Pushing The Limits

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Understand the importance of the cell membrane and how taking care of the cell can improve optimal health.
Be inspired by Ben’s fitness journey. Learn how you can start your fitness journey!
Learn scientific-proven ways to help build the body’s metabolic flexibility for optimised keto results.

Episode Highlights

[03:03] Ben’s Fitness Story

Ben grew up following the standard 'sad, toxic, and process-filled American diet' alongside unhealthy behaviours linked to drugs, alcohol, and video games.
At 24, Ben started to read health books. Reading helped change his mindset and take ownership and responsibility for his life and decisions.
He began exercising and eating better.
Ben went from 250 pounds at 34% body fat to 170 pounds at 6% body fat.
Ben continues to explore different diets and protocols and keeps up with the research.

[07:16] The Deal with Type II Diabetes

Ben's father had Type II diabetes and died from it despite following his healthcare providers' instructions.
His father’s untimely death prompted Ben to question the ‘conventional approach’ to treating diabetes and why many people suffer from the chronic disease.
Ben considers this a significant turning point in his transformation journey. He believes that the pain pushed him from hobby to purpose.

[10:43] Ben’s Book: Keto Flex

Ben has authored four books: Keto Flex, The Perfect Health Booklet, The Intermittent Fasting Cheat Sheet, and The Power of Sleep.
Keto Flex, his flagship book, was written to help people understand what ketosis is, how to apply it, and how to use it as one tool to achieve metabolic flexibility.
A study conducted by the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill found that only 12% of the American adult population is metabolically healthy.

[14:47] Get Well, Fix the Cell

The human body has an innate intelligence that acts as the world's greatest physician, healer, doctor, chiropractor, and health coach from within.
The cell membrane is where this intelligence lies; hence, this is the part that needs care.
Ben explains that removing interferences from bad nutrition, lifestyle, and behaviour, among other things, is one method to promote cell membrane health.
Listen to the full episode to learn about good and bad oils!

[25:21] Insulin Resistance

Ben explains that the body’s optimal amount of glucose is about one to two teaspoons or 80 milligrams per deciliter.
Insulin levels spike when the body takes in too much glucose, overworking your receptors.
The solution is to reduce carbohydrate intake, practice intermittent fasting, and drop glucose and insulin.
Measure, then double your waistline. If it's more than your height, you probably have metabolic dysregulation.

[31:52] Taking Responsibility for your Health

Insulin resistance leads to Type II diabetes, leading to many other problems — stroke, heart attack, infections, and kidney failures.
Diabetes and insulin resistance are easy to reverse, but they involve time and effort.
Understanding the process and science will make people much more likely to do the work.
Epigenetic changes take place over at least six to eight weeks or longer.
There is no need to avoid carbs for years. Instead, try different avenues of healing to get optimal peak healthy states.

[38:33] Counter Regulatory Hormones

Human bodies drop insulin in a fasted state. The body's counter-regulatory hormones increase as you lower insulin.
This is the body’s innate intelligence to pump the body full of energy for daily functions.
At the same time, when the body is dropping insulin, it burns body fat and produces ketones giving you another fuel source.
Listen to the episode to learn more about how keto works!

[41:58] Metabolic Flexibility

Think of intermittent fasting as a muscle that develops over time. It has to be trained to have metabolic flexibility .
Hypoglycemic people often feel awful during the fast; instead of burning fat and producing ketones, their brains panic and send intense signals for cravings for sugar and carbs.
Exogenous ketones also help people transition through the phase.
Ben recommends adding ketones in the mix and electrolytes during keto to help transition into the ketosis state.
It gives the body the needed ketones, especially for people who have never experienced a deficit of calories or glucose.

[48:08] Keto Diets

Keto is not a diet. It is a metabolic process.
Ketosis is our natural fat-burning state. It has always been around for as long as humans have existed.
Dieting is not the only path to health — there are other tools to use.

[51:22] Focus on Cellular Health, Not Just Losing Weight

Do it from a lens of cellular health, not just losing weight. Do not lose weight to get healthy. As you get healthy, you will lose weight.
View health in cycles, just like in circadian rhythm.
Listen to the full episode to learn about the four pillars of keto flexing!

[59:35] Thyroid Epidemic

Insulin resistant bodies create more cellular inflammation, including membrane and receptor sites in the thyroid, making it more difficult for the thyroid to do its job.
Long term ketosis usually causes a thyroid epidemic.
Elevated insulin and chronically low insulin levels affect the body, particularly the thyroid.
Balance is always important.

7 Powerful Quotes

‘When I took ownership and responsibility, I immediately became the victor of my future [and] stopped becoming the victim of my history.’

‘When I went through my transformation, it was more of a hobby that I was treating health and teaching it. When I lost my dad, it went from a hobby to pain to purpose. And that's what lights me up every day to get the message out there.’

‘If you want to get well, you got to fix the cell.'

‘These are lifestyle interventions and dietary changes. And nobody can make money out of that. So nobody's going to be pushing you to do that. And it is hard.’

‘If you treat your health casually, you end up a casualty.’

‘...There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something you accept. No excuses, only results.’

‘So I love to kind of change the paradigm when it comes to keto. Teach people that keto is not a diet, keto is a metabolic process.’

Resources

Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!
Track your blood glucose in real-time with Levels Health.
Cortisol Effects on Body by Dr Ben Bickman. Watch the Keto Camp episode here.
Keto Kamp
Grab a copy of Ben’s latest book, Keto Flex: The 4 Secrets to Reduce Inflammation, Burn Fat & Reboot Your Metabolism
Listen to the Keto Kamp Podcast.
Connect with Ben: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

About Ben

Ben Azadi, FDN-P, is a certified functional health coach and the founder of Keto Camp, a global brand that aims to bring awareness to ancient healing strategies such as the keto diet and fasting. He is also the host of The Keto Kamp Podcast. Ben is also the author of four best-selling books: Keto Flex, The Perfect Health Booklet, The Intermittent Fasting Cheat Sheet, and The Power of Sleep.

In addition to Keto Camp, Ben also owned several fitness facilities, including Shredfat Inc, Live Free Zone Training, and Live Free Crossfit.

Learn more about Ben’s work on his website.

You can also connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Personalised Health Optimisation Consulting with Lisa Tamati

Lisa offers solution focused coaching sessions to help you find the right answers to your challenges.

Topics Lisa can help with:

Lisa is a Genetics Practitioner, Health Optimisation Coach, High Performance and Mindset Coach.

She is a qualified Ph360 Epigenetics coach and a clinician with The DNA Company and has done years of research into brain rehabilitation, neurodegenerative diseases and biohacking.

Testing Options

Comprehensive Thyroid testing
DUTCH Hormone testing
Adrenal Testing
Organic Acid Testing
Microbiome Testing
Cell Blueprint Testing
Epigenetics Testing
DNA testing
Basic Blood Test analysis
Heavy Metals
Nutristat
Omega 3 to 6 status

and more

Lisa and her functional medicine colleagues in the practice can help you navigate the confusing world of health and medicine .

Join our Patron program and support the show

Pushing the Limits' has been free to air for over 8 years. Providing leading edge information to anyone who needs it. But we need help on our mission.

Please join our patron community and get exclusive member benefits (more to roll out later this year) and support this educational platform for the price of a coffee or two

You can join by going to Lisa's Patron Community

Or if you just want to support Lisa with a "coffee" go to

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/LisaT to donate $3

Lisa’s Anti-Aging and Longevity Supplements

Lisa has spent years curating a very specialized range of exclusive longevity, health optimizing supplements from leading scientists, researchers and companies all around the world.

Subscribe to our popular Youtube channel

with over 600 videos, millions of views, a number of full length documentaries, and much more. You don't want to miss out on all the great content on our Lisa's youtube channel.

Youtube

Order Lisa's Books

Lisa has published 5 books: Running Hot, Running to Extremes, Relentless, What your oncologist isn't telling you and her latest "Thriving on the Edge"

Check them all out at

https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books

Perfect Amino Supplement by Dr David Minkoff

Introducing PerfectAmino

PerfectAmino is an amino acid supplement that is 99% utilized by the body to make protein.
PerfectAmino is 3-6x the protein of other sources with almost no calories.
100% vegan and non-GMO.
The coated PerfectAmino tablets are a slightly different shape and have a natural, non-GMO, certified organic vegan coating on them so they will glide down your throat easily.
Fully absorbed within 20-30 minutes!
No other form of protein comes close to PerfectAminos

Listen to the episode with Dr Minkoff here:

Use code "tamati" at checkout to get a 10% discount on any of their devices.

Red Light Therapy:

Lisa is a huge fan of Red Light Therapy and runs a Hyperbaric and Red Light Therapy clinic. If you are wanting to get the best products try

Flexbeam: A wearable Red Light Device

https://recharge.health/product/flexbeam-aff/?ref=A9svb6YLz79r38

Or Try Vielights’ advanced Photobiomodulation Devices

Vielight brain photobiomodulation devices combine electrical engineering and neuroscience.

To find out more about photobiomodulation, current studies underway and already completed and for the devices mentioned in this video go to

www.vielight.com and use code “tamati” to get 10% off

Enjoyed This Podcast?

If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!

Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can know how to optimise sleep.

Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.

To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Download this Episode

[REPLAY] How to Build Resilience and Get Control of Your Biology with Paul Taylor 0

Jun 21, 2022

We deal with a lot of stress every day. From balancing our responsibilities to merely reading the news, stress is an inevitable part of life. But contrary to popular belief, stress isn’t always the enemy. A healthy amount of stress allows us to grow more resilient to tougher conditions. Too much stress, however, can lead to the downfall of our well-being. Especially during these exceedingly stressful times, we need to manage our stress levels and build resilience.

In this episode, Paul Taylor joins us to share how we can better respond to stress and build resilience. He explains how too much stress can damage the body and the role of genetic predispositions in our health. Paul also gives us tips on training yourself to handle stress better. Finally, we talk about reframing negative self-talk and forming good habits.

If you want to learn more about how to build resilience and handle stress better, then tune in to this episode.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Train yourself to build resilience and handle stressful situations better.
Discover ways to deal with negative thoughts.
Learn Paul’s tips on creating good habits.

Resources

Pushing the Limits Episode 183 - Sirtuins and NAD Supplements for Longevity with Dr Elena Seranov‪a‬
You can also watch Episode 183 on YouTube
Watch my interview with Dr Seranova on The Interplay Between Autophagy and NAD Biology.
Learn more about NMN supplements on NMN Bio.
Stopping Automatic Negative Thoughts

Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl

Connect with Paul: Website | LinkedIn
The MindBodyBrain Project with Paul Taylor
The Better You Program by Paul Taylor

Episode Highlights

[05:13] About Paul’s PhD in Resilience

Paul is studying psychophysiological resilience.
Gratitude, empathy and mindfulness are necessary. But they are not sufficient factors in studying resilience.
Paul is looking at the interaction between resilience, mental well-being and burnout in military guys.
Paul is developing a new measure of resilience. It uses self-reports, cognitive batteries and biological measures.

[07:57] What Stress Does to Your Brain

Consistent exposure to stress changes the brain, both structurally and functionally.
These changes make people less able to control their emotional responses.
People suffering from anxiety, depression, PTSD or burnout were found to have significant maladaptive changes in their brains.

[17:38] Daily Stressors That Damage Us

Aside from life traumas, the smaller daily stressors can also be damaging for us.
Paul believes that modern life is characterised by input overload that puts us in a constant state of stress.
Our resilience and responsiveness to stress depend on factors such as genetics, social support and nutrition.
Listen to the full episode to learn more about how nature and nurture inform how stress is processed in the brain.

[22:40] Training Yourself to Build Resilience

The Goldilocks Effect proposes that for optimal performance, stress levels must be just right.
Specific training and repetition can help people arrive at an automated response regardless of their genetic predispositions.
Learning arousal control strategies can make you act effectively under pressure. These strategies are also used routinely in training military, police or firefighters.
Breathing is one easy arousal control strategy. Specifically, techniques like box breathing and resonant frequency breathing help manage stress.
Listen to the full episode to learn more about breathing techniques and the autonomic nervous system.

[29:49] Using Attention in Stress Response

Our attention tends to be internally focused if we’re anxious, depressed or stressed.
If you’re not in danger or no external threat, shifting your attention outward can help minimise your stress. You can shift your attention to your breathing or the things you can sense.
Paul says that we all have an ‘inner gremlin’. It’s a character that is responsible for negative self-talk, anger, anxiety and depression.
Instead of listening to it, you can shift your attention to the “inner sage” or the best version of yourself. This process of “self-distancing” has been found to reduce people’s emotional intensity.
Listen to the full episode to find out how to create a character based on these figures.

[35:58] Discharge, Recharge and Reframe

When you’re feeling overwhelmingly anxious, first find a way to discharge your stress hormones.
Paul finds that even 30 seconds of intense activity helps in discharging.
Then you recharge by focusing on your breathing.
Lastly, reframe your perception by thinking about what your best character would do.

[40:44] Dealing with Automatic Negative Thoughts

You are not your negative thoughts. You can choose not to listen to them.
In Japanese psychology, our automatic negative thoughts are stories we tell ourselves. What matters is what story we pay attention to.
The concept of Hebbian learning suggests that every time you’re repeating a thought, you’re strengthening it.
Interrupt your maladaptive and unhelpful thought patterns and create new healthier ones.
Watch your thoughts with curiosity and remember that you have a choice over the ones you can focus on.

[48:10] The Importance of Getting Outside Your Comfort Zone

The small circle-big-circle analogy is used to describe comfort zones. The small circle is your comfort zone and the big circle is where growth and adaptation happens.
Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have stopped adapting to their environment.
Paul thinks that learning how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable is key to growing stronger and building resilience.
However, you can’t go outside your comfort zone and push yourself too hard all the time. You also have to allow yourself to recover physically and mentally.

[53:05] On Recovery

Seeking comfort is done during recovery.
Recovery isn’t the same as relaxation.
Recovery is doing stuff that energizes you.
If you don’t take the time to recover, you’ll run the risk of burnout.
Balancing recovery, proper nutrition, good sleep hygiene and high-intensity training drives stress adaptation.

[1:01:52] How to Make Good Habits and Stick to Them

As humans, we are more driven by immediate rewards. Temporal discounting is what happens when our brains ignore rewards that are far off in the future.
Temporal discounting gets in the way of making good habits and achieving our goals.
In making good habits, it is important to understand your values and connect your behaviours to those.
Breaking big goals into smaller and more manageable goals makes it easier to follow through them.
Engaging in enabling behaviour also helps in priming your brain to make your habits.

7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode

‘And so this is what happens when people get burnout or anxiety, depression, PTSD, is that there are adaptive changes that turn maladaptive. And it's basically because the brain is being overwhelmed with stress, either way too much stress in the case of trauma, or just complaints, daily bombardment with stress, and not enough recovery’.

‘So that resonant frequency breathing or box breathing can be really really useful and to deal with stuff in and of the moment. Just, it's basically autonomic nervous system control through breathing’.

‘So if we take a step back, people who have anxiety or depression or just have a busy mind, you know, they've got a lot of negative self talk going on, they want to get rid of it, right? But these three approaches, and I say, look, getting rid of it, it's not really the objective. It's really about where you focus your attention’.

‘I like to talk about shifting your attention to the concept of your inner sage, which is what the Stoic philosophers talked about, you know, that's the optimal version of you. And that's either my best self, me at my best or some sort of other character that I'm consulted’.

‘If you're sitting listening to this, think of your biggest achievement in your life, something that you are most proud of. And I guarantee you, for almost every listener, it will involve stress and being out of your comfort zone. But we need to hang with the tension long enough for adaptation to happen’.

‘You only get bigger, faster, stronger, because you hang with the tension long enough for adaptation to happen right’?

‘And I find that there are a lot of high achievers who are at risk of burnout because they're just on, on, on. And not enough serotonin focused stuff, just contentment, relaxation, connection with others time in nature, all of that sort of stuff’.

About Paul

Paul Taylor is a former British Royal Navy Aircrew Officer. Paul is also a Neuroscientist, Exercise Physiologist and Nutritionist. He is currently completing a PhD in Applied Psychology. He is developing and testing resilience strategies with the Australian Defence Science Technology Group & The University of Tasmania.

In 2010 Paul created and co-hosted the Channel ONE HD TV series Body and Brain Overhaul. And in 2010 and 2015, he was voted Australian Fitness Industry presenter of the year.

Paul also has an extensive background in health and fitness. Additionally, he has experience in leadership, management and dealing in high-pressure situations. His former roles include Airborne Anti-submarine Warfare Officer and a Helicopter Search-And-Rescue Crew Member with the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm. He has also undergone rigorous Combat Survival and Resistance-to-Interrogation Training.

In 2012, he practised what he preaches about resilience training and became a professional boxer.

Want to know more about Paul’s work? Visit his website or follow him on Linkedin.

Personalised Health Optimisation Consulting with Lisa Tamati

Lisa offers solution focused coaching sessions to help you find the right answers to your challenges.

Topics Lisa can help with:

Lisa is a Genetics Practitioner, Health Optimisation Coach, High Performance and Mindset Coach.

She is a qualified Ph360 Epigenetics coach and a clinician with The DNA Company and has done years of research into brain rehabilitation, neurodegenerative diseases and biohacking.

Testing Options

Comprehensive Thyroid testing
DUTCH Hormone testing
Adrenal Testing
Organic Acid Testing
Microbiome Testing
Cell Blueprint Testing
Epigenetics Testing
DNA testing
Basic Blood Test analysis
Heavy Metals
Nutristat
Omega 3 to 6 status

and more

Lisa and her functional medicine colleagues in the practice can help you navigate the confusing world of health and medicine .

Join our Patron program and support the show

Pushing the Limits' has been free to air for over 8 years. Providing leading edge information to anyone who needs it. But we need help on our mission.

Please join our patron community and get exclusive member benefits (more to roll out later this year) and support this educational platform for the price of a coffee or two

You can join by going to Lisa's Patron Community

Or if you just want to support Lisa with a "coffee" go to

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/LisaT to donate $3

Lisa’s Anti-Aging and Longevity Supplements

Lisa has spent years curating a very specialized range of exclusive longevity, health optimizing supplements from leading scientists, researchers and companies all around the world.

Subscribe to our popular Youtube channel

with over 600 videos, millions of views, a number of full length documentaries, and much more. You don't want to miss out on all the great content on our Lisa's youtube channel.

Youtube

Order Lisa's Books

Lisa has published 5 books: Running Hot, Running to Extremes, Relentless, What your oncologist isn't telling you and her latest "Thriving on the Edge"

Check them all out at

https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books

Perfect Amino Supplement by Dr David Minkoff

Introducing PerfectAmino

PerfectAmino is an amino acid supplement that is 99% utilized by the body to make protein.
PerfectAmino is 3-6x the protein of other sources with almost no calories.
100% vegan and non-GMO.
The coated PerfectAmino tablets are a slightly different shape and have a natural, non-GMO, certified organic vegan coating on them so they will glide down your throat easily.
Fully absorbed within 20-30 minutes!
No other form of protein comes close to PerfectAminos

Listen to the episode with Dr Minkoff here:

Use code "tamati" at checkout to get a 10% discount on any of their devices.

Red Light Therapy:

Lisa is a huge fan of Red Light Therapy and runs a Hyperbaric and Red Light Therapy clinic. If you are wanting to get the best products try

Flexbeam: A wearable Red Light Device

https://recharge.health/product/flexbeam-aff/?ref=A9svb6YLz79r38

Or Try Vielights’ advanced Photobiomodulation Devices

Vielight brain photobiomodulation devices combine electrical engineering and neuroscience.

To find out more about photobiomodulation, current studies underway and already completed and for the devices mentioned in this video go to

www.vielight.com and use code “tamati” to get 10% off

Enjoyed This Podcast?

If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!

Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends, so they can learn to build resilience.

Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.

To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Full Transcript of Podcast

Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Tamati: Well, hi, everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. I’m your host, Lisa Tamati. Today I have the legend Paul Taylor. Now Paul is a former British Royal Navy air crew officer. He's also a neuroscientist and exercise physiologist and a nutritionist. And he's currently completing a PhD in Applied Psychology, where he's developing and testing resilience strategies with the Australian Defence Science Technology Group and the University of Tasmania. This guy is an overachiever. He's done a whole lot of stuff in his life.

In 2010, Paul created and co-hosted the Channel One TV series Body & Brain Overhaul. And in 2015, he was voted Australian Fitness Industry presenter of the year. This guy has been there, done that, and you're going to really enjoy the conversation today—all around resilience. He has so much knowledge, and he is with us all today. So I hope you really enjoy this episode with Paul Taylor.

Now before we head over and talk to Paul, I just want to remind you, if you're wanting to check out our epigenetics, what we do with our gene testing program that we have, where you look at your genes, understand your genes and how to optimise your genes, and how they are being influenced by the environment and how to optimise your environment, then please head over to my website, lisatamati.com. Hit the Work with Us button. Then you'll see peak epigenetics, peak epigenetics and click that button and find out all about it. Every second week, we have a live webinar where we actually take you through what it's all about, what's involved and how it all works. So if you want to find out about that, just reach out to me. You can reach me at any time and the support@lisatamati.com. If you've got questions around in the episodes, if you want to know a little bit more about any other guests, or you want to find out about anything that we do, please reach out to us there.

I also want to let you know about the new anti-ageing and longevity supplement NMN that I'm importing. I had a couple of episodes with Dr. Elena Seranova, who's a molecular biologist who shares all the information about this incredible supplement and how it upregulates the sirtuin genes in the body and helps create more NAD. Lots of big words but very incredible. The information in those episodes is really incredible. And if you want to try out this longevity and anti-ageing supplement, have more energy, it helps with cardiovascular health, there's even some evidence now starting to looking into fertility. It works on a very deep level in the body and helps upregulate the sirtuin genes which are longevity genes, helps with DNA repair mitochondrial biogenesis, lots of really good stuff. You probably didn't catch all those words, but go and listen to those episodes.

