested in that, food and nutrition, to want to be formally trained. And I have a family history of autoimmune conditions. And I just have a passion to figure out these complex puzzles. And it's a sacred responsibility for me to then take my own passion. And how can I problem solve for these people and hold space for them? Because I see in the topic of autoimmunity specifically, it's a vast, in many ways, a silent epidemic of people that are struggling, there's so much medical gaslighting going on, they're told they're just depressed, given antidepressants, they're told they are just stressed out.
But the research speaks for itself, the statistics speak for itself, that we have in the United States alone about 50 million Americans having an autoimmune condition. but millions more are somewhere on this autoimmune inflammation spectrum where they're labeled with things like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. And they may not even be diagnosable, but they're feeling that sort of anxiety and fatigue and brain fog and digestive problems and different iterations of inflammation.
So it's, if you know anything, I guess to answer your question pointedly, my Enneagram, if you know anything about that sort of personality study, I'm an Enneagram five, which means I'm a researcher. So I'm sort of this voracious, like, let's figure this out and get to the root cause of why you're struggling. So that's why I do what I do. And you define yourself in terms of your job title as a functional medicine doctor? Yes, I'm a functional medicine doctor.
What does that mean? So if I had to break it down, the differences between conventional medicine and functional medicine, mainstream medicine and functional medicine. First thing is we interpret labs using a thinner reference range. If you know, you get your lab and you have your number and you have this x to y interval, this reference range. that your GP or PCP is comparing you to. We get that reference range largely from a statistical bell curve average of people who go to that lab.
It's non-standardized for the most part. People that are predominantly going to labs are people sadly going through health problems. So a lot of people know intuitively something's off here, my fatigue, my brain fog, my digestive issue, my hair loss, whatever it is. They go to the doctor and the doctor runs the basic labs and they say, look, the labs pretty much look normal. You're just depressed. You're stressed out. What they're unintentionally telling the patient is they're a lot like the other people with health problems that they're being compared to.
Just because something's common doesn't necessarily mean it's normal. Comparing yourself to people with health problems is no way for you to find out how you can feel at your best and why you feel the way that you do. So in functional medicine, we're looking at optimal, not average. So the Cleveland Clinic here in the United States has a functional medicine center. Many mainstream institutions have functional medicine and integrative medicine institutions.
And all of us in functional medicine are trained through what's called the Institute for Functional Medicine. So we're looking at optimal and average. We're running more comprehensive labs to get to the root cause. Because ultimately speaking, none of us are sick from a pharmaceutical deficiency. You're not going to like... pharmaceutical your way into health one day. They are disease managing medications and are needed many times. But ultimately we ask the question, what is your most effective option that causes you the least amount of side effects?
And for some people medications fit that criteria and they need to be on it. But oftentimes medications really don't fit that criteria yet it's the only option given to them. And there's a root upstream causation as to why they have to be on that disease modifying medication in the first place. So we're looking at things like underlying gut problems, chronic infections, nutrient deficiencies, hormonal imbalances, or things like trauma and shame, the things that I'm talking about in my latest book.
And ultimately it's predicated on bio-individuality. We're all different. And even good things, even healthy things that's relevant, that's pertinent for one person may not be relevant for you. And even healthy foods, what works for one person may not work for you. So it's really curated, customized, evidence-based medicine in short. When you think about conventional medicine and conventional, I guess, health advice, and then you contrast that to your perspective, your view of health and medicine, what are the real stark differences?
Well, I think the diagnostic aspect is one of them because they're trained in the standard model of care to diagnose a disease and match it with the medication. So that sort of medicinal matching game, if you will, is a major part of the conventional model of care. And I think a nutrition forward approach to healthcare is another one. And I mentioned a study in Gut Feelings, how it was, study in a medical journal and showed that in this one group that the average conventional doctor would fail a basic nutrition test because of the training that's not there.
And any conventional doctor will tell you, and actually most of my colleagues in functional medicine are conventionally trained, and they will tell you they have to go to post-doctorate training to even learn about nutrition. And I find that to be problematic because we're dealing with the vast majority of health problems that people are seeing are lifestyle driven, meaning that the foods we eat are not eating, our stress levels, our sleep, our exposure to toxins.
These epigenetic lifestyle things are really what's fueling what is plaguing our society and what the major like endocrinologists, PCPGP are seeing. on their day-to-day visits. So I would say the approach is different because there's a place for medication. Again, I mentioned that sort of litmus test of maybe a piece to your puzzle, but ultimately it is not the totality of what's going on here. And we have to look at, in my opinion, a both and, not an either or, sort of reductive tribal approach.
And that's where I think functional medicine attempts to bring things together. where it's not us versus them. It's, well, what is the most effective tools within this person's toolbox? And medications may be part of it, but there are oftentimes a lot more effective, a lot less side effects tools within that toolbox. You mentioned earlier that you had family members that had autoimmune inflammation conditions. Yeah. What was that? And how did that have an impact on you at all?
Well, I mean, I could go to both sides of my family, really. There's different neurological autoimmune issues, like MS-type symptoms, if you know anything about that. Type 1 diabetes on both sides of the family, where the immune system attacks the pancreas and then the body cannot produce insulin, so you have to take insulin to manage your blood sugar. People have autoimmune thyroid issues, Hashimoto's disease is really one of our top patient base today is people that have autoimmune thyroid issues.
And different and other inflammatory problems, how it impacted me, I think was just seeing... how it impacted the quality of life. And health and life on earth, I think in many ways, is just so fragile. I mean, we take things for granted so much until it's not there. And I'm reminded on an hourly basis with my patients now too, it's just a sacred thing that I want to do everything I can to help them regain it. gut feelings book you've just finished writing i believe um why did you write a book called gut feelings what was the you know i always say this when i speak to authors that writing a book is an absolute labor of love i mean it takes forever to do it's a painful process yeah so to so to do that you must really have found a topic subject matter that really really mattered to you why gut feelings why did you call it that why did you write that book This is my fourth book, and as with anything that I've written, it's really born out of my passion for my patients, and it's just seeing things play out.
And I think in many ways, my patients are kind of like, you know, that's saying canaries in the coal mine. I think they're canaries in the coal mine for the rest of the world, and... because they tend to be further down that autoimmune inflammation spectrum. They're struggling with different inflammatory problems. But then I look at the statistics and I realize it's just, they're the tip of the iceberg of really what's going on. So gut feelings is really a conversation around mental health and autoimmunity and people's, I would say, diet culture as a whole.
And talking about the sort of duality within wellness, both gut and feelings, the physiological and the psychological, the physical and the mental, emotional, spiritual. And again, this both and approach that I think is needed to have sustainable healing in people's lives, whether they're going through anxiety and depression, brain fog or fatigue, or they're going through an autoimmune condition or a different inflammatory problem. You have to deal with this both physical and mental, emotional, spiritual.
And I love the fact that I think in our culture in the past years, we've made great strides to normalize mental health care and destigmatize people getting access to mental health care. Wonderful. I just feel like it's in many ways, this is sort of the next stage in that conversation because I think in many ways, it's an incomplete conversation around mental health care because in the West, we still like to separate mental health from physical health.
