The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #229 - Best Of 2023 (Part 1)

TRANSCRIPT

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

Melanie Avalon:
Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking podcast. Okay, friends, I'm so excited to have these best of episodes at the end of the year. I started this last year and I knew I just had to make it a thing every year.

Melanie Avalon:
It's really an incredible moment to look back at all the incredible guests that I've had on the show, all the amazing memories that we've made, and it's a great chance to highlight some of the truly epic, life -changing moments on the show this year, especially if you miss them.

Melanie Avalon:
Or if you listen to them hearing it again so you don't forget. Of course, there were so many incredible guests, so it was really hard to make this lineup, but I really hope you guys enjoy and I can't wait to hear what you think.

Melanie Avalon:
These show notes for today's episode will be at melanieavalon.com/bestof2023part1. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about, so definitely check that out.

Melanie Avalon:
There will be two episode giveaways for this episode. One will be 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, finally Friday announcement post, and again comment there to enter to win something that I love.

Melanie Avalon:
All right, without further ado, please enjoy this part one of the best of the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast 2023. All right, well, starting off this collection, I actually immediately knew who I wanted to start with, and how could I not start with Gabor Maté?

Melanie Avalon:
Wow, this was so surreal. I will say I'm always super honored to interview all of the guests that I have on, and I really take it in, and it's such a magical moment. I don't get as nervous as I did when I first launched this show.

Melanie Avalon:
I was so nervous going into interview Gabor Maté, I mean, he's a legend, and I remember the timing of this. It was right after he had just interviewed Prince Harry, so that was like the vibe surrounding him, and it ended up being just amazing, and he is so kind, so approachable.

Melanie Avalon:
We actually, in real time, had basically a therapy session, like he gave me a therapy session, and I was like, okay, this is happening right now. So that part is not this clip. This clip is actually something he talked about, that I was really interested to hear his thoughts on, which is basically the role of having children, and can you have children as a mom and still be a career woman?

Melanie Avalon:
So we talk about that. So please enjoy the wisdom of the legendary Gabor Maté growing up.

Dr. Gabor Maté
And as a parent, sometimes I was depressed and sometimes very joyful and jovial, you know, very confusing for my kids. But the point is, when a parent is distressed or stressed, the child automatically picks up on that energetically and they make it their own fault.

Dr. Gabor Maté
Because the children are narcissists by nature, by which I don't mean the pejorative or pathological sense, I just mean in the pure meaning of the word, they think it's all about them. So if the parent is depressed, something wrong with me, I better work hard to make sure that she's not, you know, which is a reversal of roles.

Dr. Gabor Maté
So we can pass on our stresses to other our children, not by doing anything back to them, but just by not having dealt with our own stress, then the child picks up on it. So stress can be passed on two ways.

Dr. Gabor Maté
I think the major way that stress is passed on is that the unresolved trauma or stress imprints of the parents get automatically passed on to the child, whether or not the parents wish that, of course, the parents don't wish it at all, but they can't help it.

Dr. Gabor Maté
And that certainly happened between my wife and I and our children.

Melanie Avalon:
What about the initial instinct for childbearing? Because you do talk in the book about how it is natural and how we get evolutionarily rewards from having children, raising children. Like I personally don't perceive having a desire to have children.

Melanie Avalon:
Did I cognitively decide that? But deep down, I really do want children.

Dr. Gabor Maté
Okay, since you're asking me, you want my honest opinion.

Melanie Avalon:
Yes.

Dr. Gabor Maté
First of all, don't make yourself wrong, okay? Either do it or you don't, you know? So if you don't, you don't, you know? So I would never talk you out of it or into it. But I'll tell you what I think.

Dr. Gabor Maté
It's not that we should want to have children, it's sort of nature wants itself. I mean, all nature, whether it's planned around or wants to reproduce. When I say wants to, it's not even conscious. A tree doesn't want to reproduce, it just does.

Dr. Gabor Maté
And really that's why we're, Hollywood movies aside, the reason we have a sex drive is to support reproduction. So when that's not there, there's two things that come up for me as potentials. One is, and I don't know your personal life at all.

Dr. Gabor Maté
So I'm theorizing and it's totally generalized, it may not apply to you at all, okay? But one is, maybe you've not met the person between when you feel safe enough to take on that task. Okay, that's a possibility.

Dr. Gabor Maté
And if you haven't met that person, there might be reasons why you haven't. Which brings me to my more basic point, is that I think some people who don't want children, they don't want to repeat their own childhoods.

Dr. Gabor Maté
Unconsciously, they're going to recreate the pain. So that may be going on for you as well. Again, Melanie, I can't tell you, if either of these dynamics are true, I can only give you a general impression.

Melanie Avalon:
It sounds like a lot energetically and stress -wise. And if I were to have a child, I would want to be the perfect parent. And I would want, you know, my whole life would become that. And I would, that's what my life would become, which would be great.

Melanie Avalon:
Then I don't think I'd be able to do all of my career life goals and everything like that. And I am haunted by like, what if they turn out to be a not nice person? you

Dr. Gabor Maté
Well, you know what? You wouldn't be able to pursue your career goals. Not for the first three years. If you listen to me, or not just mothers, but fathers, if I could live my life over again, forget my medical practice.

Dr. Gabor Maté
Not that I wouldn't be a doctor, but I wouldn't be a workaholic doctor. My priority would be to work less than to be at home more with my kids. Because that's when they need you the most. That's when the brains develop, that's when their personality develop.

Dr. Gabor Maté
That's when they need to have this unconditional loving acceptance. In modern society, we wear the handicap. Because human beings were never meant to parent on their own, or even as a couple. We were meant to parent in groups.

Dr. Gabor Maté
That's how we evolved for millions of years. So parents today are in this dilemma of, if I have a kid, it interrupts everything. You know, how to gather a tribe, having a kid didn't interrupt anything.

Dr. Gabor Maté
Life just went on, and everybody supported your parenting. So part of what you're describing is the dilemma of modern life. Particularly the dilemma of modern professional women. You know, so that's genuine.

Dr. Gabor Maté
But you're quite right. And if you felt safe enough with somebody who was really a partner to you, where you could discuss this, then you'd make a decision that not just you, the mother, but you as a couple would design your lives so that you can really serve your children's needs in those all essential early first few years, you might feel differently about it.

Dr. Gabor Maté
You'd feel partnered and supported. And yeah, no big deal to put your career on hold for three years. You know, I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just saying that it all depends on circumstances. You're quite right.

Dr. Gabor Maté
If you're going to be a parent for the first three years, that needs to be your main task from the child's point of view.

Melanie Avalon:
I've had many men tell me, like, well, you know, you can have like nannies and all this. I'm like, that's not, that's no. Like that's not the answer.

Dr. Gabor Maté
That's not the answer. That's not the real answer. You know, the real answer is, can I and my partner create a life where our first priority in the early years is our children's well -being and our relationship with them?

Dr. Gabor Maté
That's the real question. I think it's possible, but it needs to be very conscious and very deliberate. And because of the stresses on parents in this society and because of the demands, especially on women in society, you know that in the United States, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth for economic reasons.

Dr. Gabor Maté
Well, it's toxic. It's children are being abandoned in the actual sense because their children needs to be with their mother for many, many, many, many months in the point of view of development. So when you look at the rate of children being diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety and depression, the rising rate of childhood suicide, you know, the New York Times and the New Yorker, both had articles in the last six months about their unexplicable rise of childhood suicide, it's not explicable.

Dr. Gabor Maté
In this society, parents are too stressed and parents have to pay attention to so many things outside their children's needs that children are feeling abandoned, whether their parents want to or not, unconsciously, despite the loving, best intentions of the parents.

Dr. Gabor Maté
So kids are more and more stressed. Of course they're more anxious. Of course their attention is more scattered. Of course they're more oppositional. Of course they're more depressed. And it's not the parents fault.

Dr. Gabor Maté
It's the toxicity of this culture.

Melanie Avalon:
All right, for our second guest, we have a woman that I absolutely adore. This was actually my second time interviewing her. I have now interviewed her three times in total. I knew Terry Walls had to be in this lineup.

Melanie Avalon:
She has honestly done so much work when it comes to the role of diet and specifically the paleo approach to addressing autoimmune conditions. Her clinical work is just so profound, so appreciated. For those of you not familiar with Terry, she actually reversed her multiple sclerosis via diet and supplements and lifestyle.

Melanie Avalon:
She used to be in a wheelchair. Now she can walk. She is so inspiring. I just really adore her. And on top of that, she's just such a genuine, kind, sincere human being. And that really, really comes off and speaking with her.

Melanie Avalon:
I just love her so much to know, and it is such an honor to know her. And of course, there were so many things that I could have picked from this episode, but I picked this section because after airing it, I was surprised.

