The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #282 - 2024 Best Of Part 2

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

There are so many great things I do intermittent fasting now that have upped my physical stamina. It can really take your life off track if you mess with your hormones. Red wine seems to be what is beneficial and has protective effects at that moderate amount.

A lot of times the things that clear our energy, that release negative energy from our body are things that we already normally love doing. That the body is incredibly intelligent. It really knows my story.

Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. Friends, we are here. The very last episode of 2024. Oh my goodness. What a surreal, crazy journey it has been. I am so, so grateful for this show, for all of the guests that I've had on and for all of you guys.

If you missed it, definitely check out last week's episode for part one, where we had excerpts from 11 other incredible guests from the show this year. Now it's time for the homeward stretch. I so enjoy doing this episode because it allows me a moment to just reflect on all the incredible conversations I've had, all the things I've learned, all the incredible humans I've met.

It's really a beautiful, incredible, fun moment. I hope you guys enjoy these highlights. The show notes will be at Melanie Avalon.com slash 2024 part two. There will be a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about, including to the original episodes.

So if you guys want to go back and hear the entire episode. episode, definitely do that. And yeah, I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear who your favorite guests were, what you learned this year, all the things.

Definitely let me know in my Facebook group, I have biohackers, intermittent fasting, plus real foods, plus life. Comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love.

And then check out my Instagram, find the Friday announcement post, and again, comment there to enter to win something that I love. All right, I think that's all the things. Happy holidays to everybody, and please enjoy this part two to the best of the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast 2024.

It's always a moment for me deciding who to start off these best of episodes with. I just knew it had to be for this episode, Nina Teichels. I have been following her work for years and years and years, she is a legend.

Nina is a science journalist, an author, and a thought leader in the field of nutrition, science and health. She has her New York Times bestselling book, The Big Fat Surprise. which will change everything you thought you knew about the role of dietary fat, especially saturated fat and vegetable oils.

She dives deep into the politics of nutrition. It is mind blowing stuff. And in this excerpt from our conversation, we talk about the suspect craziness that goes into the olive oil industry, AKA is even olive oil, the shining golden child oil of health that we thought maybe not.

And it takes somebody like Nina to find this shocking information. So without further ado, please enjoy this excerpt from episode 234 with Nina Teichels. Listeners, read the book because what Nina was saying about the Mediterranean diet and the olive oil.

I think that, I mean, that's like a page turner, all of that information. And you talk about so many studies in the book that like we've talked about now on the show, but where it's just shocking what was actually in the study compared to what they said.

Like one of the, I think one of the most shocking ones to me personally was the one that was on olive oil. And you said that they actually didn't measure the olive oil and the participant's diet. Oh my goodness, that was an incredible study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

This is a famous study that was in a top, top, top journal by Antonia Trikopoulos, now deceased, but she was like, she literally was called the mother of the Mediterranean diet, a Greek doctor. She published a study based on observational studies.

So data, which, so it's, you know, a weak form of data, but she was like, and the title in the New England Journal of Medicine was olive oil prevents heart disease. And I start looking into this study and I'm looking and I'm looking and I'm looking and I cannot find any measurements of olive oil intake.

Like, and I just don't understand it. Like how did this get, like somebody, it must be there because it's in the New England Journal of Medicine. So finally I reach out to Dr. Trikopoulos and I said, you know.

where did you how did you measure olive oil I must have overlooked it and she said well we just asked them about dishes that they ate like you know you know moussaka or whatever any kind of cooked dish and we just assumed based on our recipes the amount of olive oil they must have used like can you imagine it's like mind-blowing it's like it's so upsetting that's not so unusual actually as a you know as a I mean I also discovered that I guess it maybe it's now relatively well known but that Ansel Keys for his super famous seven country study where he had gone to the island of Crete where he studied all a total of 30 to 33 men which who became like the sole subjects that was the foundation of the Mediterranean diet like it's based on their diets that he founded a Mediterranean diet concept He went there.

One of the three periods he went there was during Lent, which is incredibly strict in Orthodox Christianity at the time in Greece, which was a total abstinence from all animal foods. And therefore, he inevitably undercounted the amount of saturated fat that these men were eating.

But things like that, you know, you just, you can't, you can't sort of believe that the science is quite as bad as it is. And also, I think there's an added layer of surprise that really, there are no referees in nutrition science that, that the field itself does not recognize or try to correct its own mistakes.

There's, there are really good nutrition scientists, but as I have come to understand, they really are, those are not the people with the most power or influence. And so the ability of the field to police itself and hold itself to higher, more rigorous standards is, is truly lacking in nutrition science, which is, which is part of why we all have such difficulty in getting good advice.

Oh my goodness, friends, it was so exciting and such an honor to be introduced to Cameron Chestnut by Ben Greenfield. And this conversation was so eye-opening when it comes to the industry of cosmetic procedures.

Dr. Chestnut is a facial plastic surgeon for the world's highest performers and he has a massive following on social media. He's known for his progressive use of regenerative medicine and his really interesting post-op recovery techniques.

In this excerpt from our conversation, we talk about the role of cosmetic surgeries and helping you look how you feel. It's really mind-blowing, forward thinking stuff. Without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous excerpt from episode 274 with Dr.

Cameron Chestnut. Ben into beauty standards and what that is. So. This is where I really break down procedures into transformative versus rejuvenative, which we talked a little bit about before. And in my world, like yours, Melanie, is a very interesting mix, right?