The product is called Nicotinamide Mononucleotide. It’s fully natural, there’s no downside to this. Very safe to take and will slow the ageing process. If you want to find out a little bit more head on over to nmnbio.nz, that's nmnbio.nz. Right, enough for today. I'm going to send you right now over to Paul Taylor who's sitting in south of Melbourne.

Lisa: Well, hi everybody, Lisa Tamati here at Pushing The Limits. Super excited to have you. I'm just jumping out of my skin for excitement because today I have the legendary, Paul Taylor with me. Paul, how are you doing?

Paul Taylor: Hi, I'm bloody awesome. How the devil are you?

Lisa: Very excited to meet you. Paul is sitting in south of Melbourne, he tells me, in Wine Country. Is that right?

Paul: That's correct. Like any self-respecting Irishman, I moved to where they make the wine.

Lisa: An Irishman who lives in Australia, who is ex-British Royal Navy e-crew, neuroscientist, nutritionist, exercise physiologist—a bit of an overachiever, Paul. Crikey, could you do a little bit more, please? You're not doing enough.

Paul: Well, I’m currently doing a PhD in Applied Psychology, just to sort of finish it—round it all out. And I need to keep myself out of mischief.

Lisa: Crikey. I feel very intimidated right now. But I am very excited to have you on the show. Because I have come across you from our mutual friend Craig Harper, he is awesome. And I've been listening to your lectures and your work and your learnings, and just going, ‘Wow, this guy puts everything into such a lovely way - with stories and good analogies’. And so, I wanted to share you with my world, over here with my audience. So today, I wanted to do a bit of a deep dive.

But before we get into it, so you are doing a PhD in resilience. So, can you elaborate a little bit on the PhD you’re doing?

Paul: Yeah, so what I'm looking at is psychophysiological resilience, because I'm just bloody sick to the back teeth, hearing that resilience is all about gratitude, empathy, and mindfulness. And that stuff, it's important. But as I say, it's necessary, but it's not sufficient. And there is a large component of resilience that has to be earned. And that's the sort of stuff that I realized from my time in the armed forces.So, the positive side stuck is important. But there is a lot more to it. And I actually wanted to explore it and do the research on it.

And I'm very lucky that one of my supervisors, Eugene, is the principal scientist at Defence Science Technology Group. So, they work a lot with the military. And I'm actually doing—I'm just finishing off my first study with the military. So, it's pretty cool for me, having left the British military 16 years ago. Now, I’m doing resilience interventions with the Australian military.

Lisa: Wow, I mean, it just sounds absolutely amazing. What sort of things are you—because I agree, like, the gratitude and all that very, very important—but it is, you can't just decide. Like, positive thinking, ‘I'm going to be positive thinking’. It's like a little bit more complicated than that. We need to look at things at a deeper level. What is it that your PhD is actually researching? So, what is the study that you've just done, for example?

Paul: Yeah, so the one that we're doing, we basically—it's a pilot study. So, what we call a proof of concept. So, taking a bunch of military guys, and they've gone through training, so I did a full day's workshop, 34 hours with the guys. And then they went on to my app, to be able to sort of track behaviours and log habits and interact with each other and put the tools to the test. And so they did—they've done a survey on mental well-being, another survey on resilience, and another survey on burnout. So I'm actually looking at the interaction between your resilience levels, your mental well-being and your burnout, or risk of burnout in the workplace.

And what I'm hoping to do in further research is to develop further the model or the measurement criteria of resilience. Because at the minute, in the literature, it's just measured through a questionnaire, and it's pretty poor, really.

Lisa: Wow, yeah. Very subjective.

Paul: Yes, it just gets very subjective. And it's also influenced by—if you're doing a resilient survey, it's influenced by who is actually going to see that right. So, if you're doing it for your employer, a lot of people will actually think, ‘Oh, I better not answer this in a certain way, because there may be ramifications’. So there are limitations with any self-reported questionnaire.

But more lately, there's been some biological measures of resilience that have come out of University of Newcastle, which I'm actually going to be working with that group.

So, they've actually lived in something called an acoustic startle response, which is basically you'd be sitting with your headphones on, doing some sort of task. And every now and then there'd be this light noise going off in your headphones, and you'd be all wired up. And they'd look at your heart rate, your blood pressure, your galvanic skin response. And you see there's a spike from your autonomic nervous system, right?

And what they have actually shown is that people who have higher levels of resilience on these self-reported questionnaires, they actually—they acclimatized or they adapt quite quickly to that noise, whereas those who have got lower resilience or who maybe have PTSD or anxiety or depression, they don't habituate to it. So, they're still getting that response, right. So, and this is about what is actually going on in the brain, and particularly an area called the amygdala, that I'm sure we'll get into.

So, I'm looking at a sit back and develop a triangulated measure of resilience. We're taking that maybe acoustic startle and some of the self-reports stuff, and then performance on a cognitive battery when you're under pressure, right? So, trying to then get a triangulated measure or a new measure of resilience. That’s a very long winded—yeah, so we can measure it a bit more objectively.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, because you're working with, like, in Special Forces, I think, in the military. So these are guys that are under immense pressure situations. And looking at our military and vets and stuff, and a lot of them come back with PTSD, and all sorts of mental health issues. And these guys that are coming into this are tough characters, these are not—and then they're coming out with problems. And even not in military, but just in things like my husband's a firefighter. The stuff that they get to see every day. Like he's a really strong, resilient, resourceful human being, but I'm seeing the load, the PTSD sort of load that's coming up over years and years and years are starting to have some bigger ramifications.

Do you see that people that are like super hardcore tough, amazing, but when they are going into these repeated situations and being because usually like exposure therapy is one of the things we do to lower our stress response. If you don't like spiders, and you have to hold a spider every five minutes, you're going to get used to holding a spider, and it no longer will cause a response. By the same token, are you seeing this going flip the other way? Where you're actually getting worse from exposure?

Paul: Yeah, so there's a lot of academic research in this area, looking at not just PTSD, but also burnout. So, for me, there's that, there's a continuum of workplace burnout is linked in a way to post traumatic stress disorder, right? It's just that the exposure isn't as extreme. There's not that trauma, but it's the insidious, consistent exposure to stress that actually changes the brain. It changes the brain both structurally and functionally.

So what I mean by that is what we're seeing in both PTSD and anxiety and depression, by the way, and workplace burnout, with the advent of brain scanners, they're able to take a bunch of people and follow them for a long period of time—six months, a year, two years. Ask them about their stress levels, and then look and see, does the brain change over time? And what they're actually seeing in that people who are suffering from burnout or anxiety or depression or PTSD, there are significant, as I said, structural and functional changes in the brain.

So what I mean by that from a structural perspective, the amygdala, the part of the brain, one of its job is to sense and respond to stress, and it actually becomes bigger. And so there's increased cells, increased connections and hypertrophy, it's just like your muscles with hypertrophy. And I'll come back to that in a second why this is, right. But in concert with that, areas of their prefrontal cortex, that rational planning judgment part of the brain, and also, another area called the anterior cingulate cortex—they're actually shrinking. There’s damage to those neurons and there's less activity in those areas.

And what this means functionally, is it means it's a less-connected brain. And it means it's a brain that is less able to control emotional responses. So basically, the amygdala is starting to hijack the brain. The neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, he's the first to show in his lab that with that repeated— if your amygdala becomes sufficiently activated, it can actually secrete chemicals to block your frontal lobes. Basically, it says, ‘Talk to the hand. I’m in control of this brain’. Right now we all know that as losing our shit, right? Things are hijacked. But when this is happening repeatedly, what's happening is that there are neuroplastic changes in the brain. Right? And we know that this even happens in unborn children, in fetuses, that if they're exposed to chronic stress in the third trimester, the amygdala will grow bigger and more sensitive. And if we think about it, it's an amazing adaptive response. Because it's basically, they're getting inputs through the placenta and stress hormones. If we're adults, we're getting input saying, ‘This is a dangerous word’. Right?

Lisa: Got to be vigilant.

Paul: Yeah, the brain is all about survival first, right? It's all about survival. So, and sometimes that adaptive response is maladaptive. Right? In that there are changes that no longer serve us, right? And so this is what happens with people get burnout, or anxiety, depression, PTSD, is that there are adaptive changes that turn maladaptive. And it's basically because the brain is being overwhelmed with stress, either way too much stress, in the case of trauma, or just bombardment. Daily bombardment with stress, and not enough recovery. And I know as a lead athlete, you know about the balance between stress and recovery and just dealing with what you’ve got.

Lisa: Never got it right.

Paul: And then you don’t, right?

Lisa: Burnout was my best friend. Yeah, there's a huge—because I studied genetics, there’s a huge genetic component to this as well.

Paul: There is, yeah.

Lisa: When you're looking at how long your adrenal, your stress hormones, for example, stay in the body, your COMT gene, your—the RD2 gene, the RD2B gene. Once they actually get the adrenaline, is it going to stay here in the body very long? Or is it going to be out? And they call it like the warrior gene and the worrier.

Paul: Worrier and warrior. When I say it, people go, ‘What’s the difference’? I go...

Lisa: Warrior as in a Maori warrior, and the other one as in worrying, worrying yourself to death. And there’s a genetic predisposition. And then you couple that with environmental, being overwhelmed with either an event or a series of events, or like you say, the constant bombardment. Because there's a question in my head, like, you and I, there’s history, we've both been in some pretty freakin’ scary situations in life. And those are certain traumas that you've been through and you've carried. But then there is a daily shit that goes on.

Like something that I'm dealing with currently is like, I don't know, but the level of anxiety sometimes is like as high just because I feel like a computer with a million windows open. And it's got inputs coming up. And there's so many—you're trying not to drop the ball, and you're wearing so many hats on so many levels. So that's a different type of anxiety. And it's—and that one that like the big, major ones that you've been through, they sort of self-explanatory that you've got problems with those. But these little ones can be quite damaging too, daily on the mind.

Paul: Absolutely. And I like your analogy about having a million windows open. And that's really modern life, is it's just input overload for a lot of people. And it's, even we know that reading the news a lot, and the negativity particularly around COVID is just bad juju, right? Particularly if you are predisposed, or you have underlying anxiety. Then we've got kids, we got that juggle, we got kids and parents, right? And we got work stresses, we got money worries, we got relationship issues. These are all things that our ancestors didn't really have to deal with. Right? And our stress response system has evolved over the last 2 million years in our ancestors in response to certain challenges. Right, so three minutes of screaming terror on the African savanna when you're being chased by a lion—that's your fight or flight mechanism. And then longer term or really traumatic stress, but mostly longer term stress, like famine. And that's the HPA axis and cortisol.

And as you rightly said, different people are different. There's genetic predispositions to which one is dominant, how quick the clearing is. But there's also that, as you rightly say, and a lot of people don't understand this, is that the interaction between nature and nurture. That just because you have a certain variant of a gene, it predisposes you—it doesn't mean you're going to develop that, there needs to be that event. And then we know that those events, when they happen early in life, tend to have a bigger impact. Right?

Lisa: So children exposed to trauma are in much deeper in the shit than others

Paul: Can be. Unless they have the presence of a caring, supportive adult, often, they can get through it and end up being more resilient. Or they've got a certain variant of a gene, that when they're exposed to stress as a kid, they end up more resilient as an adult. So, it's a really complicated thing.

And the thing that I also talk about a lot of people don't, is it also depends on other environmental factors going on. Like what's your nutrition like? Like, what's your sleep like? What's your exercise like? All of those things are hugely, hugely important. It’s a really complicated story, as to whether someone and develop some psychopathology because of exposure to either trauma, or just that insidious day to day stress—what we call de-stress versus used stress, which I'm sure we'll get into.

Lisa: Yeah, now that's absolutely exciting because I mean, I preach a lot about doing the fundamentals right. Getting a sleep—at the basis of everything is good quality sleep. And that's not easy. It's not always an easy simple thing.

Paul: But check if you're under stress, right?

Lisa: Yeah, yeah, because your brain won't bloody turn off. And studying the gamma and dopamine and adrenaline and norepinephrine and all these chemicals that are running out and they're actually controlling us to a large degree, or at least when we're unaware of their influence on the body. But there are things that we can actually do to actually help regulate our own physiology.

So I mean, guys and girls in the armies, in the military, have to do this. Or even like I watch my husband and my brother—they’re firefighters—when they're under an emergency situation, three o'clock in the morning, called to a bloody accident, someone's trapped in a burning car type of situation. Like, my husband's just so cool and calm and collected in that moment, like he's completely present. And in daily life, he's quite a shy, introverted dude, right. But when the shit hits the fan, I've seen his like, he doesn't put on a cabbage head. When I looked at his genetics, he doesn't have that predisposition to having adrenaline much. He doesn't have much of an adrenal response. So he'll come up for a minute, and then he'll be back down very quickly, and he’ll be able to control it. And he also understands, I've taught him more about breathing and all that sort of jazz to help regulate your cortisol and all of that sort of stuff. But it is a predisposition.

My predisposition, I have a hell of a lot of adrenaline, testosterone up the wazoo, dopamine. I tend to start really responding and taking action. But I have to actually turn on the prefrontal cortex. I have to really focus on that and not just fly around like a blue ass fly going just running into the burning building without thinking about what the hell I'm doing. So, two different responses—and both are very good responses in a way, if you can learn to manage them and control them and bring them on at the right time.

Paul: Yeah, and look, that's where the training element comes into, right? And so, irrespective of what your underlying genetics are, through military training or police or firefighters, they are trained in these situations routinely. And the brain sort of habituates to it and you learn strategies to be effective under that pressure, what we call arousal control strategies, right. So, whether that is—an arousal control can be both ways can be—for people who are generally low, can be getting them up to the right level of arousal. And for people who are a bit too overactive, bringing their arousal down, so they're in that peak performance zone.

Let's say the neuroscientist Amy Ornstein talked about Goldilocks and the Goldilocks effect of stress in the brain. That it can't be too little, because when you're bored or you're under arousal, your performance is just not going to be optimal. But also it can’t be too much. And everybody's got a level of arousal that is too much.

Lisa: Wow. That's a cool analogy. I like that, Goldilocks.

Paul: It's a wonderful analogy. And she's shown, looks at the neurotransmitters that are involved in that—and particularly looking at dopamine and noradrenaline, or norepinephrine, as some people call it, how they're really important in that regulation. But as I say, training, specific training and repetition, can really help people just to get into an automated response. And no matter what their genetic predisposition.

Lisa: So if someone is prone to a lot of anxiety, and maybe depression, what are some of the practical—like, if we start talking a few practical strategies now for people dealing with different issues — and let's start with anxiety and maybe depression—what are some of the things that they can do when their amygdala hijacks you? How do you get a grip on yourself and actually change the physiology? Because you feel some big noise happens, or an earthquake happens, or something and you've got that adrenaline just poured out and you’ve got all this stress cortisol and all that, how do you bring yourself down quickly, get yourself under control? So you don't end up in a panic attack, for example?

Paul: Yeah, so there's both short-term strategies and there's long term adaptive strategies, right? So, and I'll go into both of those things. First of all, it's important to understand what's going on, right? So this is about the autonomic nervous system. And there are—some of your listeners will be aware of this, but there's two branches of the autonomic nervous system. There's the sympathetic nervous system, and the parasympathetic. And the sympathetic is probably badly labelled because it's not very sympathetic, right? It's the one that increases stress, right?

So, and if we think about the response that's going on—so in the brain, the amygdala senses a threat, it sets off a general alarm. And then, the hypothalamus is involved in this, the sympathetic branches is fired up. And for some people, it fires up more than others. But for everybody, when that's fired up, and the vagus nerve is really quite important in this, that's the nerve that connects the brain to the heart, the lungs and all the visceral organs, right? So and the blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up in order to pump blood to the muscles to give you the fight and runaway, right. And additionally, breathing gets faster and shallower. And then, we know your digestive system is affected and all the blood that is in your digestive system, digesting your food...

Lisa: Your peristalsis.

Paul: It’s shunted away. It’s shunted away to the working muscles, right, we know the immune system is temporarily switched off, the reproductive system’s temporarily switched off because there's no point in ovulating or creating sperm when you're being chased by a lion. It’s a waste of energy, right?

If we think for a second about the long-term consequences when people are in a chronic state of overarousal, even if that's just low baseline overarousal. So, I have a suppressed reproductive system. This is why people who are chronically stressed, and they become infertile. Right? Boom. And this is why they develop digestive system issues like irritable bowel syndrome and stuff like that, which we know can change your microbiome. And then there's a two-way interaction, which we'll talk about later. And the immune system becomes suppressed. That's why people develop—they get sick, and they take longer to recover, whether it's from a wound, whether it's from training load, or whether it's from any type of illness or injury. And then heart damage can happen, right, and with that chronic stress. So that's over activation of the sympathetic branch, and particularly the vagus nerve, right?

What we now know is it's only taken our scientists about 3,000 years to catch up with the knowledge of Yogi's, right? Yeah, exactly. Certain breathing patterns can affect your heart and your brain. And I used to think, all that breathing, I used to think it was fluffy bullshit. Until I get into the science—and Jesus, how wrong was I?

Lisa: Me, too. I must admit, and now I'm doing it 100 times a day.

Paul: Yeah, exactly. So, techniques like box breathing. I'm sure your listeners have probably heard you talk about it.

Lisa: Repeatedly.

Paul: Yeah, breathe in like the sides of a box. Breathe in for four or five seconds, hold for four or five, out for four or five, hold for four or five. And you can also do a modified box breathe, which is in for four, hold for four, out for six, hold for two. And I'll talk about that in a second. There's also something called resonant frequency breathing, which is also really, really beneficial and can actually enhance your what's called heart rate variability, which is a kind of a window into overall stress on the body.

So, reso-frequency being—you need some equipment to measure it effectively. But generally, everybody listening is probably between four and a half, five breaths and seven breaths a minute. And it's been shown that if you get within one of that, then you could. So I teach people, just generally six breaths a minute, right? So that's 10-second breath cycle, but breathe in for four and out for six. Because the longer breath out—when you breathe in, you are up regulating your sympathetic nervous branch, right? When you breathe out, you're activating the parasympathetic nervous branch. So, the long breath out is really, really key, which is why I talk about the modified box breathing as well. So that resonant frequency breathing, or box breathing can be really, really useful to deal with stuff in and of the moment. Just—it's basically autonomic nervous system controlled through breathing, that’s it.

Lisa: Control your physiology in seconds.

Paul: And the other thing that goes in concert with that, and my wife uses a lot of this, she's qualified in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in Japanese psychology. And we're both fans of stoic philosophy. And it is about attention, and all three of these great agree that attention is key. So if we take a step back, people who have anxiety or depression, or just have a beasty mind, they've got a lot of negative self-talk going on, they want to get rid of it, right? But these three approaches, and as they say, look, getting rid of it, it's not really the objective. It's really about where you focus your attention.

So, if you think of your attention, like a light, and when you're in that stress response, your attention, and it is very internal focused, if you're anxious or depressed, or you're stressed about something that's on that particular thing. But it's an internal experience that you're having. So just shifting your attention outward. If you're not in danger, this is—you just have an anxiety, depression, whatever, just look for the colour blue. That's one thing. Just shine the light of your attention somewhere else.

Lisa: Like a naughty kid who’s having a tantrum. Just distract them.

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. And I call that part of the brain your inner gremlin, that’s responsible for anxiety, depression. And but also just negative self-talk and self-criticism, and anger — all of these things. And the key thing to understand is your gremlin’s like a chameleon, right? It can take many guises. But it's like, if you remember the movie Gremlins, when you feed Mogwai after midnight, it becomes energised and turns into the Gremlin. So, when you shine the light of your attention on the gremlin, it becomes energised. So this is where you just shift your attention either to where's the colour blue or what can I smell?

Lisa: Or breathing.

Paul: Or we like to—or your breathing—yeah, that's another great combination. And I like to talk about shifting your attention to the concept of your inner siege, which is what the Stoic philosophers talked about. That's the optimal version of you. And that's either my best self, me at my best, or some sort of other character that I'm consulting.

Lisa: Ah, yes, I heard you talk about this on Craig’s show. And I was like, that analogy that you use, like there was one with your son, Oscar. And him talk, having Derek, I think it was...

Paul: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, Derek. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lisa: So creating a character around these two polarizing figures. I’m always talking about the lion and the snake in my head. Or Wonder Woman in this chicken shit, who’s me. And we all have this positive, amazing self. And we have the self that's full of self-doubt and imposter syndrome, and I can't do this, and angry, and negative, and cynical. And so it's creating a character. So tell that story a little bit.

Paul: Yeah. So the character thing is really, really powerful. And so I get people to—you've got to bring this character to life, right? So there's a little exercise, which I'll share with you. And you can share with your listeners where, so I call them your inner Gremlin and your inner siege, right? Or you can say whatever you want. So, what do they say first thing in the morning, right? You write that down. Generally your inner Gremlin is the one that says, ‘Press snooze’ or ‘Not another bloody day’, right? But then you go, what do they say when they're faced with a challenge? And then you write down their character strengths and particularly, you focus on your inner siege, what are the character strengths that you have when you're at your best?

And then I like to do a thing called plus ones. Like what are ones that you'd like to develop or have more of? And you write down. So, if it's calm under pressure or being more empathetic, I'm going to write down that my inner siege is calm under pressure, is more empathetic, right?