You know, it's a mental health problem. We sort of relegate it as sort of this abstract problem sort of philosophical chemical imbalance, if you will, which is in now it's coming out, it's flimsy science at best anyways, that we have to realize that mental health is physical health and our brain is a part of our body just like anything else. So it's really in a part gut feelings is a conversation around what's known in the research as the cytokine model of cognitive function.
cytokines are pro-inflammatory cells, right? So it's research looking at how does inflammation impact how my brain works? How does inflammation impact mental health? So things like anxiety, depression, brain fog, fatigue have this inflammatory component. But then the question is, what I really talk about in the book is what's driving the inflammation? Because inflammation is a normal part of the immune system. But what's triggering this chronic inflammation that's sort of this forest fire that's burning in perpetuity?
That's the problem of what's triggering people's mental health issues, just like it's triggering their autoimmune issues. So both the gut and the feelings part of it are the things that we know from the research, and I have a lot of clinical experience to show how these things impact people's health. So the gut things, i.e., like underlying gut problems, that's 75% of the immune system. Inflammation's a product of the immune system. Our gut and brain are actually formed from the same fetal tissue.
So when babies are growing in their mother's womb, the gut and brain are formed from that same fetal tissue, and they're inextricably linked for the rest of our life through what's known as the gut-brain axis, or the connection between the gut and the brain. And if you think about it, the intestines kind of even resemble the brain. 95% of serotonin is made in the gut. 50% of dopamine is made in the gut, stored in the gut. Researchers call it the second brain for a reason because of this.
This is a lot of far reaching implications to underlying gut problems, to not only inflammatory problems, i.e. autoimmune issues, but also to mental health issues because it is the second brain. But then conversely, the feeling stuff, like I really talk about in the book, the research around chronic stress and trauma and even intergenerational trauma, how these big complex things, these mental, emotional, spiritual things are literally stored in our cells.
dysregulating our nervous system, raising inflammation levels, impacting how our hormones are expressed. So it's both a gut and a feeling side of two sides of the same coin that impact so many people. And I don't, you know, I just, I had these conversations with my patients all the time. It just was a matter of when I had the conversation in book form. Inflammation. I don't really know what that word means. How would you summarize or simplify that word for anybody that also doesn't really understand the term inflammation?
Yeah, it is abstract. I think to your point, I use it so flippantly that I realize I'm in this weird health bubble, but it is a nebulous term. It's not inherently bad. It's a product of the immune system. The immune system makes different proteins, different amino acids, different chemical messengers, if you will. That fights viruses, fights bacteria, heals wounds. So when you think of inflammation in this sort of normal acute state, it's if somebody gets a sporting injury and their knee swells up, right?
That's acute inflammation, rushing nutrients and healing and oxygen and white blood cells to the area to repair it, to rejuvenate it. That's normal, measured human inflammation. We would be goners as a species without a normal inflammatory response. It's when inflammation goes chronic that there's a problem. Chronic inflammation... It's associated with just about every health problem under the sun. When you're looking at what researchers are looking at these inflammatory components, you're looking at autoimmune issues, metabolic issues like type 2 diabetes, and you look at cancer, heart disease, to mental health issues.
As I mentioned, this sort of cytokine looking at the neuroinflammatory component to things like anxiety and depression. So that's what inflammation is. When it goes chronic, it really sets off a lot of cascade of dysregulation in the body. because it's a lack of homeostasis. It's the Goldilocks principle. You know, it's not too high, not too low, but just right. That's where you want inflammation, just like many things in the body, just like the gut bacteria in our microbiome.
We don't want bacterial overgrowth. We don't want a deficit of beneficial bacteria, like hormones. We don't want too much hormones, like a dominance of hormones. We don't want a deficiency of hormones either. Inflammation is the same thing. We don't want excess inflammation. That's what's associated with all of these chronic health problems. And we don't want a deficiency that's immunosuppressed people, that people have immunodeficiencies. That's not good either.
So it's about modulating and supporting healthy inflammatory pathways. It's really the clinical objective for my patients and for the average person out there that's looking to optimize how they want to feel. That should be their goal as well. So I've got two questions there. What is a symptom that one might notice in themselves of chronic inflammation? And what are, in your practice, what are the leading sort of causes of that chronic inflammation?
Sure. So there's three, the way that we see it in functional medicine, there's three main symptoms. stages, if you will, on this continuum, this inflammation spectrum. On one end, there's silent inflammation, silent autoimmunity, meaning if you ran labs, you'd see some markers off, like a high sensitivity C-reactive protein, which is quite a conventional marker. You'd see that spiked. You see maybe a homocysteine level elevated, another inflammatory protein.
But the person feels all right. Everything's cool. Stage two is the inflammation reactivity. That's the vast majority of people living on our planet today are in stage two or three. Stage two, a lot of people are there. They have things like brain fog. They have things like fatigue. They have some sort of dysregulated nervous system response. A way that people typically will say it, they'll say I'm anxious but I'm exhausted or wired and tired is the other way of putting it.
They have different digestive problems. I mean, the amount of people that have chronic constipation or IBS or some sort of digestive issue that, again, it's their everyday, so they normalize it. But these things are anything but normal. They're just ubiquitous. And I would put under that category mental health issues, like anxiety and depression, autoimmune reactivity issues, and people that have hormonal problems. And then stage three is a full-blown diagnosable issue.
Like they're going to their doctor and they're given an ICD-10 code in the States, they're given some diagnostic code, and they're given a medication or recommended some conventional treatment. But researchers estimate It's about four to 10 years prior to that diagnosis when things were brewing on the spectrum, meaning by the time somebody gets diagnosed officially, it didn't happen overnight for most people. So it's no matter where you're at, how can you be supporting your gut and your feelings?
How can you be supporting your physical health and your mental, emotional, spiritual health? So to answer the second part of your question is like, what are the most common causes of it? It really stems, like the broad umbrella of it has to do with what researchers refer to as an evolutionary mismatch or an epigenetic genetic mismatch. Our genetics, it's estimated, hasn't changed, haven't changed in about 10,000 years. But yet our world has changed dramatically in a really finite period of time when you're putting that into context with the totality of human history.
So the foods we're eating or the foods we're not eating, our stress levels, our collective and personal traumas, environmental toxins, our soil microbiome disruption and depletion, and in turn impacting our gut microbiome. So all of these epigenetic modulators, if you will, are DNAs living in this brave new world and it's awakening genetic predispositions that have been lying dormant there for 10,000 years, but they're being triggered like never before in human history because of this onslaught of this chasm between our DNA and the world around us.
So on that point then, the world we live in is maybe misaligned to our genetics, which is kind of what I heard there. Let's start with the emotional stuff. One of the topics you introduce in chapter one of your book is this idea of shameflation. Never heard that term before. Yeah, shameflammation. Shame, okay, shameflammation. What does that mean? And what science have you got to support that that's a real thing? Yeah, well, it's really a commentary on inflammation.
It's not that shameflammation is a literal real thing. It's a commentary on how does what's shown in the research as far as in things like chronic stress, which is so well researched, and trauma, and I talk about in the book something called intergenerational or transgenerational trauma, how do these things impact our body, our physical health? So shame is sort of a term that a lot of my patients feel varying degrees of shame. They feel shame that they're not perfect enough with their body or around food or around life itself, not being the best parent or the best whatever in their life.
