The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #230 - Best Of 2023 (Part 2)

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, it is here part two of our best of the Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast 2023. I am just so enjoying creating these episodes. It's so fun to just reflect on the year, go back, see all of the incredible guests that I got the amazing honor to interview, see the amazing spectrum of topics that we covered.

Melanie Avalon:
I am just so grateful for these conversations. I'm so grateful for you guys. I could not have these shows literally without you all. And I am so grateful that you guys enjoy listening, that you share your thoughts with me, that you reach out.

Melanie Avalon:
Honestly, so many of my best friends now are guests that I've had on this show and even listeners. I'm just so grateful in case you can't tell. And by the way, I am even more excited about 2024. I have so many incredible guests booked.

Melanie Avalon:
It's going to be an incredible year. I can't wait to hear what you guys think of this episode. Definitely let me know who your favorite guests were this year. And next year as well, these show notes for this episode will be at MelanieAvalon .com slash best of 2023 part two.

Melanie Avalon:
Those show notes will have a full transcript. So definitely check that out. There will be two episode giveaways for this episode. One will be in my Facebook group. I have bio hackers, intermittent fasting plus real foods plus life.

Melanie Avalon:
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 Facebook group. Find me Friday announcement post and again, comment there to enter to win something that I love.

Melanie Avalon:
All right. Without further ado, please enjoy all of these wonderful moments from the best of the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast 2023. All right. To start off our lineup. How could I not start off with Dave Asprey?

Melanie Avalon:
I mean, this is the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast and he is basically the founder of biohacking, at least in the popular culture. Honestly, he's the reason that I'm doing what I'm doing today. And that's why it's even more surreal friends that I actually just got back last night from Austin recording two episodes for 2024 at his house in his home studio.

Melanie Avalon:
And not only that, but that was actually my first in person podcast recording ever. So it was just, whoo, it was like, it was a lot to take in. And actually, because I don't think I'm going to talk about this when those episodes air because they're going to be on the intermittent fasting podcast.

Melanie Avalon:
So I'll just take a moment now to talk about it. It was a lot for me to take in because I wanted to just be in the conversation and be in the moment. But I'm so used to having my notes. And I don't, I never plan the order of how things are going to go or anything like that.

Melanie Avalon:
I just do an exhausting, overwhelming amount of prep. I have tons of notes and then I just see where it goes. But I do have my notes that I reference. So it was a lot to like have my notes, but like be on camera and like look at him.

Melanie Avalon:
But then it was just, it was a lot. So I can't wait to hear what you guys think of those episodes on the intermittent fasting podcast. They'll be in January and February of 2024. In any case, the excerpt today with Dave Asprey is from the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast.

Melanie Avalon:
And it was when he came on for his new book, Smarter Not Harder, and we talk all about being triggered. One of my favorite topics, what does it mean when you're triggered? You're going to find out. And by the way, I do get a lot of questions about this.

Melanie Avalon:
I no longer drink Bulletproof coffee. I drink Danger coffee. Yes, I drink it. It is so amazing that I even gifted it to so many people, including my amazing assistant Diane shout out to Diane. That's how much I love this stuff.

Melanie Avalon:
And you can get a 10% discount on Danger coffee, which is remineralized and mold free at Melanie Avalon .com slash Danger coffee with the coupon code Melanie Avalon. All right. So now without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous excerpt from my conversation with Dave Asprey.

Melanie Avalon:
I think it's people, you know, projecting and getting triggered for that, that response.

Dave Asprey:
We can talk about being triggered. That's kind of fun. You want to talk about being triggered?

Melanie Avalon:
I love talking about being triggered. Yes, I actually just interviewed Gabor Mati. And so we talked a lot about this. What are your thoughts on being triggered?

Dave Asprey:
Well, number one, I identify as being triggered. I want to make that really clear. Right? So that means you have to call me whatever I want, but I'm not going to tell you what it is, so I can have more excuses to be triggered.

Dave Asprey:
It's great. I'm not going to tell you what to call me, because I want to be triggered, because I identify as being triggered. Most people here that say that's absurd. Right? But the bottom line is, if anything can trigger me, it's because I have bullets in my gun.

Dave Asprey:
And if you got triggered by what I just said, it's because you have triggers. Healthy people don't get triggered. If something triggers you, it doesn't mean other people have to change. If something triggers you, it means you need to go to a therapist and you need to find out why your meat operating system thinks you're going to die when someone tells you that whatever you're not good looking, or that whatever story is offensive to you, you cannot live as a happy human being, being triggered all the time.