And then drawing the characters is a brilliant thing because it brings it to life. And Oscar when he drew the characters, he drew Derek and he drew Flash, who has now actually being replaced with Richie. A little side story. I actually bought a book called The Real McCaw from Richie McCaw because I am a big fan of the All Blacks, and particularly Richie McCaw. And I bought his book, and I was wanting to read it, and it friggin’, it disappeared, and I couldn't find where it was. And one night, I went down to Oscar’s room. He was supposed to be asleep, and he's there reading. And he's reading that book. He'd nicked it from me, and he had a highlighter. He's 10 years old, and he's highlighting stuff what Richie McCaw said, right. So now, his inner siege is called Richie, right?

But when he drew these original ones, he actually did a speech bubble for Derek and it said, ‘I will crush the good ones and I will be the king of Oscar’s head’. How cool is that?

Lisa: And he’s 5 or something.

Paul: No, he was seven at a time.

Lisa: 7. Oh my god. But I mean, the hard cold, maybe 6, actually. But sometimes kids are so insightful. Because that's what happens, right, is that when that negative character takes a hold of the negative self-talk, it does crush the good self-talk, kind of becomes the king of your head. If you choose to let it, right?

Paul: So my inner siege is called, Jeff. So when I'm struggling, or I need to get myself up, I just go ‘What would Jeff do right now’? Right? And so this is a process in psychology called self-distancing, where you're taking yourself out of the emotional state, and you consult a character or my best friend or whatever, and it actually shows it reduces the emotional intensity. And research shows that people make better choices. They're more courageous, and they make better choices, right. And so that's one, I think, really useful way to shine the light of your attention. So, the process that I use, depending on who's around, right, if someone's having a bit of an anxiety or just a bit of negative stuff, I like discharge, recharge, reframe. So think about it, it’s stress hormones, right? If somebody’s having an anxiety, get it out. You got to discharge those stress hormones. When you run away...

Lisa: Go for a run.

Paul: ...you come back to homeostasis, right. And I find, even 30 seconds of intense activity is enough. So, you discharge the stress hormones, then you recharge by your breathing, right. So you're doing that breathing and you're focusing on your breathing. And then, so your amygdala hijack is gone now. Use you're focusing on the breathing, and then you reframe and you go, ‘Okay, what would Jeff do right now’? Or ‘What would my character do right now’? Or, if I've written down all my character strengths, what action do I need to take right now to display those characteristics? Right? So the Japanese psychology, Morita Therapy, there's this beautiful term called, arugamama, right? It is what it is. And then they say, ‘What needs to be done’? And the stoics are very much like that — what do we need to do right now? So it's very action focused. Right? And so that is something that I think works for me well.

Lisa: Yeah. Because it sort of removes yourself so that you're looking—it's like looking down on yourself. Because this brain of ours is like a thought factory, it just keeps going and talking and chattering and go, go, go, go. And yeah, emotions take over, amygdala often is in control of our prefrontal cortex. And if we can separate ourselves and sort of hover over ourselves—and I've been looking into stuff like what happens after death because I just recently lost my dad and all those questions. ‘How do I connect to my dad on the other side’? All of that sort of jazz that nobody can bloody answer, really.

Paul: Yeah, if you get the answer, let me know.

Lisa: Yeah, I’m working on it. I'm really trying to get it out. But a lot of talking about the connection to the other side and opening up those channels, and to me, it's like, okay. So just from a brain point of view, if I just separate myself out from my brain, like, if you believe that we are a spiritual being and so our brain, our body, we're just walking around in this earthly body, but we have a higher self, if you like. So, it’s this higher self looking at that brain going, ‘Oh she's running that stupid program again that she learned when she was seven. It's no longer relevant here, I need to change the recording, and I need to change up’.

So it's just giving yourself a way of separating yourself from the actual emotions that your body is feeling, your physiology is feeling like now. And for me, a lot of it is, when I get anxious and stuff, I will just go and sprint for 50 metres. Like you say, it doesn't have to be long, it might be 2 minutes. It just comes back, reset myself. Sometimes if it's a really bad situation or whatever, I'll have a little cry that discharges more energy. And then I pick myself up and we'll get on with it, and we'll do a breathing, and we'll get back into gear. And just having those little tools in your toolbox can really help you manage the day-to-day crap that comes at us. And even in the big situations, the really traumatic ones, I've used those situations regularly—just remove myself for a minute from the situation, go and get my shit together. And then come back into the situation. And that can really help if you have the luxury of doing that.

So, I think these are really, really important because people often think, well, they look at someone like you and all your achievements and all stuff that you've done—or even in all the races that I've done. ‘No, never. I could never do that’. And that's your automatic negative thoughts coming in, your angst, as Dr. Daniel Amen talks about, they just pop up. And you need to realize that that isn't you, that's just your brain doing its thing. And you can choose not to believe that brain when it tells you you're not good enough, or you're not sexy enough, or you're not pretty enough, you're not strong enough, whatever the case may be. You can go, ‘No, I'm not listening to that’. And I'm diverting, and what you're saying, is divert your attention.

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. And those answers are automatic negative thoughts. In Morita Therapy, Japanese psychology, it's basically, it’s a story. It's a story that we tell ourselves, and there are a number of different stories. And it depends what story we pay attention to. And because when you pay attention to a particular story, when we think about what's happening in the brain, that self-concept, or that idea that ‘I'm not good enough’, is basically what we call a neural net in the brain, right? It's a bunch of neurons that are firing together for a concept or a thought or a particular line of thinking.

And the Scottish neuroscientist Donald Hebb showed in the 1950s, it's called Hebbian Learning. And it's a well-accepted way of the brain works, nerve cells that fire together, wire together. Right? So every time you're repeating that thought, or paying attention to it, you're strengthening it. And he showed that eventually, after a certain amount of repetitions—and we don't know the magic number—but that circuit becomes what's called long-term potentiation. This means that this circuit is primed for firing. And it means that then even neutral information is more likely to fire off that circuit, right? And every time you're paying attention to it, you're strengthening it.

So, the other approach is to go, ‘Thanks, Gremlin’, or ‘Thanks, brain. Thanks for that story that you're telling me. But it's not helpful right now’. Right. And that's where you focus on another story, or a particular affirmation that people might have. A different story, I've got this, whatever, it's another neural net. And every time you're focusing on it, and paying attention to it, you're strengthening it, right? So it's about interrupting the old and maladaptive, unhelpful thought patterns...

Lisa: That we all have.

Paul: ...and actually creating new ones. And every time you catch yourself—this is why the first part of all of this is about being the watcher. It's about being the watcher in your own brain. And for lots of people, this is a frigging revelation, that they can actually watch their thoughts, and do it with curiosity. And go, ‘Wow, there's an interesting negative thought. And that's an interesting negative’...

Lisa: Great example!

Paul: Yeah. And then be curious and go, ‘Well, what would a more positive thought actually be’? Right? So you can trick yourself into having these positive thoughts and every time you're doing it, you're laying down and strengthening those networks in the brain, right? So like anything, like you didn't become awesome at what you did by doing it once and then boom, that's it. It's about repetition, repetition, repetition.

So, really the first step is being the watcher, and then just repeatedly intervening, and going, ‘Actually, I have a choice’, right? And what's called in Acceptance Commitment Therapy, the choice point. And Viktor Frankl talked about it, the Jewish psychiatrist who was imprisoned in Auschwitz. And I read his book as a 17-year-old, had a pretty profound effect on me. He said, in between stimulus and response, is the space where we have the ability to choose. And he talked about the last of human freedoms, is your ability to choose how you react to your circumstances, whether they be external circumstances or circumstances in your head, we all have that ability to choose how we're reacting, right. And choosing what we actually focus on. And it's this light of attention, that I think is really, really powerful.

So when we wrap it all up in those characters, and then we're repeatedly doing it, and then people are waking up in the morning, and actually spending a few minutes saying, ‘Okay, who am I going to be today? What version of me is going to interact with the world’? And every time they observe negativity going, ‘Well, I say I've got a choice right now. What would Jeff do right now’? Right? Before they walk into their office, and just before you walk in the door, just think, ‘What do I need to do to express those characteristics of my best self’? And especially when you come home, particularly if you've had a shitty day, you just spend 10 or 15 seconds going, ‘Okay, there's a choice here and what version of me, do my partner, my little kids want to see walk into the room’? Right?

And it's just that little mental rehearsal, as you'll have done hundreds of thousands of times as an athlete and every world class athlete does this mental rehearsal because that shit works. Get your game face on.

Lisa: Get your game face. I have this analogy and I've told this story before on the podcast but when I was doing this race in the Himalayas and absolutely terrified, 222 K's of extreme altitude...

Paul: Jesus Christ!

Lisa: And I’m an asthmatic with a small set of lungs, who did mostly deserts for a particular reason. And I was absolutely packing myself, and I got my crew together like two days before and I said, ‘You have to protect me, my brain. You have to like tell me how amazing I am. Every time a negative thought comes up, I want you to sort of shout it down for me and protect me from everyone else’.

And on the day of the actual event, they did that and they really helped me get my shit under control because I was really losing it. Like I was just terrified I'd had a concussion in the build-up, I'd had to rip some ligaments, so I hadn't had a good build up. And it was the scariest thing I've done at the time. And I've done some other scary crazier shit but that was pretty up there.

And on race day, you wake up and you have that moment for a second where you go, ‘Oh shit. It’s that day’. That day you've been preparing for, for a year and a half, but it's that day and you've got to get up and face down 222Ks in the mountains in extreme temperature, extreme altitude, and no air and things. And I'm putting on my gear, and then that person changes. When I put on my running gear...

Paul: That’s your thing. Right.

Lisa: It’s my thing. That's my ritual.

Paul: That’s your siege.

Lisa: When I put on a number, there's a different person in front of you. And that person is a freaking warrior.

Paul: Machine, yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, in my head. I’m not, but I am in my head, in that moment, I am Wonder Woman. I'm Gal Gadot. I can do any freaking thing and I’m telling myself the story, I'm telling myself the story in order to create the chemicals in my body that I need just to get to the freaking start line and not run the other way because I'm terrified.

And then, once you start and you're in the battle, you're in the battle. You're in it. There's no way out but through. And then you have to bring in all the guns. Over the period of the next 53 hours, I had to bring out all of the stock, sort of things, to get through every crisis that came. And these voices in your head are pretty freaking loud after 50 something hours out there.

Paul: That they bloody well are, yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, but when you go—because one of the other analogies that I wanted to bring up that you talked so well about in one of the interviews was the small circle and the big circle. And the small circle is your comfort zone. That's you, that's the life that you're living when you're in your comfy world and you're not pushing outside the zone. And you’re staying safe because you're too frightened to jump out into the big circle is what you can be, and your potential.

But out there, in that big circle, it's freaking scary, it's hard work, it's terrifying, there’s risk of failure, there's all sorts of things. And everybody wants to be that big person that does these, lives this full life, that reaches their—none of us will reach our full potential, but we're reaching a heck of a lot of potential. And not living in the safe, little comfortable, ‘I'm scared’ world. And pushing yourself every single today to do shit that hurts, that’s hard, scares the crap out of you. And then coming back and recovering.

Paul: It’s critical, right? And I called that big circle, our scientists will refer to that as the zone of productive disequilibrium, right?

Lisa: Those are scientists’ words?

Paul: Yeah, exactly. So you're out of balance, you're out of whack. But it is where adaptation happens. And this is the problem. So we are by our very nature, we are comfort seekers, right. And just because all of our history has been of discomfort, and so it's pretty natural that we're comfort seekers. The problem is that we have an ancient genome in a modern world. Our genome hasn't changed in 45,000 years, right. And for the vast majority of our human history, we had lots of discomfort, life was uncomfortable, and we became the dominant species on Earth, largely because we adapted better to environmental stressors and pressures than other species right.

Now, what's happened in the last 100 years since the Industrial Revolution, particularly in the last 30 years, is that we have stopped adapting to our environment, and we've started changing it. And recently, we've changed our environment to such a level that we're no longer optimally matched to it genetically, right. So when we seek comfort, we get soft, we develop a soft underbelly. And this is what a lot of the positive psychology people do not talk about, is that getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.

And you can just do this, quite simply, if you're sitting listening to this, think of your biggest achievement in your life, something that you are most proud of. And I guarantee you, for almost every listener, it will involve stress and being out of your comfort zone. But we need to hang with the tension long enough for adaptation to happen. And lots of people spend most of their life in that little small circle, the comfort zone, and they dip their toe into the uncomfortable zone of productive disequilibrium. They go, ‘This is uncomfortable. I'm getting right out of here’. No good shit ever happened in your comfort zone. Right?

Lisa: It’s a quote from Paul Taylor, ‘No good shit ever happens in your comfort zone’. You gotta put that one on the wall.

Paul: It’s like past 2am. Right? That's the thing, no good shit happens there. So, it is about seeking discomfort. And one of my things, which you actually exemplify much better than me, but it’s that get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Right? Yeah, that's really key. And I think we have, as a generation, particularly in the West, we have got comfortable with being comfortable. And we are comfort seekers.

Lisa: Getting cosy all the time.

Paul: It's all, it's served up to us everywhere. And we're prompted to buy things and do things that make us comfortable. And it's natural to want to go there. But it's not self-serving.

Lisa: But our biology isn't, our epi genome isn't suited.

Paul: Absolutely not.

Lisa: Getting out of that thermoneutral zone, for example, like cold showers, cold water, hot. All of these things that are outside the neutral zone are where the change happens, from a physiological point of view. If I hop into a sauna, I'm going to create heat-shock proteins, I’m gonna sweat. That's going to cause all this cascade of events in my body that will make me stronger. The next time when I go to the gym and I work out with weights, then I'm going to be sore and I'm going to be breaking down the tissues. What happens is a cascade of events that makes me stronger for next week.

Paul: And here's the thing, right, that if somebody wants, if somebody goes one, if someone hasn’t been trained for ages and particularly, they’re bloke. And they go riding got to get back and then they go to a CrossFit class or F 45 hard core. And they go, ‘Jesus. That was ridiculous. I'm never doing that again’. But then you're not going to adapt, right? You only get bigger, faster, stronger, because you hang with the tension long enough for adaptation to happen right.

Now, seeking comfort, we should do that when we're in recovery, right? But a lot of people, and we should really define the difference between recovery and relaxation. Right? Recovery isn't sitting with your feet up with a bottle of wine watching Netflix, right? Recovery is stuff that is actually energising you, right? It’s doing the breathing stuff, it’s doing the meditation, doing the tai chi, the qi gong, those sorts of things, yoga. Or for some people, it's drawing, it's reading a book, it's connecting with others, it's gardening, it's spending time in nature. These are all things that really help us with that balance between stress and recovery. And when, if we get that right, the stress becomes used stress. And if we are just exposed to that too much or don't get the recovery, right, it's de stress. And then we can go into burnout/overtraining syndrome, which then when you look at the physiology between overtrained athletes and burnt out executives and depressed people, it’s almost identical.

Lisa: Yeah. And like, I've had to try to get my head around this because when you're an athlete—and I grew up in a household where being tough was cool. And physical toughness and mental toughness were what was valued and what was rewarded in my family. So therefore, I have this complete construct in my head that if you're not tough, and you're not hard ass all the time, then you're useless. And I had to deconstruct that a little bit because that lead me to burnout, that broke me, that lead to hell of a lot of pain in sickness and all sorts of things.

Now, as I'm hopefully older and wiser, I know that my body also has a full on and it has to have a full off. And that recovery is really important. And that recovery can be cuddling the cat, it can be going to the beach with my husband and just staring at the waves for half an hour to recover. It doesn't have to be something epic, and it can be something like the sauna or your hyperbaric over the air, or something like that, that's physically going to help me recover or mentally help me recover. And those are as important—and not feeling guilty for not being hard ass all of the time. Because a lot of my listeners are athletes and people that like to push hard all the time, type A personalities. And that can be, have the flip side, when you're just outside your comfort zone all the time you’re pushing too hard for too long without any recovery as well.

Paul: And you know, there’s some interesting emerging neuroscience in this area is that people who are like that, who are those type A personalities, who are very goal driven, they tend to be very dopamine driven. Whereas when you get that out of whack, that balance between dopamine and serotonin, and it's not good, and it leads to risk of burnout. So serotonin, to simplify things really, dopamine is all about achievement. It's about goal directed behaviour and motivation. So it's pushing you to do, do, achieve, achieve, in that context, right?

Lisa: Get that reward.

Paul: But then, there is this whole serotonin driven system, which is more about contentment, relaxation and connection, that sort of stuff. And I find that there are a lot of high achievers who are at risk of burnout because they're just on, on, on. And not enough serotonin focus stuff, but just contentment, relaxation, connection with others, time in nature, all of that sort of stuff.

Lisa: And that can be genetic, too.

Paul: Absolutely. There are genes that will influence where your brain is wired. And then there's upbringing as well, that goes into it. And so, it's really about trying to discover that balance. And that balance is different for different people. Right? That’s the thing, that we all need to find our own. But it's just—it is getting the understanding that proper active recovery is not about sitting, drinking wine watching Netflix, right? That's relaxation, there's a place for it.

Lisa: There's a place for that, too.

Paul: And I’m not saying you don't do it. But I'm saying, we need to think about recovery. We need to think particularly around sleep hygiene, you mentioned that earlier on, how crucial that is. You need to think about exercise. I mean, you mentioned heat shock proteins, which I'm in love with heat and cold shock proteins.

Lisa: Yeah. Me, too.

Paul: Because they—not only do they drive stress adaptation. But there is some evidence and I see, there's going to be a shitload more right? Because in the military, the British military, British Navy has been training soldiers for over a thousand years, right. And they have just noticed that the fittest individuals seem to be able to handle greater amounts of emotional and psychological stress. So, it's no surprise that special forces guys are the fittest, right? And their training is more brutal physically.

But there's only been a few studies, actually. I thought there'd be a ton, and I'm mostly focusing on this in my PhD. It is that, what's called the cross stressor hypothesis, that when you become, expose yourself to more high intensity exercise, and high intensity interval training, that sort of stuff, and also called exposure and heat exposure. And not only do you become resistant—stress resistant in those areas, but there is a spill over into other areas of your life, right? There's this adaptive response that crosses over stressors. And I'm a massive fan of that.

And again, it's something that the positive psychology guys don't get, is that cross stressor and drive

Lisa: Of energy.

Paul: Of actually yeah, yeah, yeah, of doing that. But then as I said, again, we need to balance that out with recovery. We need to make sure that our nutrition is actually supporting us, right. And a lot of athletes, they are on two...

Lisa: I have to get you back on for a whole episode on nutrition…

Paul: Yeah. There is an absolute chasm when you get into but because a lot of your guys are athletes. A lot of those guys are too carbohydrate focused and that, that shit’s bad for your health in the long run. You look at what's called Professor Tim Noakes, who wrote the Lore of Running. And he said, ‘I got it wrong’, he said, ‘You cannot outrun a bad diet’. Right? Yeah, too much of that carbohydrates.

Lisa: Why? I started running, so I can eat more. Apparently that doesn’t work.

Paul: Yeah. But you get into glycation end products from carbohydrate metabolism. And particularly for athletes who are ultra guys, you’re looking at becoming fat adapted. And there's Professor Grant Schofield, I'm sure you know over there. He's a mega mind, who's done a lot of research in this area. Have you had Grant on your podcast?

Lisa: No, no.

Paul: You need to get Grant Schofield on your podcast. He’s an ex-triathlon and Ironman guy, and he's a professor at Auckland University of Technology.

Lisa: Yeah, I know who he is. But I haven't had him on so. So, hook me up then.

Paul: The dude is brilliant. But yeah, what I'm getting at is that the approach to peak performance needs to be a more holistic one, where you really—you're looking at your sleep, your sleep hygiene, you're looking at exposing yourself to manageable amounts of stress, and then recovery. You're doing those used stress activities, you're also fuelling yourself, right. And then you're doing a lot around your mind, your mindset, around optimising your thought processes, building those, reframing negative events.

But then there's other stuff around connecting to others, understanding your values, your virtues and connecting your behaviours to those. And then there's a whole heap of science around creating habits because there's lots of people listening, going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool. I want to do all that’. And then they don't do shit, right?

Lisa: Everyone wants to be epic, and no one wants to do the hard work.

Paul: That's exactly right. But I mean, there's a lot of neuroscience behind that. To be epic, that's a long term response. And the brain—it’s just one more concept I want to introduce to your listeners is around temporal discounting, right? So the brain will discount and rewards and benefits that are far off in the future. Because we may not live, right?

Lisa: We want the immediate.

Paul: Yeah, when someone's sitting here going, ‘Yeah, I'm really motivated. I want to do all this, I want to become really fit and whatever’. And the brain is going, ‘Yes, yes, yes, I want that. But it's actually quite far away. It might be months or years away’. And then, they're presented later on with the glass of wine, the Krispy Kreme donut, and that's immediate. It's immediate, and we are driven around immediacy, and because that reward is right there, the brain will actually give extra value to it, and it will discount stuff in the future. So that is a reason why it's so hard. Then we know that if somebody becomes obese, because they're overeating, or somebody is a drug addict or an alcoholic or has taken drugs or alcohol—a lot of them. We know that that temporal discounting is actually accentuated in their brain, right? So they are less able to control at the moment and they discount stuff that's further in the future. So, it's even harder for those guys to make decisions, right?

And then there's a whole heap of habituation that goes on in the brain that we really don't have time to get into right now. But it's understanding this is complex, right? It's not just about the science, it's about how your brain actually works around that. So, I like to work with people around, let's identify your virtues and your values. And let's match the behaviours to those things, right? Because when you do that, you're much more likely to do it, and there’s a whole exercise.

Lisa: So, it’s looking at what's motivating you deeply.