Where you had a very, very functional part of yours, the septoplasty, right? To make you breathe, physically breathe better. And I don't know how anybody who's especially listening to your podcast would not want to breathe better, right?

That's wildly important. And then you had a part of it that was, you know, transformative that kind of took away part of your, a genetic dorsal hump that you had, right? So you have this like very dichotomous mix of procedures that happened at the same time, right?

And then there's this middle category of rejuvenative, I would say, where you take something that has aged or changed and you move it back towards where it was. And this is where it gets very philosophical into your listeners, optimizing their physiology, their genetics, their epigenetics, their aging, they're doing everything they can to improve their longevity, their health, their health span, all those things,

right? Well, interestingly, our facial aging does have some impact from those, meaning if you're really optimized in all those areas, your face will age slightly slower, but it's not to the same pace as to your maybe longevity improvement, right?

Meaning that there becomes a mismatch at some point. And you certainly, the most common thing I hear from my patients is that they want to look how they feel. And there is, in my world, absolutely nothing wrong with that.

You've worked really hard to feel good. And this little area of your life is changing that. You know, you've worked so hard with your exercise, with your diet, all these things. OK, great. Well, we have a solution for that that is relatively low input.

You know, it's that's maybe not the right word, depends on how you look at it. But, you know, we have an option that's very realistic and inbounds to improve and make this match the way you look and the way you feel.

And that's I think that's really important as we look at our health, our emotional health. I don't see anything wrong with that at all. And again, that's there's different motivations. If somebody comes to me and said, you know, I am doing this to get my ex-husband back or to get back, I'm not doing that procedure, right?

That's not that's not the right motivation for me. So I think that, you know, there's a lot of that part of it, too. Like, what's what's the motivation to do this procedure? And I think you could get really analogous with this with, you know, orthopedic surgeries, even, you know, optimizing function of your body to match what you like to do.

If you're a super high level tennis player and you want to get this little procedure on your knee, that's really only going to make your knee function 10 percent better that you don't really, quote unquote, need to have done.

But you do it because you want to function at your highest level. That's a lot like having a procedure to make yourself look how you feel. so you can function at your highest level. I just love this conversation so much.

I could not agree more. I find it so fascinating how we silo the different, like you said, like motivations behind things and then do apply judgment to it. So for example, like with the Botox, like if I say that I'm getting into my jaw because it relieves my jaw pain, which makes me happier relieving that pain, like that's okay.

But if I'm getting a little bit in my forehead because it makes me happier to be preventively addressing these wrinkles and seemingly that, people will judge that as not okay. And I don't really know why that is.

And then same with like the septoplasty versus the rhinoplasty, like the septoplasty, which the thing that made me... decide to do that was I interviewed James Nestor for his book, Breath, which is incredible.

And I highly recommend it. I read that book and I was like, I got to fix my deviated septum like now. Even me, like if I will talk about what I got done, sometimes I'll just say I got a septoplasty and I won't mention the rhinoplasty.

And it's like, why is that? Both have really improved my quality of life. So I'm really fascinated by it. And I really appreciate your approach. I think that's very interesting and very well said. And, you know, there's degrees of that.

It's again, it's a spectrum all over the place. As I'm having patients, you know, traveling for surgeries and things like that, for some reason, the laser part of the procedure is more socially acceptable.

And it's okay, oh, you had a laser. That's like acceptable. Yeah. But the minor surgery part, oh, you had surgery. So and I'm interested in like, well, they're very similar in their, you know, total recovery and all these things.

And so, you know, I use that a little bit in my counseling of folks in their recovery that might say, hey, you know, if anybody ever asks you anything about what you had done, you can always just say, I had a laser done, which is true.

You know, if somebody has a history of skin cancer, it's even better because the laser will reduce their future history of skin cancer. And you can say, I had, you know, some sun damage. And so I had a laser to reduce my skin cancer risk.

And that becomes really acceptable at that point, you know, which is also, you know, partially true. So we have a great scapegoat in there where we take advantage of that a little bit, much like you do with your septoplasty versus having a septoplasty and anaplasty.

You tell me a septoplasty who cares, you know, especially if you think it's somebody that you don't want to have that conversation with or that they're just like maybe not open minded enough to handle it.

Okay, friends, it was so, so cool to meet and interview Misha Tate. She is the ultimate warrior of warriors. She is a combat sports veteran. She actually won the women's UFC Bantamweight World Championship in 2016.

And she's really a pioneer when it comes to women's MMA. I met her when I had no idea she She was. And then later I was like, oh wow, she's like really, really cool. I have to have her on the show. And the reason I had no idea is I just don't follow the world of fighting.

Literally everybody else probably knows who she is. She is such a kind, radiant, inspiring human being. She's a mom. She does all the biohacking things. So it was really exciting to have her on the show.

And in this excerpt from our conversation, we talk about the role of biohacking as an athlete. So without further ado, please enjoy this excerpt from episode 239 with Misha Tate. But I really have found that biohacking and staying on top of regular regimens when it comes to recovery, like I'm in my hyperreg chamber very often.

I use red light therapy. I use brain tap regularly. I use the Mark Pro. I am on top of my supplements and even the quality of those things. I personally eat more red meat, grass fed. I have just more information.

I eat grass-fed liver. I eat a lot of things that are very rich in vitamins and nutrients. That's for me personally, works well. And I mean, there are so many other things that I feel like I do on a consistent basis.