There's a lot of health-related shame in our world and just shame in general when it comes to life. So shame is sort of the... term that I used in the book of how to explain the sort of mental, emotional, spiritual feeling that people have, how does impacting their health in the book, I talk about this study around self-compassion and which is really right. The antithesis of someone that's shaming themselves is someone that has sort of grace and a lightness and a self-compassion around it.
And the study had people do, they had them speak in public or do math, which apparently that's what we hate the most as humans. But they measured their inflammation levels when they were doing these stressful things, right? And their inflammation levels were high, interleukin-6, this IL-6 inflammatory protein. But the people that practiced self-compassion during this time had the lowest levels of inflammation. And on day two, you'd expect, okay, the person would sort of adapt and the people that were doing the math or the public speaking, maybe the inflammation would come down.
Actually, the inflammation levels were higher on day two than day one, sort of this cumulative effect. Okay. But again, the people that practice self-compassion, which I talked about the different practices in the book that I've seen effective for my patients, it attenuates, calms that inflammatory response. And that's just one of many, but we know most health problems of why people are visiting their doctor are stress-related, that are either exacerbated by stress, that are flared up by stress, or literally caused by stress.
When you're looking at things like autoimmune issues, we have patients fill out, what's called an adverse childhood experience score, every telehealth patient that we have. And research has shown that people that have these higher ACE scores, these cumulative childhood and beyond childhood lifestyle, like life stressors, whether physical abuse, sexual abuse, mental, emotional abuse, alcohol abuse in the home growing up, people that have gone through these things in life have an increased likelihood of an autoimmune issue later on in life or a mental health issue later on in life or a metabolic like type two diabetes issue later on in life.
So again, there's a lot of shame around that stuff too as far as what people have gone through. So shameflammation is really just my term to explain this phenomenon that's in the scientific literature that I see play out in people's lives on a daily basis. You talked about how vicious stress is as a cause, I guess, for inflammation. You know, people tend to think of stress as being a really, really bad thing. I hear often that some kind of stress is a good stress.
What is, in particular, the type of stress you're talking about that is... leading to this shameflammation. I'm assuming it's chronic stress. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the human species wouldn't be here without some grit and resilience. And I think in some ways you could argue... that we're really lacking a resilience in grit. And that's something that I'm teaching my patients and in the book for people to sort of gain a resilience to handle stress. There's nothing wrong inherently with stress.
And even if you look at the research around hormetic effects or hormesis, like people are doing the cold plunges you see all around the wellness space or sauna therapy high-intensity interval training, or even things like fasting. These are all hormetic effects that humans would have spent times in, like difficult times, periodic times of stress. It actually makes ourselves more resilient and our souls more resilient in many ways. But it's the chronic stress where it's out of alignment with that ancestral health perspective.
There's that evolutionary mismatch that I mentioned earlier. That is something that we haven't aligned with. We have these different stress adaptation responses in the body. and the body's releasing things like cortisol and adrenaline, and we never allow this sympathetic fight-or-flight stress aspect of our autonomic nervous system to calm down. So we're always in this fight-or-flight stress state to varying degrees that people never are able to regulate themselves and never able to support that parasympathetic, that resting, digesting, that hormone-balanced state of their nervous system.
So yeah, it could look different for different people. But the things that I hear the most with from people, it's their jobs. It's like a lack of, I would say, healthy boundaries with their jobs. And their family can be a source of stressor. Finances can be a sort of stress. And their health. I think when you don't feel well, that's stressful as well. Those are the most common things that I hear from people. This fight or flight response, this sort of prolonged state of feeling like you're kind of in fight or flight, which is sort of characterized by being short of breath or feeling a bit on edge or nervous.
What is the consequence of being in that state for too long? Because a lot of people can probably relate to that. Yeah. Well, it's that is in part what's driving these these vast epidemic of health problems in our world today. When you're talking about 50 million Americans having autoimmune condition, hundreds of millions worldwide are having autoimmune condition, type 2 diabetes. I mean, it's the vast majority of people in the West are somewhere on this insulin resistance spectrum, meaning they have things like PCOS or weight loss resistance or insatiable cravings or prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.
All of these health problems that we are plagued with as a world are in part fed by chronic stress. It's just a matter of how much your body can handle. And that's sort of the conversation in the book about bio-individuality, right? Some people have the buck analogies, sort of that bucket analogy. Some people have massive buckets. And they can handle a lot of things in their life before it's going to hit that tipping point. What is the tipping point?
The tipping point is health problems, where something's got to give, and they realize they're diagnosed with a health problem. And it's stressors, the foods we eat, trauma, all of these things accumulate. You can't change your bucket size, but you can change what you put in it. You can't change your genetic tolerance for stressors, but you can change what you put in it. So it's really a message of agency, right? It's a message of... What can I do?
We all have different abilities or thresholds to handle things in our life, but we all have the ability to clear these things out and to heal ultimately. You know, hearing all of this, it makes me feel so deeply that the way we've chosen to live our lives is really unhuman. And when I think about what we can do to change that from like a real systemic level, it seems like it might just be too big of a job because of the direction of travel of everything, technology, the way we're organizing our lives in terms of like cities and work and professionalism and social media, et cetera, et cetera.
Are you optimistic that there's things we can do to change it? And what are those like real systemic things we have to do within our own lives as individuals, but also as a society? Yeah, I mean, it's something I think often about. And I think that there's a growing amount of pockets of people, if you will, that are that know intuitively they have to do something different to see something different. And being in functional medicine. for the past 13 plus years at this point, I have to say what was once considered radical or fringe 13 years ago, the idea that stress and trauma could trigger autoimmune issues, is now very much talked about in conventional settings.
And that things that may have seemed woo-woo and strange 13 years ago now is being researched by reputable institutions. I talk about the research of the book around Shinrin-yoku, which is the Japanese term that translates as forest bathing, which sounds weird when you think of it in English. But it's actually a beautiful description, I believe. of the Japanese art of using nature as a meditation, using nature as a medicine, and how researchers show that just spending few minutes in nature and taking in with all of your senses, like a sensorial effect of nature, lowers inflammation levels, lower stress hormones, balances the human immune system, actually improves the human microbiome because of the things you're smelling in and taking in with all of your senses.
So I think the fact that researchers are looking at these ancient arts is a good sign that we as a culture are looking for something different. Because I think in many ways, do you remember that Pixar film, WALL-E? Mm-hmm. I think WALL-E is prophetic in many ways of like the path we could go down where people are just sitting looking at a screen and we've lost all sense of reality. I don't I think whoever wrote WALL-E, the people at Pixar, we can go a different direction.
You know, this is such a strange question to ask based on what you've said, but I was just, just as you finished speaking, then I was thinking about how we know this stuff. Like, you know this stuff. I know this stuff. It's not the, in terms of like getting back to being a little bit more human in the way that we organise our lives. But we, I was going to ask you the question, like, do you do it? Yeah, I mean, to me, I don't think you have to pick between modernity and decreasing that chasm between genetics and epigenetics.