Paul: It's yes, deeply the emotional connection. So not only that I do a lot of stuff on your why, Anthony Robbins said, ‘Find your why, you find your way’. But he stole it from Frederick Nietzsche, the German philosopher, who said, ‘He who has a why to live can bear almost any high’. Right? So I do a lot of stuff on finding your why. And it's got to be an emotional connection. But then it's about identifying what are your core virtues and your core values, and then matching that behaviour, right, to those values.

So, for instance, if somebody’s way of values is family, and they want to lose weight, I would be going, right, ‘Let's connect that with family’, right. How usefully you're going to be as a dad or as a mum to your kid, if you're dead or if you've got a heart attack, or if you have diabetes, and then you become a burden on your family? So, let's connect what you're doing on a daily basis to family. And let's get a way to remind you, when you're faced with that choice, this is about family, right?

So, there are a lot of things that people can do. Hopefully, there's a few little snippets there of how they can actually use neuroscience and psychology to help them to change those behaviours, or help them to get towards their goals.

Lisa: And understanding, like, the more I learn about the things, it takes away some of the guilt and shame that's associated. Because when we fail, ‘I'm going to do the diet, and I'm going to be good’. And then five minutes later, you bloody fall over and do something you shouldn't have done. And that's part of the human condition and understanding that it's very complex.

This is why I love having these conversations, because I learn obviously a ton from people like you, but it also just helps us have these conversations around removing the guilt and the shame associated with failing. Because if you understand that it's neurotransmitters at play, and then there's the way that you were conditioned, and there is a genetic component, the choices that you've made up to now, you may have made some bad choices, because of all this combination of things. It's not always 100% your fault, but that doesn't mean that it's not 100% your responsibility to do something about it from here on and then.

Paul: That’s exactly right. Also, people need to understand that people are motivated differently with goals, right? So you're very goal focused, I could tell, and big, hairy, audacious goals drive you right. And some of your listeners will be the same, particularly those who are more athletic, we know that they are driven by that. But for some people, and big goals are not good, right?

Particularly when you have people who need a lot of weight loss. If I had clients in the past who needed that, I'd say right, ‘What's your goal’? If they said it's 20 kilos, 30 kilos, and it's months away, I'd be like, ‘Right. Write that shit down somewhere. Forget about it’. Right? And what are you going to do in the next three months? Then what are you going to do in the next month? And then what are you going to do in the next week? Write your goals, right because for some people, that big goal, say somebody, Missus Narcan Furken, or Mr Narcan Furken wants to lose those 30 kilos, he's got it written on his mirror, all of that, he's got his why there. That 30 kilos every day is a reminder that he's a failure. Because it’s really far away.

Lisa: Because it’s too big.

Paul: It’s too far away. And his brain can't connect what he's doing on a daily basis. So, some people—and I like to get people to experiment with it, but I like to break those Goldstein, longest I'd like people to focus on if they're not a gun like nutter, like you, is three months. Then, what's your one month then? Then, what's your weekly weigh point?

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I need that, to. When you enter big, hairy audacious goal, you do have to break it down. Like when I ran through New Zealand, I've told this analogy before but 2250 kilometres and I'm standing at the start line, bawling my eyes out going ‘Oh, God, dude. 2000 kilometres. What was I thinking’? And my mum just said to me, ‘Get to that first bloody power pole. That's your job right now’. For the first half an hour, stop looking at the hugeness of that and just break it down into what do I have to do right now, the next half an hour?

And I use it too, sometimes when you're making a little decisions, and you're trying to make that decision. Because people think often, and I know we need to wrap it up, but people think often that, ‘Oh, you're an athlete. You just love running and you're just totally into training and you're just fully motivated all the time’. I can tell you 90% of the time when I go training, I don't feel like training. But you learn to do it anyway. And you just take—I trick my brain into going on, I just put my gear on a bit of stretching, and, a bit of jumping around, see how it feels. And when I've done that little bit, it's like, well, you're here now your mouths will carry on.

Paul: Love it. So I call that an enabling behaviour. Right? So I'm a big fan of when you come home from work, put your exercise gear on, right? Lots of people come home from work. And when I do workshops, I say ‘Who comes up for work and puts their pyjamas on’. The amount of people that go, ‘Yes, that's me’. I'm like, ‘What is that shit priming your brain to do to sit on there hours on the couch with a glass of wine or a beer, right? When you come home, put your exercise gear on, right? Because it just primes you to be more active. You don't have to do anything else. Just put your exercise gear, but then, you're a shitload more likely to be more active, to do a workout, or just to move around more’, right? And it's like, you don't want to go for a run? Fine. All you got to do is you got to put your exercise gear on. You got to get to your letterbox and then you make your decision. And if it’s, no come back in.

Lisa: Yeah, and do it all fine. And sometimes, I do come back. Like, get up the morning, you say, ‘Well, I’ll go for a kilometre. And if I'm not feeling it, because I'm really not. And if I'm really not feeling it, then there's a reason that I'm not going to be there’. And then I'll go home. And I've learned to listen to my body and do that. And I mean, I just go into my running gear all day, every day. Because if you have a crazy busy life like me, it's like, ‘Oh, I've got 20 minutes, right’. And that's the other thing I wanted to say, you don't have to have a full hour for it to be a training session. Get 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there and 10 minutes there, that adds up. So doing those micro commitments sometimes is another way to trick yourself

Paul: Yeah, I'm a big fan of movement snacks. So right over in the corner, in my office is club bells. So I can just see the club bell, go up, pick them up, do some stuff and then boom. 30 seconds a minute right? People think you have to go to the gym to be active, horseshit!

Lisa: An hour and a half at the gym. If I spend an hour and a half at the gym, I would be absolutely knackered because I only need 20 to 30 minutes generally at the gym. Because I’m in there, plus my warm up—do your warm up properly, people—I can be exhausted in 10 minutes if I want…

Paul: Oh, absolutely. I say if you're in the gym more than 20 or 30 minutes, you're not working hard enough. Unless you're doing a strength training, component big heavy and you need that, then that’s good.

Lisa: That's different because I need to rest in between.

Paul: There’s always nuance, right?

Lisa: There’s nuance to that.

Hey, look, Paul, I'm very respectful of your time. I'm very grateful for your knowledge, it’s just insane, I could really love to have you back on the show at some stage if I may be so bold to ask again and to talk nutrition perhaps next time. So, this one's been all about resilience and how to get a control your biology, and it has been absolutely wonderful.

Where can people connect with you, get you as a speaker? You do a whole lot of stuff. How do people follow your work, your podcast, all that sort of good stuff?

Paul: Yeah. So, Mind Body Brain. Yeah, and people don't understand me when I say brain. So mindbodybrain.com.au. My podcast is The Mind Body Brain Project. And actually, I’m just releasing my first ever public course, with my wife, who's the Japanese psychology person and ACT. So we're doing a Better You program, you can find out more details on that. It's all online and webinars and stuff, deep dives into all of that stuff there. So I'm really excited about that. But that's really where you find out.

But I just want to say the reason why I have to go is that I'm actually going to see a PT for the first time, probably ever. And I'll tell you why. Because I need a hip replacement, and I'm shit at doing my rehab. And I realized I need accountability. So I actually find someone who lives quite close to me, who actually did my course because I used to certify personal trainers. And there's a bit of ego going, ‘You don't need to see a personal trainer, you know all this shit’. But I actually need the accountability.

Lisa: We all need coaches.

Paul: Yeah, for accountability, because then I do that shit. And I know, I'm going to go in and see that and she's going to go, ‘Have you done your rehab’? Right. So she's holding me accountable.

Lisa: You're using that little trick to do something that you don't really want to do, but you know you have to do. And that’s the little tricks, and what I like about that too, is that you don't have to beg an ego to go and actually learn from someone that you've taught. Everybody needs coaches. I have so many coaches. I feel like I'm being bossed around all the time. Like, because I want to learn from the best. I want to be pushed and challenged and stuff, and I love having mentors and people that keep me in line where I need to be in line. And each of us needs that.

Paul: Absolutely. And the ego gets in the way and you know what? I've learned stuff from someone that did my course, which is really cool. Don’t let that bloody ego get in the way.

Lisa: No. Paul Taylor, you've been absolute legend today. Thank you so much. I can't wait to have you back on again.

Paul: And I can't wait to get you on my podcast and explore things a little bit. So, looking forward to it.

That's it this week for Pushing The Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

The information contained in this show is not medical advice it is for educational purposes only and the opinions of guests are not the views of the show. Please seed your own medical advice from a registered medical professional.

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Navigating the Crypto Jungle: What You Need to Know When Investing in Bitcoin with Rob Wolff 0

Jun 16, 2022

Are you thinking of diving into the crypto space and investing in bitcoin? If so, you’re not alone.

In this episode, Rob Wolff discusses the mentality and strategies that you need when investing in bitcoin. It’s important to understand exactly what you’re getting into before taking the plunge, so he shares what bitcoin is and why it’s worth investing in. From understanding the technology behind it to assessing risk, volatility and making profits, we’ve got you covered.

If you’re new to investing in bitcoin or curious about the crypto space but don’t know where to start, then this episode is for you!

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Understand what bitcoin is and why you should invest in it.
Learn the mentality and strategies that you need when investing in crypto.
Find out the benefits, risks, and regulations surrounding crypto investing.

Resources

Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!
Dollar Cost Averaging Bitcoin
Connect with Rob: Website | Youtube | Twitter

Episode Highlights

[03:12] Rob’s Background

After high school, Rob became a combat medic in the military.
He went into home health management and then medical device sales at a company called KCI after he was discharged from the military.
Eventually, he started an online education platform for nurses and got into real estate.
His first exposure to crypto was in 2012, and he used dollar-cost averaging.

[09:53] Getting Into Bitcoin and the Crypto Space

You can’t build wealth if you quit after making just a little money.
Inflation plays a large role in pushing people to consider alternative income streams such as bitcoin.
It’s difficult to make more bitcoin because its value lies in its scarcity or finiteness.
Bitcoin is a decentralized technology.

[22:51] Investing in Uncertain Times

We’re in for some bearish days and should expect that the traditional stock market will see a decline.
Rob predicts that because of fear, people will hold onto their cash and enter into what they consider risky assets.
Bitcoin may be volatile right now, but it will stabilize as time goes on.
Make sure you’re making the right decision for you and your family.

[22:51] Investment Mentality and Strategy

Everybody has the mentality to invest, but not everyone has the stomach for it.
The most stable asset and most volatile market is bitcoin Ethereum.
Do research on the projects and companies you’re interested in, determine whether you really want to invest in them, and only invest what you can afford to lose.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

[41:34] Volatility and Risk

Bitcoin is currently in price discovery mode.
Looking at the risk factor of the volatility, the time horizon can be different.
Volatility depends on the asset that you’re investing in, so volatility is fine as long as you can stick out the time horizon.

[44:20] Crypto Regulations

Triage on cryptos will be needed to come up with regulations.
With stablecoins, if they’re pegged to the dollar, determine the assets that they’re pegged to and perform audits, however many months it takes.
Bitcoin that you lend out to institutional investors will be collateralized.

[53:48] Adoption Curve

There’s already too much money in the crypto space and it’s going to keep growing.
Bitcoin creates jobs for miners and people doing construction.
Bitcoin is now a base layer protocol where you can build on second layer solutions and make transactions built on the safest, computerized network in the world.

[1:07:39] CBDC vs. Crypto

If you have a centralized ledger, banks will have control over your account.
Crypto isn’t for illicit transactions because every transaction is made on an open ledger.
CBDCs are not truly decentralized crypto.

7 Powerful Quotes

‘The value of Bitcoin lies in its scarcity.’

‘The reality is, is that I believe we're in for some pretty bearish days. And I believe that the traditional stock market on Wall Street, we're going to see a pretty big decline with the S&P 500 and NASDAQ as it goes down.’

‘In the short term right here, it's extremely important to make sure that you're making the right decision for you and your family.’

‘Everybody has the mentality to invest. But the question is, do you have the stomach?’

‘The basics are just like getting any investment: you take a look at the project or the company itself, and just go and just do as much research as you possibly can and go, do I want to invest into this, and I'm going to invest only what I can afford to lose.’

‘If you take a look at at the risk factor of the of the volatility, there is, again, the time horizon that you look at could be a lot different.’

‘People always complain about, oh, blockchain and crypto it's for illicit activities and things like that and drug smugglers. No, it's not. Because every transaction you do is on an open ledger.’

About Rob

Rob Wolff is the host of Digital Asset News and the creator of DAN Teaches Crypto, a free crypto education platform for all levels of digital asset knowledge. With his incredible wealth of knowledge in crypto, he helps people understand cryptocurrency and digital asset news.

As a business owner and investor, Rob firmly believes the crypto space will change the world in dramatic ways. Learn more about his work on his website and YouTube channel. You can also connect with him on Twitter.

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Order Lisa's Books

Lisa has published 5 books: Running Hot, Running to Extremes, Relentless, What your oncologist isn't telling you and her latest "Thriving on the Edge"

Check them all out at

https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books

Perfect Amino Supplement by Dr David Minkoff

Introducing PerfectAmino

PerfectAmino is an amino acid supplement that is 99% utilized by the body to make protein.
PerfectAmino is 3-6x the protein of other sources with almost no calories.
100% vegan and non-GMO.
The coated PerfectAmino tablets are a slightly different shape and have a natural, non-GMO, certified organic vegan coating on them so they will glide down your throat easily.
Fully absorbed within 20-30 minutes!
No other form of protein comes close to PerfectAminos

Listen to the episode with Dr Minkoff here:

Use code "tamati" at checkout to get a 10% discount on any of their devices.

Red Light Therapy:

Lisa is a huge fan of Red Light Therapy and runs a Hyperbaric and Red Light Therapy clinic. If you are wanting to get the best products try

Flexbeam: A wearable Red Light Device

https://recharge.health/product/flexbeam-aff/?ref=A9svb6YLz79r38

Or Try Vielights’ advanced Photobiomodulation Devices

Vielight brain photobiomodulation devices combine electrical engineering and neuroscience.

To find out more about photobiomodulation, current studies underway and already completed and for the devices mentioned in this video go to

www.vielight.com and use code “tamati” to get 10% off

Enjoyed This Podcast?

If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!

Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn about all things crypto.

Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.

To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Download this Episode

[REPLAY] Understanding Your Genetic Hormone Pathways with Dr Mansoor Mohammed 0

Jun 14, 2022

Our hormones affect almost every aspect of your body. Mood, metabolism and many physical processes are all governed by hormones. However, you might not recognise just how unique you are genetically. Our genetic profile and predisposition to certain hormones impact our daily lives more than we think it does. Learning more about ourselves can drastically improve our quality of life and allow us to make informed and empowered decisions.

Dr Mansoor Mohammed joins us in this episode to explain the importance of understanding our genetic predisposition and the hormone cascade. He also talks about women's hormones. Finally, he explains why we should take our genetic profile into account before experimenting with pharmaceutical treatments and different types of therapy.

If you want to know more about the science behind your genetics and hormones, this episode is for you.

Hormone Report with The DNA Company

If you would like to have your hormone test done, understand your genetics in regards to your hormones and would like to then have these interpreted by Lisa, please go to this link to get the test done. Lisa will then contact you once the DNA has been processed to have a consultation.

The Report can be purchased here: https://www.peakwellness.co.nz/dna

Please note The DNA Company is based in Canada and this price is in Canadian dollars. It may take up to 6 weeks depending on where you are located in the world for your results to get back to you.

For any questions, please email lisa@lisatamati.com.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Understand why it is essential to learn about the nuances of the menstrual cycle.
Discover your individuality as a person going through hormonal cascades.
Learn more about the effect of estrogen and why being on the pill fundamentally changes you up to the cellular level.

Resources

Your DNA Company Female Hormone Profile Report
In the FLO by Alisa Vitti
The DNA Company
The DNA Company on Facebook

Episode Highlights

[06:47] The Journey Going Through Hormones

Menarche is the first menstrual cycle, which is when a female enters young womanhood. After menarche comes pre-menopause, perimenopause and then post-menopause.
Our sex hormones are fundamental at a holistic, physiological and phenotypic level, as they affect functions at the cellular level.
Hormones have a circadian nature, which affects metabolism, oxidative stress and other physiological processes.
Some of the top female athletes in the world are still unaware of their menstrual cycles’ health and how it affects them.
The phases of the menstrual cycle and variety of hormones affect ligament flexibility, likelihood of injury and exercise response, among others.

[12:45] The Circadian Rhythm of Hormones

The nuances of your hormonal circadian rhythm rely heavily upon your genetic predisposition.
Women have different mental, emotional and physical responses, depending on where they are in their cycle.
We should focus on the individuality of women when it comes to the genetic traits of their hormonal circadian rhythms.
Females need to listen to their bodies and be wary of one-size-fits-all approaches to hormones such as birth control. The pill can either be a saving grace or bring complications.

[18:39] Understanding Hormones, Treatment and Therapies

Even without the extremes such as hormonally-related cancers, daily issues such as migraines, fatigue, weight gain, and nutrient deficiencies can occur.
Knowing your innate tendencies is essential to feeling healthy and optimal.
Most women enter womanhood without clearly understanding their innate patterns. This lack of understanding forces them to accept the routine or resort to pharmaceutical treatment.
Symptoms of what was thought of as supposedly lyme disease and other complications vanish when women enter pregnancy.
Some hydroxy-dominant women have a genetic predisposition to inflammation and oxidative stress due to hormones, regardless of their diet.

[29:44] Estrogen and Testosterone

Estrogen is essentially aromatised testosterone.
Four hydroxy estrogen metabolites in men contribute to prostate enlargement, leading to inflammation.
Men who have a genetic predisposition to aggressively convert estrogen into metabolites are more likely to experience benign prostatic hyperplasia.
Both men and women will benefit from understanding their tendencies when it comes to converting metabolites.

[35:57] Athleticism, Menstrual Health and Birth Control

Some women can eat the same food and do the same exercises but can never achieve the same musculature.
World-class athletes need to understand their monthly cycle thoroughly to be in an optimal state.
Being on the pill makes you estrogenised for 21 days instead of the usual five days, which can be wonderful or detrimental for you depending on your genetic makeup.
Estrogen binding to its receptors radically changes gene expression. Being on the pill fundamentally changes you on a cellular level.
The pill can be right or wrong for you; taking it is not a trivial matter. Women aren't designed to be estrogenised continuously in the long-term, as it affects mitochondrial efficiency.

[47:46] The Effect of Having a Proclivity to Produce 4-Hydroxy and Being on the Pill

Being on the pill exacerbates the effects of having a genetic predisposition to inflammatory and oxidative traits in hormones.
Women who already have a disadvantageous genetic profile expose themselves to greater toxicity if they estrogenise themselves non-stop.
Estrogen isn't evil, and it keeps us young. However, we have to find a balance.
Listen to the full episode to understand the entire process and the chemical processes and genetic pathways involved!

[53:32] The Importance of Cellular Balance

Cells have other receptors, and there has to be a proper balance and circadian rhythms to have healthy processes.
Optimal health comes when the presence of hormones come in optimal waves.
There are many nutraceutical or nutritional intake and environmental exposures that can further slow down essential processes. An example is a glass of red wine.
If you know your genetic predispositions, you can improve your quality of life.
This knowledge empowers us to make choices to either live a healthier life or at least mitigate negative consequences and know our genetic limits.

[1:03:57] Hormonal Implications for Men

Older men can erroneously assume testosterone is the magic fix to declining sex drive and athletic performance due to aging.
However, the reality is that you may have a genetic predisposition to convert testosterone into estrogen and become more estrogenised.
These have implications with undergoing testosterone replacement therapy and can undermine your goals.

7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode

‘Your listeners have to understand that the way in which their bodies respond to these hormones define and contribute every aspect of cellular function’.

‘Few aspects of medicine are as boldly innately different as the nuances and the individuality of a young woman's innate genetic control of the circadian rhythm’.

‘It defines why she can eat the same foods, exercise the same as her mate, in fact, exercise more than her mate and be fit and be beautiful and be strong, but never get that cut or that sort of musculature’.

‘When you are naturally menstruating, there's only a window of about five to seven days, give or take, in your 28- or 30-day or thereabouts, where you are in your unit, but recycle that your body is actively producing estrogens. Those estrogens are actively circulating in your bloodstream. And the cells of your body are actively responding to that estrogen’.

‘It's about the balance... A healthy female cell is one that is having, it's a traffic system, and it's one that is being trafficked into it at the proper ratios at the proper circadian pulses and rhythms’.

‘If you do not know these things, you're going to be at risk of using a one size fits all approach that will be beneficial for 10%, 20%, 50% of women, but that most certainly equally can be deleterious for a group of young women, unwittingly’.

‘This is about empowerment, it is the empowerment of being informed — being informed about your unique predisposition. What is your operating manual, making your more normative choices, if you will, of these cascades? And then how do you optimise the things that you want to do and the things you don't want to do’?

About Dr Mansoor

Dr Mansoor Mohammed is the President and CSO of The DNA Company, a leading and innovative provider of comprehensive Functional Genomics testing, consulting and personalised health solutions.

He is widely regarded as a pioneer in medical genomics and has been the recipient of multiple academic and industry awards. He is the holder of several patents in the general fields of molecular diagnostics and genomics research and is one of the most sought-after national and international conference speakers in the genre of personalised medicine.

Prior to his role at The DNA Company, Dr Mansoor was also the former Founder and President of ManaGene, CEO of Combimatrix, Director of Genomics at Quest Diagnostics and Director of Research and Development at Spectral Genomics.

He continuously maintains an active clinical practice as a genomics consultant to some of the leading executive health clinics in Canada and abroad, has served on the Canadian Board of Autistic Research and is a consultant to the world-renowned Toronto Center of Applied Genomics.

If you want to learn more about Dr Mansoor and his work on genetics, you may visit his website. Alternatively, you can check out his Facebook and Twitter.