Melanie Avalon:
I got so much feedback about this one thing that we talk about in just a second. People were shocked to learn about it. And I'm being super teasy right now and not telling you what it actually is. So all right, without further ado, please enjoy this clip from my conversation with Dr.

Melanie Avalon:
Terry Walls. Can anybody get MS or do you still have to have a genetic piece?

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So, we'll talk about MS, well, the sequence looks like this. You have genetics, and there are probably 300 to 400 genes that we've identified that increase your risk for MS. Now, for the vast majority of these genes, the amount of risk is about a half percent to maybe a percent, maybe 2%.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
There are a couple genes that have a bigger impact, maybe a 10 or 15%. But the vast majority, it's very tiny, and the vast majority of people with that gene will not get MS. And we have people who are identical twins, one gets it, and they were raised in the same household.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
One gets the disease, one does not. We have identical twins raised not in the same household, and then you have sibling studies and parent studies. So, we know siblings and parents do have a higher risk, so genes are part of it.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Then the next thing that needs to happen is an infection that you don't completely clear or clear correctly. And right now, we've identified 16 different viruses and bacteria that are associated with a higher risk of MS and other autoimmunity.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
And the reality of Melanie is nearly everyone has been exposed to at least one of these 16, and probably many of these 16 microbes. But still, the vast majority don't get MS or an autoimmune problem.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So, there's other factors involved. And my colleagues in the MS world would say, we don't know what they are. And my response was, okay, but we know what the factors are that are associated with good health.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So, let's work on using those to improve the health of the individual. At the very least, you are addressing the comorbidities and what we see is reduced fatigue, higher quality of life, better motor function, better thinking function, better MRIs, and that people get closer and closer to normal functioning.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
That infection concept. Step one is the gene. Step two is the infection. Step three is all the environmental stuff. Wow.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, I'm just like very shocked because I feel like I don't hear people talking about that. Does that infection step, is that specific to MS or for other conditions as well?

Dr. Terry Wahls:
Yeah, it's probably true for every autoimmune condition that you have a genetics, then you have an infection that you don't properly clear. And then the environmental factors, toxin exposures, diet, exercise, stress, sleep, hormone balance, microbiome, all of those interact.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
We have a progressively more severe disruption or worsening of our health behaviors. People are sleeping less, there's more stress, more conflict, more hormone disruption, we don't have enough light, the quality of our food is decline.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So we have all of those insults that accelerate the disease process. I was at the consortium of MS Centers, which is the annual international meeting where the clinical people who take care of MS patients, the researchers who do clinical research, it's not about the mouse people, it's about the people who do clinical research on humans, we're all there, the drug companies are there, patient advocacy groups are there, and then some MS people are there.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So they have a couple thousand people there. And what was so remarkable, I started going to this meeting five years ago, and I was the only one with a research poster talking about food, just me. This year, there were many more people with research about food, several oral presentations and some posing about diet, and researchers who were talking about clinical trials, and aging MS, molecular pathways, etc.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
These PhDs were all saying diet and lifestyle, particularly diet and exercise, are just so important that MS is a disease of accelerated aging. And I've been talking about that actually for years, and that, and then they said, we don't really have anything to fix that, metformins, very interesting animal model studies.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
And then there was diet and exercise. And I'm like, yes. And lecture after lecture, people were talking about the molecular mechanisms, potentially some drugs, and then saying, and yes, there is diet and exercise, they might have thrown in stress reduction and sleep.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
So super interesting, we're certainly making progress. Clinicians are being told that you got to talk to your patients about diet and exercise, that that should be an adjunct to every treatment conversation that's happening.

Melanie Avalon:
Well, one more question about the infection, the step two in the process. Is it the actual infection itself that is causing the continued problem or is it the affections effect on the immune system and how it modulates the immune system?

Melanie Avalon:
It's the immune system.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
The infections impact on the immune system. And what I want your listeners to know is we had thought, I'm in my 60s, so when I went to medical school, I was taught that we're sterile. The urine is sterile, the blood is sterile, my bones are sterile, my brain sterile, that, you know, we're sterile.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
We're not. Now that we have this more sophisticated looking at our tissues, including our bloodstream, our spinal fluid, our brain, our bones, turns out we're packed with organisms. Even in the areas that I thought were sterile when I was young, isn't that wild?

Dr. Terry Wahls:
That I think there's a debate, is it a quarter or a third of our DNA is borrowed stuff from viruses? And that when we get infected with a virus, it's never completely gone. We keep it under control with our immune system.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
We keep those viruses in our brain under control with our immune system. We keep the bacteria load in our body and our blood, in our bones, in our lungs under control with our immune system. And as we age, you know, it begins faltering around in men, faltering around age 40 and women, once you go through menopause, you know, at whatever age that happens, our immune cells begin to age.

Dr. Terry Wahls:
They can't control the viruses, the bacteria as effectively, which is why pneumonia becomes a bloodstream infections when we're older, why we get demented as we get older, and we may begin to have more confusion and that we may begin to have some encephalitis or activation of the brain infections when we're older.

Melanie Avalon:
All right friends, our next guest is somebody who I read his book and it honestly changed my life and that I see the world differently now. Before reading Matt Simon's book, A Poison Like No Other, I Saw the World One Way and now I see it a different way.

Melanie Avalon:
I did not realize how prevalent microplastics are in our world and this is coming from me who was already talking about the problems with plastics. I had no idea. Mind blowing. Did you know most of our clothing is plastic?

Melanie Avalon:
Who knew? And then to be even more shocking, I got utterly disillusioned with the concept of recycling. So here we go for Matt Simon's thoughts on that. I definitely recommend checking out his book and hopefully we can help make change with this whole plastic situation, which by the way, I was already creating my Avalonic supplements with glass bottles before reading A Poison Like No Other.

Melanie Avalon:
Then I read his book and I was like, oh my goodness, I am so glad we are using glass bottles for that. That's a side note. Please enjoy this conversation with Matt Simon. One of the things that bothers me is stuff like there's so much unnecessary plastic in my opinion.

Melanie Avalon:
Like I eat a lot of cucumbers, like a lot and I buy them in bulk at Costco and there's so much plastic wrapped around them, you know, like in the actual cucumbers and then there's like the plastic layer around that.

Melanie Avalon:
I was always just concerned historically before reading your book about the plastic touching the cucumber and then somehow leaching into the cucumber and having that effect.

Matt Simon:
lose my goddamn mind any time I'm in a supermarket and I see cucumber wrapped in single -use plastic. Are we not aware that cucumbers have their own skins that work perfectly fine? And this is a talking point in the plastics industry is that plastics are so useful because they keep our food fresher longer and that means there's less plastic and that means there's less food waste in the United States, which is I think the numbers on actual food waste in the United States would otherwise.

Matt Simon:
That also doesn't take into account the fact that in the United States we recycle about 5% of plastic, which is crazy. Historically about 10% of plastics ever produced have been recycled. The rest have been thrown into landfills or burned or just chucked into the environment.

Matt Simon:
So when we produce this plastic we don't recycle it in the United States, we actually ship it across oceans to developing countries. Until recently China was taking a lot of this stuff, but a couple years ago said no we're not doing that anymore.

Matt Simon:
So it's now flowing into other countries that are openly burning it. So when you hear the plastics industry say well it cuts down on food waste, well we are then shipping that plastic across oceans that comes with the tremendous amount of carbon emissions involved, were then burned and sent into the atmosphere.

Matt Simon:
It doesn't seem particularly efficient to me.

Melanie Avalon:
When the plastics are burned and go up into the atmosphere, is that ash still plastic?

Matt Simon:
Yeah, so it will, it's, it's, it's extra bad. So it will burn and it'll break into smaller pieces and it will go up as ash. But in that ash is, is it's basically microplastic ash and maybe some larger pieces of plastic because the thing fires is that that warm air rises and propels all that particular matter into the atmosphere.

Matt Simon:
But you're also releasing just straight up chemicals when you do that beyond, beyond the microplastics. And there have been a number of reports in these developing countries that are that are openly burning the stuff of terrible health problems for people living around this stuff because this this plastic is a is a long it was long pitches benign material.

Matt Simon:
Oh, it's very safe. It makes actually things safer. It makes our food safer.

Melanie Avalon:
It's so inert.

Matt Simon:
It's so inert and don't even worry about it. It's not going to be an issue. But these people have terrible human health effects because they're breathing, burnt plastic. But then that is also sending the material up into the atmosphere, again, propelling it because this is warm air rising.

Matt Simon:
It's again a consequence of the United States and other developed countries shipping the stuff that they can't profitably recycle. I will emphasize profitably because that's been the issue is that it's just not profitable to recycle.