So I live in a modern world. I run a telehealth clinic. So I use technology to speak to people around the world for the past 13 years. And we ship labs to them. And so I very much am a fan of technology. And people are... listening to us right now around the world. I love the decentralization, the democratization of health information because of technology. It's wonderful. But I think the sort of unfettered, lack of healthy boundaries with this phenomenon that we only have relatively a few years of experience with as a world, I think that that's something we just have to learn how to check ourselves.
§02Transcript — part 2
And we are all trying to figure it out right now. So do I live it? Yes, I live it. But I live it in a balanced way where I have boundaries with technology. Like my son's here in the studio with us right now. He's 16 years old. He just got a phone at 16. And so as a parent, I'm making these decisions of kids that are like eight, nine years old having social media. And we have the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, say recently that he says, and this is the U.S. government saying, children under the age of 14 shouldn't have social media.
If the U.S. government saying it, who takes well-measured conservative advice for these type of things when it comes to wellness historically, if they're recommending it, I could only assume that we have an issue at hand. So, yes, I think it's just a matter of all of us to make these decisions for ourselves out of self-respect, not out of shame, but out of self-respect. What do I need? What healthy margins, what healthy boundaries do I need to live a more sane life, to live a more joyous, to live a more meaningful life?
Some people can handle probably more technology than me. Some people could probably, we all have, again, this bio-individuality when it comes to these things. But I think we just need to, out of self-respect, check ourselves. I'm thinking even beyond technology into things like, you know, we're becoming more lonely than ever before. But we all know that's not good for our health or our happiness. We know that being in a community is great for our health and happiness.
We're eating things that we all know are not great for our health and happiness as well. And so like the really, and many of the things you've said, I was like, yo, I know that to be true. But like, why don't I do all of those things? And my conclusion in my head was that I think I optimize for something else. I think a lot of us actually optimize our lives not for like... health or really even for what we know at our deepest level would make us happiest.
We optimize for other things like status and success and we're all reproductive, reproductive pursuits. And I was just thinking, I was just trying to mull it over there. Why that is why like everything you've said in terms of being healthy and being happy, we all understand. And even I think about myself here, I think I could go do all of those things, but what I'd have to do. is probably log off the internet you know probably wind things down a little bit be a little bit less ambitious um would i be happier probably but i'm not doing it and would i be healthier yeah probably But I'm not doing it.
And that's really what I'm trying to get at. It's like why people don't do what they know they should do and why they seem to be optimizing for like success and happiness. Yeah, I think it's it's our culture's priorities, right? It's like burnout is this badge of honor and like status and how many followers you have on social media, how many downloads you have is seen as it's deified, it's glorified in many ways. And I think this unsexy stuff like, you know, getting it, whatever, fasting or eating well isn't as alluring because people don't see it all the time.
So I think it's human nature. I think our culture is really sells us a lot of things as far as what's important. and how we look and things that are materialistic tend to be top of the list. So I don't think it's about, it's not just you, it's me, it's all of us. We all are in this culture that tells us this is what's important. But ultimately my experience is to be the best you, like to be the best CEO, to be the best successful human being, to be the best partner, We have to have our health.
And I see a lot of high-performing, successful people that don't want to choose either or. They want to be successful, but they realize they cannot be the highest-performing person if they don't have their health. And I see people start their health eroding because it is unsustainable to always be in that sympathetic fight or flight stress state. And they know intuitively something's off here. I got away with it in my 20s. I'm getting away with it mostly in my 30s.
But they start to erode. And then when you have your health look not as sustainable and impenetrable as you thought it was, then at that point, oftentimes it's that motivation that you just said that actually motivates them to get healthy. One of the things that orientates us and changes our priorities is trauma. And that's something you talk about in the book as well. The really fascinating thing that I've always been keen to ask somebody is about this idea of intergenerational trauma, which you've referenced a second ago.
Because I wasn't sure if intergenerational trauma was just like woo-woo spiritual stuff or whether it was real science, i.e. that the idea that your parents' trauma can be passed on to you somehow. Yeah. Is that true? Yeah. Well, and that's... Yes, it is true. It is true. It's what researchers are really exploring of how it's expressed in our descendants. And then we all have trauma just in our own life, right? And we all... These are things that we can accumulate and through things like therapy and somatic experiences and things like EMDR that I talk about.
You can work on your trauma in your life. But for some of us, part of our trauma in our life today has to do with the trauma that our ancestors have gone through. So two things. geopolitical, historical things that were big things in our world are really were explored in the scientific literature to see how this plays out. One was a Ukrainian genocide, manmade famine in the early 20th century. Joseph Stalin, the Ukrainian people wanted to have freedom.
Really, nothing new is under the sun. Every time the Ukrainian people wanted to have freedom, there was some sort of authoritarian squash on their efforts. But this famine in the early 1900s, was done on the Ukrainian people. Millions of people died and what researchers have found is not just the people that went through this atrocity, their children and their grandchildren had the same methylation gene variance. Methylation is something that we quantify on labs.
It's a sort of interconnected different biochemical pathways that impact inflammation levels, impact neurotransmitters and how our brain works, different detoxification pathways, that literally this trauma that the people went through during this Ukrainian genocide was passed on like an epigenetic heirloom of how genes were expressed by their experience. Similar research was done in the Holocaust and the descendants of people that went through the Holocaust in Germany and Poland.
So, yes, it's sound science fiction, but intergenerational trauma or transgenerational trauma, looking at how trauma is literally stored in the cells and then passed on through family lines, is very much science. And it's shown that these people have increased likelihood of mental health issues, autoimmune issues, type 2 diabetes, different hormonal problems. And this is what's being explored in science, but I could only imagine that it exists on a spectrum, that maybe all of our descendants haven't gone through the same things.
But I think intuitively, again, we can know that there's certain behaviors and certain ways that people live in part because of what our ancestors have gone through. So yeah, that's what's being explored. It feels a bit like a lot to deal with, like having to deal with my own trauma, let alone my great grandparents trauma as well, having a role in my life. And in that way, I think that can make, a lot of people can think about this. It's like, wow, I'm screwed.
Like if it wasn't, I have my own junk, let alone my ancestors stuff. And I'm going to pass my junk on to my kids. But I think so for the average person, you don't necessarily even have to think about it because it's just where you're at today. And but I would say this. If you shift your perspective and almost give yourself a little bit more grace. a little bit more forgiveness and compassion to say, well, there are some big things at play here. And I see people up against seemingly insurmountable things that have gone through a lot of personal trauma as well as ancestral trauma, break the chains of dysfunction, break the chains of disease and disorder in their life and heal not only themselves, But heal their families.
Heal their children's children. Heal generations they'll never get to see. So I think it's how you look at it. Yes, it's heavy. But as trauma can be inherited, so can healing. In that chapter where you talk about intergenerational trauma, you also talk about polyvaginal theory. Big word. Big phrase. Yeah. What is polyvaginal theory? Polyvagal. Oh, right. Of course, I've got vaginal. Jesus Christ. We'll keep that in. Is there anything called polyvaginal theory?