Personalised Health Optimisation Consulting with Lisa Tamati

Lisa offers solution focused coaching sessions to help you find the right answers to your challenges.

Topics Lisa can help with:

Lisa is a Genetics Practitioner, Health Optimisation Coach, High Performance and Mindset Coach.

She is a qualified Ph360 Epigenetics coach and a clinician with The DNA Company and has done years of research into brain rehabilitation, neurodegenerative diseases and biohacking.

Testing Options

Comprehensive Thyroid testing
DUTCH Hormone testing
Adrenal Testing
Organic Acid Testing
Microbiome Testing
Cell Blueprint Testing
Epigenetics Testing
DNA testing
Basic Blood Test analysis
Heavy Metals
Nutristat
Omega 3 to 6 status

and more

Lisa and her functional medicine colleagues in the practice can help you navigate the confusing world of health and medicine .

Join our Patron program and support the show

Pushing the Limits' has been free to air for over 8 years. Providing leading edge information to anyone who needs it. But we need help on our mission.

Please join our patron community and get exclusive member benefits (more to roll out later this year) and support this educational platform for the price of a coffee or two

You can join by going to Lisa's Patron Community

Or if you just want to support Lisa with a "coffee" go to

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/LisaT to donate $3

Lisa’s Anti-Aging and Longevity Supplements

Lisa has spent years curating a very specialized range of exclusive longevity, health optimizing supplements from leading scientists, researchers and companies all around the world.

Subscribe to our popular Youtube channel

with over 600 videos, millions of views, a number of full length documentaries, and much more. You don't want to miss out on all the great content on our Lisa's youtube channel.

Youtube

Order Lisa's Books

Lisa has published 5 books: Running Hot, Running to Extremes, Relentless, What your oncologist isn't telling you and her latest "Thriving on the Edge"

Check them all out at

https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books

Perfect Amino Supplement by Dr David Minkoff

Introducing PerfectAmino

PerfectAmino is an amino acid supplement that is 99% utilized by the body to make protein.
PerfectAmino is 3-6x the protein of other sources with almost no calories.
100% vegan and non-GMO.
The coated PerfectAmino tablets are a slightly different shape and have a natural, non-GMO, certified organic vegan coating on them so they will glide down your throat easily.
Fully absorbed within 20-30 minutes!
No other form of protein comes close to PerfectAminos

Listen to the episode with Dr Minkoff here:

Use code "tamati" at checkout to get a 10% discount on any of their devices.

Red Light Therapy:

Lisa is a huge fan of Red Light Therapy and runs a Hyperbaric and Red Light Therapy clinic. If you are wanting to get the best products try

Flexbeam: A wearable Red Light Device

https://recharge.health/product/flexbeam-aff/?ref=A9svb6YLz79r38

Or Try Vielights’ advanced Photobiomodulation Devices

Vielight brain photobiomodulation devices combine electrical engineering and neuroscience.

To find out more about photobiomodulation, current studies underway and already completed and for the devices mentioned in this video go to

www.vielight.com and use code “tamati” to get 10% off

Enjoyed This Podcast?

If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!

Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can understand themselves more through learning about their genetic predisposition and hormones.

Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.

To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Download this Episode

Fight off the Effects of Ageing Using Oxaloacetate with Alan Cash 0

Jun 9, 2022

In this episode, Alan Cash talks about oxaloacetate and the beginning of his journey in developing it as a nutritional supplement. He shares the ongoing research on oxaloacetate's benefits, especially for patients suffering from brain damage. He also dives into oxaloacetate's ability to increase muscle use before fatigue and reduce anxiety and depression levels in women experiencing PMS.

If you want to learn more about oxaloacetate's many benefits and applications, then this episode is for you!

Here are three reasons why you should listen to this episode:

Learn what oxaloacetate is and how it can help slow the biological effects of ageing.
Discover the numerous potential health benefits of oxaloacetate.
Get to know Alan’s journey in developing and manufacturing oxaloacetate as a nutritional supplement.

Episode Highlights

[09:36] How Alan Found Out About Oxaloacetate

Alan got sick and needed to undergo brain surgery. He found out that his pain and illness were related to ageing.

As Alan researched more about ageing, he discovered calorie restriction, wherein organisms tend to live longer when they eat less.

Increasing the ratio of Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide (NAD) to NADH helps fight off ageing.

Alan started looking into biomechanical pathways and found that oxaloacetate that can change the ratio of NAD from NADH to 900% in just two minutes. He started testing oxaloacetate using worms and realised that the activated pathway was the same as calorie restriction.

[21:53] What is Oxaloacetate?

Oxaloacetate is a naturally occurring molecule in our bodies during metabolism. It exists in every cell of the body and, therefore, is non-toxic.

Oxaloacetate is considered a hot molecule right now, given how it can help moderate metabolism on a cell-by-cell basis. Increasing oxaloacetate affects metabolism, which is vital to some people.

[25:38] Patenting Oxaloacetate

Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, conducted research in the 1960s which found how oxaloacetate reduced fasting glucose levels in type one and type two diabetics.

At first, Alan ran into the problem of being unable to get a patent for oxaloacetate, a naturally occurring compound in the human body. He persevered and eventually was able to own patent rights based on how oxaloacetate can maintain its stable form of enol-oxaloacetate.

After rigorous testing, their products now have a shelf life of two to three years or more.

[31:00] Oxaloacetate and the Warburg Effect

Oxaloacetate is a potential drug for brain cancer such as glioblastoma. It also has the potential to reverse the Warburg effect, in which fermented glucose turns into lactate that a tumour feeds off.

Giving Oxaloacetate to cancer cells changes the cancer metabolism cell by cell. There’s a specific dosage where cancer cells stop reproducing.

[38:03] Oxaloacetate and Glutamate

Glutamate is a compound that fires off the neutrons in the brain. Excessive glutamate excites the neurons until they die, a process known as excitotoxicity. Many studies describe how we may reduce the risk of excitotoxicity.

Alan is looking into cognition through clinical trials with Alzheimer’s disease patients. The study showed how oxaloacetate reduced glutamate levels. In the same clinical trial, they also found how oxaloacetate increased the amount of glucose the brain can take in.

The brain can take in more glucose due to the signalling protein PGC-1 Alpha enabling the production of more mitochondria.

[38:03] Oxaloacetate Can Improve Muscle Use

Oxaloacetate also improves muscle use by 10% more before it goes into fatigue. 10% is a significant improvement for both top-end athletes and daily living.

Alan has done a clinical trial that showed a 25% to 30% drop in fatigue levels within six weeks, even for people with chronic fatigue syndrome or ME/CFS for up to 30 years. NF-κB turns on genes that release a cytokine storm, which at high levels can lead to chronic inflammation seen in arthritis or long COVID patients.

Animal models show that oxaloacetate led to a reduction of NF-κB’s translocation to the nucleus by 70%, which turns off the cytokine storm.

People experiencing chronic fatigue can benefit from oxaloacetate’s mechanism of producing new mitochondria.

[51:34] Increase Focus and Attention Using Oxaloacetate

In animal models, oxaloacetate turns on the mechanism to increase the number of neurons in the brain and increase the length of the axons, the little tendrils that connect neurons.

Alan did a critical trial on the effect of oxaloacetate on premenstrual syndrome (PMS), wherein he found a 50% drop in anxiety, depression and suicide ideation.

Drugs have an immediate pharmacological effect. Another is the genomic effect with a cumulative property that takes about a month or more to see.

Even after getting better from your illnesses, keep the ball rolling and don’t stop intaking your medicine and supplements.

7 Powerful Quotes

‘We could see when we gave the oxaloacetate to them if they live longer, or if they didn't, so we could eliminate what were the critical genes. And, we were able to follow along with a pathway, and it turned out to be the exact same pathway as calorie restriction, which is really exciting.’

‘First of all, is oxaloacetate toxic? Well, it turns out it's a human molecule. It's in metabolism. It's in practically every cell of your body.’

‘Experiment and see what works and understanding some of these mechanisms is really important because then we can actually start to connect the dots of cells.’

‘The reality is most people are not going to have the perfect diet, not going to be in a perfect environment, can't maybe even afford to have great food, or organic food, or all of these things that restrict us from having the ideal.’

‘None of us are going to know what's around the corner for us but, if we can be in that preventative space and be understanding this more and more, then that is to me the most fascinating conversation we can have.’

‘What happens then is that they stop all their protocol, and the thing that they were doing and, “Now I'm fixed. I don't need it anymore.” And I'm like, “Hang on a minute, you don't drop the ball now. You're already underway. You got to stay underway. You got to keep it going.”’

‘You want that cumulative, and those epigenetic changes, and those long term changes.’

Resources

Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!
Oxaloacetate supplementation increases lifespan in Caenorhabditis elegans through an AMPK/FOXO-dependent pathway.
Studies on Anti-diabetic Effect of Sodium Oxalcacetate
Get benaGene Capsules containing oxaloacetate
Get TMG (Trimethylglycine) as the ultimate anti-aging combination with NMN
PerfectAmino Tablets by Bodyhealth
Keto-Pro’s D-BHB Exogenous Ketones - Chocolate Flavour
Keto-Pro’s Keto Bar - Chocolate Almond Brownie
Colloidal Health’s Colloidal Silver
Black Cumin Seed Oil
Connect with Alan Cash: LinkedIn

About Alan

Alan Cash is a physicist, biologist and geologist. He's also a professional entrepreneur and the CEO and Founder of Terra Biological LLC and MetVital, Inc.

Alan is also the clinical trials supervisor and medical researcher. He’s currently pursuing the advancement and development of nutritional supplements containing oxaloacetate, which is known as a caloric-restriction mimetic compound. His research has brought profound breakthroughs addressing cognitive decline and anti-aging.

If you want to reach out, you may connect with Alan via LinkedIn.

Personalised Health Optimisation Consulting with Lisa Tamati

Lisa offers solution focused coaching sessions to help you find the right answers to your challenges.

Topics Lisa can help with:

Lisa is a Genetics Practitioner, Health Optimisation Coach, High Performance and Mindset Coach.

She is a qualified Ph360 Epigenetics coach and a clinician with The DNA Company and has done years of research into brain rehabilitation, neurodegenerative diseases and biohacking.

Testing Options

Comprehensive Thyroid testing
DUTCH Hormone testing
Adrenal Testing
Organic Acid Testing
Microbiome Testing
Cell Blueprint Testing
Epigenetics Testing
DNA testing
Basic Blood Test analysis
Heavy Metals
Nutristat
Omega 3 to 6 status

and more

Lisa and her functional medicine colleagues in the practice can help you navigate the confusing world of health and medicine .

Join our Patron program and support the show

Pushing the Limits' has been free to air for over 8 years. Providing leading edge information to anyone who needs it. But we need help on our mission.

Please join our patron community and get exclusive member benefits (more to roll out later this year) and support this educational platform for the price of a coffee or two

You can join by going to Lisa's Patron Community

Or if you just want to support Lisa with a "coffee" go to

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/LisaT to donate $3

Lisa’s Anti-Aging and Longevity Supplements

Lisa has spent years curating a very specialized range of exclusive longevity, health optimizing supplements from leading scientists, researchers and companies all around the world.

Subscribe to our popular Youtube channel

with over 600 videos, millions of views, a number of full length documentaries, and much more. You don't want to miss out on all the great content on our Lisa's youtube channel.

Youtube

Order Lisa's Books

Lisa has published 5 books: Running Hot, Running to Extremes, Relentless, What your oncologist isn't telling you and her latest "Thriving on the Edge"

Check them all out at

https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books

Perfect Amino Supplement by Dr David Minkoff

Introducing PerfectAmino

PerfectAmino is an amino acid supplement that is 99% utilized by the body to make protein.
PerfectAmino is 3-6x the protein of other sources with almost no calories.
100% vegan and non-GMO.
The coated PerfectAmino tablets are a slightly different shape and have a natural, non-GMO, certified organic vegan coating on them so they will glide down your throat easily.
Fully absorbed within 20-30 minutes!
No other form of protein comes close to PerfectAminos

Listen to the episode with Dr Minkoff here:

Use code "tamati" at checkout to get a 10% discount on any of their devices.

Red Light Therapy:

Lisa is a huge fan of Red Light Therapy and runs a Hyperbaric and Red Light Therapy clinic. If you are wanting to get the best products try

Flexbeam: A wearable Red Light Device

https://recharge.health/product/flexbeam-aff/?ref=A9svb6YLz79r38

Or Try Vielights’ advanced Photobiomodulation Devices

Vielight brain photobiomodulation devices combine electrical engineering and neuroscience.

To find out more about photobiomodulation, current studies underway and already completed and for the devices mentioned in this video go to

www.vielight.com and use code “tamati” to get 10% off

Enjoyed This Podcast?

If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!

Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can know how to optimise sleep.

Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts.

To pushing the limits,

Lisa

The Search for the Perfect Protein and Why So Many of Us Are Deficient 0

Jun 7, 2022

We are regularly exposed to toxic heavy metals, from uranium used in war weapons to lead in our food, burning coal and even vaccines. Exposure to these toxins leads to a lot of fatal diseases, such as cancer. How does our detox system flush them out, and what is the role of amino acids in it?

Dr David Minkoff joins us in this episode to explain how heavy metals harm us and how to detoxify our bodies. He also talks about the role heavy metals play in the formation of cancer, the importance of amino acids in our body and why not all proteins are created equal.

If you want to know more about the science behind heavy metal detoxing amino acids and protein, then this episode is for you.

Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up

For our epigenetics health program all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to https://wellness.lisatamati.com/epigenetics.

Consult with Me

If you would like to work with me one to one on anything from your mindset, to head injuries, to biohacking your health, to optimal performance or executive coaching, please book a consultation here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/consultations

Order My Books

My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: http://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/

My Jewellery Collection

For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce’, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

You will learn about heavy metal detoxing and safe ways to do it.
Discover how environmental influences and toxins lead to cancer.
Learn more about the impacts of being deficient in amino acids in protein.

Resources

Visit LifeWorks Wellness Center to learn more about natural medicine.
Metal-Free from BodyHealth
If you live in Australia, get BodyHealth products such as PerfectAmino, Body Detox Oral Spray, Full Spectrum Digestive Support and more from Stoneagehealth. Email lisa@lisatamati.com for products if you live outside Australia.
The Search for the Perfect Protein by Dr David Minkoff

Episode Highlights

[06:28] How Dr Minkoff's Story Started

Dr Minkoff did triathlons and was interested in performance and health.
His wife, a nurse, investigated the mercury in the amalgam fillings in her teeth.
Mercury is volatile and is liquid at room temperature. It is very toxic and can make you sick when aerosolised.
Dr Minkoff's wife went to a dentist to get her fillings removed. The mercury aerosolised, and she began showing symptoms of mercury toxicity.
His neighbour practised natural dentistry and referred him to a doctor in Seattle. After undergoing the advised detoxification protocols, his wife got better.

[17:32] How Can We Get Ourselves Detoxified?

The body keeps an electrical balance.
If you want to detoxify, the mineral balance in your body has to be good.
The body will hold on to toxic metals and will not detoxify well if there is magnesium, zinc and selenium depletion.
The amino acid levels in your blood should also be good because all detox systems are based on amino acids.
If the liver is not healthy, a chelator or binder might move the heavy metal to another critical organ, such as the brain.

[22:14] What Are Safe Ways to Get Detoxified?

Chlorella is a good chelator. It helps bind the mercury in food and has nutritional contents such as chlorophyll.
Activated charcoal is a binder you can use as a substitute for chlorella.

[24:53] How Does Heavy Metal Exposure Lead to Cancer?

A healthy cell makes energy by taking oxygen and food into the mitochondria. It extracts energy from food and produces energy molecules (ATP) for the survival of the cell.
When drugs, chemicals or infections get into the mitochondria, it cannot use oxygen to make energy.
When a cell makes energy anaerobically, it generates only minimal amounts of ATP. In this case, the cell will either die or transform.
Growth factor genes are turned on to get a lot of sugar into the cell and make lots of ATP.
Anti-cancer strategies are working on blocking transport or utilisation of sugar in the cell.

[33:01] What Can We Do to Prevent Cancer?

Cells turn cancerous due to heavy metal and toxin exposure, as well as poor food practices.
Consuming ‘clean’ or organic food is essential.
Vitamin D is the best anti-cancer drug.
Sunlight hitting the body will activate vitamin D.
Glyphosate, a herbicide, blocks the process of conversion needed to activate vitamin D.

[38:20] What’s Vitamin D Got to Do with Cancer?

Vitamin D functions for immunity. It is more of a hormone than a vitamin.
High levels of vitamin D lowers the risk of multiple sclerosis, cancer, osteoporosis and hypertension.
Vitamin D is not the be-all and end-all of cancer prevention. Low levels of selenium, vitamin A, zinc and amino acid can also cause cancer.
When you get enough nutrition, you have more resilience against toxic factors.

[41:11] What Is the Importance of Amino Acids in Protein?

Our bodies are made up of macronutrients: carbohydrates, fats and proteins.
Amino acids are the basic unit of proteins, and they are made up of nitrogen.
There are 22 amino acids in the body, eight of which are essential. It means the body cannot produce them, so you need to obtain them from your diet.
Almost everybody has low levels of amino acids. A lack of amino acids will result in a lack of protein.
Specific body processes cannot work if there is an amino acid deficiency. Listen to the full episode to learn how it affects body repair, weight loss, immunity and athletic performance!

[1:05:11] Why Are Acid Blockers Harmful?

Pepsin is an enzyme in the stomach that initiates protein digestion. The stomach needs to be very acidic to activate pepsin.
If a drug blocks stomach acid production, the pepsin won’t be activated.
You won't get the benefit from the proteins you are eating and absorb key minerals if you can’t digest protein.
Stomach acid also kills the bacteria in the food we eat, especially raw food.
If bacteria in food doesn't get killed in the stomach, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth can occur.
Listen to the full episode for more information on how you can improve your health amid the heavy metals in our environment!

7 Powerful Quotes from This Episode

‘The search for the perfect protein was really my search for what is the perfect thing that works better than meat and fish and eggs by a factor of at least three to six times that you could take as a supplement’.

‘Medicine is not the answer. Lifestyle’s the answer. That's nutrition, and it's what you said. It's sleep, and it's relationships, and it's good nutrition, and it's organic food, and it's sunshine, and it's finding what makes you happy and the purpose. Without those things, you drugs aren't going to fix you’.

‘I think we do need appropriate supplementation, good organic food and good exercise. Good sleep patterns — all those basic things that we often also neglect to have a healthy human’.

‘You've got a bleeding ulcer? Okay, take the acid blocker. Your stomach heals. But then figure out what happened — was it an infection — or what was wrong and get off of it because long-term, it's bad for you’.

‘The more we buy the things that aren't good for us, the more we support the industries that are doing things that aren't good for us’.

‘You're going to pay. You're just choosing to pay later and down the track with worse consequences, or you're paying to be preventative. You're paying for good health’.

‘You have to be able to orient your life toward nutrition and supplementation and detoxification and healthy living’.

About Dr Minkoff

In 1995, Dr David Minkoff’s wife became ill. Not accepting her physicians’ ‘We really can’t help her except for symptomatic medication’ conclusion, Dr Minkoff and his wife went on a search to find the actual underlying cause of her condition. This led him out of his emergency medicine practice and into complementary and alternative medicine to find the answers.

In the process, he gained expertise in fields like anti-aging medicine, integrative cancer care, Lyme disease treatment, hormone replacement therapy, functional medicine, energy medicine, homeopathy and optimum nutrition.

The answers he found were soon in demand when others learned of his wife’s return to good health. In response to this, he and his wife, Sue Minkoff, RN, established LifeWorks Wellness Center in 1997.

It quickly became one of the largest comprehensive complementary and alternative medicine clinics in the US. The demand for the products and protocols he discovered became a catalyst for founding BodyHealth.com, a nutrition company that manufactures and distributes these cutting-edge solutions.

Dr Minkoff is a doctor of complementary and alternative medicine, a board-certified pediatrician and an Infectious Disease fellow. He also is an avid athlete himself and has completed 43 Ironman Triathlons. Dr Minkoff has helped many pro athletes improve their performance. He tries to set an example for others so that they can enjoy a life free of pain and full of energy.

If you want to learn more about Dr Minkoff and his work on proteins, you may visit his website.

Link to the Perfectaminos tablets by Dr Minkoff. Buy them here:

https://www.optimoz.com.au/products/map-master-amino-acid-pattern?aff=62

To the Perfectamino powder

https://www.optimoz.com.au/products/map-amino-acid-xp-powder?aff=62

Link to the electrolytes mentioned in the podcast

https://www.optimoz.com.au/products/perfectamino-electrolytes?aff=62

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To pushing the limits,

Lisa

Full Transcript

Welcome to Pushing the Limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host Lisa Tamati, brought to you by lisatamati.com.

Lisa Timati: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Pushing the Limits. This week I have a fabulous interview. Gosh, it was great. It was a long one. And it's a really, really good one, with Dr David Minkoff, who is just an absolute legend. He is the author of the book The Search for the Perfect Protein. And this is all about amino acids, how your body utilises proteins, why you're probably protein deficient, all the diseases and ailments that it can help with and getting the right combination and explains just stuff that would absolutely blow your mind. It's an amazing book that's really changed the way I look at amino acids for sure and integrating them in my life.

Now, Dr Minkoff is also the founder of the LifeWorks Wellness Centre. He has a huge practice in Florida, in the USA, with over 50 staff, and he does complementary and alternative medicine. And he's an expert who has worked with many of the world's top athletes. He is himself a finisher of 43 Ironmans, including eight Hawaiian Ironmans. He is, I think, 70 years old or— and he’s still doing Ironmans. He's got another one coming up in a couple of weeks. So just an incredible man, both from an athletic point of view and from a medical point of view and is an author and speaker on these really important topics.