Matt Simon:
So we just don't bother. That's a perverse system in the United States of capitalism, which is we're totally fine profiting by making all this stuff, all this plastic, but totally uninterested in actually taking care of it and keeping it from getting into the environment.

Matt Simon:
Because once the plastic industry makes it, it could just wipe its hands and walk away and then blame less as consumers that were not recycling enough. So recycling needs to be fixed, but it also cannot be a crutch that we stand on because at the end of the day, we just need to stop producing so much plastic.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, friends, this next conversation is actually super special to me because Joel Kahn had been on my list for so, so long to interview on this show. Honestly, probably when I first launched it, he was on the initial dream list ever since I heard him debate Chris Cresser on Joe Rogan.

Melanie Avalon:
And this was a situation where I had an article published in CNBC and Joel read it and reached out to me about collaborating. And I was just so incredibly excited. And I so enjoyed this conversation.

Melanie Avalon:
I really like bringing on people, as you know, of all different perspectives. So I bring on the carnivores, the paleo, the keto and the vegans. So we have Joel Kahn here today, who is very vegan and plant based and a very renowned, well -known cardiologist.

Melanie Avalon:
He's also a super nice guy, super kind guy. And what we talk about in this episode was from his most recent book, which I think is so, so important because when it comes to heart disease risk, we're talking about cholesterol.

Melanie Avalon:
Some people are looking at ApoB, but very few people are looking at LP little A and its role in heart disease is profound. I think everybody needs to know this. I'm so grateful to Dr. Kahn for spreading this awareness.

Melanie Avalon:
So without further ado, please enjoy this excerpt from my interview with Dr. Joel Kahn. Major question for you that relates to all of this. So I read your, you know, your newest book, like a protein A, the heart's quiet killer.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm so fascinated by this. And it sounds like, do you think LP little A is one of the primary reasons that statins may or may not work for people?

Dr. Joel Kahn:
Yes. In fact, again, my life isn't all about social media, but I did post this morning, yesterday morning, that if you take large statin trials and people with serious heart disease, of course, I know your listeners know statins are like Lipitoric Restore, the prescription drugs that block an enzyme in the liver and lower your production of LDL cholesterol.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
So your blood LDL cholesterol goes down, been used for about 35 years and have side effects, muscle laking, raise your blood sugar, give you brain fog, a little liver enzyme bump, but largely are quite safe and tolerable drugs if you use them intelligently.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
When you look at the trials across the spectrum that have been done, and there are big trials, 30 ,000, 20 ,000, 40 ,000 people, you add them all up, some of the largest studies ever done in medicine, you drop the risk that the patient has for heart attack, a stent, a bypass, a death by about 40%.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
But that leaves 60%. That's actually called residual risk. And it may be that we're doing better than that now because we're not relying only on statins, we're relying on these combinations of various approaches and hopefully, hopefully lifestyle.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
And we may be reaching LDL cholesterol reductions of 50% to 60%, which may translate into even better results for the patients. But it's called residual risk. And it has been estimated that the biggest piece of the pie of residual risk, why don't we eliminate 90% of a heart patient's risk for future events?

Dr. Joel Kahn:
Maybe this genetic cholesterol called lipoprotein A that still is in its infancy for being well known and for being practiced by practitioners in terms of a simple blood test and counseling a patient, which is why I went out and wrote a simple but available book because nobody else in the world had written a book on what lipoprotein A is.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
It's a molecule very similar in structure to LDL cholesterol, but there's one extra piece added on to it that makes it totally different and totally unique. And 100% of people, their liver makes LDL cholesterol for survival.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
But 20 to 25% of people get a genetic ability on chromosome 6, if I remember, that they're now able to make two cholesterol. They're able to make LDL cholesterol and lipoprotein A cholesterol. And lipoprotein A cholesterol in some people is a really bad actor and it's 20 to 25% of people.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
And everybody's one blood test away of knowing if their parents gave them the ability to make it or didn't give them. You only need to do the blood test once if it's negative. But it can cause clotting of blood, thrombosis.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
It can cause atherosclerosis. It can easily be taken up by the lining of cells and become part of plaque. And it causes inflammation. And if you had a plan, a heart attack or stroke, you'd drive up clotting, inflammation, and plaque formation.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
So lipoprotein A can cause heart attacks, cause strokes. It also uniquely can cause one of the four heart valves called the aortic valve to become damaged, calcified, and narrowed. And a lot of people have to deal in their 50s, 60s, and 70s with a condition called aortic stenosis that may require surgery or other procedures.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
And lipoprotein A is the reason for the season. And yet, you know, the estimates are one or two percent of patients seeing their doctor may get a lipoprotein A blood test, which Quest Lab, Lab Corp, your local hospital, everybody runs it.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
It's neither expensive nor exotic. It's harder to get the genetic test. It's simple to get a lipoprotein A blood test. So everybody should get it checked. The statins do not treat lipoprotein little A.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
They do not lower it. They either leave it neutral or they actually, unfortunately, actually cause it to go up and go higher and potentially become more dangerous. And so statins are, I think that's the reason there's residual risk.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
Because in these large studies, lipoprotein A wasn't measured. It turns out they were giving statins to 20 to 25 percent of the group that had lipoprotein A and driving lipoprotein A up while they were driving LDL cholesterol down.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
Now you mentioned, because you're a sophisticated person and your audiences, you can still do the blood test called APOB or APO lipoprotein B, which is a combination of all the bad atherogenic particles in one blood test.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
And lipoprotein little A will show up in your APOB blood test and LDL cholesterol will show up in your APOB blood test. So if you have a serious heart patient and you put them on a statin and their LDL goes way down, which is the plan, and their lipoprotein A goes up a little bit, but the APOB goes down, you've probably done them a net benefit.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
You've made one atherogenic particle better. You've made one atherogenic particle worse, but you can use the APOB to say, overall, I helped my patient, but I only can imagine what would have happened in those big statin trials if we would have segregated out those that had really high lipoprotein A and not included them in the trials.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
You probably would have seen who knows projecting a much bigger drop in risk. And then there is no FDA approved treatment for lipoprotein A, but a drug company out of Switzerland called Novartis, a drug company, Amgen, and a startup, I think it's called Silent Therapeutics.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
If I remember, all have drugs pretty far along in testing, probably going to be out in 2025 or so. That will be very expensive, but very helpful additions to the toolbox. For those that don't have lipoprotein A, we'll use this group of cholesterol -lowering drugs and lifestyle.

Dr. Joel Kahn:
And for those that have cholesterol and lipoprotein A, we'll have new tools that seem to be very effective. We just have to wait for the FDA to say they also prevent stroke and heart attack because that's the criteria for drug approval nowadays.

Melanie Avalon:
All right, our next guest is somebody which is an example of something I love about this show is when I have incredible guests on the show and then I become friends with them. I adore Kris Gethin. He is just the coolest and it is such an honor to know him.

Melanie Avalon:
I really hope we get to hang out in person someday because he is just so, so cool and he's super inspiring. And we talked about so many things in my interview with him and we've talked about so many things offline that it all sort of like runs together in my head.

Melanie Avalon:
For example, we talk a lot about his epic travel skills and my lack of epic travel skills, but either way, how we both bring a lot of stuff requiring multiple suitcases because a girl and a guy have got to have their supplements and all the biohacking things and all the things.

Melanie Avalon:
But in any case, he is an epic bodybuilder. He's an epic shape. And we talk about can you do that while doing intermittent fasting and his thoughts have actually changed on that historically. And then we also talk about things I love, like the differences in men and women and the importance of sleep.

Melanie Avalon:
Gotta love it. Without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous excerpt from my interview with Kris Gethin. How strict are you with your approach to diet? You say in the book that you haven't missed a meal in 18 years or something.

Kris Gethin:
Yeah. Has that changed? Yeah, that changed in 2017 or 2018. Yeah, I had to go for a colonoscopy and they asked me to fast. I thought, okay, well, I knew a lot about fasting and I've been reading a lot about fasting.

Kris Gethin:
I thought, okay, let me try it. So I started doing the fasting protocol because I wanted to know, am I going to lose muscle? Am I going to wither away? So I did actually start fasting. And now on my non -training days, I'll usually fast.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, okay, this is so interesting. So what did you experience? Did you experience any muscle loss, any decline in performance, implementing a fasting protocol?

Kris Gethin:
No, nothing. You know, I definitely felt it on larger muscle groups. So if I was training legs, for instance, and I was in a fasted state, I didn't feel as strong. I wasn't as strong. I wasn't recovering.

Kris Gethin:
I wasn't able to perform at my best. But on smaller muscle groups, you know, like arms, shoulders, not a problem. I didn't feel any difference. And obviously, I know the benefits of fasting. And I thought, God, if anybody needs to fast, it's me after eating so many meals over so many years, and I wanted to reduce my biological age as well.