Probably. We have to learn about that together. I don't know. Let's talk about polyvagal theory instead, then, if you don't know anything about polyvaginal. That'll be the next episode. The After Dark episode. Polyvagal theory is, well, it gets its name in part because of the vagus nerve. It's the largest cranial nerve in the body, right? And it translates from the word wandering or wanderer, and it sort of wanders from the brain down into the gut.
And it's the main nerve that's responsible for our parasympathetic. our resting, digesting, our zenned out, hormone balanced state, of which that aspect of our autonomic nervous system is weakened, or what researchers call a, many of us have a poor vagal tone. Our vagus nerve is weak, our parasympathetic is weak, because our sympathetic, that fight or flight stress, super productive, always on the go, type A is very strong. It's really overactive.
So the sympathetic nervous system is where the fight or flight, the stress responses happen. And then the parasympathetic nervous system is ultimately what calms us down. Yes, exactly. And both are important. Okay. Both are important. It's about, but many of us have a dysregulated nervous system response because of this sort of imbalance within the autonomic nervous system. And then the enteric nervous system is sort of the third aspect of our autonomic nervous system.
But polyvagal theory is a way to understand how trauma can be stored in our body. So there's three main in this sort of study of the human nervous system. There's the dorsal vagal, sympathetic, the ventral vagal. It's understanding how upon this continuum, Can the human nervous system reside? So can we be in this sort of I'm in a state of calm and protected and I'm grounded and I'm in balance all the way to sympathetic fight or flight all the way to I am under threat.
I am shutting down. I'm in hypervigilance. And the end stage of that is something called dysautonomia. It is when the nervous system is perpetually stuck in that fight or flight state, which that's a diagnosable disorder. But again, Polyvagal attempts to describe how these things exist on a spectrum to understand how things like thoughts and emotions exist. trauma, shame. Our bodies are like cellular libraries where we're storing all of these things.
And the thoughts we speak, the thoughts we're thinking, the words we speak are literally stored in ourselves. And we have trillions of cells that are listening intently to how we speak and how we live our life. So that's what polyvagal theory is talking about. So in essence, there's these three states where you're relaxed in state one. State two, you have sort of acute stress, small amounts of stress. And then in state three, you have severe things like burnout and, you know, physiological collapse, I guess.
Yeah. And what sort of proportion of the population do you think are living in each state there? Yeah, I mean, I would assume when you look at the statistics of chronic disease and the fact that you're talking, depending on the study that you look at, 60 to 80 percent of the West, U.S., U.K., all Western countries are somewhere, are dealing with some massive metabolic issues, which is very much stress related. Food plays a part of it, because unhealthy foods that don't love us back is also stressful, but also the mental, emotional, spiritual stress of it.
When you look at the phenomenon of insulin resistance, of which is the leading cause of heart disease in the world and doubles the risk of many cancers as well, that phenomenon of metabolic issues and hyperinsulinemia or excess insulin and glucose issues, That's the vast majority of people. So you really can't have a regulated nervous system when you're looking at that. So I would venture to say that between stage two and three, between the sympathetic to all that system hypervigilance, it's… the vast majority of the human race right now.
I always think about, you know, I have stress in my life, and I worry that at some point, ongoing stress will put me into that state of hypervigilance. My understanding of hypervigilance is basically where, really regardless of stimuli or environment, you just can't shake the feeling of stress. Some people, like, you know, they're just kind of stressed, on edge, anxious at all times. I've always thought that that state is reached after a prolonged period, Is that accurate?
Is that kind of how it works? Where you're in sort of chronic stress for too long that you fall into this category of hypervigilance where you're basically just anxious forever? Yeah, I think in most of the cases, it's cumulative like that. It takes time. I mentioned that sort of general statistic of most people that have metabolic issues, most people that have an autoimmune issue, these sort of end, like more diagnosable things, right? It's about four to 10 years prior that things are brewing.
So yes, I think for most people, it's like that. But then you have the outlier that I think that goes to just such intense trauma, such intense trauma. loss in their life that things could happen, speed up, if you will, speed up that degradation of how the nervous system and immune system is regulating itself. And you mentioned food a second ago and the role that plays the foods that don't love us back. What are the foods that don't love us back?
I'm going to lose some friends right now on this podcast, but it's what I would call the inflammatory core four. plus one if I can, but the would be gluten containing grains would be on the list. That's things like wheat and rye and barley and spelt and sort of nuanced conversation about this. Is it, is it really the grain or is it what we've done to the grain? I think it's more of what we've done to it. We're not properly preparing it, plus we're hybridizing it.
We're spraying it with tons of stuff. And then we're over consuming it, right? We're over consuming a famine food. We're feasting on a famine food that historically was stored well. And now we're always consuming it, let alone what we've done to the crop and the soil in which it's grown. But for the sake of simplicity, I think the average of wheat that people are consuming is triggering a lot of inflammation levels. Definitely doesn't love the human species back very much.
And number two would be industrial seed oils, things like canola oil, vegetable oil, soybean oil, these things that are not – this is kind of controversial for me to say in the health space. I don't think that they are inherently bad. I think they are just overconsumed because we need healthy ratios of omega-3, 6, and 9. When you think of omega-3s, it's like the healthy fish, right? The people are like the mega, the healthy long-chain omega fats you get predominantly from fish.
People are not having enough of those unhealthy omega-3s. They're having a lot of these seed oils that are in a lot of packaged foods. So I think it's just the overconsumption of one and not eating enough of the other. The third would be conventional dairy. By conventional, I mean the average dairy that you're getting, the milk that you're getting at the grocery store. There are better versions of it when you're looking at grass-fed organic, A2 milk you'll see popping up because beta-A2 casein is the subtype of casein that would have been consumed by humans for thousands of years.
Now, because of the crossbreeding of cows, most casein is beta A1 casein, which has been shown to be more inflammatory because, again, of this evolutionary mismatch. Our ancestors wouldn't have consumed all of this. The fermentation of dairy can make it more digestible because it's breaking down the casein, the dairy protein, and those dairy sugars. So things like kefirs and cheeses and yogurts can be more digestible. And the fourth would be sugar.
And the overconsumption of that. But most people know that. But I would be more mindful of even the nice sounding euphemisms for sugar, you know, where it's like, oh, it sounds like agave nectar. I think of that, right? Agave just sounds so natural, like they're squeezing the agave in the cup and just consuming it. It's mostly marketing because it's still sugar and it's still high in fructose. So I would be just mindful for the listener out there to look at the grams of added sugar you're consuming in a day, no matter where it comes from.
And then the plus one would be alcohol, which is really a saboteur to our gut feeling connection. It will impact our gut microbiome. It's been shown to increase leaky gut syndrome, really raise systemic inflammation, and it's a neurotoxin. Researches have shown that even drinking a small amount a few times a week is associated with lower brain volume, lower hippocampus size, which we need for focus and energy and having optimal cognition. This term gut microbiome is one that I've only come across in the last couple of months, maybe the last three to four months roughly, and the importance of the gut microbiome.
For anybody who is new to this term, gut microbiome, why does it matter and what is it? Vastly important. And as I mentioned earlier, the gut and brain are formed from the same fetal tissue, right? That's our gastrointestinal system. Within it, we have upwards, depending on the study that you look at, upwards of 100 trillion bacteria in our gut. And it's sort of this gut garden that influences a lot of things in our body. As I mentioned, about 95% of serotonin is made in the gut, 50% of dopamine.