In the show we get into heavy metal detoxing, we get into the science behind dealing with cancer, we look at amino acids, we look at toxic environment and we look at the state of our medical world, all of these issues we get into with this really in-depth conversation. So, I hope you do enjoy it.

Before we head over to Dr Minkoff, just want to remind you, please give us a rating and review on the show, if you haven't already. And make sure you subscribe. You can always reach out to me at lisa@lisatimati.com, if you've got any questions that come up from these episodes, or you want some advice on a certain topic around what we've been discussing, then please reach out to us. And give us a feedback on the podcast as well.

And if you enjoy the content, please share it with your friends and family. It's only through networks and people—ground level movements are people sharing good information—that we can get this sort of stuff out into the world, this great information that we'd love to share.

Finally, I just want to let you know I'm taking on a small number of clients on one-on-one at the moment with consulting around health with that right mindset, if you've got a health journey that you're on, if you're struggling, if you need help navigating your health, then please reach out to me. I have a huge knowledge base and a huge network of people that I can see you to.

If you're needing help, and you can't work out, if you've got a medical problem where you can't work it out in the normal system and you don't know where to turn to please knock on our door, we might be able to help you. Obviously got a huge background in brain injuries, but also in biohacking in general and health optimisation as well as the whole mindset piece of the puzzle which I love sharing and teaching as well.

So, I work with only a very few people at a time because I like to be able to invest time with people and my brain gets occupied with just a few cases, because I tend to go off and if I don't know something, I will go and find it. So, I don't profess to know everything in the world, but I usually know someone who does. So, if you want to work with me, then please reach out.

And the last thing also we are holding every week a webinar either it's on epigenetics one week in on it and the second week it will be on our running programs and how to increase your running speed, how to improve your performance, how to do all that without avoiding injuries and burnout. So, if you want to join us for our webinars for the epigenetics webinar, go to epigenetics.lisatimati.com. That's epigenetics.lisatamati.com and register there for the free webinar. It'll be on a Tuesday in New Zealand time 12:30 and the alternate weeks we're doing it at the same time Tuesday 12:30 New Zealand time for our running masterclass, how to run faster, longer be stronger without burnout and injuries.

So, without further ado, over to the show with Dr David Minkoff.

Lisa: Welcome to the show everybody. I am super excited. I'm jumping out of my skin. I've got Dr David Minkoff, who is one of my role models and heroes, and I'm finally got him on my show. And I'm very, very excited to have you, Dr David.

You're sitting in Florida, and you are an Ironman athlete. Let's start there for starters. You've done 43 Ironmans and you're about to do your 44th. And you've actually been to New Zealand, we just discussed your time in New Zealand and it rained a lot, unfortunately.

Dr David Minkoff: The cold was worse than the rain.

Lisa: The cold. Yes. Lake Taupo, for example, can be very, very cold, the water’s just absolutely freezing. But yes.

So, Dr Dr Minkoff, you have an amazing reputation and you’ve recently written a book called The Search for the Perfect Protein, that for me was an absolute game changer and a real eye opener. And something—as an athlete, I think, unfortunately, I've sort of finished my competitive career now. But if I'd known that information 20 years ago, oh my gosh, what could I've done? Sort of information. So, I'm really, really keen to share a little bit about the book and your background.

But let's start firstly with your story, your life story. You were an emergency physician. Can you pick up the story there and just tell us how you got into what you're actually doing now?

Dr David: Yes, so I didn't really—I was doing triathlons and I was interested in performance and health. But it was sort of a crude viewpoint. My wife's a nurse, and she was always investigating things. And one of the things that she investigated was that she had a lot of mercury amalgam fillings in her teeth. And she learned that the mercury is volatile. Mercury at room temperature is a liquid. Like no other metal is a liquid at room temperature. Like lava, you got to heat it up to a couple thousand degrees, but mercury boils at only 110 degrees Fahrenheit. So hot cup of coffee or soup would be like 140, 150, 160. And it's an amalgam.

So, what they do is they take liquid mercury, and they add to a zinc, silver, copper. And so, it's—the things aren't really amalgamated together. They're separate things that bond. So, if you add heat, Mercury can aerosolise if it's hot, and it will come off. And there are lots of studies in, they put fillings in sheep, and just with their chewing, the mercury gets volatile and it gets in the air and they swallow it, they breathe it. And then they sacrifice them three months later, and they find the Mercury's in their kidneys, it’s in their brain, and it's all over the place.

And Mercury is very toxic. You took one amalgam filling, so, it's about a half a gram of mercury. And you put it in a 10-acre lake, like you grounded up real fine so that you dissolved it in a 10-acre lake. And the natural resources guy came, the Fish and Wildlife Association came to test the levels of mercury in the water. They would put a fish advisory on it, like you can't eat the fish in that lake, the Mercury concentration’s too high because it would be toxic to humans.

Lisa: And that's one filling.

Dr David: So, one filling in 10 acres.

Lisa: It’s equivalent to one filling.

Dr David: Now the square meters of a body is maybe one square meter, it's not very—one and a half. It isn't very much. So, you get these things coming off constantly. And the more you have, the more load you will get, and they can make you sick.

So, she decided that she wanted to get them out. And this was back in the middle 90s, and the dentist that she went to wasn't really proficient in doing this. And he said, ‘Sure, I'll take him out’, and he takes a high-speed drill, and he drills him out and he aerosolises it all over the place with no protection for her. And it went all over the place.

Now, subsequent to that, she'd started to feel bad. She got problems with her thyroid and problems with her liver and the doctors who saw her thought that she was at some kind of an autoimmune condition. But they didn't associate it with mercury. I didn't either. And they just thought, they didn't know what to do with her. She's a nurse. She's smart. She's a triathlete as well. And then eventually, it got to the point where one day she woke up and she had trouble lifting her arm, and her glute muscle was weak. And it looked like she had some neurological involvement. One of the doctors thought, ‘Well, maybe this is a mess’. And we didn't know what to do.

She's a nurse and she has a home healthcare nursing business. And next door, a guy moved in. And the marquee said, ‘Natural Dentistry’. And one day when I was going to pick her up from work, he was walking out of his office to his car, and I stopped him and I introduced myself. And I asked him, ‘What is natural dentistry’? And he said, ‘Well, we're dentists that believe that the mouth is actually part of the body’. It's not a separate thing. And that you shouldn't do things in the mouth that you wouldn't do any place else. He says, ‘For example, you'd never use mercury in a wound yet’, or for a while there used to have this stuff called mercurial, which was mercury liquid, but they found that the mercury—if you were putting it on a wound, it's a good disinfectant but it also will get you mercury toxic. They used to put thimerosal, which is ethyl mercury in your contact lens solutions.

Lisa: Oh, my God!

Dr David: But they took it out because they found that you could put this stuff in your eyes, and you could get toxic from the mercury that's in the solution. So, he said, ‘We wouldn't do that’. And then he told me about some other things, and I said, ‘Well listen to this story’. So, I tell him her story. And he says, ‘Oh, she's mercury toxic’?

Lisa: Oh, well...

Dr David: And he said, ‘There’s no one in this town that's going to help you because nobody knows about this, or they're just not aware of it. But there's a doctor in Seattle, and he trains doctors in diagnosing and treating this with a natural kind of approach’.

So, I flew to Seattle, I spent some time with him, I learned his methodology. And I came back and tested her and she indeed was mercury toxic. And I did the protocols that he taught me, and she got better.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr David: Over four or five months, she got better and her symptoms went away. She was fine.

Lisa: No MS, no all the other things started to disappear when she started to—So what are the some of the...

Dr David: Wait Let me just look. Let me just take it one more step.

So, then we had friends that were sort of watching this whole thing happen. And they said, ‘You know, I've got migraine headaches, and I've got rheumatoid arthritis, and I've got all cervical, I've got that. Will you help me’?

The emergency room work is shift work. So, it's a seven in the morning till seven at night or seven at night to seven in the morning, three days a week, maybe four. And I had some time and she had an extra office in her nursing business. And so, I said, ‘I'll be there Thursday afternoon, why don't you come in? I've got a success of one. I'm not sure I know what I'm doing. This will be—we'll just play, we'll just see what happens’.

Anyway, it started to work. And pretty soon it was I was being inundated when we renovated a space next to her office, 3000 square feet and we set up shop as a natural medicine clinic and I got out of the emergency room. And we got to be very busy with all these kinds of things.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr David: Oh, that was 1997. And here, 20 years later, now we have a huge clinic, lots of bright, 50 staff and people come from all over the world for—most of its chronic medical problems. They have cancer or Lyme disease or chronic fatigue or MS or Parkinson's or—they've been around the block. Many doctors, no solutions. So that's mostly what we do now. Occasionally, I saw a couple professional football players today but mostly it's...

Lisa: It's very sick people. So, I just wish you went down the road from where I live and I can come and get the help that... Because your approach—I mean, I've listened to everything that you've got out there and your approach just resonates completely with me. You've gone into the function where natural medicines and you're dealing with people with chronic diseases.

So, just following on now from the mercury story and how you helped your wife and then onwards. Heavy metals are a big problem in our world, aren't they? How do we get exposure? Okay, amalgams obviously in fillings, but I don't think people understand that there's mercury, cadmium, arsenic, thallium—goodness knows what else. There's lots of things that we can be...

Dr David: Lead, aluminum.

Lisa: Lead, aluminum, yes. We're being exposed to toxins and heavy metals, 24/7, and now horrible environment that we're creating for ourselves and our modern world. And our bodies just weren't made for this. were they?

Dr David: That’s right. That's right. I mean, you look at Fukushima, the amount of—I mean uranium is a heavy metal to heavy, it's one of the heaviest metals. So, you got scads of this released into the ocean and into the air, it flows around. When the Iraq War was going on, they used uranium depleted warheads because they were making tanks that regular warheads wouldn't penetrate.

But if you put a depleted uranium warhead on that missile, when that thing hit the tank, the temperatures were so hot that it would penetrate the tank. And so there was— I don't know how many, thousands and thousands of pounds of these things were scattered all over Iraq through two wars, which released a lot of uranium and a fair number of—I know, at least American soldiers started getting heavy metal toxicity and when they were tested, they had high levels of uranium in their body.

So, it is all over and we have sort of dumped this onto the planet, leaded gasoline on the planet for 50 or 60 years saturated the countryside. So, vegetables grown have high lead levels, and it's in the ocean. So, most fish have lots of mercury. And we—our bodies are exposed to it. And we absorb it, we breathe it, cold burning produces a lot of mercury, unless it's filtered right. Some vaccines still have mercury.

Lisa: Do they still have mercury in them? In the time when they’re sold?

Dr David: Yes! So...

Lisa: Yes. And we're giving this to our children and we’re wondering why the heck they've got autism and ADHD and cancers and things that can be a knock on. It's very hard to correlate this but I heard in one of your talks, you were talking, I think, back when you're a young doctor, there was like 1 in 250,000 kids had autism or some great number. And now it was like 1 in 40 or something ridiculous.

We're doing something massively wrong in our environment. And we seem to just bumble along as if everything's fine. And yet, we've got all these chronic diseases that are knock offs, or knock-ons from all of these things and the toxicity that we're involved with.

So how can we—if we're looking at the heavy metal situation, if we don't have access to you, because we don't live in America, and we can't come to Florida, which is a real shame. How do we get ourselves detoxified from some of these heavy metals? Or how can we test for it?

Dr David: So I think, to detox someone from heavy metals, it's really important that you make sure that they're in a position where they can be detoxified. So, the body tries to keep electrical balance, you have to have as many negatives as you have positives.

Many people are mineral depleted, they don't have enough magnesium, or zinc, or selenium. Okay? And so those are all positively charged metals, like its mercury and lead. And if you get someone who's depleted in these things, and then you try to detoxify them, some of the things that are holding on, that the body's holding on to, will be the bad heavy metals, if it doesn't have the good minerals in those places. And so, the body doesn't detoxify very well when you try to pull it off when it's mineral depleted. So, you have to make sure that they're mineral good. You have to make sure that their gut is good, they're not full of parasites, and mercury, and yeast, and bad digestion. And because then they have a hard time.

They have to make sure that their amino acid levels in their blood are okay because if they're not okay, all the detox systems are based on amino acids. And so, if you don't have that sort of ready and waiting, you can get into trouble. You can try to move a metal, which the body is stuck somewhere that it feels is relatively safe. It's in the fat somewhere. It's at the periphery of an organ, and it isn't really causing toxicity.

But then if you give a binder, like a chelator, when these things bind heavy metals, and you pull it off of there. And it gets to the person's liver and the livers already overloaded with the plastics and the Tylenol and the rest of the stuff they’re taking...

Lisa: Yes, the crap we’re taking.

Dr David: It won't move it out. And it will circulate around and it can end up someplace worse.

Lisa: Like your brain or your heart.

Dr David: Like I had a patient here not too long ago, she went to a doctor. He did a test on heavy metals for her, she was indeed very high in lead. But he didn't understand that you have to set them up—their hormones, their gut, their nutrients have to be sufficient so that you can detoxify them, and she wasn't set up. And so he put her in an IV room and he gave her an IV medicine, which will bind lead. And she ended up pretty much—I don't know if you have that expression in New Zealand — she's a bag lady. Like she wears earphones, she listened to religious music, she carried two paper bags around, and she was really like, totally out of it.

And she had been one of the most successful realtors in the area. And she turned into someone that couldn't even really take care of herself, talks to herself, and she was—her brain, the lead in her bones got transferred to her brain.

Lisa: Oh my gosh.

Dr David: And it took us a couple years to get her to the point where we could get the lead out of her brain and that she could actually wake up and get normal. But it was a medical error at the original time.

Lisa: And this is very, a dangerous—like because it would be EDTA IV, wouldn't it?

Dr David: Right. Right.

Lisa: Because I've got a case. So, my mum who had an aneurysm four years ago, and I've rehabilitated her back from massive brain injury to being now completely normal. And I've written a book on it, called Relentless, which I'll send you a copy of. And one of the things that I identified was mercury poisoning. And I've been too scared, though, to go and get EDTA chelation in her case because she's a 79-year-old with fatty liver disease, kidney.

So, for someone like, who doesn't have a doctor who is a real expert in the area, to do something like this, I can sit her body up the best I can with the right vitamins and the right minerals, and selenium and zinc and things and vitamin Ds and all of those things that are have here on. Is there any—and vitamin C is a big player.

Is there anything that I can give her without—obviously, you don't want to do something like that and cause a really, a big detox reaction. And with someone who's fragile should say, is there a safe way of doing it?

Dr David: An easy thing, chlorella is a pretty good chelator.

Lisa: Oh, brilliant. I had her on that.

Dr David: Chlorella. So, you could add like, three, four capsules of chlorella with each meal.

Lisa: Wow. Okay.

Dr David: It will help find the mercury that's in the food. And it's not really absorbed. And the chlorophyll in there is good for her and you can just start to tease it out with that

Lisa: Very smart.

Dr David: There is a product called Metal-Free—I have a nutrition company—that we make, it's called Metal-Free. It's very safe, it's natural. It's a spray. So, you can start with a little bit, and in someone like her, start with just one spray underneath her tongue once a day. Do it for a week or 10 days, she's doing okay, she’s not getting sick with it, she's tolerating it. Okay, you could go to two sprays. And you could just tease it up, where it's done slowly, over six to 12 months. You can use that with the chlorella. You can get her to get the heavy metal start coming out. And that's very workable, and a lot of people do that.

Lisa: What about activated charcoal? Is it another good chelator? Or is it...

Dr David: Charcoal? It would be a substitute for chlorella. It's a binder.

Lisa: It’s one or the other.

Dr David: Yes, I think the chlorella is better because there is some nutritional content. Charcoal just binds sort of randomly everything. Whereas with chlorella...

Lisa: Yes, you can get mineral deficiencies too if you have too much of, say activated charcoal, couldn't you?

Dr David: Right.

Lisa: Yes. Okay, that's a really good sort of framework. And I'll link to Dr Minkoff’s website, everyone, so it's bodyhealth.com. And I'll put that in the show notes in the links to those particular products, because I think, you know, there'll be good, safe ways for people who don't have access to a doctor that can do it really safely to start to detoxify themselves.

So, I wanted to move now a little bit. So that's some heavy metal and we touched on it pretty briefly, but it's a major, major problem in—when we're looking at lots of other diseases, the heavy metal can have a massive impact can’t it? So things like MS or Parkinson's or cancers. I heard in one of your interviews saying, on Ben Greenfield's podcasts, many of the cancer patients that you see or most of them have a heavy metal problem, and there's probably a correlation there.

Is it, if we move the discussion towards cancer, would that be one of the first places that you would look for a cancer patient?

Dr David: What happens with cancer and this, this has been known since the 1920s and 30s— a German doctor named Otto Warburg was looking at the biochemistry of what makes a cancer cell different than a healthy cell, or what causes a cancer cell to transform—I mean, a healthy cell to transform into a cancer cell.

And what he discovered is that a healthy cell makes energy by taking the oxygen that you breathe, which eventually gets to the cell and the food that you eat. And those two things go into the little factory in the cell called the mitochondria. And the cell is able to extract the energy from the food and make ATP, which is the energy product particle. And then the cell can live, it can do its job, it can get in nutrients, it can get rid of toxins, it can make proteins, depending on what its job is.

Because the impact of toxins and infections are around us all the time, and now they're at levels that are unheard of. And I think 80 something thousand chemicals in the environment, which have never been tested for safety, and heavy metals, and many people are on many different kinds of medications, which are just different kinds of toxins, really. I mean, an emergency someone might need a medicine, but there’s a long-term solution to a health problem, it's really not the best way to go.

Lisa: Absolutely.

Dr David: And so there are lot of environmental influences, which can—when those drugs or chemicals or infections get into the mitochondria in the cell, lock that mitochondria from being able to use oxygen and food to make energy. And that cell then, when it can't make ATP in enough quantity because when you use oxygen, it can make 38 of these energy particles, each go around. It can also make energy not using oxygen. So that's called anaerobic metabolism,

Lisa: It’s the fermentation, yes.

Dr David: No oxygen. It’s fermentation. You only make two ATPs. It can't live on two ATPs. So, it's got to change it either is going to die or it's going to change. And then if it changes...

Lisa: Does it turn on the oncogenes?

Dr David: It turns, yes, and I don't even really think they're oncogenes. These are normal genes that in a foetus make one cell into a 100 trillion in a full adult. They’re your growth factor genes. They're blood vessel factor genes. And they turn on in an adult person, they're supposed to be on, but they get turned on because this cell now needs lots, and it's the preferred fuel for that cell ends up being sugar. And so, it needs to get a lot of sugar because if it can only make two ATPs on every go around, it's got to be able to get way more sugar in that cell in order to get enough ATP so that it can live. And that's what cancer is.

Lisa: And this is why people with cancer then have these cravings for sugar. And lose a lot of weight very quickly because they're not able to produce and they’re extremely fatigued.

Dr David: Well, they have a very high need for sugar, they have a very high need for sugar. And one of the strategies—the anti-cancer strategies—is to not give them any sugar. Because our own cells could use fat, they can use proteins, but cancer cells prefer sugar.

So, there's a standard medical test done for cancer patients, which is to give them—it’s what is called a PET scan. And the PET scan is sugar IV. Sugar has a radioactive label on it and you can see where does the sugar go. And if let's say a woman's got a breast cancer, the normal cells are eating one unit of sugar and the breast cancer cells are using 25 units of sugar. So, the PET scan shows a 25 where the lump is and it shows a one in the arm, in the brain, and the other breast, or in the kidney, where there's no cancer, because this thing is so rapidly using the sugar that it sucks it up. Well, sometimes that's five times, sometimes it's 10 times, sometimes it's 20 times. The more aggressive the cancer, the higher the metabolism, and the higher the reading on the PET scan. So that tells you what the cancers do and what it's eating.

And then anti-cancer strategies have to be to figure out, can we block that guy from getting sugar or utilising sugar because otherwise it's going to use it and it's going to replicate it, it's going to make more of itself. And then you really you...

Lisa: And I've just done a series actually on in vitamin C, with a number of researchers and scientists, doctors, around intravenous vitamin C. Because I recently had a case with my father who unfortunately passed away in July, with sepsis and I was battling to get intravenous vitamin C for him in the ICU, and I was unable to, they wouldn't let me. Unfortunately. I did win in the end, but by then the sepsis was multiple organ failure and too little too late.

And so, I'm on a bit of a crusade now to get that changed and in support the doctors and scientists that are screaming from the rooftops that we should be using vitamin C, not only for sepsis, but also for things like COVID, there's lots of studies going on, in cancer.

And one of the researchers that I had on last two weeks ago, Professor Margreet Vissers, she has done a lot of study around cancer, vitamin C. And getting the vitamin C—the molecule of vitamin C is very similar to glucose, so the cancer cells can take it up and thinking it's glucose. And if we can get the levels—I think the levels were from memory 350 to 400 micromolar—it can get in there and it can actually kill the cancer cell. Don't quote me on those numbers, people, but listen to the episodes. But it can also stop the tumour growth, the health sector from being switched on that turns that gene off so that the tumour can’t develop its own blood supply. So, I know that that's a really, really powerful intervention for cancers. It's not the obviously the only one.

Keto diet is another, as we mentioned, starving the cancer cells off from the glucose and having that in combination with things like vitamin C. What else is—so that cancers are tuning on these cancer genes, if you like, or these cells are turning cancerous, probably because of our environment, probably because of heavy metals, toxins, bad foods, our food practices, all of these things are making kids a little sort of skyrocket, what can we do to prevent ourselves? I mean, vitamin C is obviously one that I'm big on as a prevention. What else can we do? We can do the heavy metal detoxing in a controlled manner as we spoke about. What else can we do for cancer prevention? Because I'm always about the prevention side.