Cold therapy, sauna, you mentioned those things earlier. There are so many great things I do intermittent fasting now that have upped my physical stamina in ways that I didn't have when I was younger.

So I feel like my body is able to stay younger, and therefore my performance is staying, quote unquote, younger than what we have seen in prior generations. This knowledge that we have now keeps us functioning as though we were still in our late 20s, early 30s, which is kind of like a nice prime age for an athlete at least.

And for me, it's made such a big difference because you look at somebody like Tom Brady, for example, and you're like, well, he's just an anomaly. I'm like, no, he just is really smart and he works really hard at maintaining his physical because as an athlete, you cannot have the experience and the repetitions that a veteran has as a young person.

You just don't have enough time yet, hours on the mat. You couldn't do it if you even stayed 24 hours a day, which wouldn't even be recommendable. But you can't make up for the years of experience. But where the veterans typically tend to lose it is that they don't take care of their bodies.

So when the body starts to fall apart, it doesn't matter how much skillset they have. Their bodies can't keep up with it. The wheels are coming off the car. It's falling apart. But if you could keep your body functioning young and have the experience and the repetitions on the mat, well, then you have a recipe for success.

And that's where I feel like I'm at. more athletes that find their way into this world of biohacking. It just seems, I mean, I'm like saturated in it. So when I'm like, it seems obvious, but I am surprised.

Yeah, I feel the same way. I think more athletes do need to understand. I think more people need to understand, but I'm especially surprised that athletes don't. But I do see a little bit more seeping in here and there.

There's a little bit of a cultural shift, it feels like around the whole idea of putting back in. I think people are tired of being tired. I think people are tired of feeling like shit. I think people are tired of feeling depressed and we're starting to ask questions and the information is presenting itself.

Scientists are studying what happens to you when you are vitamin D deficient and why does it affect you in so many ways? Well, maybe because it's a hormone, maybe it's actually important to be outside.

Maybe we should use a little less sunscreen. Like what are, you know, where is the balance in all of this? I find that the information has probably been out there longer than I've been looking for it.

I know a lot of it actually has been out there longer than I have personally been seeking it out, but I think more people are able to access this information in easier ways than ever before. All right, so keeping on with the theme of really epic, inspiring human being with massive followings, Max Lugavere is a legend in the health and wellness sphere.

He's super well known for being the New York Times bestselling author of the book Genius Hudes, also the Wall Street Journal bestseller Genius Kitchen. He hosted Genius Life Podcast, and I had him back on for a very, very special episode for his incredible, beautiful documentary, Little Empty Boxes, which he poured his life into filming the experience of his mom dealing with Alzheimer's.

It is a haunting, beautiful documentary. I cannot recommend enough checking it out, so you can hear a little bit about that in this excerpt from episode 256. And so we really wanted to make it about my mom.

She really is the star of the film, and I'm super proud of that. And in fact, she named the film. Oh, she did? Yeah. Well, you probably remember a scene in the film where my mom is attempting to describe her inner world, and she alludes to these boxes remain empty.

If you want to just, for a second, consider all of your memories and all of the experiences you've had piled into boxes, and then suddenly those boxes, you go to check on them. And one day, there's nothing to be found.

My mom talks about that in the film, and she's struggling and suffering, but she references this idea of empty boxes. And my mom passed away in 2018, but as we were editing this film over the past three years, that line really stood out to my co-director of the project, Chris Newhart, and he brought it to the rest of the team, myself included, and he was like, what if this is the name of the film?

What if we let Kathy name the film? And we did, and I'm so glad that we did. Because I remember that scene. It was really, really haunting. I thought you were saying that you had a conversation with your mom that she knew you were making it, and she said that it should be called that.

What I remember from that, I think it was the same scene. I was trying to remember the moments where you're talking to her and she's saying these things, and you would like repeat it back to yourself, thinking about it.

Because I think she made some other comment, not like about like a grandfather, a person in the room, or a man. I don't know, she was saying stuff, and you were repeating it back to yourself. And what was so interesting about it, I personally don't have any family members who have had Alzheimer's.

I did have, my grandmother had cognitive decline. It was after a stroke, though, and it was. pretty fast. So it wasn't the, like the long drawn out, you know, experience that people often have with people like Alzheimer's and to clarify, your mom had Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

So is Lewy Boddy's a combination of those two essentially or? It has more in common with Parkinson's disease, but it's essentially like having Alzheimer's and Parkinson's at the same time in terms of the symptomology of the disease.

Yeah. Okay. And I remember she said in the film that it's almost like you expected her to be most stressed by the cognitive decline, but she made the comments about, you know, the Parkinson's aspects being most troubling to her, at least, you know, at one point.

Yeah. We've, we've done, you know, it's been really interesting. We've done a little theatrical tour of the film in the US and, you know, it's been great to show the film to audiences in person. And one of the things that I, that's really stood out from the Q and A's that we've been having after the film is that many people with experience with Alzheimer's disease, you know, a lot of the times the patient is unaware of the cognitive decline that they're experiencing,

which I think in a way is a, is a, is a bit of a grace of sorts in the sense that they're, they're not fully aware of what it is they're experiencing of what their loved ones are experiencing. But in the case of my mom, she was fully aware of the degree to which her cognition was, was being diminished.

And, you know, that was part of the reason why I think my mom was suffering to the, to the degree that she was. And this is, you know, documented in the film. And it's, it's just a testament to, I guess, you know, how different these dimensions can be, but irrespective of the dementia diagnosis, once you've seen one case of dementia, you've seen one case of dementia, they're also different.