Kris Gethin:
So I started fasting on a regular basis. Like I did it for about eight months consistently to begin with. And then I just started bringing it back a little bit, whereas just doing it, you know, a couple of times a week.

Melanie Avalon:
Did you ever do like a one wheel a day? Type fast?

Kris Gethin:
I was doing two, two meals a day and it'd be like an 18 hour fast. I did try the Volta Longo five day fast as well.

Melanie Avalon:
You made it through. I made it like one day and I was like, I need more food.

Kris Gethin:
Right. Yeah, I did it. I had my friend and business partner with me doing it as well. So I think that helped. But what was so difficult is I was training during this time as well. So weight training and having was it 500 calories a day on average?

Kris Gethin:
It was tough. It was tough. Very, very tough. And after the five days, I vowed never to do that again.

Melanie Avalon:
That's so funny. Yeah, I've had him on the show twice actually in the second time I had him. I was like, I'm gonna do this. But for me, I think it's harder to have just a little bit because you're eating just like a little bit and that's just miserable, at least to me.

Kris Gethin:
Yeah, that's a worse. I think I agree with you there. I think you'd be better off actually having nothing and getting used to it because it's like, I don't know, it's like you're feeding your, I guess your appetite, foreplay, but you're actually not following through.

Kris Gethin:
So, you know, you're doing that on a daily basis. It's not a happy ending.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I agree. Although I do know it, some people do it and they love it and it's like a great reset. So if people enjoy it, do it. It just doesn't work for me. Each to their own. How about men versus women?

Melanie Avalon:
Is there a large difference in how they approach, I mean, everything, but like protein intake for men versus women, training, are there special considerations? And do you work with female clients?

Kris Gethin:
Yeah, I work with females and males, and I really don't have anything that different in the way that they train. The food is obviously according usually to their lean muscle mass. So let's say if it's one gram per pound of body weight, whether you're a male or female, that's generally what I found that works.

Kris Gethin:
I do find on a diet that a female's, I don't know, thyroid will downregulate a lot quicker. So sometimes as we're going into a calorie deficit towards an end of a program, let's say if they're getting ready for some event or some show, then I will give them kind of reefy days more often than I would with a male.

Kris Gethin:
Only because I just find their metabolism downregulates a lot quicker. So let's say for instance, I'm just pulling this out of my hat, that I'm going to give a male a reefy day of higher carbohydrates every eight days.

Kris Gethin:
I may do that every four or five days for a female because I'll just find that they plateau much quicker. But the training is pretty much the same. You know, we have the same muscle insurgences, we have the same muscle attachments, very similar digestive system, so everything else is very similar.

Melanie Avalon:
Do you see between the two sexes is one more inclined towards certain types of injury than the other, or is that also pretty similar?

Kris Gethin:
Yeah, females are much smarter when it comes to training than guys I notice. I think maybe it's an alpha thing, testosterone filled, very competitive. I want to be the king of the jungle. So we'll train a little bit more haphazardly.

Kris Gethin:
We'll have more injuries. You never hear of a female tearing a peck or a bicep, but guys you do very, very often. So I think females are much more smarter and articulate like an artist when they go to a gym.

Melanie Avalon:
Well, when it comes to being smart about your training and your priorities with all of this, where is the priority for people? Is it the actual exercises? Is it the diet? Is it the mindset? Is it all of the above?

Melanie Avalon:
If a new client came to you and was like, I wanna become the best in this bodybuilding, like what would you say this is the most important thing to know?

Kris Gethin:
I usually start them on sleep. Sleep is usually the most important thing that I get.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, I like that answer.

Kris Gethin:
Yeah, I get them to prioritize sleep because if you're lacking in sleep, then again, you're dehydrated, you could possibly injure yourself, you're emotionally charged, so you crave more. So I try to get people's sleep and consistent habits in order first before even thinking about the training or your PBs or your goals.

Kris Gethin:
That is the goal because that's the goal that people seem to struggle with the most. It's free. It's much like if I tell clients to ground every day or meditate every day, well, it's free, it's not going to work.

Kris Gethin:
So that's usually what I get them to focus on the most because that's what they should appreciate the most. You don't recover, you're not going to perform. Your recovery dictates your performance and sleep is a big portion of that performance, you know, your recovery.

Kris Gethin:
So that's the one thing that I usually get people to focus on and hydration. I noticed specifically in Europe, I have a lot of clients that just drink coffee and tea and I think that's a hydration. So hydration is a big portion of it.

Kris Gethin:
If your body's made up of around 70% fluid and you want to perform and maybe you live in a humid climate, you're just not going to. A lot of the time, if I look at all my own progress, if I'm down, I'm just not performing as I should from a mental and physical aspect.

Kris Gethin:
It's usually not the food. It's usually the fluid. That's another thing, a component that I'll focus on and the consistency because, you know, if I look at someone's progress from the neck down, it's always coming from the neck up.

Kris Gethin:
So having the right mindset, especially when you've gone through an injury or you're depressed, you just got fired, you've just split up from your girlfriend. It's that consistency of being relentless in your pursuit is what's really going to count and what's really going to help you in the long term.

Kris Gethin:
Because if a client ghosts on me, it's usually because they've gone through a breakup or they've been on holidays and they have shame now because they haven't followed the protocol as they should. But as I tell them, it's 10 times more important that you put your sincerity on the line and be transparent with yourself and with myself for you to pursue your goals.

Kris Gethin:
Otherwise, life happens and you'll always fall off the rails. That's why, you know, when you do the cryotherapy, do you want to always do it? Probably not, but you do it because you know that's going to have a transcendence effect in your life anyway.

Melanie Avalon:
All right, our next guest is somebody I adore. I adore Dr. Caroline Leaf. I adore her daughter, by the way, who just so happens to be my sister's best friend and one of my really good friends. So I sort of feel like I'm talking to family here, but Dr.

Melanie Avalon:
Caroline Leaf is so renowned in the world of neuroscience. And what I love about her work is that she actually shows the science behind things we think about, no pun intended, like the power of your thoughts and the power of your mindset for actually making changes in your brain.

Melanie Avalon:
I didn't really realize until I read her work that our thoughts are actual things. Like you can see them in a picture that she has in her book and they look like trees. It's crazy. So please enjoy this excerpt where we talk about the fascinating effect that toxic thoughts can have on your biology, including your biological age.

Melanie Avalon:
For measuring the 35 years, was that like a blood test or was it measuring telomeres or how did you measure that?