So our happy, pleasure, joyous chemicals, neurotransmitters, are made in the gut, stored in the gut, almost exclusively when you're talking about serotonin and dopamine. And these bacteria also regulate the immune system. So we're talking about the way that two thirds of the immune system is living in the gut or an inflammation, as I mentioned, so ubiquitous, most of it's originating in the gut. So there's a lot of gut-centric components, both from a gastrointestinal system and nervous system standpoint.
But part of that crosstalk between the gut and the brain and the nervous system and the immune system has to do with the microbiome, which is the collective term for all the bacteria and yeast and parasites living in the human gut, which we co-evolved with. And in some ways... it kind of made us. It kind of, we would not be here without the microbiome. If the microbiome all of a sudden left, we would not be able to produce neurotransmitters, we would not be able to have an immune system, we would not be able to digest food, we would not be able to convert hormones.
20% of the thyroid hormone is converted in the gut, in the presence of healthy bacteria. So the point is we are it is regulating these bacteria, which are not us, is regulating how we think, how we feel, how we operate, what we crave. I mentioned a study in the book where there's bacterial imbalances in many people's guts actually causing them to crave certain foods because it wants to eat. It eats what we eat. So again, this message of really, I think, grace in many ways where it's not your lack of willpower.
Sometimes it's just he's got bacteria that need to be tended to and pruned so we can actually have proper signaling as far as our blood sugar control and craving control. So if you care about mental health, if you care about your overall health as far as inflammation is concerned, if you care about your weight and your energy levels, you have to care about the microbiome because if it's not healthy, you're not healthy. How do I go about caring about my gut microbiome?
So it starts with the foods you eat. Yeah. So I would say that there's that inflammatory four plus one, decreasing those, and then focusing on foods that love us back. One of the action items that I talk about in the book is those soups and stews that I mentioned. It comes from what's called a GAPS protocol. It's an acronym. It stands for Gut and Psychology Syndrome or Gut and Physiology Syndrome. So it's a food tool that we use within functional medicine, or at least I do, that's really helpful for calming a lot of gut-centric inflammation.
And it's sort of a proverbial siesta for your gut because it's almost pre-digesting the foods when you're cooking things. Again, our ancestors would have known all of this because they would have, if you talk about just ancestrally, soups and stews were... a thing that people did, especially when you're going through a health problem. When you think of chicken soup and someone's sick, it wasn't the noodles that were the health benefits of the soup.
It was these broths and these cooked vegetables and cooked meats that were easy to digest and break down. So somebody that's going through a digestive problem, gut health problem, or has inflammation levels and suspects there's gut-centric components to that inflammation, or they're going through things like anxiety and depression or fatigue, I really would implement, I mean, put a lot of recipes in the book so people can really learn how to cook this way that's really quite easy, and it's an affordable way to do it, and you can batch cook it and really have it throughout the week as well.
So that's one thing. And then like these feeling action items and breath work, it's huge for vagal tone, huge for microbiome health. It's simple meditation, simple breath work, all the way to the holotropic and more of the advanced tools that I talk about. is a really way to support vagal tone. The more you're supporting your vagal tone, the more you're supporting your gut-brain axis, the connection between the two, which is innervating the gut.
There's something called the migrating motor complex, or the MMC, which is your gut kind of keeping the bacteria in this large intestine, in the colon. But your brain has to be the one that's regulating this bi-directional relationship between your gut and the brain and the brain and the gut. So breathwork and meditation, I mentioned the forest bathing, hygge, like acts of stillness is what I call it in the book. Pick which one you want, but stay consistent with it.
Because these supporters of the parasympathetic, these acts of stillness, are hugely restorative to your vagus nerve and in turn your microbiome. If someone's in a supermarket or on their way to a supermarket today, and they've heard your first comment there about the importance of food and the foods we pick, about the broths and the stews, etc. As they're walking through those supermarket aisles, what things should they be picking up if they are trying to be good to their gut?
Yeah. Well, I would start with fiber-rich vegetables because you're going to be cooking those in the soups. So you really could pick any of your favorite vegetables that you would want to be having. And then your favorite protein that you'd be having. You could do chicken, grass-fed beef. You could do fish, really, or a plant-based protein. And you could do what stock you want to be having. You could do a bone broth. You could do a plant-based broth like a glangle or ginger broth or seaweed broth.
And just of your choice, really curating these soups and stews. And think of it, again, as sort of this nourishing, grounding, healing time for you and your gut. That's what I would do. So wherever that's at in the supermarket, go find those things. And then I would say fermented foods can be something that people could consider. Starting off low and slow because they are kind of potent things. But things like sauerkraut and kimchi and kefirs, those can be good too for many people.
You were vegan for 10 years, weren't you? Why are you not vegan anymore? You did your research on me. Yeah. I was a vegan for a while. It didn't love me back. It worked for a while. And I think that's... My first book was called Keto Terry and it really was that... exploration of being that health nerd and trying something new and feeling great and doing it in a whole food based way and then evolving from it and realizing it didn't love me back.
And just because something's better, meaning just because something's better than the standard Western diet, which it certainly was, doesn't necessarily mean it's optimal. And it's okay to pivot. It's okay to evolve. So for me, I talk about it in Ketotarian, but I wasn't getting the complete protein that I needed. And a lot of the proteins that I was getting really wasn't working for me on a digestive standpoint. It just was like a lot to digest.
It was kind of irritating my system. Yeah. And there were some nutrient deficiencies from a bioavailable iron standpoint, bioavailable B vitamins, like folate and B12 standpoint, and true vitamin A, retinol, which you cannot get in plant-based form. Now, in theory, I could have supplemented with all of those things. I could have supplemented with iron, I could have supplemented with B12, which I was, and I could have supplemented with vitamin A, which I was, but they're synthetic mainly.
The retinol that you're getting from supplement form is synthetic. It's not in its whole food form. So the question that I posed to myself was, if I have to supplement, is it really the most ideal diet for me? So I have many patients that are vegan for various reasons, like religious and ethical reasons, and we want to make them the best vegan or vegetarian, if they're vegetarian, food protocol for them. But for me, I was able to pivot out of that, where I can still be predominantly plant based, but still be omnivore and feel amazing.
So that's that was my journey. What were the physical sort of symptoms that you experienced that made you awaken to the idea of pivoting out of being vegan? It was fatigue more than anything. It was fatigue, brain fog, and digestive problems more than anything. And I thought it was just me and I evolved from it. I have a, not to get super sciencey on you, but I have a double MTHFR gene variant, which just, we all have different gene variants, right?
But this is one of those gene SNPs or single nucleotide polymorphisms that we can measure, we quantify on labs. We get raw gene data from something like the different genetic tests that people get, like Ancestry or 23andMe. We can look at their own genetic bioindividuality. My body is not as good in that way at methylating, meaning that specific MTHFR gene has a lot of science behind it. I'm not as good at converting folic acid into folate. I'm not that good at bringing this inflammatory protein down called homocysteine.