And that's something that I've, that I've learned from interacting with people who've gravitated to the film and who've seen the film and, you know, who have had dementia in their, in their family trees.

It's just, it's so different. Yeah. I mean, I wish in a way my mom. was less aware of what it was that she was going through because she really did suffer, you know? She saw her life get just more and more diminished by the disease and that's, I think, part of what made it so hard for me to experience because my mom was somebody who had such an incredible zest for life and to see that taken away from her by this condition was just,

it was heartbreaking. And I'm just so glad that we've been able to capture it in little empty boxes because, you know, there are probably millions of people out there like me like her and, yeah, I just don't want people to feel alone in that process.

All right, time for some more inspiring, incredible females, Dr. Sarah Zall, formerly known as Dr. Sarah Gottfried. What an incredible human. She's the New York Times bestselling author of many books about hormones and nutrition and health and her latest book, The Autoimmune Cure, was so eye-opening when it comes to what actually causes autoimmune disease.

and what we can do to change that, in particular the role of trauma in autoimmune disease. And in this part of our conversation, we talk about the future of psychedelics for both health and autoimmune conditions.

So without further ado, please enjoy this excerpt from episode 268 with Dr. Sarah Gottfried. You said that people who have higher inflammation don't respond as well. Wait, I want to get it the right way.

I think people who have higher inflammation are like less likely to respond to talk therapy. I wasn't sure if that was because they're less likely to go or they just don't respond as well. Yeah, that's a good question.

I learned about this from my friend and colleague, Will van de Veer, who's a psychiatrist. He's a co-founder of the Integrative Psychiatry Institute in Colorado. When I first, yeah, the point is that there's kind of different subtypes of people with mental health challenges.

And if you look at the group of people with depression, as an example, there's a large portion of them who have increased inflammation. So their immune system is activated. And when you've got increased inflammation, some of these treatments that are standard of care, like talk therapy, are less likely to be effective.

You have to have a more holistic approach where you're addressing inflammation. And then if we shift to what you were starting with, which is for people with trauma, when I was researching this book, I looked, okay, what's the gold standard?

You got someone who walks in the door and they've got symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. What's the latest thinking in conventional medicine for how to treat it? And the latest thinking is...

still, talk therapy, sometimes trauma-informed, but not always. And then there are three drugs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, that are used and FDA-proofed for the treatment of PTSD. So talk therapy with or without an SSRI has an efficacy of about 30%.

So if you have 100 people with PTSD and you treat them with talk therapy and one of these SSRIs that are FDA-approved, about 30% of them will get better and no longer meet criteria for PTSD. I think that's abysmal.

So 30%, when I started talk therapy in my 20s with my first bout of depression, if someone said to me, hey, Sarah, your partial PTSD has an efficacy of 30% response to this weekly psychotherapy that you're starting.

I don't think I would have done it. So if we then shift and look at MDMA assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, it has an efficacy of 67 to 71 percent. So it's more than double as effective as the standard of care, which is part of what makes the FDA's rejection of the use of MDMA for PTSD so infuriating.

And that rejection, what's the latest on that? Because I know when I was reading the book, it was talking about like March 2024, which is now, I'm not sure if that was for MDMA. I'm curious, what is the current, like right now, how are things going with different psychedelics?

Yeah. So the advisory board voted on it this summer and they voted against it. And then we didn't see a decision just two weeks ago in August of 2024 against approval for MDMA. So it's really unfortunate we think that there's pharmaceutical influence because you can imagine being treated two to three times with MDMA assisted therapy and having all of these people, veterans, other people with the experience of trauma,

having them come off of their long term antidepressants and SSRIs, that's a big hit to pharmaceutical companies. So it's a messy situation and we've got to keep fighting, especially for people who are traumatized who deserve access to this treatment.

Okay, friends, now time for one of the guests who has historically been one of my most downloaded episodes. That happens when he comes on my show. I hear it from my other podcasting friends when they have him on.

People are obsessed with what Morley Robbins is doing. He knows all about the importance of minerals in the body. and will completely change everything you thought you knew about iron regulation. In particular, the role of copper, mind-blowing.

Prepare yourself for this excerpt from episode 261 with Morley Robbins. The part that people have been trained to believe is that as it relates to copper, that it's toxic. And it's alarming that people believe that.

I understand why they believe it, because it's constantly in the airwaves and on the internet and things like that. But what's important for people to realize is there is elegant regulation of copper.

And what copper does, second to none, copper's purpose on this planet is to regulate oxygen and iron without creating static. It's a really big deal. And the average listener doesn't fully understand what I just said.

It's just that when iron and oxygen get together, they like to create rust. They react with each other, and copper prevents that reaction. And so when people think they have, quote, copper toxicity because they've got some level of upset stomach or maybe they've got a headache, what they don't realize, Melanie, is that copper is really good at mobilizing iron.

And where does iron hang out? In the stomach and in the brain. And when copper gets into the system, it will mobilize that iron, and it will cause you to feel differently, but what you've got to do is keep your wits about you and realize that if you've never had copper in your diet and then you suddenly start to work with a biovel with a form of copper supplement, what I've developed, like the cuprate,

you're going to have a reaction, and your body will adjust to it, and you will settle down. But I think what people need to do is be more curious than concerned, and just wonder, what is my body trying to tell me about my mineral status?