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
So we do, yeah, so the research that we do with my team, we look at the most important thing is we look at the person's narrative, the story, who are you, what's going on in your life, what's happening.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
Most important, we want to describe not diagnose. In our current biomedical model, it's very much symptom diagnose and aim a treatment that works beautifully for the physical brain and body, but doesn't work well when it comes to issues of life.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
We have to be much broader. So we look at the narrative, we look at psychological measures and self -regulation measures. I have a validation scale that's being validated, which means that you can look at how a person is self -regulating.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
The less self -regulated we are, the less managed our mind is, and the more messy we become. Messy mind, messy brain, messy body, messy life. You can always fix up the mess, okay? So it can be a mess, but fix up the mess.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
Okay, so then we also look at the brain. I use QEG because the brain, look at the frequencies in the brain, which is very accurate because we get a lot of, in terms of how the brain is responding to the current moment, and you can get a pattern average over time, but it gives you millions of bits of information per second on an energy level, which is very, very accurate.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And then we look at as well at the body. So we look at things like obviously, the obvious one's cortisol, but ACTH, we even look at things like prolactin, which is a hormone that is in males and females, generally associated with lactate, the woman that'll breastfeeding, but it's also in males, but there's very interesting research showing that it's linked to how we manage our stress levels.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
So there's an ideal range to based on whether you're male or female, whether you are whatever age you're at. And based on that, we see from the research that if it goes out of that range, then it's a problem.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And it's very often knocked out of that range if we don't manage our minds. So we, you know, we call those scale of one to 10, those toxic thoughts, if we don't manage them, it affects our prolactin as well.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And all these are the ACTH, DHEA, we looked at a lot of different things. And then we also looked at telomeres, and telomeres are the ends of chromosomes and chromosomes unwind into DNA. And telomeres are very involved in your cell cellular renewal, cellular turnover.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And we are always making new cells. We make 800 ,000 to a million, somewhere in that region, every second. So pretty much our body is constantly over time renewing itself, but we see that the quality of those cells is based on the quality of the telomere, which is like if you imagine making an X with your two fingers, that chromosomes look like Xs, then your fingernails would be the telomeres.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And telomeres are activated by something called telomerase. And telomerase is very, very influenced by your mental state. So if the telomeres, they do get shorter over time. So as you get older, naturally the telomeres will shorten.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And when telomeres shorten, then you're not as strong and healthy. And that's part of the aging process. But you don't have to, you know, longevity is a real thing. You can age in a much better quality way.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
So you can influence how you age and the quality of your telomeres. And the biggest factor there is, we've thought for years, it was pretty much diet and exercise. Those pay a big role, but mind plays an even bigger role.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
So Lisa Eppel, I'm sure you've heard of her. She's in Elizabeth Blackburn or the leaders and when it comes to telomere research, and they actually, Lisa Eppel, which is out to me, but because of her research, I decided to include it in my research.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And to see, because generally they didn't think telomeres could change, not they, but the science, the world of science, didn't think that telomeres could change in under five years. And, but telomerase, an enzyme that activates, it changes very quickly.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
So most research was done on telomerase. And then some people, Lisa Eppel and Co, started looking at telomeres and found that they could change in shorter periods of time with things like meditation and so on.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
So I started doing research and we found that with mind management using the system called the neuropsychol that I've developed, that you can actually increase significantly, statistically significantly, increase the length and influence the decreasing length when you use mind management.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
So we found with our subjects that use the neuropsychol, and that the case of that 35 year gain, that was one of the subjects in the clinical study, and this particular study that I'm talking about, and the stuff that I'm talking about is in my other book, Cleaning Up the Mental Messe, which you actually interviewed me about in the last podcast.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And I referenced the same research, but very simplistically, in the children's book, a parent's book, I should say, for children. But essentially, this one person at the beginning of the study was in the mid -30s, and all of her, everything, the brain, psychological brain, and all the biological, tests evaluations showed that she was had a body of a sickly 65 year old, pretty much had given up on life.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
She actually was suicidal when she entered the study and was just, you know, had done everything, had every diagnosis, polypharmacy, which was just so tired. And within 21 days, she had her life had transformed.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
She'd been very badly abused as a child and she had suppressed all these years and just, she actually felt worse at day 21 because, but it was a different worse. She said it's, she feels worse. She's grieving now because she suddenly realizes that the neuropsychal opened up her mind, her unconscious mind, subconscious to allow the trauma to come through to the conscious mind.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And that was, she was grieving for what had happened, which she had suppressed all those years. But the suppression had basically played havoc with her health and she, all of her biological readings were terrible.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
Like she literally had a body of a sickly 65 year old. And within nine weeks of telling me a length, all of her biological readings, everything had restored back to the correct levels for her age. So it was literally, if you look at biological aging, which is the age of your cells versus chronological, which is your actual age, you want them to be as close to each other as possible, preferably your biological age younger.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
Like mine is, I think nearly 12 years younger than my chronological age, but you definitely don't want your biological age older than your chronological age. And this person did started with almost 35 year old chronological age.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And then that went down to the actual age, close to the actual age once by the nine weeks into the study. So obviously we've, you know, we replicating, there was other subjects too, we replicating that we do more research on that.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
But we've got a lot of people now interested to see and take this research a little further. So that's what you're doing with your kids. And if you come at it on a proactive level, we want to, as throughout our life, we have to manage our mind.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And your mind drives you 24 seven. So we need to manage your mind 24 seven. We need to go to bed managing our mind. We need to be managing our mind. Otherwise we get into these overwhelm, burn out, conco.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And when our minds messy, we don't see things clearly as we all know, and that can accelerate into quite severe brokenness in our minds, which can lead to all kinds of, of things, signals shooting out at us like, you know, broke, a really broken traumatized mind can, you can hear voices and, you know, there's a lot of psychosis and those are not illnesses.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
Those are just the signals of a very, very, very broken mind that completely disrupts functioning. So we don't want to, to reach those levels. We want to be able to get harness this in and, and work through it.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
And that's, that's pretty much what the neuropsychal is doing. And you want to be proactive about this. So we want to start not just fixing up on the back end, but we want to be proactively teaching children from as young as we possibly can, how to be able to recognize that when I feel this way, I'm not broken.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
It's okay to be a mess. There is a way of getting through this. I have a, you know, the tools to tell my narrative. Even that two year old who doesn't have the linguistic skills, they can pick up brainier.

Dr. Caroline Leaf:
That's a signal to mom that there's something wrong. You know, if you're following the systems, brainier becomes the tool of your mental health journey and that kind of stuff. So that's what I've tried to be proactive from both angles.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, our next guest, and I promise I will stop saying how much I am obsessed personally with these guests and how they have become friends. Actually I don't promise that I'm going to stop saying that because I love these people so much.

Melanie Avalon:
Ben Azadi. Ben Azadi is the type of person where if you meet anybody who knows Ben Azadi, the first thing they'll say is he is such a nice, awesome person, like something to that effect. Because Ben Azadi is such a nice, awesome person.

Melanie Avalon:
He is so kind, so empathetic, so knowledgeable, and doing really profound things. He's doing a lot in the cuto world and just the health world in general. It was an honor to be on his show and it was an honor to have him on mine.

Melanie Avalon:
There were so many things I could have pulled out from the episode to showcase, but I really wanted to do this one because when I posted about it on my Instagram, who started a little bit of debate about whether or not this practice was super helpful, super amazing, everybody should do it, or is it neurotic and crazy?

Melanie Avalon:
So what do you guys think? You'll have to listen and let me know. Please enjoy this excerpt from my conversation with Ben Azadi. So also within this dietary fat world, you talk about polyunsaturated fats, seed oils, things like that, and you talk about a very shocking concept that you make the case, and I think it was quoting somebody who did some research, but it was making the case that a certain type of dietary fat could actually be worse than smoking.

Melanie Avalon:
Why would that be?

Ben Azadi:
Yeah, so I interviewed a gentleman named Brian Peskin, who's an MIT researcher, Professor Peskin. I've actually, he came down to Miami a few years ago. We had lunch together. We recorded a podcast. And he's probably, him and probably Dr.

Ben Azadi:
Kate Shanahan have probably done the most research on polyunsaturated fatty acids and fish oil and different fats. So I asked him the question. I said, what do you think is worse? You know, smoking cigarettes or eating these vegetable oils, these polyunsaturated fats?

Ben Azadi:
And he said, well, according to his research, if somebody smoked two packs of cigarettes every day for 25 years, 28 years or so, the chances of them developing lung cancer within those 25, 28 years is about 16%, one six.

Ben Azadi:
Then he said, if somebody ate these vegetable oils every day for 28 years, the chances of them developing cancer or heart disease is about 86%. Now that's one man's research. And he threw in one type of cancer with all cancers and heart disease.

Ben Azadi:
So we got to consider that. I get that. But then I asked the same question to Dr. Kate Shanahan, who, as many of your listeners know, she wrote a great book called Deep Nutrition. She's a medical doctor.

Ben Azadi:
She was the nutritionist for the Los Angeles Lakers when Kobe Bryant used to play. And I recently had a conversation with her and I gave her three scenarios. I said, Dr. Kate, scenario number one, well, actually, I said this first, three scenarios, which one causes more disease?

Ben Azadi:
Which one is more inflammatory? So I said, scenario number one, somebody smokes cigarettes every day. Scenario number two, somebody eats processed sugar every single day. Scenario number three, somebody eats vegetable oils every single day.

Ben Azadi:
Which one is worse? Dr. Kate? And she giggled and she said, Ben, that's an easy question. It is vegetable oils. She said, if you were to smoke cigarettes, of course, that's not good for you. But the toxicity, the damage is done after your last puff.

Ben Azadi:
That's not getting stored in your body. Then she said, of course, processed sugar is not good for you. But if you ate it in excess or had a piece of cake or whatever it is, you could exercise, you could burn it off.

Ben Azadi:
That could store it as regular body fat. You could burn it off. She said, these seed oils, also called linoleic acid, they stick around for a very long time. She estimates and other researchers estimate the half -life for these inflammatory fats are 680 days, meaning if you remove them today, 680 days later, about two years later, half of them will still remain in your body fat, creating inflammation, creating cell membrane and receptor site inflammation, inflaming the mitochondrial membrane.

Ben Azadi:
That's why she believes they're worse than cigarettes and Brian Peskin believes they're worse than cigarettes. The reason is because of the processing. I want to make this clear for your audience, and I'm not sure where you stand here with this, Melanie.

Ben Azadi:
Not all omega -6 fats are bad. It's the adulterated ones that we're talking about here. It's the processing of them. It's the chemical, the ingredients they're putting in there, the detergents, the bleaching, the dyeing, the high pressure, the high heat.

Ben Azadi:
It makes them very unstable. These fats called polyunsaturated fatty acids, the chemical structure shows that poly means many. These fats have many double bonds. The more double bonds a fat has, the more oxygen it attracts.