Dave Asprey:
So your job is to be untriggerable, and that's what biohacking is all about. When you have enough energy, when you're in charge of your meat operating system, if your body sends you a signal that says, I'm annoyed, you just laugh and go, yeah, you're annoyed, but I've got other stuff to do, and you just move on with life.

Dave Asprey:
And that's how most people are. There's a few people who are really, really aggressive about being triggered, and those people themselves will trigger other people. Build your life so you have that much ability to just not be triggered at all.

Dave Asprey:
And it is a meat operating system thing. It's a trauma response from the body. In the last couple of chapters of the book, I talk about trauma. I talk about what I've done for working on my own trauma, and I talk about something called the reset mode, which is the fastest way I've found to go in and edit the trauma response in your body.

Dave Asprey:
What it looks like when you're done is like, if you have your phone, when you first get it, and all the notifications are turned on for everything, you can't even use it, because it's just going off all the time.

Dave Asprey:
That's the same as a highly triggered person. When you turn off all the notifications you don't want, what's left is a useful phone, and it becomes a tool for doing good things. So you get to pick. Do you want your alerts going off all the time, your notifications, or do you wanna just turn them all off?

Dave Asprey:
I've turned off all the notifications I can find to the need turning off. If I find a new one, I'll turn that off too. I teach you how to do it, because that makes the world a better place.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm so passionate about this. I think one of the biggest epiphanies I had was that anytime I personally feel triggered or offended, like it's not the other person. Like it's something in me that is scared or something I need to deal with.

Melanie Avalon:
And it's really freeing because then you just can, when you do experience that, you see, it's like a flashlight showing you what you need to work on. And I just feel like if everybody could understand this, our world would look very different.

Dave Asprey:
It would, but there's a little nuance in there. If you are running without some raw materials that your body needs, it will feel anxiety because it's starving. This happened to me when I was a raw vegan.

Dave Asprey:
In fact, how many vegans do you know who are easily angered? I was a vegan. I love vegans. The mindset of like the end goal is they're great goals. It doesn't work as a practice is the problem. So what happens is if you say you're out of zinc or chromium or any of the other minerals, manganese that your body needs, you will feel a sense of stress and anxiety.

Dave Asprey:
And you'll think that it's something that triggered you and your environment. And that's why one of the first chapters in the book is like, hey, if you have these couple things available to your body when you exercise, when you meditate, when you do personal development work around being triggered, all of those work better when you have enough minerals.

Dave Asprey:
And so you can go to vitamindake .com, vitamindake .com. And for less than $20 a month, you can get vitamins D, A, K, and E, those fat soluble vitamins that only come from animal foods. They will direct minerals to the right place inside the body.

Dave Asprey:
And then you take minerals 101. It's at the same website, vitamindake .com. Again, low -cost, broad -spectrum mineral supplement. And when you take those two things, every other thing you do works better.

Dave Asprey:
And your anxiety can go down when your body has adequate nutrients. So there's an enormous number of people who think they have anxiety. They think they're easily triggered. They're not. They have a body that is out of minerals, but it is out of vitamins because they're eating usually ultra -processed or plant -based foods.

Dave Asprey:
So we've got to fix our diets, which drops anxiety, which makes people harder to trigger, and we have to deal with the emotional trauma. And that's why the last two chapters of the book are around trauma reset process.

Dave Asprey:
And the first two chapters are around, let's get our basics done.

Melanie Avalon:
We both have birth trauma, because you had the umbilical cord wrapped around you right when you came out.

Dave Asprey:
I was posterior.

Melanie Avalon:
I was put immediately into an ICU box for weeks, so my mom couldn't hold me.

Dave Asprey:
You're an incubator. I've had so many people with incubators come through 40 years as in. That's my neuroscience program and I've been in relationships with people who had your born premature and it creates very deep trauma that is Invisible to your adult person that it did for me, too That's the idea of the meat operating system in that third of a second if you were born with you know Stressful things around birth.

Dave Asprey:
It just believes that things in the world are trying to kill you And it'll keep believing that until you do the work to heal it. It's work. That's possible to do

Melanie Avalon:
Like for me, I think the way that I noticed that it manifests, I have to warm up to people touching me. Like I immediately, I don't want people to touch me. And I think it probably goes back to that.

Melanie Avalon:
Like I didn't have that human touch, that loving human touch, like right when I was born for quite a while.

Dave Asprey:
So you can reprogram your operating system to be comfortable touch. I used to have that two years ago. I'm actually completely happy with hugs and touching and all that. It turns out that physical touch is one of my love languages.