And I think the most important thing is for people to embrace the fact that the body is incredibly intelligent, it really knows what it's doing. And when you bring the right nutrients, which are laid out in the root cause protocol, when you bring the right nutrients into the body, the body knows exactly what to do, it activates the blueprint for the metabolism, and there is a response from the body's part.

So I think what's missing is that people have been trained to believe that their body's stupid, and that we as individuals need to override our immune system and our digestive system, and we've got to do all the thinking, well, the hypothalamus runs the body thinks two million times faster than we can think and it's just we don't appreciate the elegance and the absolute changes of our bodies natural ability to regulate itself.

All right friends it was such an honor and so so cool to interview Abby Epstein and Ricky Lake yes that Ricky Lake like the talk show host for their incredible documentaries The Business of Being blow your mind about the birthing process in the US when it comes to hospitals versus home births all the things and then with birth control oh my goodness all the crazy stuff that happens with that and why you may want to think twice before taking that little pill.

In this excerpt from episode 277 we talk about the role of birth control in our attraction to our partners and the mind warp that it can do on our minds. So definitely get ready for this excerpt from episode 277 with Abby Epstein and Ricky Lake.

It can really take your life off track, you know, if you mess with your hormones, because these sex hormones, like we know, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, these are not sex hormones. These are hormones that have receptors all over your brain on every organ of your body.

I mean, these are your life hormones, you know, and when you start messing with them, there are effects, you know, and at the very least, I feel like, look, there's so many young women who, you know, I have friends with teenage girls, and they're like, well, you know, we really need to put her on the pill because of X, Y, and Z.

And I'm like, okay, that's great. So you know, if you're going to have your daughter go on the pill, or someone's going to choose to go on for X many number of years, do you know what you should be supplementing?

Do you know what kind of, you know, micronutrient and vitamin depletions are now going to be happening? No, they have no idea, you know, there's, there's even like baseline things that women could be doing just to like counteract the birth control and keep themselves healthier that nobody knows about.

Yeah, it's so crazy. And the attraction thing, that's fascinating that you talk about that study in the documentary, where basically, if you're on the pill, it can make you more likely to be attracted to more of like a brotherly love type man rather than like a sexual erotic attraction.

So you know, women will be on birth control and then go off of it and you know, not be attracted to their husbands anymore. It happened with lesbian couples too, like they did. Oh, does it really? Yeah, there was some doctor was Keith told the story about the lesbian couple that they were for doing fertility treatments for one of them to get pregnant and she was pulsed by her partner suddenly and he would say don't worry you know when you go off the hormonal you know birth control or the hormones to to you know for to amp up your fertility don't worry it'll it'll go back to normal but yeah it's it's just it's it's a real thing I don't remember experiencing any emotional effects from being on yas in high school but interestingly if you look at my high school yearbook pictures just pictures in general I mean I've never been severely overweight but I definitely gained I mean probably like probably like 20 pounds just from going on that like you can see the differences in the pictures and I definitely at the time did not realize that it was from that which is kind of shocking to me but I feel almost I just feel like taking advantage of like I didn't need to be on that you know like there was no reason so it's just it's it's frustrating and I'm just so grateful for you ladies for drawing attention to all of this Okay,

friends, this next conversation was a conversation I've been wanting to have for years and years and years. I have been so intrigued with the Mind Diet for so long. It is the diet most studied for helping to prevent cognitive decline.

So interviewing Laura Morris and Jennifer Ventrelli for their newest book, The Official Mind Diet, was such a surreal moment for me. Jennifer was the lead dietician on the Mind Diet trial to prevent Alzheimer's disease, and she co-wrote it with Laura, whose mother, Dr.

Martha Claire Morris, actually did all of the foundational work for the Mind Diet. In this excerpt from episode 272, we talk about something I am very intrigued with, which is the role of wine and the brain.

Is it actually preventative of cognitive decline? Time to find out. So what are the findings with wine? Yeah, so as you just described, it's sort of a bell curve, right? Those who have none at all don't get any benefit.

And it seems that a very moderate intake, so the target is about five fluid ounces, which is really interesting. Laura, I love, so we do our six-week program that's in the book. We have a live program that we do.

And one of my favorite demonstrations that Laura does is actually pour out five ounces of wine. Yeah, I get my little ounce pour like a bartender, and I show what five ounces look like. It's really disappointing.

So five fluid ounces, which is probably less than we're used to being served at most restaurants, is the amount that was shown to be protective per day to the brain. And anything above that was shown to really be offensive, neurotoxic.

Yeah. And so this is a really controversial area of health right now, because that is still true for the brain health world. world data. There's been some other information research that's come out, like my cardiologist friends are sort of recommending no alcohol at all now, because there's been more studies about the negative connection between alcohol and blood pressure and other cardiovascular outcomes.

But it seems to be that the polyphenols, there's anthocyanins and specifically resveratrol that is contained in the skin, in all skins of grapes, but higher concentration in red grapes. So higher concentrated in red wine seems to be what is beneficial and has protective effects at that moderate amount.

So, you know, we tell people to just be responsible with it. We never recommend that people start drinking if they're non-drinkers, but just being mindful with intake and enjoying it, enjoying it with a good meal, savoring it, tasting it.