Many people have this and higher homocysteine levels, even slightly elevated, is linked in the research to increasing the blood brain barrier permeability, basically contributing to in part neuro inflammation. So people that are going through things like brain fog or different inflammatory problems or fatigue. Oftentimes, homocysteine is implicated in that. So for me to get those levels optimal, bringing in things like wild caught fish and grass fed beef and more soups and stews with like bone broth based soups and stews, like collagen based things, love my body back tremendously.
Did it fix the physical symptoms? 100%. And that's the thing. It's science and art. For all of my patients that are vegan and vegetarian, maybe they're not willing to pivot. So let's be pragmatic and be the best option for you. But for someone that is willing to test these things out, still be predominantly plant-based, but still bring these things in, I think can do wonders if you're willing to do it. A lot of people, when they're thinking about being good to their body or good to their gut, they'll have like a detox.
Mm-hmm. You know? Like detox juice week or something. Yeah. What's your thoughts on that? You know, I think it's a lot of... Probably, well, first of all, it's such an ambiguous term, right? It's like you don't know what they're actually talking about when people say that, or it's mentioned on a bottle or a protocol that you saw online. Seven-day juice detox. Yeah. Yeah, so I... I get why people want to do it, because we live in quite a toxic world and eat a lot of foods that don't love us back.
So people are looking for some reprieve. But I find in many ways, it's sort of like diet culture has snuck its way into wellness in that way, where it's like it's this yo-yo dieting of the 90s is now in the form of like juice detoxes where you sort of drink and eat like crap and you go and do a juice detox. To me, it's not what wellness is really about. I want people to have tools whenever they do fall off the wagon, so to speak. I don't even like that term.
But you know what I mean. When they're up against maybe a stressful time in their life or kind of have been busy and haven't been eating the best and they want to kind of find their center again. I think that's great. I think that juice cleanses, juice detoxes probably aren't the way to go, I would say. Again, better than the standard American diet, maybe, but not necessarily optimal. And my point would be in thinking about this is the lack of fiber.
I think if somebody wants to eat whole foods and maybe get smoothies because the fiber is then blended up in sort of this fruit-based, vegetable-based smoothie, I think that has its place because the fiber will buffer all the fructose that's in there, the fruit sugars. If somebody is having copious amounts of fructose for seven days with no fiber, I don't feel like that's setting them up for success. Where do you go from there? I think after the seven days would be my mind.
§03Transcript — part 3
And if they have a game plan long term, because look, a lot of people have unhealthy guts. We know that. So sometimes giving your gut a break from all the junk in any form can be good. So it's not necessarily the juice that's the most healthy thing in the world. It's that you're not feeding it junk for seven days. So your gut's like, I'll take it. I'll take the juice over whatever, the beer. Your son is sat in the studio, as you said. He sat over in the corner over there, 16 years old.
Based on everything you know about the gut, about food, about our emotions, about stress and the sort of causal relationship all of these things have with each other. If you could design your son's life to be optimal as it relates to health, can you talk me through the experience? I was going to say adjustments, but how you would design that life for him to have an optimal life in 2023 and beyond. Yeah. So for me, like if we're talking specifically my son, it, I look at him now at 16 years old.
And I think all of us as parents, like whoever the parents listening to this right now, it's plant seeds by first living it out yourself. Right. And yeah, living your life as an example instead of sort of preaching and being dogmatic and making it about diet culture. I don't think that that's healthy at all, but it really shifts your perspective away from all the things you quote unquote can't have, but really focus back to all the things you get to have.
And avoiding things that don't love you back isn't restrictive, it's self-respect for your body. And really, that's something that I've tried to do with my son and his sister, is really focusing on foods that love him back. So if you want a day in the life of what it would look like, it's funny to see at 16 years old, he starts to own it for himself. It's not this thing that I'm just talking about or a thing that dad does. Now I see him. He actually said to me this the other day.
He said that like it. He said that very thing. He's now taking it for himself. I took it. He said, I took it for granted for all these years of just it was in the house. And this is what was that was doing. But now this is like now he can own it for himself. So I think there's hope for us because he'd be the first one to tell you he's a picky eater. And that's okay. And it's really just meeting your kid where they're at and planting seeds. And then at some point, the goal is for them to own it for themselves.
So in the morning... I mean, he typically does some intermittent fasting in the morning, which isn't for everybody. But at 16 years old, he's working out, he's eating clean. He does some time compressed feeding in the morning. So that's something that's not for everybody. But it works for him and I. We both do it. Why? Why is it good? Because it's a goal to support metabolic flexibility. Humans would have done this, they just would have called it life because of food availability.
Food wasn't always available for our ancestors. Again, most of our genes haven't changed in 10,000 years. So to having some intentional time where you're not eating and you're breaking your fast a little bit later in the day, or you're ending your eating window in mid-afternoon, those are two ways that you can do it. Be sensible about it, be moderate about it. If you have, you know, an eating disorder, I wouldn't recommend it. But for the average person that's looking to optimize their health, most of us are in the West stuck in this sugar burning, metabolically inflexible state where we're on this blood sugar roller coaster.
We have these insatiable cravings, even if it's for the healthier sugars. And intermittent fasting is a way to sort of train your metabolism to be more So then break the fast around lunchtime is how we typically would do it. But we have lots of vegetables and clean protein and healthy fats like avocados and extra virgin olive oil. And you can have that whole food smoothie with fruits and greens and, you know, some sort of protein powder if you want to do that.
And it's similar for dinner. And then there's lots of things people can have. But also cultivating these feeling practices to be supportive of the parasympathetic. For speaking about my son, I'm so proud of him because he, I'll walk in his room sometimes and he'll just be on the floor meditating. And that's, We all should be doing that. It's completely free. It's accessible. None of us are good at it. That's why it's called a practice. And the people that say that meditation isn't for them, they're probably the ones that should be doing it the most.
Because, and I'm one of those people that where our brain is always going, that's why we should be flexing that mindfulness muscle, because it's freaking weak. So I don't know. Those are some things that I, That's impressive. I mean, you walk into your son's room and you sat there meditating. More than once. At least that's what you think he was doing. We're very good at hearing our father coming in quickly. Get in the lotus position. Is that your trick, Saul?
He's a man lotus position. He's a down pat. And what do you struggle with? You know, because I always ask this question to people that know a lot about subject matter, because I always think it's quite disarming to understand that they're imperfect too. Yeah. So what do you struggle with as it relates to these? Oh, man, I am so imperfect. So I... I am prone to anxiety. I'm prone to thinking sort of frenetically of just like all the things I have to do and not spending enough, really not that much time at all focusing in the present moment.
Back to why I suck at meditation. And that's okay. Like I'm okay with that because that's why I need to do it and why I need to do it even more than the average person probably. So that's what I struggle with. It's really being grounded in the present moment. My mind is thinking about all the things I have to do, my team, my patients, my whatever, the next thing I have to do for the book or the podcast. So that's my goal is to be better in that area.