Ben Azadi:
When you use a lot of high pressure and high heat, it is aggressively attracting oxygen, and it is oxidizing during the processing of these oils. They're already rancid and toxic before you even consume them.

Ben Azadi:
Everywhere you go to Whole Foods, supermarket. Yeah, you're going to see the American Heart Association put their stamp of approval on canola oil. You go to the fanciest restaurant in the world. They're going to use maybe olive oil that's cut with a soybean or canola oil.

Ben Azadi:
I have come up with something really cool. I think it's cool. When I go to restaurants, Melanie, I always ask the server, hey, what do you cook your food in? What oils do you use? They're going to say canola or soybean or olive oil that's cut.

Ben Azadi:
They're going to use one of these inflammatory oils. I always tell them, and it drives my fiance crazy sometimes, but I always tell them, hey, we're allergic to those oils. Can you use coconut oil or olive oil that's not cut?

Ben Azadi:
Or do you have butter? Or can you grill it or do something else where you're not using the oils? Most of the time they say yes, but you got to say you're allergic. But here's the thing. Here's the thing that I was talking about that I did that was super cool.

Ben Azadi:
I have come to find that even though I've been telling my students and my community to make that request that they're allergic, most of them don't do it. And I think they don't do it because they just feel uncomfortable or they might be at a table with people and they might look weird.

Ben Azadi:
So here's the cool thing that I developed.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh, I'm excited to hear this.

Ben Azadi:
I created a seed oil allergy card, and I'm holding it right here in front of me, and your audience could get it for free. But here's what it says. It says, allergy card at the top. Dear chef, I have food allergies to vegetable oils.

Ben Azadi:
In order for me to avoid an allergic reaction, I must avoid everything marked off below. Canola, corn, grape seed, sunflower, safflower, cotton seed, rice bran, soybean oil. Please use the following alternatives that are safe.

Ben Azadi:
Avocado oil, duck fat, olive oil, beef towel, coconut oil, lard, ghee, butter. Please make sure the approved alternatives are not cut with the allergic options. Thank you for keeping me safe. So now it's so easy.

Ben Azadi:
Just print this out or put it on your phone and just show the server this, and they're going to make that request. So your audience could get it over at seedoilcard .com. It's a free download, seedoilcard .com.

Melanie Avalon:
All right. Our next guest is somebody that honestly, I've been wanting to interview for so, so long ever since launching the intermittent fasting podcast, because Thomas DeLauer is very famous in the intermittent fasting world.

Melanie Avalon:
And what I will say that I was so excited to experience with Thomas is he's such a legend, such a brand, such an image. And I think in general, in the social media world and the content world, sometimes things become a little superficial with that or a little click baby.

Melanie Avalon:
Thomas is the real deal. Like he knows his stuff and I was talking to him and I mean, he just like knew his stuff. I was so excited. The episode was honestly just so valuable. It was hard to pick which clip to use for this best of episode, but I definitely really like what he said when it comes to men versus women and burning fat.

Melanie Avalon:
We dismantled some myths there. So please enjoy this conversation with Thomas DeLauer. This is the, I don't even like using the word conclusion because that makes it sound like it's settled. But this is what I had found as well in researching men and women and fat burning was that women tend to look like they're, they seem to be better fat burners and, you know, better with exercise and burning fat and all of that.

Melanie Avalon:
But then, but some people will say the complete opposite, you know, that women just, you know, that fat burning is that men do it better. So what are your thoughts on men versus women and fat burning and fasting?

Thomas DeLauer:
Yeah, I was trying to pull up the study if I could find it, but essentially women seem to do better utilizing fats, basically the action of adrenaline and hormone sensitive lipase, seem to utilize fat better through that simple pathway, which is really like one of the only pathways.

Thomas DeLauer:
That seems to be, they seem to do marginally better than men, which would imply that if adrenaline is higher and the percentage of fat burned in that situation is better, then yeah, women would actually do better with fasting and do better with high intensity work and do better with things like keto, where there is a higher catecholamine output.

Thomas DeLauer:
So yeah, I'm going to see if I can find it really quick because that's pretty interesting.

Melanie Avalon:
I might definitely read like that one or one really similar to it.

Thomas DeLauer:
Yeah, journal of applied physiology. A journal in burns more fat in women than men, since women have a higher fat percentage of men of the same weight, not only their bodies, but also within their muscles.

Thomas DeLauer:
It would also make sense as the primary energy source. So they're more sensitive to the lipolytic action of epinephrine compared with men, while maintaining similar gluco regulatory effects. So women burn more fat, less carbohydrates, and less protein than men at the same exercise intensity.

Melanie Avalon:
It's really interesting because that's what I've seen and I've seen it in multiple studies. But then I'll just see like very simple sentences like that just say, you know, women are not as adapted to Bernie Faddis men.

Melanie Avalon:
And do you think that's because and if so, why? It seems like when it comes to quote problems with keto infasting, women seem to have more quote problems. Like, it becomes too stressful or like, what do you think is the nuance there?

Thomas DeLauer:
I think there's probably just the fact that women have a lot of complicated things going on. It's probably not apples to apples all the time. It's definitely not apples to apples, but it's not apples to apples each and every day.

Thomas DeLauer:
Men have relatively homeostatic sex hormones, and I shouldn't say that. They fluctuate a lot too, but nothing like ladies would. There's a lot of complicated things, and there's a lot of rebound, and there's a lot of homeostatic feedback loops.

Thomas DeLauer:
That's probably what makes it more complicated is who knows. Perhaps one day women would burn fat more, and the next day they wouldn't. But I also think that when you look at a large cohort of women, just the stress of child -rearing and all that comes with that, who knows?

Thomas DeLauer:
There could be a heightened cortisol response. It also could be, this is purely speculative, maybe there's more of an evolutionary role where they utilize fat better than men because they are probably more stressed out than men.

Thomas DeLauer:
You actually think about, again, I'm not an anthropologist. It would be really fun to interview some anthropologists and bring them into our world because I feel like that's what needs to be done because there's a lot of just misinformation about people like total BS about this is how our ancestors age.

Thomas DeLauer:
Is it really? Do you really know? I don't know if you've seen that show on Netflix, that anthropology show with that guy. He's been on Rogan before. I can't remember his name.

Melanie Avalon:
I think I just listened to his interview on Rogan.

Thomas DeLauer:
He's awesome. And he gave me so much hope because I'm not a scientist, right? People call me a pseudoscientist. And he's like, I'm not even pretending to be a scientist. I don't even want to be a scientist.

Thomas DeLauer:
I'm just good at articulating this stuff. And he's like, I'm no more a pseudoscientist. I'm no more a pseudoscientist than a dolphin is a pseudo fish. And I was like, I love that. It's like, it's perfect because he's like, I'm not trying to be a scientist.

Thomas DeLauer:
Just like a dolphin's not trying to be a fish. He just is what it frickin is. And like, I hear I am look and like, it's the same with me. But the reason that I mentioned that is like, maybe women have the more stressful role.

Thomas DeLauer:
Think about it. Like men kind of like, it seems as though they would go out and hunt. And then they'd probably just come back and sit on their asses all day. And then they'd go hunt. Like they probably, and like most of the research we have seen with that, and Dr.

Thomas DeLauer:
Tommy Wood had talked about this, is that they're relatively sedentary, like beings. And an athletic individual today, an athlete today is estimated to be six times more active than like the most active hunter -gatherer.

Thomas DeLauer:
So it's like, we think like, I want to be a caveman. Do you really? Like, because the caveman's weren't probably weren't jacked. And the cavemen probably were like skinny fat and probably just like hunted for short bursts and then sat around and gathered nuts most of the time.

Thomas DeLauer:
So like, is that what you want to do? Whereas the women probably had the tough job of actually like wrangling children and like actually had chronic stress, whereas the men might have like acute stress and then they go sit on their ass.

Thomas DeLauer:
So like, that's probably what it was. But again, I'm not an anthropologist and that would just make sense. Like, okay, well, maybe women were designed to be a little bit more stressed out and utilize fuel accordingly, whereas men were not as good at utilizing fat because they were less active.

Melanie Avalon:
All right, our next guess, I cannot recommend enough everybody read her book, The Immunotype Breakthrough. It will blow your mind about the immune system. It finally answered all the questions I had about the immune system.

Melanie Avalon:
And then interviewing Heather in person was so incredible because I got to ask my nitty gritty questions and dive deep into all of it. And we tackled so many things in the episode. It was so hard to pick what to highlight.

Melanie Avalon:
But I in particular was fascinated about something. And I side note, I hate that I can't even say this word without it sounding political, but this is not political. The effect that sleep has on the effectiveness of when you get a vaccine, kind of crazy, kind of mind blowing.