Something I would love to see studied is pretty much all of the studies I've seen on alcohol and health and whatever regards it may be, they tend to lump it together. Either it'll be just alcohol as a broad category or it'll just be wine, might be like red wine or white wine, but I don't ever see studies that look at conventional wine and alcohol and drinks versus like organic, dry farmed, lower alcohol,

lower sugar. I feel like the quality might be playing a role there because to me there'd be a big difference between having a conventional glass of high sugar wine that's high in pesticides from some winery in California compared to like a dry farm, low sugar, low alcohol wine from the Loire Valley in France.

That's some studies I would like to see personally that if there's any difference there. Yeah, you make a good point. It's a nice parallel to what we talk about with olive oil. We make a big deal about reading your labels with olive oil, checking that it's certified, storing it in a cool, dry place.

A glass container is better than a plastic container. You really want to preserve those polyphenols and monounsaturated fatty acids. I could see a lot of the same applications that you're talking about with preserving those nutrients in wine and thus the effects.

It's a good point. All righty friends, next up we have the epic Oliver Nino. He is an energy healer and a spiritual activation expert with a massive following because of the extent to which he truly changes people's lives.

He's worked with so many legends, Demi Moore, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julian Hugh, Gerard Butler, Tony Robbins, and I had him on for his book, The Spiritual Activator, which actually teaches you how to practically clear energetic blocks that you may have in your life, how to identify, activate, and master your spiritual gifts.

understanding the role of chakras and auras down to the cellular level and so many things. I really truly enjoyed the conversation. And in this excerpt from our interview, we talk about how you can do what you love to cleanse your energy.

So without further ado, please enjoy this part of my conversation from episode 249 with Oliver Nino. And the thing with it as well is when I talk about energy healing, people sometimes automatically jump into, oh, it's a bunch of crystals and a bunch of, you know, this new age and rituals and all those different things.

And I'm like, I get that that's a sector of it, but, you know, that's not typically what I mean by that. Like I have practices that I teach to where, you know, people want to feel better than they move their body, they exercise or they get sunlight or they take a salt bath, right?

Or they set an intention or like, you know, there's, or there's more than one way of doing it. And a lot of times the things that clear our energy that release negative energy from our body are things that we already normally love doing, right?

Whether it's playing with animals, right? Being with elements, being by yourself, you know, creating stuff like writing, playing instruments. I mean, these things, if you look at them, they're what people do on a daily basis, right?

And they might not even know or think that it has any positive effects for energy healing and clearing, but it does, right? So a lot of the times people can be doing things that clear their energy without ever knowing that's what they're doing.

And that's fine because again, it's like energy clearing in my mind is just a, it's just label. It's just a way to describe like, you know, a certain way of doing things, but people are clearing their energy more often than they know, just by doing the things that they, you know, naturally do every single day.

And to provide some language for people more and clarify and definition surrounding this concept of the actual energy itself. And this is, I hope I can articulate this question correctly, but could you kind of paint a picture of the low versus the high vibration energy state, what that looks like?

And my, my nuanced question there is, cause I think we could see it as binary, like, you know, happy feelings and joyful feelings versus like sad feelings and feeling down and feeling afraid. But then on top of that, sometimes I feel like sometimes you can have these, I don't know if they're like lower, so like non, non happy feelings, but not be personally distressed by it and almost enjoy it.

So what I mean by that is like growing up, I was really attracted to like. Bitter, sweet things. And I would have like my sad quote book and I would love to like, you know, write sad quotes and then I'll look listen to sad songs, so that state of enjoying sadness, where does that fall on the energy spectrum?

So kind of a long question. Yeah, I mean, I look at it as I'm not so much, there's a lot of things in life that I'm black and white with, right? But that's not one of the things that I'm black and white with, because the way I look at it is, let's say somebody experiencing sadness or grief or fear, right?

If they live in that, and that's what they're experiencing 100% or 80% of the time, and it's disempowering, it's debilitating, it's not allowing them to live life to the fullest. Sure, it's an issue, right?

But if you are 80% of the time in neutral or high vibrations, and then sometimes sadness and fear comes in, right? Then it's just part of the human experience. I mean, you want to understand why they're coming up.

You want to understand what it's teaching you. You want to understand, Because it can be a teacher, it can be a lesson, it can be feedback, you're sad because of what, right? You're sad because somebody passed away, you're sad because of a heartbreak, you're sad because you feel unloved or abandoned.

Those are all good things to be sad about. It doesn't mean that you're experiencing that. It doesn't mean that all of a sudden you're a crappy human being. You're a human being. You're experiencing that.

You're experiencing it fully. You're learning from it. And then you're moving on. Because the thing is, when you're experiencing it fully, you process it. Okay, friends, it wouldn't be a best of episode for the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast without something spicy and sexual.

It is time for Susan Bratton. She is a major figure in the world of supporting sexual health and wellness. She is a renowned expert when it comes to intimacy. And she is a champion and advocate for all of those who desire intimacy and passion their whole life long.

She has so much insight, techniques, recommendations when it comes to transforming your sex life. So having her on the show was just so, so fun. In this excerpt from our conversation, we talk about the problems with many conventional lubes, including plastic that may be in them and the best lube that you should be getting.

Spoiler, I love Foria. I love their lube. I love their melts, which I have started using on the regular whenever I go out after talking with Susan. You can get 20% off all Foria products when you go to MelanieAvalon.com slash Foria, F-O-R-I-A, and use the code MelanieAvalon.

Definitely get that lube. Definitely get their melts, which you're going to hear about in a second. So without further ado, please enjoy this excerpt from episode 265 with Susan Bratton. Let's talk about phthalates.