Dr David: Okay. So, I mean, clean food, organic, super important. The actual best anti-cancer drug is vitamin D.

Lisa: Vitamin D?

Dr David: Yes, there are lots of studies that show that people who have a blood level of vitamin D, between 70 and 90, have half the rates of cancer that people have low vitamin D level, there's no known drug, or medical intervention, or anything known that is that effective.

So, if someone's listening to this, and you don't know what your blood level of vitamin D is, you should go to your doctor or your laboratory and you should get a blood level vitamin D. The levels in America run 30 to 100 is considered normal. In the studies that have been done, if the level is between 70 and 90, in America, for the average person, that means that they're going to be taking about 10,000 units a day of vitamin D3

Lisa: Wow, that's a lot. That's high. Okay, there's no toxicity with that sort of a level of vitamin D?

Dr David: Well, you have to measure it. I mean, at that level, that's the average person that I see. If I put them on 5000, they're running in the 40s. If I put them out on ten thousand, they're running in the, I want them 70 to 90-ish. If they're 65, I'll leave them alone. If they're 95, it's fine.

It's very interesting, because the way you're supposed to get vitamin D isn’t to take it with a capsule, you’re supposed to get it from sunlight. And sunlight hitting the body will convert the molecule into vitamin D and that's how we're supposed to get it. Unfortunately, now, and I think the reason is glyphosate on the planet?

So I'm in Florida, there's 300 days a year of sunshine, we're in a subtropical climate. So, the sun is high enough for most of the year, where the sun should be effective at converting our bodies to make vitamin D. I have tested vitamin D levels, and every patient I have seen for the last 20 years, except for one person, and she was using a tanning bed every day, except for one person, everyone else had a sub therapeutic level of vitamin D. And we’re in Florida, and there's sunshine. Now some people wear sunscreen and then the vitamin D doesn't get converted. But a lot of people don't wear sunscreen and the vitamin D does convert.

Now my own example. So, I am about 12 hours a week outside in the sun unprotected. I swim in an outdoor pool at noon. I ride my bike a lot. I'm outside. And I run a lot, usually without a shirt if it's warm and shorts, so I'm exposed. My vitamin D level unsupplemented is 34.

Lisa: Wow, that's shocking.

Dr David: I have to take 12,500 units every day to keep my level—last time I did it, it was 84. Now this is my theory on this: is this herbicide glyphosate roundup...

Lisa: Hmm, horrible.

Dr David: ...is so prevalent around the world. Something like three quarters of the rain samples will show glyphosate. I have measured thousands of patients for urine levels of glyphosate. I've never tested anyone who is negative for glyphosate.

Lisa: Gosh. That’s shocking.

Dr David: Like never. It’s in our food, it's in our water. We're getting it. And one of the side effects of glyphosate is it blocks the conversion of the sun's ability to produce active vitamin D. And I think that's at least one of the factors that's causing this problem because there's an epidemic of low vitamin D.

Lisa: And vitamin D is so important for your immune system, for your bone health, for hormones, for so many—I think there's no 700 processes in the body or something that it's responsible for. And here's me like I take 5000 IU a day and I'm thinking, I'm really good. And I study functional genomics, when I've discovered that in my genes, for example, because I'm of Maori descent, so native descent, my father was Maori, I have a slightly darker skin tone. I need more vitamin C because my transporters don't do their job very well and I don't get a lot of receptors. So I've been aware of this problem, and I'm taking 5000, bump up. I haven't actually gone and got it tested, I'm probably still deficient, given... And that's someone who's already on vitamin D. So that's a bit of an eye opener. And so how does—what is the mechanism? Why is cancer vitamin D, why is vitamin D so important for cancer?

Dr David: You said, it’s immune function, it's more of a hormone than it is vitamin. It's lots of different things that are really important. And they just noticed this association of cancer incidence versus vitamin D and the people at high levels, they had much less MS and less cancer, and less osteoporosis and less hypertension. So it's really important, it's a single nutrient. Now, there's lots of things that if you're if your selenium level’s low, if your vitamin A level’s low, I mean, these are all things, zinc level’s low, these are all things that are super important. You have low amino acid levels, it’s important in cancer. So it isn't a one-thing thing. But these are things that are measurable.

Like a vitamin D blood test is maybe 25 bucks, it's not expensive. I mean, these are things that regular doctors can order. And, of course, guys who were doing functional medicine or functional nutrition, they can order it. And so—and everyone, we see—I order panels of all this stuff, because you find it virtually everybody isn't getting enough nutrition from the diet that they eat to keep them healthy and well nourished. And they're in a toxic environment where you need more of this stuff, not less. And then if you can normalise these things, then the person is going to have more resilience to this huge toxic factor that we're all living in.

Lisa: Yes, this horrible suit that we're stuck in.

So I wanted to transition now over into your book, The Search for the Perfect Protein because I think this is a good segway coming. Because I didn't understand like, as an athlete, I used to always, and I've done 70,000 kilometres in my lifetime. I've run pretty much every desert there is on the planet, I've done horrific things to my body. And I will always be taking branched-chain amino acids and they certainly helped my performance.

But I'm now starting to understand after reading your book, that they aren't the whole picture. And they are only three of the essential amino acids. And I've got PerfectAmino coming, hopefully today to my house, and I'm super excited because I know I'm protein deficient. I feel that I'm constantly anaemic even I have a good diet and I do everything right. And I know a lot of the athletes and a lot of the woman especially that I work with have are fighting these sorts of battles as well.

Can you tell us what is an amino acid? Why is this absolutely crucial knowledge that people have and why they need to go and buy your book for starters? But what we need to understand about amino acids story?

Dr David: Okay. So if you look at nutrients, there's three things that are called macronutrients, the big ones, okay. There's carbohydrates, and fats, and proteins. Now, all of them are made out of three things, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen. Amino acid, amino in Greek means nitrogen. So amino acids make up protein. So proteins have nitrogen, but carbohydrates and fats don't have nitrogen. Okay?

Now, an amino acid if you think of it, if we use an analogy, like language. So in the English language, there's 26 letters. And you could arrange those letters in different sequences and different lengths to make words. And so, in English language, I don't know, there's 350 or 400,000 words, okay. Some of them are very short, like one letter, like ‘I’ or ‘A’, one letter, some of them are really long.

In amino acid chemistry, the alphabet is these things called amino acids. There's 22 of them, roughly. And so they are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, plus, they have nitrogen, so they're called amino acids. And if you put them in different lengths and sequences, you get proteins. By definition a protein has to have 30 or more amino acids in a chain. There is a hormone in the body, which is just one amino acid, tyrosine. And if you put iodine on there, you get thyroid hormone. So thyroid hormone is made out of amino acid.

Lisa: Wow, tyrosine and iodine.

Dr David: With three to four iodines attached and that’s thyroid

Lisa: Okay, T3, T4. Okay.

Dr David: T3, T4, okay. Glutathione is a well-known antioxidant detoxifier, has three amino acids. So, the body puts those three in the right order, and it makes glutathione.

Lisa: Wow. Super interesting.

Dr David: It gets more complex. Insulin has—I think, I forgot—89 amino acids. And growth hormone has—I don't know—something hundred, hundred and 20 amino acids. So, the sequence of the 22 amino acids has to be just right or it doesn't make the same thing. Every insulin has the same sequence. The skeletal muscle is made up of two proteins. One's called actin, and one's called myosin. Actin has 5600 amino acids per one actin fibre.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr David: So if your body wants to make muscle fibre, you work out, you tear it.

Lisa: That’s a lot of protein.

Dr David: It takes 8600 of these amino acids to make one fibre.

Lisa: Wow. In the right combination?

Dr David: In the right combination. So most of us—so I got injured. I was training for Ironman, and I injured my hamstring. And at the time, I was a vegetarian. Now vegetarians are on low protein diets by definition. They're not eating meat, fish and eggs, that's where the major proteins are that we take in. And beans don't cut it. So, I didn't know this. I'm just a doctor. And I'm a young triathlete. But I think I'm doing the right thing.

So I get injured, and I can't figure out how I can get it healed. I injected it and massaged it and chiropractored it and I did heat treatments and I did everything. Wouldn't get better. And I had a friend who had an amino acid mixture. And he said, ‘Try these’, he was in Europe and he got these things. And he said, ‘Try these’. And I tried those for six weeks, and my hamstring healed, they actually healed. I could do go to a track, do hardcore miles, no pain. And about three months later, I went to Canada and I did Ironman Canada, and I had my best time ever. And I thought, ‘Holy smokes, this stuff is really, something's happening in my body, that's good’.

I noticed a couple other things to my maximum heart rate went up by 12 points. I could hit 176 on a real hot day going up a real steep hill on a bike. And I could hit 176 and it went to one 184. So I got a change, I got a physiologic change and improvement. So, I started playing with these amino acids. And I started measuring levels of amino acids in the clinic of patients that I was seeing. And what I found is that almost everybody had low levels of amino acids than what they should. Especially these things called essential amino acids.

Now, eight of the amino acids are called essential because the body can't make them, you got to get them in the food that you eat or in the supplementation. From those eight, you can make the other 14. So, if you don't get the eight, you don't make proteins because all the proteins have the essential amino acids. And if you're low in one or two or three, you're not going to make the protein

Lisa: The whole thing doesn’t work.

Dr David: It doesn't work. And the proteins turn over, they're always being rebuilt remodelled, because through our life there’s stressors. All the enzymes in the body that make energy and detoxified are proteins, they're made out of amino acids. And so, if the body isn't getting enough, there are 50,000 proteins in the body that need to be made all the time. And if you don't have enough coming in, the body is going to say, ‘I'm going to fix this tendon, but I'm going to let the immune system sag’, or ‘I'm going to fix this, whatever, and I'm going to I'm going to let the bones go because bones are made out of collagen, which is a protein, and I'm going to repair something else’.

And so, the gut lining is supposed to get a new layer every three or four days. But if there's a shortage, it might be, ‘Let's put that off’. So, it's every six or seven days, or eight or nine days, or a person gets a—they get an overuse injury. And then it's weeks before it heals instead of, ‘Why isn't it healed in a couple of days, it should be able to heal up’. So, it's because there's a deficiency of amino acids. And so all these patients had deficiencies of amino acids.

And so, we put together this formula called ‘PerfectAmino’, it's eight essential amino acids. And it's in a very specific blend.

Lisa: And that’s key.

Dr David: So that when you take the amino acids, your body utilises it 99%, utilises it to make body protein. So, there are thousands of athletes, or post-op patients, or pregnant or nursing patients, where you give them these supplemental amino acids and the body just starts to work better, it heals better, it performs better, immunity is better, osteoporosis gets better. And you can make a huge difference.

So, the search for the perfect protein was really my search for what is the perfect thing that works better than meat and fish and eggs by a factor of at least three to six times that you could take as a supplement. Nobody wants to eat pills as their meal. So, you eat good food, and you eat animal proteins. And if you're a vegetarian, you don't want to eat animal proteins, then you need to take more essential amino acids, more PerfectAmino, because the amount of amino of essential amino acids in vegetable foods is low. And they just aren't good enough to really keep somebody nourished.

I have tested thousands of vegans and vegetarians on their amino acid levels. They look terrible. A lot of these people are tired. They don't feel well, but they feel like the healthy thing to do is don't eat meat. Fine, I have no argument with that. But then you gotta make sure that you're getting the stuff you need so your body doesn't suffer. And PerfectAmino is vegan, it's kosher. So, like anybody with a list of, ‘It's got to fit these things’, they can take it because it's a safe, clean product.

Lisa: And the amazing thing that I didn't understand was that when we’re looking at foods and saying, ‘Well, we'll get our protein from our food’, say, a whey protein drink or a piece of steak or a fish. You see, in your talks, I heard—whey protein you’re actually only using around 16%, as actual protein gets integrated into the body and the rest gets used and tuned into either carbohydrates. And actually, if you're trying to keep your weight down or anything like that, I’ve got lots of friends who are trying to do low carb diets, and then you taking a steak, and not realising that part of that steak will turn into carbohydrates.

So, a steak was I think 33%, and fish was around the same and in eggs were quite high with a 48%, and breastmilk was the best at 49% that actually gets utilised. Yes, utilised in the body as a protein. And I was like, ‘Wow, so half of what I'm eating is not actually being used in the right way’. And when I looked at spirulina, because I'm very big on spirulina, and I've been, ‘Oh, it's got almost 64% protein’, and then realising that actually, you're only using a tiny portion of it. Not to say that spirulina is bad because there's lots of great reasons to take spirulina, but protein source, it’s not the optimum.

And then the other interesting thing that I found is—just hopping back to my mum story, she's got fatty liver disease and some kidney issues. So, I've got her on a very low protein diet. And I've been concerned about what her ability to recover and do all the things that her body needs some protein when I've got her on a low, mostly vegetarian diet.

Now I'm excited to get the PerfectAmino because I had to have a low protein diet with her because she can't process nitrogen. Nitrogen, for listeners, is the protein, it takes the nitrogen off and then it has to be processed in the liver and to urea and then excreted in the kidneys. Now if you've got liver or kidney problems, you can't get the urea out of the system. And of course, that leads to problems where you've got too much nitrogen, which is a toxin, and you can get gout and so on and worse things.

So, this is a really good thing for people who have kidney disease, for people who are on dialysis, for people who have fatty liver disease or alcoholic liver or anything where it's impaired these detox processes and you can’t take your proteins, this is a way to get those proteins without the nitrogen problem.

Dr David: Exactly, exactly. And then so you can meet their protein needs with virtually no calories because this stuff has practically no calories. 10 grams is only four calories.

So, if you're a dieter or, you know, if you're—let's say, we're going to go super lean, we're going to do low calorie, and still a chicken breast is going to be 250, 300 calories, or beef steak. Whereas you can get more protein and 10 tablets of PerfectAmino or two scoops, it comes as a powder too. And it's only four calories.

And so, you can meet your protein needs, but you don't deplete yourself, and you don't get the calories. So, for dieting, it's good for your mum. It's perfect because see, immune wise, these immune proteins are made out of proteins. And if you're depleted, it may mean lack of immunity and a lot of these people that have chronic illness with kidneys or livers, they're susceptible to infection. And when you put them on low protein diets, their gut, they get a leaky gut, and they leak bacteria and they get infections. And then they have low immune proteins in their blood and they can get really sick, they can get sepsis, they can really get sick, they can get skin breakdown. So, mouth ulcers, lots of stuff.

So, this is something that can be used by, virtually all sick people are amino acid deficient. I mean, 100%, I don't care what's, whether you've got cancer or Parkinson's or chronic fatigue, you have low amino acids. If you're an athlete, you most likely have low amino acids and your performance will increase. We've had lots of super high elite level athletes that are taking this thing now. And I just tell people, if you're an athlete and you're trying to get performance, the guys that are beating you on PerfectAmino.

Lisa: And you've had this case in the Tour de France. So I heard that story with the guys that were on the PerfectAmino we're not breaking down like the guys because after 21 days of an extreme amount of exercise, you're smashing the crap out of your body. And at the end, they were turning out to be stronger than they had gone into the competition with these aminos, and I'm like, ‘Ah, damn, why didn't I have that during my competitive career’? It was good to have branched-chain, but it wasn't really the best option out there.

Dr David: Well, see, with branched-chains, of the eight essential amino acids, three of them are called branched-chain. So that's just their structure. But if you take branch-chains—see, every protein in the body has all eight essential amino acids. So, if you're trying to build or expand your protein, or recover your protein, if you're taking the three, you're not getting all eight, and it won't work. So branched-chain amino acids act like a carbohydrate, you might as well eat a banana.

Lisa: Oh, wow.

Dr David: Now what I've been finding, so I'm doing an Ironman in two weeks, and I have this company called BodyHealth, so we make an electrolyte. So, it's a mixture of sodium, it's got high potassium, it's got zinc, and magnesium and trace minerals, and we put two grams per serving of PerfectAmino in there.

So, I'm putting my 22-ounce water bottles, when I go out and bike, 22 ounces of water, I put two scoops in the electrolytes, that's four grams of amino acids. And I put a scoop of the regular PerfectAmino, which is another five grams. And I'm drinking a bottle every hour or two, depending on the heat.

And I tell you that it's a performance increaser recovery. And then, it keeps your mind clear because having these amino acids trickle in, just gives your body a message that there's plenty available, you can work it hard, you don't have—there's no deficiency. And I find it just really makes a huge difference to use doses that are higher than what we used to recommend, but it actually works better.

Lisa: So, because someone like me, who's done like 25 years of extreme endurance sports, and really smashed my body, damaged my kidneys, constant problems with anaemia, and now I have really a problem with my exercise tolerance has gone down massively, in the last four years, I've had lots of stress as well, with sick parents and so on.

But is there a way back? Is there a way to build that resilience that I used to have through—like, I have a very good diet, I have very good supplementation or constantly learning but doing well on all those points, and yet the exercise tolerance is still very low at the moment.

So, where I used to be go out and be able to run 200 kilometres, now a 5k run is quite a mission. Is there a way back for me, do you think? I should book an appointment with you, but just look from an athlete's point of view, will this help with exercise tolerance, as well as the recovery?

Dr David: See your mitochondria are not, they’re not producing? Every disease condition too—it's a power failure.

Lisa: Yes, someone pulled the plug.

Dr David: The bulbs are, you got a 10-watt bulb in a room that needs a 100-watt bulb. And as long as there's daylight coming in from the outside, and you could read, you could see with a 10-watt bulb, but when it gets dark, you can't read, you can't see. And these mitochondria, they’re not making ATP.

And so while they used to be able to crank out ATP, I don't think it's at this point that their structure is so damaged, that they can't be recovered. I think they need some help, like some diagnostic help, like what are the actual issues? What are the mineral imbalances? What are the hormones doing? What shape is your gut in? Do you have parasites? Are there heavy metals? What are your amino acid levels? Like you have to do sort of a like where is the problem coming from? What is the weak link that's causing this mitochondria to not be able to produce energy?

And so, we do a thing where we actually do a test of mitochondrial function, we measure the VO2 max and we measure what their actual metabolism is, and you can say, ‘Wow, this guy can't do it’. You take someone with chronic fatigue and their anaerobic threshold. So that's where they can no longer have enough oxygen coming in to keep up with what It's needed and they start producing lactic acid. Their anaerobic threshold consists of sitting up in bed, they just hit their anaerobic threshold. Like they can't walk to the bathroom because it's too much.

And then you take somebody like yourself, you could run 200 kilometres. And you never were at anaerobic threshold, and you were moving pretty darn fast, with tremendous amount of energy being produced. And I don't think the machine is broken, I just think the machine has been stressed and it needs a rebuild process. And that you could do it, and some of its amino acids, and some of its hormonal, and some of its, there's a lot of tricks now to be able to, like, ‘How can we get this thing moving so that we can get the performance back up’? And then when the performance goes back up, it’s like, ‘Here, I’m back’.

Lisa: It’s like, ‘Oh my God’. Yes. And then, I've been working on my own issues while I'm learning all these other things and rehabilitating my mum, and I've learned a lot, and I'm certainly a lot better. But there's a couple of pieces of the puzzle missing. So that's why I'm super excited about the PerfectAmino part of the story. And I'll report back to you on how they had to fix me because I'm damn sure that there's a protein deficiency going on. If I look at my whole entire history, there's always been a problem.

And getting off my case now, but just looking at the whole gut health situation, this is where it was really an eye opener for me too. You see that the gut lining is only one self-second, it replaces itself every three, four, five days. But some people it's taking up to 10 days. And this leads to leaky gas with a zonulin and the tight junctions are getting too loose and leading protein and in bacteria and things through into the bloodstream, which is causing systemic inflammation and problems everywhere. And it becomes a bit of a catch 22 isn't it? When you don't have enough amino acids, you can't make new gut cells. But then if you don't have a good gut, then you can’t absorb the protein, and it sort of becomes a vicious cycle. So this is a way to break that cycle. And...

Dr David: I mean, these things, we've measured this, you take a dose of 10 grams of amino acids and you start measuring blood levels amino acids in 23 minutes, this stuff’s in your bloodstream, almost irregardless of what your gut health is like. Like it gets in, it gets through.

Lisa: Even with the gap absorption issues and working with a patient with celiac, for example, at the moment, whose got a lot of gut issues and so even for someone like that...

Dr David: You may have to start them easy, work them up.

Lisa: Yes, we're going to go to 30 grams a day straight off.

Dr David: Don’t go 30 grams straight off. But you can get them—but it starts the repair process. And then they can, nobody's healthy without a good gut. And hardly anybody's got a good gut. So it's always a critical piece of the puzzle to get people where they're not bloated and they don't have heartburn and they don't have constipation, they don't have diarrhea, and they wake up in the morning and they've got a flat belly that feels good. And you got to get that person there with things that you're familiar with, with probiotics and digestive enzymes and PerfectAmino, and these things. And in most people, you can heal up.

Lisa: You can fix it. The digestive enzyme piece of the puzzle. Is there any danger with digestive enzymes? I heard your story about Kelley William Donalds, the enzyme?

Dr David: Yes, those are over the top strong.

Lisa: So, digestive enzymes. Do you have a digestive enzyme product in your line?

Dr David: Yes, yes, we call it Full Spectrum Digest. And it's, it's a really good product. It's like a digestive enzymes or some hydrochloric acid in it. The tolerance level on it is almost everybody can take it without a problem. The ones I was experimenting with, they're really strong.