Melanie Avalon:
It's something where I don't know why this isn't being prescribed as part of the protocol of getting vaccines surrounding all of that. So please enjoy this excerpt with Dr. Heather Moday. So I was actually reading in another book, it was talking about circadian rhythms in the body.

Melanie Avalon:
And it was saying that the immune system basically has four jobs of surveillance, repair, attack and cleanup. And it was saying that these are not task driven. Like it was saying that you would think it would be like, you get an invader and that, you know, it's like surveilling.

Melanie Avalon:
And then there's the invader and attacks. And then it repairs and cleans up. But it was saying that it's completely circadian rhythm so that all that's not happening at once. And it happens at different times.

Melanie Avalon:
And it was saying that sepsis is actually when all of that happens at the same time. When we get exposed to a pathogen or something, what is the role of circadian or peripheral rhythms in that? Like you talk about sleep, how stuff happens when we sleep.

Dr. Heather Moday:
So I wouldn't say that it doesn't happen other times. I would say that routinely, you know, it's sort of like, you know, if you think about it, like if you only cleaned your house or took your garbage out once a month, you'd be in a lot of trouble, right?

Dr. Heather Moday:
So you got to do it every day. However, you're still gonna be able to attack and, you know, do that kind of stuff, repair even at a time of the day that wouldn't be say like normal, right? So the normal routine maintenance work, I would say, of our immune system is definitely driven pretty significantly by circadian rhythm, but that doesn't mean that it's not happening at other times when we need it.

Dr. Heather Moday:
That's why it is so important to have like healthy sleep habits and things like that, because our immune system actually is, and I write about this, is that it's pretty active while we sleep. And, you know, I actually learned quite a bit when I was doing research in this area, because this is an area, obviously I knew a little bit about it, but I didn't really think about the fact that, you know, sleep is a really, really mysterious, like for, you know, the longest time we had no idea why humans actually slept.

Dr. Heather Moday:
Why? Why do we sleep half of our lives? And why is it that if you try to sleep to bride people, you can actually kill them? And part of it is that if you think about it, if we had to do all this work of, you know, not only like killing microbes and making antibodies and cleaning up our brain and repairing tissue and stuff like that, we had to do that while we were like walking around and moving our muscles, talking, you know, thinking, you know, all that kind of stuff, there's no way it could happen.

Dr. Heather Moday:
And so it's really a downtime for the rest of our body where our immune system can actually be super active while we're not aware of it.

Melanie Avalon:
But the sleep chapter was fascinating. You just talking about how when we are sleeping, that's really when immune activity really ramps up. So for people who are, because we haven't even gotten into the immunotypes yet, but for people who tend to err on a side of a more inflammatory response in their body, is it possible that when they sleep, they actually might get more inflamed?

Dr. Heather Moday:
I don't think they get more inflamed. I think that, you know, because I think part of it is that while we're, you know, we have that inflammatory response early in the evening, that's, you know, I talk about like during that non -REM deep sleep and melatonin is very active and we have a lot of cytokine activity, but the rest of the evening when cortisol starts to kick up in the early morning hours, we actually resolve inflammation.

Dr. Heather Moday:
So we want to be able to do the cleanup, right? And then go back to like a nice homeostasis. So when we are sleep deprived, whether it's front and back end, we can have ongoing inflammation because we haven't done a lot of cleanup.

Dr. Heather Moday:
So we have like things that linger. So I mean, everyone's had the experience when they're starting to get like a tickle or something like that, but they're like, oh, I got to stay up and write a paper or I've got to do this thing.

Dr. Heather Moday:
I've still got to work or they try to like go exercise, you know, get to the gym and then they just get sicker and sicker and sicker because they're skimping on their sleep instead of being like, you know what, I feel this coming on.

Dr. Heather Moday:
I need to go to bed and like get, you know, 10 hours of sleep because, you know, how that feels, you're going to feel better. You're going to actually start to heal because you're giving the space for your immune system to do its work.

Melanie Avalon:
It's fascinating. You mentioned, I feel like they should integrate this into public policy, the role of, like, when people get vaccines and the antibody response that they mount based on their levels of sleep they got.

Dr. Heather Moday:
They do not say that. And I'm like, I don't understand why that's not public policy, that it's not some, or at least not even that's public policy, but it's something that should be, should really be something that when someone comes in for a vaccine, they say, OK, well, tonight, you need to make sure that you don't go out and party, that you need to go home and sleep, because your response to this vaccine really hedges a lot on giving your immune system time to actually do the work, because it's the immune system that does the work, right?

Dr. Heather Moday:
I mean, the vaccine's there, but your immune system is what gives you that, you know, the lasting protection.

Melanie Avalon:
studies is at the sleep directly following the vaccine or directly prior.

Dr. Heather Moday:
You know what, I think it's actually both, but most importantly is right after, is that evening. Because you've gotten the, you have then gotten whatever it is, if it's a killed vaccine or a live vaccine or mRNA or whatever, it's to help your body then do the work.

Dr. Heather Moday:
So really, I would say after.

Melanie Avalon:
That is just really fascinating. That should definitely be more well known. All right, our next guest is an example of, and now I'm just thinking about how, with all of these guests, I'm talking about how they're examples of different situations.

Melanie Avalon:
But this is an example of a topic I wanted to tackle so, so bad, and I knew that I had to have the perfect person for that topic, and I knew it would just come to me. And that's what happened. When Kris Gethyn, who you heard earlier in the show, offered to connect me to Dr.

Melanie Avalon:
Dom, I was like, yes, please. And then furthermore, I read his book and it was everything I could want it to be and more when it comes to oral health. I really think everybody should read his book. It's all in your mouth because it will change your perspective of the world, honestly, because you will realize just how intensely your oral health relates to your whole physical body in general.

Melanie Avalon:
It's crazy stuff. And wait until you hear Dr. Dom's perspective on flossing. This is so fascinating. So if it doesn't show up on X -ray or comb beam, do you just have to find a biological dentist and then does he just diagnose based on symptoms and then do surgery assuming he's going to find?

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
No, no, the gold standard to diagnose is actually a cone beam. What I was saying before was most dentists don't know about the issues. So they don't know how to diagnose it on a cone beam because they don't even know what to diagnose it.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
Because they don't even heard, they haven't even heard about cavitations, just have no idea about it. So we use a cap, we use the cone beam and we will have a separate machine, which is a it's called a cavitao, which is an ultrasound that we can also use on top to make it even more sure.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
And then only then if we have a solid diagnosis, we do it. But patients fly in from all over the world, mostly more people come from all over the world than from Germany, actually. And therefore we plan everything remotely, not with a cone beam, but just with a simple panoramic two dimensional x -ray.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
Because I can already see that the wisdom keys have been taken out. And then my assumption is, okay, 90% of all cases, this patient would have cavitations. So we plan them. And then when you come in for the health optimization week, where we take care of everything, then we do the cone beam, then we do the cavitao, then we make the perfect diagnosis.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
But preliminary we use a two dimensional panoramic x -ray.

Melanie Avalon:
Another just offshoot question that it made me think of, because you were talking about the healing process from surgery, you talk a lot in your book about implants, for example, and how the recovery for that is really important, and what is the recovery as far as immediately putting in implants or not?

Melanie Avalon:
Like what's the conventional way of doing implants, and what do you think is important?

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
So an implant has an artificial root. So if you lost your root to a root canal or the tooth is just gone and you need to replace the missing tooth, generally you need an implant. And 99 .7% of all dentists still do titanium, which is a metal.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
And what we do is we use ceramic implants. And now it's finally medically accepted and even newly been classified as a biomaterial. So a zirconia ceramic implant, what we do is a biomaterial. A titanium metal implant is a foreign particle.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
The foreign particle always heals within a chronic inflammatory response. So foreign body reactions, cytokines, like TNF -alpha, versus zirconia implant. Only osteo integrates within your body if your body is anabolic and can build bone and tissue.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
That's simple. So what we do, specialty is we remove all root canals anyways, clean the socket, clean everything perfectly. And then if possible, we place an immediate ceramic zirconia implant to stabilize the socket, kind of like as a tent pole.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
So we don't lose any anatomy.

Melanie Avalon:
And one of my business partners just got a root canal. Now he's having all of these issues. And I was talking with my friend about it. It's interesting, my friend was saying, you know, that's why we need to have good oral hygiene.

Melanie Avalon:
I was like, well, I'm actually reading a book right now. And I think, so what do the studies show on oral hygiene practices and how they relate to oral health? Does it correlate?