So last night I went to see a documentary screening called We Are All Plastic People Now. Oh, I believe it. And they are measuring our blood and finding 28 different types of plastics in our blood. They're finding it in placentas.

They're finding it in men's tassels. They're finding it, you know, in every turtle swimming around in our oceans, like we're just completely turning into plastic. And the sex toys, tools that I recommend are, there are so many horrible tools out there that have phthalates and plasticizers that leak into your vaginal mucosal lining.

If you wouldn't put it in your mouth, you shouldn't put it inside your vagina or on your vulva anywhere. And yet companies have, they don't care about our health. So the only tools you're going to find in my eight tool cross training link on your sexy page are going to be the highest quality.

products with no phthalates and plasticizers in them of the premium silicone. Even that is still imperfect. The only thing that's not plastic is a G-Spot glass wand or stainless steel wand, but they don't vibrate.

You're still working with some materials. Phoria, which I want to talk about next, is the CBD. Now, they have a non-CBD-based version for those of you who live in Canada, or those of you who live in states where you can't get deliveries of CBD-based products, or you're tested at work, or you have a fundamental thing around, I don't use any hemp-related products in my life.

No worries. Everything I'm about to say also comes in CBD-free, but Phoria is only one of the three companies out there that has lubricants that do not have what are called organic fluorines. They are all like KY, all the stuff in CVS, Target, Walmart, Walgreens, all has garbage in it, and two of the other three lubricants have stuff in them that I probably pre-penole, add a lot of that.

Okay, so it doesn't have organic fluorines. It has other crap in it that I'm not putting in my vulva. The only brand I recommend, and not only am I happy to recommend them because they're clean, I'm recommending them because they are marvelous, is the Phoria products.

I've gotten you special discount codes on those for your sexy page too. All right, friends, sticking with the women, doing awesome things for women's health and vitality and experience. It was such an honor to have Dr.

Molly Maloof on the show. She wrote an incredible book called The Spark Factor, the secret to supercharging energy, becoming resilient and feeling better than ever. And I actually got to meet her. in person when I went to the eudaimonia conference a few months ago.

That was exciting. She is a sparkling, motivating, incredible woman with the science and knowledge you need to truly optimize your health and wellness. And in this part of our conversation, we talked about whether or not there actually can be love drugs.

Please enjoy this excerpt from episode 257 with Dr. Molly Maloof. So oxytocin is the bonding hormone. Oxytocin and basopressin are really important for social bonds and community bonds. And men are more basopressin dominant, women are more oxytocin dominant.

So men are really designed for protection, defense and aggression. So protecting the tribe, ensuring that women and children are safe, and going out to war if necessary to defend one's resources. And then oxytocin is about safety, trust and love and social bonds.

And these bonds between parent and child, these bonds between parent to parent, these bonds between families, these bonds between communities. We need oxytocin because it helps us maintain these bonds.

So when you take drugs with somebody that you may not know very well, you might find yourself saying, oh my God, I love you, you're so amazing, right? Oh my God, I just like, you know, you can find yourself literally bonded to someone prematurely.

And those premature bonds can be problematic because you might end up in a relationship that you shouldn't be in. And also if you take these medicines with someone that you're having conflicts with who may not be best for you in life, let's say they're an abusive partner, they're emotionally abusive or physically abusive, you could bond a person that's abusing you.

And so there's a lot of ethical conundrums with love drugs. And there's a great book on the topic called Love Drugs, The Chemical Future of Relationships. And I actually presented in Oxford University for this Oxford Hopkins Ethics Consortium.

And I definitely had the room spinning a little bit because I was like, I don't think anybody here is really acknowledging the fact that these are love drugs, aside from the guy who wrote the book on them.

And even after this session with these people, the advisor of the company that I had working for me who wrote the book on love drugs literally said, you know what, I don't even know if it's ethically sound for me to advise your company since you're a commercial entity.

And I was like, wow. So there's a lot of ethical issues in psychedelics for sexuality that I am actively investigating. And I've actually stopped commercializing a certain drug that I was working on because I felt it was ethically questionable.

I felt that a drug that could make people fall in love might be problematic because what happens if you fall in love with the wrong person? That's why I'm much more interested in aphrodisiacs than I am in having massive doses of medicine with partners because I think it is a very ethical gray area.

Oh my goodness, this is crazy. It's pretty wild. people talk about like love potions and love jugs for you know millennia and now it's like possibly actually a thing and like you said the implications of that though just ethically is I mean insane.

It's 100% not a holy grail concept like these things exist so the question now is with this power what do you do with it right because now you're playing with like human biological programming. All right friends we are here the end of part two of the best of the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast 2024.

I knew who I had to end with it's actually one of the more recent episodes and it was something I was looking forward to for months and months. Ever since I heard Rizzwerk on Joe Rogan for his book The Simulation Hypothesis I knew I had to interview this man if at all possible.

I'm so excited that it manifested at least in this simulation. Prepare to have your mind blown when it comes to how you interpret reality. are we living in a simulated reality? You're about to find out.

In the episode, we talk all about whether or not we live in a video game and how quantum physics supports the idea that we may be rendering our own reality. So please, please enjoy this fascinating excerpt from episode 278 with Rizwan Verh.

After I was thinking about the stages of technology and how we would build something like a matrix, I started to investigate a bit on the quantum physics side and I found that they were telling us something very similar, that there really is no such thing as matter, like this physical thing called matter.