Lisa: Right and that was for cancer prevention. Yes. And looking, which was interesting research, actually. But so okay. So you're looking at those two sides of the puzzle. And people as they get older, we produce this stomach acid. And then there are billions of people on 59:50 bloemen acid blockers. And that's a real problem that's causing all these gut issues and then it becomes the next pill to fix, the next thing. So polypharmacy sort of situations that people get into.

So this is a way out now taking acid blockers, why are they bad? Or well, bad, long term?

Dr David: Well, the enzyme in the stomach, it starts protein digestion, requires an acid to be active. So it's called pepsin. And if the pH of the stomach, so pH is a measure of acidity, one is the most acid, 14 is the least acid. So 14 is alkaline, 7 is water in the middle. So, in order for the pepsin in the stomach to activate, it requires a pH in the stomach of one to two. So that's very acid.

Pepsin is the beginning process of breaking down the proteins that you eat. So you eat a chicken breast. So the actin fibres in that chicken muscle have 5600 amino acids in a chain. Now, your intestine will not accept that, it's too big. It will only accept it if it's chopped into little teeny individual amino acids. So if you don't break actin fibre down into 5600 individual amino acids, your body can't utilise that protein, it can't get it in.

So if you give someone a drug, which doesn't allow them to produce stomach acid—no, so now the level of acid in the stomach is seven, it's water. The pepsin doesn't get activated. The first step in protein digestion doesn't occur. And so you don't get the benefit of the proteins that you're eating. The other side of it is in order to absorb minerals, magnesium, zinc, selenium, you need an acid stomach. And if you don't have an acid stomach, you don't get absorption and key minerals. So we find 80% of the patients that we test, they have magnesium deficiency, many of potassium on a cellular level deficiency and zinc deficiency, and selenium. So, these are key things.

The other problem when you block stomach acid, the food that we eat is not sterile. Nobody boils their food until it's sterile before they eat it. We eat raw food or fruits, we eat raw vegetables, there's bacteria in there, there’re parasites in there. And you eat that stuff. And if the mechanism of the body to protect itself from bacteria in food is that there's acid in the stomach, and it kills bacteria. If you don't have acid in your stomach, you eat that broccoli raw, or the tomato. Or you went to a restaurant you had a salad but right before they chopped up the lettuce, they had a raw piece of fish on the thing that they were slicing up and he didn't really wipe off the cutting board very well. And then he puts his lettuce on there, he’s chopping it up. And so, there's some parasites in that lettuce, there's some amoebas, or something in there, and you eat that. And it doesn't get killed in your stomach, which is supposed to happen and it gets in your small intestine. There's a worldwide epidemic now, what's called SIBO, it's all intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Well, where those bacteria come from? They came from your food. Why did they get through? Because you have no stomach acid.

Lisa: Oh my gosh. So it becomes a vicious cycle.

Dr David: Dogs can eat anything because they have humongous levels of stomach acid. And so, they could go and eat out of puddles and eat all this stuff because they have a protection.

Lisa: So by blocking it, we’re actually causing way more—and that the good and the reflex, a reflex is actually not enough essence, not too much isn't it? So, and as we get older, we produce this betaine or HCl betaine. So, we need to be looking at our levels of stomach acids and enzymes. So pancreatic enzymes are lipases and proteases as well, all of the things that break down.

And so having a supplementation of good enzymes, and a good combination, in combination with the PerfectAmino, I think is a really a golden sort of—and then add on a few... And people might say, ‘Well, isn't there just a whole lot of supplementation? And can I just, you know, eat my normal food like we did back in the day’? And the answer is, I don't think we can because the world isn't a complete mess and we are not living as we did 200 years ago and how our ancestors had good food and no glyphosate and they had good organic meats and they didn't have this toxic influx of exhaust fumes and paint fumes and furniture, off gassing, and all of these things that are adding to the load that the modern day human has to deal with.

And so therefore, I think we do need appropriate supplementation, good organic food, and good exercise, good sleep patterns, good—all those basic things that we often also neglect to have a healthy human. And this is why we've got massive chronic disease now that we shouldn't be having. And the wonders of modern medicine so that they can keep us alive with great surgeries and great—but on what status so many people are in a hell of a hell of a mess.

And they just get one pill after another. When you go to the doctor often and this is not everybody, thank goodness there’s some amazing functional doctors out there, like yourself. But often you go and you get stomach acid because you've got Gerd or you get a blood pressure medication or just one pharmacy thing after the other. And this whole model seems to be skew with, doesn't it?

Dr David: Yes, it's totally skewed.

Lisa: It’s totally out of balance. Yes. Skewed is a good word.

Dr David: You know, sometimes in emergencies, they can save somebody's life. But in a long-term solution, it's not workable. And so, American healthcare is the most expensive in the world. And yet we're 29th in the world in overall health. Medicine is not the answer, lifestyle is the answer.

And so, if that's nutrition, and it's what you said. It's sleep, and it's relationships, and it's good nutrition, and it's organic food, and it's sunshine, and it's finding what makes you happy, and the purpose. And without those things, you drugs aren't going to fix you. They're never the right answer to it.

Like I said, in an emergency, it might be needed. You've got a bleeding ulcer, okay, take the acid blocker until your stomach heals. But then figure out what happened, what is an infection or what was wrong? And get off of it because it's long term, it's bad for you. These drugs are associated with gastric cancer because they're bad for you. And they shouldn't be used that way.

Lisa: And across the board, aren’t they? Just like everything, like antidepressants to our vaccinations to—these are all things that yes they may have some good things, but they're just given out like lollies, it would say, and the damage that we're doing is huge in its societal perspective, we really got some major problems. I mean, look at the whole contraceptive and I might go into that, but the damage that has been done to our whole fertility and woman's health and in so on, all of these areas.

And so, in our little way, I hope that this conversation, these open conversations and the sharing, what I love about my podcast is that I get to meet amazing people doing incredible work and just help you get that message just a little bit further, for a little bit more people. And it is basically one by one by one we’ll slowly be able to change.

And if we vote—I heard you say in one of your talks was that we vote with it with our dollar—if we start demanding food that’s not packaged in plastics all the time, if we start buying more organic, and start avoiding the things that are bad for our planet, and voting with our dollar then we're going to contribute to the solution because everything is dollar driven, unfortunately. It's a reality of our world. So, we need to actually change, each one of us add to that conversation.

Dr David: Yes, I mean, the reason why companies sell Doritos is because people buy Doritos. And they will keep making Doritos because you can’t eat just one

Lisa: It tastes so good. Oh hell no.

Dr David: It’s engineered that way. But if you eat something else and the world turns that way. That's—Amazon bought Whole Foods because it's good business.

Lisa: Great. That's good thing

Dr David: The entrepreneur’s looking for what is going to drive the business. And that's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. It's just that, like you said, each of us have a choice with what we buy, and it's a vote. And the more we buy the things that aren't good for us, the more we support the industries that are doing things that aren't good for us. If all of us decided, ‘We're not going to eat any foods from now on that has glyphosate on it’. And then the farmer brings it and says, ‘There's no glyphosate in here’. ‘Okay, I'll buy it’. ‘There's glyphosate in it? I'm not buying it’. If we got 10 million or 20 million or 50 million or a billion people to say, ‘We're fed up with this, we're not even glyphosate’. You know what? They wouldn't make glyphosate anymore.

So we got what we deserve because that's what we did. And we got blindsided. And I think we got bought, and the guys that run everything control media and 70% of the media is pharmaceutical, big agriculture. So, if you watch a lot of TV, you're going to get brainwashed, and you're going to buy what they tell you. So, I mean, you got to start getting your information from different places. Like from you. And if they listen to you, and turn off the TV set, and then do what you say, and we get more and more and more and more people doing this, we can change the world in some ways.

Lisa: A move up by the people.

Dr David: You can’t blame them.

Lisa: Yes. I mean, this is exactly what I'm wanting to make a documentary around the vitamin C story. And it's going to be very hard to get funding for such a thing, because the media companies are also, it's so one-sided, shall we say? And this is a problem. We're not getting the right—we're not getting unbiased information out there. I mean, in New Zealand, they advertise direct to our consumers drugs.

Dr David: Well, here, too. The US, too.

Lisa: I mean, I just don't understand it. We don't let them put smoke cigarette advertising on television, but we let them put pharmaceutical advertising and ask your doctor for this. And it's like, ‘Really’?

Dr David: Yes. Yes. And they control Google, they control everything. So that if you're looking for things, you're going to find what they want you to see. In the United States now, the Justice Department and the US government is going after Google for controlling media of what they want people to see. And they won't let people see...

Lisa: Are they doing this?

Dr David: It’s fantastic. Now I don't know—I hope they can get it but it's really true. They have amazing health censorship.

Lisa: Oh, yes, Google is censoring.

Dr David: And so, it's moving. Just hopefully, we can get this thing moving fast enough before we extinct our species.

Lisa: Because we are, I mean, fertility rates are dropping, everything is heading downwards if we don't start to make a difference.

And just to sum up, because I know I've taken up far more of your time than I should have. But you see that a beautiful summary in your book, there is no such thing as a free lunch. For those people who say, ‘Well, I don't want to pay for tasting and supplements and good food’, you're going to pay in another way. You're going to pay, you're just choosing to pay later and down the track with worse consequences. Or you're paying to be preventative, you're paying for good health. And those are the two choices. We're making a choice. And inaction is one choice. It is a choice.

Dr David: Right. And no one bats an eye paying five bucks for Starbucks. Okay? Maybe one every day. Okay, so that's 150 bucks in a month of Starbucks coffee. Or you could buy a big canister of amino acids for that. And you could make your coffee at home for two cents a cup. And you'd be the same.

So you're right, they’re choosing and if what you choose is not pro-survival in the long run, then you're going to end up in the medical system. And the medical system is very dangerous. The third leading cause of death in the United States, I don't know how it is New Zealand, is doctor-caused illness, death. Whether it's surgeries or procedures, or drug reactions, it is a real big deal.

And if you don't want to end up as one of their statistic casualties, then you have to be able to orient your life toward nutrition, and supplementation, and detoxification, and healthy living, then you don't have to mess with them. Otherwise, you're going to end up in because you're going to get high blood pressure, or diabetes, or osteoporosis, or arthritis, or one of these things, and then you're going to go to them, you're going to get a drug. And then that drugs going to cause a problem, and then you're going to get another drug, and then that causes a problem. And then pretty soon, you're one of their guys. And if people had to actually pay for their medical care, none of this would happen.

When government starts paying for medical care, and the governments are run by the big lobbyists, and then you get free this and that, now you're really, like you said, there's no free lunch, you're going to pay. You just think it's free but actually, it's not.

Lisa: Yes. And I mean, I've just been through two huge journeys in my family with my mum, as I said earlier, with four and a half years of rehabilitation and fighting the system. And now with my father and the things that I experienced fear, not being able to get him vitamin C, when he was dying of sepsis, and he was dying. And I was told that he was, and I was still not allowed to give it to them. And I had to fight legal battles, ethics committees, I had doctors and friends on the outside that I'm connected to pushing for me, given me all the evidence to present and I am the second person in history of New Zealand able to get vitamin C in the ICU setting. But it was too late for my dad.

And this is the sort of thing we're up against. So, I want people to understand that when they get stuck into that hospital system, there are limitations as to what you're allowed to do. You don't have the jurisdiction over your own body anymore. And I wish it hadn't got to that point with my dear father. And it's something that I'm going to have to work through over the next few years, and his legacy will be that I will get those change some way, come hell or high water. It's my ultra-marathon now, is to change that one thing. And there's lots of other things I'd like to change but if I can get that through that message, then I'm contributing to that story.

Look, Dr Minkoff, you've been just so wonderful today. Thank you so much for the generosity of your time, we've done a very long session. I would love to have another team with you. Honestly, I wish you lived in New Zealand. Thank you for the work and the dedication. I know that you could be just sunning yourself in Florida, and retiring, and enjoying, doing Ironmans all around the world but you're still passionate about this work. And I love learning from masters like yourself. So, thank you very much for your service. It's really a pleasure

Dr David: My pleasure. Enjoyed it. I'm sure you can pull this off. I would hate to go up against you if I was Medical Board, you can do this thing. You just have to keep hammering on them because they don't know what they're talking about and they're stuck in a stupid idea. And it can be changed and your contribution is enormous and thanks for what you do.

Lisa: Thank you so much, doctor.

That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

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How to Take a Preventive Approach to Cancer with Travis Christofferson 0

Jun 2, 2022

We don't often look at preventative measures when it comes to our health. We typically look for ways to get better after we get sick — take a pill or undergo this operation, and everything will be better! Don't put off becoming more health-conscious until you've been diagnosed with a disease like cancer. The adage still holds: prevention is better than a cure. In this episode, Best Selling Science Author++ Travis Christofferson discusses the root causes of diseases and how we can take a preventive approach to health. He shares emerging cancer treatment research and encourages us to learn more about them. Focus on your overall health rather than specific diseases. When your body has a good immune system, it can help prevent illnesses like cancer!

If you want to learn more about the latest in cancer research disease prevention, then this episode is for you!

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

Understand the root causes of diseases and how we can prevent them rather than waiting for illness.
Learn about emerging cancer treatment research, including the metabolic approach, ketosis, abscopal effect, etc.
The state of our health care systems

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Order My Books

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Episode Highlights

[03:17] Travis’ Background

Travis has an undergraduate degree in biochemistry. He eventually took over the family business and got married.
He then finished his master's degree, focusing on cancer metabolism for his independent study.
The prevailing teaching during that time was that somatic mutations cause cancer.
Travis was inspired by the book, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease, to do a thesis on metabolic theory.
Otto Warburg proposed the metabolic theory many years ago, but the medical community dismissed it as simplistic. New evidence reignited interest in the approach.

[08:10] The State of Healthcare

Public and health institutions have long accepted the somatic approach to cancer, with billions of dollars backing it.
The United States spends the most per capita on health care expenditure among developed countries yet has the lowest life expectancy.
The issue with the healthcare system lies in variations of treatment, over-treatment, and drug development process.
The healthcare industry is focused more on treating diseases rather than preventing them.
Although technology has advanced to assist people in tracking their health, people's health is deteriorating. Even if people live longer, they often experience illness and disability in their final years.

[12:48] Changing the Healthcare Industry

The healthcare incentive structure must change. Doctors get paid for every drug and procedure they prescribe, leading to overtreatment.
There are emerging practices where doctors get a big bonus per patient who doesn't need procedures, encouraging them to keep patients in good health.
When blood sugar levels rise, doctors usually diagnose diabetes. However, we can test for fasting insulin regularly to intervene.
This test can also help people prevent other diseases and become more health-conscious.
Change takes time with systems and industries, but we can take simple lifestyle interventions now.

[16:01] Why People Are Getting Sicker

Maintaining our health can be challenging. We've been conditioned that taking a magic pill is preferable to putting in the effort.
Remember that metabolic dysregulation causes aging, not the other way around.
In the last 10,000 years, humanity has drastically shifted to consuming processed foods, carbohydrates, and oils, resulting in noticeable consequences.
People have also become sedentary.
A hunter-gatherer society has no obesity, insulin resistance, or chronic systemic inflammation. However, we frequently see this in the Western world.

[20:32] The Root of Diseases

Understanding cellular health and inflammatory processes are critical in keeping yourself healthy.
Periods of food scarcity have happened throughout humanity's evolution. Our bodies enter ketosis due to the caloric deficit but most never reach this state.
Studies have shown that ketosis can help prevent diseases ranging from Alzheimer's to Parkinson's to cancer and diabetes.
Constantly eating keeps our immune system active and prevents it from resting, which has implications for chronic inflammatory diseases.

[24:53] What Happens During Ketosis?

Ketosis happens in a fasted state, and a ketogenic diet is nutritional maintenance.
When we fast, our bodies will mobilise the fat we have in our bodies and begin a process of beta-oxidation to burn off fat.
A caloric deficit makes this process faster, converting fats into ketone bodies, which then take the place of glucose.
Ketones have more thermodynamic energy and ATP per carbon unit compared to glucose.
Ketosis also boosts antioxidant levels. Since diseases are oxidative, ketosis can help to combat illnesses. Listen to the episode to learn more!

[32:01] Growing Healthcare Trends

Research has shown that fasting before chemotherapy can reduce some radiation side effects
Sugar is fuel for cancer cells, but doctors continue giving and allowing patients to consume it.
There's more awareness of the latest research. The annual Metabolic Therapeutic Conference has grown to around 1600 attendees.
When we approach doctors, we will receive information their institution has taught and allowed them to give us.
Even with COVID-19, people have yet to explore treatments like monoclonal antibodies, hyperbaric, and Vitamin C.

[44:00] The Abscopal Effect on Cancer

The abscopal effect is when you target a single tumour site, but it affects other tumour sites in the body.
Travis shares a case where someone with breast cancer on a checkpoint inhibitor received a much lower radiation dose.
In that case, radiation was sufficient to systematically stimulate the immune system to attack cancer, improving the patient's chances of survival.

[47:41] Advancements in Immunotherapy

Using peptides to manipulate the immune system is still a trial and error process.
The immune system's job is to survey for cancer, get rid of it early, and create a checkpoint to avoid attacking itself.

[49:44] Emerging Cancer Treatment Research

In detection, metastasis is an early stage event rather than a late-stage one. Cancer cells break off, dying when it reaches the bloodstream.
This selection pressure creates different genetic mutations in tumours.
The somatic mutation theory argues that a series of sequential mutations cause cancer, with each tumour site having a unique set of driving mutations.
The epigenetic metabolic theory posits that these mutations are a side effect of the disease.
All cancers burn sugar and evade the immune system, but mutations vary too much. Treatments should focus on epigenetic expression rather than mutations.

[55:16] Researching Treatment Options

The medical field is filled with uncertainty. Cancer treatment options have not been compared.
After an in-depth look at clinical trials, we find that what seems to be the best treatment paradigm isn't always the right option.
When conducting research, consider the data and evaluate it using a risk-reward framework. You can choose from low-risk alternatives.

[59:59] The Soil Approach to Cancer

Cancer grows in the presence of a favourable microenvironment and molecular events. It takes a long time for a chronic irritant to develop cancer cells.
Cancer cells take on characteristics of our earliest genes, including replication and the appearance of early embryos.
You can help your cells "behave" by providing oxygen and avoiding chronic irritants.
Nurture the microenvironment through exercising and eating the right foods.
Instead of focusing on the seed or cancer, we should concentrate on the soil or microenvironment.

[1:04:05] Health and Longevity

While we don't know humankind's natural and optimal states, ketosis and fasting provide a glimpse.
Cells stop metabolising as we age, causing inflammation. We may be able to extend life spans if we can reduce senescent cells.
Travis shares a study in which mice received fisetin, found in strawberries, reducing senescent cells and prolonging their life.
There's a lot of new research on substances that kill senescent cells, like senolytics, quercetin, and other compounds.

[1:08:49] About StageZero Life Sciences

StageZero Life Sciences looks into markers of inflammation, insulin resistance, etc.
They also recommend potential lifestyle interventions to change those markers.
They are currently available in Richmond, Virginia, Toronto, and Ontario, Canada.

7 Powerful Quotes

'It's just a combination of probably a terrible diet and just not moving enough because we were designed to go out and have to work every day to catch food. That's what we evolved, and when you uncouple your physiology from that environmental niche, you see all kinds of problems'

‘It appears that evolution has built in a powerful signal to that when you're in a caloric deficiency, you switch your metabolism…to something called ketosis where you completely shift what you're burning to these little small molecules that come from fat,’

‘We're terrible at focusing on prevention. We focus on the disease, trying to treat it once it's already manifest, which is an absolutely horrible strategy.’

‘If we look at cancer then as the prime drivers being metabolic and epigenetic, that means that all of those things potentially could be modifiable, right? We don't have to target mutations. We can look for ways to change the way cells are expressing genes and so forth, and metabolising substrates and things like that.’

‘Just mind the microenvironment of your body, which is giving you the right food, exercising. It's designed to do that. Every time you do that, it brings down those inflammatory processes, and so forth.’

‘We tend to think we're in this modern era, but with regard to cancer, we will look back 200 years from now, realise that we were just in the Dark Ages. We’re still using radiation which was invented about 110 years ago; chemotherapy was invented around World War II. That's still the mainstay of cancer treatments.’

‘When you really look deep, the two problems really are variation in treatment, over-treatment. The drug development process, I think, is one of the main problems too,’

Resources

Gain exclusive access and bonuses to Pushing the Limits Podcast by becoming a patron!
Want to learn more from Travis? Check out his books:
Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer by Thomas Seyfried
Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery by Dr Jason Fung
Healthy Conversations With Travis Christofferson and Guest, Jason Fung M D from StageZero Life Sciences
Check out these previous episodes with Dr Elena Seranova:
Learn more about cancer and health through our previous episodes:
- The Six Cornerstones for Better Health with Dr Charles Meakin
- Cancer Revolution: The Metabolic Approach to Cancer with Maggie and Bradley Jones
Abscopal effect following radiation monotherapy in breast cancer: A case report
Fisetin is a senotherapeutic that extends health and lifespan
Short-term fasting accompanying chemotherapy as supportive therapy in gynecological cancer: protocol for a multicenter randomised controlled clinical trial
StageZero Life Sciences: Website | AVRT Program
Foundation for Metabolic Cancer Therapies
Connect with Travis: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook

About Travis

Travis Christofferson is the founder of The Foundation for Metabolic Cancer Therapies and works in Clinical Development at StageZero Life Sciences Ltd.

He is also a science author of several books, including Tripping Over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms, Curable: How an Unlikely Group of Radical Innovators Is Trying to Transform Our Health Care System, Ketones, The Fourth Fuel, and co-author of The Origin (and future) of the Ketogenic Diet.

Want to learn more about Travis’ work? Check out Foundation for Metabolic Cancer Therapies.

You can also connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

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