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
So there's studies in their studies. So obviously the studies that most dentists read are the ones that are sponsored by any sort of company And I'm not sure if they're the right ones. So let's see from a different point of view So oral hygiene obviously is important But there are there's a good there's good data about our ancestors.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
They didn't brush their teeth They only ate the right foods which actually brush their teeth because eating hard stuff will clean the teeth So they didn't really have any sort of tooth decay or inflammation and they redid this study Or did they did a study out of it actually in the in Germany?

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
I think two years ago where they compared a control group that ate the standard Western diet with a Paleolithic kind of eating way only for four weeks and after four weeks 100% reduction of inflammation in the group that was eating how we supposed to eat versus the other ones So they hypothesized That nutrition and lifestyle might be a bigger thing than the oral hygiene part Which I'm this is what I'm seeing for for ten years already, but I'm happy if studies coming out So hygiene is important I see it different than the hygiene that we are all trained to do so So I think the usual hygiene is you have to brush your teeth with a fluoride toothpaste You should use chemical mouth washes and you floss That's basically what you should do right then you go to see the hygienist twice a year And this is how you manage your oral health This is what you what you get trained in university as you know most people are having a hard time to change what they've learned So they believe in what they learned and what you read and that fluoride is the best thing to do So even functional dentist that I know that are a little bit more open -minded Can kind of attack me if I say flossing is unnatural.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh really it's unnatural.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
Yeah, for example, I say flossing is supernatural. So, but obviously, I obviously come from a different perspective. My perspective is that nature has it right. And that if everything is perfectly healthy and you eat the right stuff and you have no deficiencies, you don't have tooth decay.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
Your body is immune against tooth decay and you don't have bleeding gums. They're just not bleeding. And then if you introduce flossing, it might be that the teeth are very tight together in a regular system and you floss, it can happen that you cut yourself with the floss and you bleed from the flossing.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
It's a total different perspective than the regular dentist who sees the average person. The average person has bleeding gums. The average person has periodontitis or at least gingivitis and obviously tooth decay, because this is the number one chronic disease worldwide with an incidence of 90%.

Dr. Dominik Nischwitz
So, yes, in this supernatural oral ecosystem, you might need a chemical band aid like flora, and flossing, and chemical mouthwashers, but that shouldn't be the long -term solution.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, how to end this show? I just knew intuitively I had to end this show with the last guest that I most recently hung out with in person at her home in London for Thanksgiving. Charlotte Fox Webber, if you're listening to this, I adore you.

Melanie Avalon:
Our conversation on this show was, I think the longest episode I have ever recorded and there's a reason for that because we are kindred spirits and souls and I am obsessed with the work that she's doing.

Melanie Avalon:
Her book, Tell Me What You Want, is such a haunting, beautiful picture of our secret wants and desires and you will feel so not alone because you'll realize that so many people want things secretly that maybe you thought you were the only person who had these secret wants and desires and maybe you felt bad about that.

Melanie Avalon:
Don't feel bad about that. Read her book. She also has done incredible writings beyond that. She has an incredible piece in Time Magazine that I highly recommend. Everybody check out. It's called I Fell for a Famous, Much Older Artist Then He Got Violent.

Melanie Avalon:
I will put a link to it in the show notes but in any case, back to today's episode, it was so hard to pick what to pull out for this episode. So I figured, might as well land on something that just talks about what I was talking about earlier, which is just being okay with yourself and beyond that, the role of the ego because friends, I am haunted by the ego.

Melanie Avalon:
I can't tell you how many conversations I have had with my therapist about the ego and my ego. I literally have had conversations with my therapist where I started crying because I was so distressed about the thought of my ego.

Melanie Avalon:
So talking about the ego, which Charlotte Fox Webber was such a moment. Definitely check out the full episode with her. But in the meantime, enjoy this very brief clip from our conversation, which I treasure so, so much.

Melanie Avalon:
So Charlotte Fox Webber, take it away. What do you feel about this idea of women in society and how it's not okay to be, like I just said, you can't be powerful or unbeautiful and intelligent and all these things, like there's gotta be, like that's like not okay, or you judge yourself for it.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
It's not okay. I mean, I think it is okay, but yes, we are told it's in so many ways that it's not okay. And we're given mixed messages. So on the one hand, love yourself, respect yourself, empower yourself, even have gratitude.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
But on the other hand, like, don't be full of yourself. Don't be greedy. Don't be demanding. Don't be needy. Like, don't be bossy. There are so many injunctions that are invisible injunctions, like rulebooks that we're carrying around in our heads, that come from different voices of authority and systems and cultures and religions and family values and friend groups.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
We get really judgmental about actually liking ourselves. And it can be weirdly difficult and totally worthwhile to let yourself enjoy the moments of really liking yourself, liking how you look, liking how you sound, liking something you've achieved, liking just how you feel, whatever it is.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
I think we need to encourage ourselves and each other to just really be okay with that. But we're kind of stop starting a lot when it comes to ego because there is some ego in that. And ego is not the same as narcissism.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
Like, ego is sense of self and individuality. And yes, it can be out of control, but so can everything. And I think it's a really unreasonable and punishing message that we should have no ego, get rid of the ego.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
And we say it a lot of the time. I mean, I used to say it or hear myself saying it years ago, like, no, no, that's ego -y. Like, I don't want ego. Like, it was a dirty word. And if we allow that we have ego, then it's a healthy thing that can be worked with.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
And it doesn't have to kind of make you a dictator or make you unbearably arrogant, but pretending to have no ego or really diminishing yourself and feeling diminished to the point of not thinking you matter.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
It can make your life just so miserable.

Melanie Avalon:
Like I said earlier, I'm haunted by this idea of the ego. And like you said, we make it a synonym for narcissism. Like bad, basically just bad. Mm -hmm. Yeah. Where you could have, I guess, a more appropriate synonym for the ego, or maybe would be the just the authentic self, like this is.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
Yeah, I love ego because it's just three letters and ego is my amigo is one thing I like to think of. And it's so simple, but yeah, you could find a replacement if ego is tarnished as a word. But I think part of the problem with the word itself is that it has so many different meanings and definitions and interpretations, like even just historically for what it means, but a sense of your own worth that we are worthwhile and even more than worthwhile, like we can be fond of ourselves, we can enjoy our own company, we can really like something that we've done or something about who we are.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
So I think that desire comes into all of that because if you don't consider your own desires, then you can't really have a picture of who you are.

Melanie Avalon:
I read a quote and it was saying that the way that we should view ourselves is basically like we're a picture that somebody else painted. Like appreciating a picture, like for self -love, like appreciating something that we didn't create.

Melanie Avalon:
There's like no quote ego and really appreciating a picture that somebody else drew. But if you drew it, then it's like, oh, then it feels egotistical. So it's like if we could have that perspective, like just a third -party objective.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
If you could see yourself to the row as tinted.

Melanie Avalon:
glasses? Yes, or like as another person, like appreciating yourself. Or even just through.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
clear, clear eyes, like just seeing yourself with that, with enough air to have an actual viewpoint. But I think, I think we get so kind of locked into our own heads that there's this great expression that I cannot see its own eyelashes.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
And you can't really see yourself in your own, your own wonderfulness or difficulties with absolute perspective. Like it's not, I think that it's important to not think that you can really, really know exactly who you are.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
Because it's not as if you're then able to kind of arrive at ego confirmed and then that's it. It's an ongoing process and it's an interesting, curious, playful, adventurous process of discovery and change and growth.

Dr. Charlotte Fox Weber
And I think sometimes just knowing that we can't yet see ourselves with clarity is a really big revelation. So like the picture, whatever, whatever confused and contradictory picture we have of ourselves, we don't really understand exactly how we think about ourselves.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay friends, I hope you enjoyed this collection for part one of the best of episodes. Originally I was going to do just one best of episode, but there are just so many incredible guests and moments that there needs to be a part two, so stay tuned for that next week.

Melanie Avalon:
And I will say, when I take the moment to go back and just revisit all of these conversations and moments, I am just filled with so much gratitude for this show, for all of you guys, because I couldn't be a podcaster without all of the listeners.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm just so grateful that I get to interview such incredible people and learn so much and especially be exposed to so many different viewpoints, because I think especially in today's society, we often get siloed in certain opinions and biases.

Melanie Avalon:
And of course, we are always going to come from our own perspective, but hopefully with this show, something I can do is just bring on a lot of ideas so everybody can find what works for them personally.

Melanie Avalon:
So on that note, I hope everybody is having the most beautiful of holidays and has a lot to reflect on for 2023 and is looking forward to an incredible 2024. Again, stay tuned next week for best of part two and definitely join me on Instagram and my Facebook groups and all the things.

Melanie Avalon:
Happy holidays!

Melanie Avalon:
Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast. For more information, you can check out my book, What When Wine? Lose Weight and Feel Great with Paleo Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, and Wine, as well as my blog, MelanieAvalon .com.

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