So there was a famous physicist named John Wheeler who was at Princeton with Einstein and he worked with all the greats. And he just passed away, I think, in the early 2000s or so. So relatively recently, for having been involved with all these guys, and he came up with the phrase which was it from bit.

And what he basically said was, we used to think particles were these real things, but basically what he found was by the end of his life, he came to realize that if you start to look for this thing called a particle, the only thing you can find are these answers to these yes, no questions.

And that's basically a bit of information. So the properties of the particle are what defines the particle itself. So he ended up saying if anything is a it, a physical object, like say a coffee cup or a table or this computer, that it actually, at the bottom level, kind of like if you open up those Russian dolls, but you keep going down to find what's at the bottom one and there's nothing there.

And that's kind of what he found. It was that it was just information. It was an answer to a series of yes, no questions. Now he got there through this idea of the observer effect, which is what you were talking about with Schrodinger's cat.

And yeah, the reason why the cat has a 50% chance of being alive or dead is in this thought experiment is there's some poison and there's a quantum randomness that has a 50% chance of releasing the poison, say after an hour or so.

And common sense tells us that the cat, has to be either alive or dead. It can't be both. And just like in the double slit experiment, when we think of shooting particles, we say, well, the particle has to go through one slit or the other.

It can't go through both. Similarly, the cat cannot be both alive and dead at the same time. But that's not what quantum mechanics is telling us. And that's what's just really weird. So we end up saying that the cat is in a state of superposition.

So superposition means take the two positions it could be, dead or alive, and you combine that together into a set. And turns out that this is true of all particles, that they're in a superposition until they're observed or measured, depending on who you talk to.

And that is just really weird. And more formally, we call it quantum indeterminacy, although the more common name is just the observer effect. Why is it a wave of probabilities until it's observed? And so if you go back to those early games that we used to play, like I used to play a game called King's Quest.

I don't know if you remember it. It's from the 80s. But but it was one of the first games where you had a guy that was moving across the screen and it was an adventure game that had like castles and things, but it turned out they had all the pixels were rendered for all of the parts of that kingdom, this mythical medieval fantasy kingdom.

It was called Coventry or something like that. And the guy would move around and basically all the computer had to do was just move his character from one location to the next. And that's what classical physics makes us think that the world is, it's there, the particles are all in place and we just move around in something that exists independent of us.

But quantum mechanics kind of blew that out of the water because it shows that we may be a part of the process. It's what Wheeler calls a participatory process of reality. And so if we're not there now in the eighties, if you had tried to say, hey, we're gonna create something like World of Warcraft, you wouldn't be able to do it.

And the reason why is there were just too many pixels to keep track of in a 3D world or a Fortnite, for example, or a League of Legends. And you would have to figure out where all those pixels are and then you'd have to store them all and you'd have to use the limited processing.

So what happened in the meantime is not only did the processors get faster, but we figured out how to render 3D worlds. And the first example of this was the game Doom, the first person shooter. It was one of the first examples of it.

And in that world, in that type of video game, the computer program optimizes so you only see that which can be observed by your player. And those are the only pixels that you care about. And so if you end up expanding that idea to lots and lots of different rooms or different planets, there was a game a few years ago called No Man's Sky.

And even though a lot of people didn't necessarily like the game, they all wanted to check it out because it had 18 quintillion planets, right? And it turns out there's no way a design team can design that many planets.

And so what they did is they use AI or they... these techniques called procedural generation that generates all of the flora and the fauna on each planet dynamically as you go. So if you're not there, those pixels don't really exist.

And to me, this sounded strangely like this idea of the observer effect, that the observer is a key part of it. Just like if you're playing a video game, you render only what needs to be there. If other people are in the scene with you, then they will also pretty much see the same thing that you're seeing.

Although that's not necessarily required, and we can talk about that separately. So one of the key interpretations of quantum mechanics is called the Copenhagen interpretation, which is that there's this probability wave that has all of the different possibilities.

And then when it gets observed, you collapse to one of those. And it's telling us the cat is both alive and dead until we observe it, and then it's alive or it's dead. So that's where the idea, I think, is an interesting one.

Basically, physicists love things like infinity. They like to say... this is infinite, no big deal. But computer scientists, as computer scientists, we hate that because we know there's not infinite computing power.

So we have to always optimize the programs to work on the machines that we have and the technology that we have. So we're used to figuring out how to optimize. So what I put forward in the book, and I think there are other people like Elon Musk who would agree with this, is that quantum mechanics could very much be an optimization method for the universe so that it doesn't have to render all the different possibilities.

And it doesn't even have to render the entire universe all the time. It's like a player inside a game. Oh, my goodness, friends, what an incredible journey that was revisiting all of these incredible humans and their mind blowing eye opening work that they are bringing to our world.

I really hope you enjoyed this. I hope that you learn some things new, maybe realize some episodes that you'd like to revisit all the things. Again, the show notes will be at Melanie Avalon.com slash 2024 part two, there will be a full transcript and links to all of the original episodes.

Again, friends, thank you so much for being here with me on this journey. I adore you guys. I could not be doing this show without you. I wish you all the happiest of holidays, the most sparkling of New Year's and I will see you in 2025.

Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. For more information, you can check out my book, What Win Wine, lose weight and feel great with paleo style meals, intermittent fasting and wine, as well as my blog, Melanie Avalon.com.

Feel free to contact me at podcast at Melanie Avalon.com. And always remember, you got this. you