Has your work ever moved you to tears? Yeah. On a regular basis, actually. When you look at things that people go through, it makes you appreciative of life so much. When you see people that are doing all the things, that are really trying with all their heart to be healthy and to get out of a dark place in their health, lose it all. um and having trouble to find their way out of it it is just the sacred responsibility for me to be there for them but it's also hugely humbling i think of just the brevity of life the fragility the between and the line between health and health problems it does is not lost on me at all so i tear up pretty consistently in a consult it's normal for me to do that because you're holding space for people that are going through heavy things and you're talking to them for hour hour and a half at a time yeah it's uh if you aren't you're pretty apathetic i think to this line of work that i do how do you manage that yourself and stop that from getting you down we talked about stress it seems like a pretty stressful position to be in Yeah, it is.
I think the first thing that comes to mind is a great support system, right? I think we all need that no matter what line of work that we're in or no matter who you are. So for me, professionally, it's my team. So I can really almost metabolize that. heaviness with my team. I can go and talk with them about what happened. We can rift ideas. We can kind of get it out by kind of somatically like talking about it and the sort of mutual experience I think that we both, we all have.
And so, on the patient team specifically. So that's it. And then these practices, the practices that I talk about in gut feelings of just grounding practices, meditation, breath work, getting out in nature, these things are non-negotiables for me because of, again, I talk about my lack of presence sometimes and my focus on all the stuff instead of being, but also my line of work and the heaviness that comes along with it. What does your future look like in your own view?
Like what does, when you think about your life, and I often think of my life in terms of like chapters, what is the next chapter in your point of view, if you know it at all? Yeah, I don't know. I think it's just like in many ways, it's like a TBD sort of thing. I've spent my career thus far really my nose to the ground doing what I love staying in my lane, if that makes sense, or just relentlessly pursuing a passion that I've had that's really just been an outpouring.
So I think of all the things that I'm doing now, talking with you right now, or writing a book or having a podcast or all this stuff, it's really just ripple effects of that main focus of just figuring out complex problems to people's health issues. So I don't know where that would take me. But I haven't really, not the norm when it comes to people that are professional and doing all the things. Cause I didn't really think that much about it other than just being of service to the person in front of me or just, I mean when I'm in a consult, that's all that's there.
It's the consult that's there and I'm focused on it. So again, it's heavy to hold, but that's basically that all that I'm doing. Um, So I don't know. I mean, I had kids pretty young and they're getting of age now, teenagers now. So I'm thinking of like being able to spend... these years with my wife in like newlyweds, you know? So on a personal level, I'm kind of excited for that. I'm excited to like, being a parent's hard. Running a business is hard.
So I'm excited to see them grow up and do the things that they're passionate about. And then I know there's a lot more books in me and conversations to be had in the podcast. So I'm thinking of just continuing to do what I love to do. How do you manage that when you become increasingly more and more successful? So, you know, the book sells really well. The next book sells really well. You do podcasts, it gets bigger and bigger. Everybody wants your time and attention.
You've got all these opportunities flying at you. And with that comes this insidious thing called stress, potentially chronic stress. Mm hmm. So how I'm trying to figure out how, when you're successful at something and the opportunity comes knocking over and over again, you're thinking about you used the word earlier on boundaries, creating a boundary so you can balance both the, I guess the pursuit of purpose and like health and wellbeing of yourself.
Yeah. Well, let me know if you figured this out. I'm asking you. So for me, it's, I'm a work in progress trying to figure it out. But I'll tell you one thing that I'm getting better at. It's saying no to things. Because my mind earlier in my career, I would say yes to everything because I think, oh, like it's an opportunity, right? Or I'm so blessed to be asked, why would I say no to that? And if I say no, they won't ask me again. All the things.
And it's like, no, at a certain point, there's only so many hours in the day. And my team is checking me on that, too. Like, you need to quit saying yes to everything. So for me, I think, like, letting, like, no, it's not personal. It's just no for me right now. that goes a long way to like decreasing my stress levels. So I'm just getting started on this path of no. So I'll let you know how it goes. But I think that maybe people that are successful maybe say yes to a lot of things and we need to get better at saying no.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest. And your question is here. What is the most controversial idea you believe within your industry that most people disagree with? I have a pretty middle ground approach, sort of inclusive approach, and I can normally find I could normally find a pragmatic understanding of, okay, it's, that's, that's the art of bio-individuality, right? It's, it's, yeah, but context matters.
Who are we talking about and how are they doing it? So I could think of just about anything in wellness where it doesn't work for one person, but it does work for another person. So I'm not a hardliner, I guess is what you would say. I really seen, and that's really, because all I do is talk to people about their health 10 hours a day, and just seeing a lot of variables out there. And it's really hard to be super dogmatic when you see a lot of nuance, a lot of variables, a lot of gray areas when it comes to somebody's health.
know what I would say that's so controversial I think that what we in functional medicine talk about is still controversial in some pockets of medicine so we can put that aside I think most people within health and wellness would agree with most things I say I'm not super dogmatic one way or the other My job is to find out what your body loves and what your body hates. And I don't really have a horse in the race when it comes to specific ideologies.
But I do feel like functional medicine gets a lot of blowback from conventional medicine. I talk about it in Gut Feelings, actually, the sort of God complex that I think sometimes happens with the conventional medicine against functional medicine. And the idea that, you know, food is influential to somebody's health, I don't think it's controversial, but I still hear it from time to time, not super common these days. And it's increasing. It's over the past 13 years, it's happening less and less.
is that 13 years ago it was so radical, I would get phone calls at the clinic saying, how dare you say that you could reverse type two diabetes with food? How dare you say that food plays a role in many people's autoimmune conditions? Now, I don't get those phone calls anymore, and we have a bigger platform than ever. So I have a feeling that it's just more normalized now. But it's still, I think it's interesting to me, the pushback that some of us get within functional medicine with conventional medicine.
It's that they will say that we're quacks or we're woo woo. But look, I bring it back to this point is ultimately, the United States spends more on healthcare than the next 10 top spending countries combined. Yet we have the worst, we have the most disease and the shortest lifespan of all industrialized nations. So I think that when you look at those statistics, we have to realize we have to do something different to see something different. And when you look at the statistics, what we do in functional medicine, it speaks for itself.
We're getting people healthy. We're able to reduce and eliminate their need for medications when it's possible. And we're improving the quality of life. And I think it speaks loudly when you talk about mainstream institutions like the Cleveland Clinic opening up functional medicine centers. They're not opening it up. Millions of dollars, they're putting it into these clinics off of quackery and woo-woo. They're doing it because the statistics and the data speak for itself.
So I think you're on the wrong side of history if you still think functional medicine's controversial. It's not. We're getting people healthy. Healthy shouldn't be controversial. And I think it says more about the system that's calling us controversial than it does about us getting people healthy. So that's the first thing that comes to mind is that still we have this sort of archaic dinosaurs critiquing people that are getting people healthy. But it's almost like the analogy that I use in the book.
It's like the... I use the analogy of school. It's like you have the failing student judging the grade A student. And I feel like in many ways that's sort of the poo-pooing of functional medicine from conventional world. It's like, well, how dare you? But yet look at the statistics. You have the worst healthcare system in the industrialized nation, but yet you're criticizing people that are trying to do something different to see something different.
Dr. Will Cole, thank you so much. Thank you, my friend. It's been a pleasure speaking to you. Likewise. And everybody should go and get your book because it's incredible. Gut feelings out now.