Dave Asprey:
But it can only do that if it doesn't trigger you to be touched. So if that's a trigger, sometimes there's atypical neurology like Asperger's, which I also had. Or it's just a trauma response where you didn't feel safe and no one touched you inside.

Dave Asprey:
The incubation chamber, so your body got that programming before the mind existed. So you can go in and reprogram the body. That's a core part of biohacking.

Melanie Avalon:
Did it become your love language after you learned to love it? Or was it always your love language inherently, you think? But you just were scared.

Dave Asprey:
I don't think it was my love language when I was young because when, you know, when things would touch me like labels in the shirts or fabrics or like all sorts of things, it was just irritating. Like I didn't want to hold your hand because it bothered my hand to hold your hand kind of thing.

Dave Asprey:
So yeah, I'm pretty sure that, that once I calmed my nervous system and my nervous system realized that, oh, it's safe to be touched. Then it was like, oh, that's actually a love language. But I didn't do it before and after tests because they didn't have love languages when I was a kid.

Melanie Avalon:
when COVID started. I was like, oh, I don't have to hug anybody anymore. This is great.

Dave Asprey:
Melanie, people with hug resistance always have trauma to work through. That's just how it is.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, well sign me up for 40 years of sin.

Dave Asprey:
And by the way, it's okay to have it, but just understand it's resistance. Like I'm not like judging, you know, you have to hug people if you don't want to. No, you have your own boundaries. Everybody has their own boundaries.

Dave Asprey:
It's just that that boundary costs a lot because it creates stress. And we want to live in lives where we have so much resilience to what happens to the world around us that we can pick our state and we can stay there whether or not we get a hug.

Melanie Avalon:
All right, friends, next up, we have such an inspiring woman. Reading Mary and Nestle's work, her books, and then interviewing her was such a moment because she has done so much for us when it comes to raising awareness to what actually happens in the politics of food, like the food politics system, how government and funding and pharma affects what we're eating, how that manifests in our plates, in our schools.

Melanie Avalon:
It's crazy. She has done so much work, such a deep dive, and it's actually funny because I was recently interviewing spoiler Nina Tysholes, she'll be a guest in 2024, and Nina talks all about Marion's work as well in her books.

Melanie Avalon:
And this excerpt that I picked is so mind -blowing. You will not believe this conversation that Marion had with Nestle about corn syrup and about sugar. It's going to blow your mind about what labels can actually mean when they talk about the sugar content on the label.

Melanie Avalon:
Just get ready for this. Are you ready? Without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous excerpt from my conversation with Marion Nestle. There's all these keto products on the market. And just last night, it'll be like a keto product.

Melanie Avalon:
It'll be like, it'll say like low sugar or low carb. And then it will literally have sugar on the back. Like, I don't understand. And then the one I was looking at last night, it said corn syrup was like one of the first ingredients and then it had an asterisk.

Melanie Avalon:
And then the asterisk said, not a significant source of sugar or carb.

Marion Nestle:
Let me tell, ooh, I've just found out about this. I mean, I don't know how I didn't know this. I was looking at, I'm writing a book chapter about marketing to children. And I ran across this product that were the first three ingredients are corn syrup, condensed protein, milk protein, and sugar.

Marion Nestle:
Those are the first three ingredients, it's ghastly. And it said in this product that it had 240 calories, but it only had 15 grams of sugar. And there were, I figured there were 100 calories missing somewhere and I couldn't figure it out.

Marion Nestle:
And you know, corn syrup, corn syrup is sugar. So I actually called the company, which is a Nestle company, no relation. And I talked to a nutritionist at Nestle who patiently explained to me that corn syrup is the product of enzymatic digestion of corn starch into smaller pieces.

Marion Nestle:
And if those pieces are bigger than three glucose units stuck together, they count as carbohydrate, not sugar. Wow. And I can't believe, I cannot believe that I didn't know that. So I'm so glad you asked because I only found that out this week.

Marion Nestle:
So what this product said was that it had 41 grams of carbohydrate, which would have been 160 calories altogether, but it only had 15 grams of sugar, even though those little teeny pieces of carbohydrate would be quickly digested into glucose.

Marion Nestle:
So they could say that they only had 15 grams of sugar in this, you know, in 240 calories, when in fact most of it was sugar, it just wasn't sugar very quickly. It had to be digested first, which wouldn't take very long to do it in the mouth.

Marion Nestle:
So that why, so when you see corn syrup or glucose syrup, either one, those will have glucose, which is a sugar, plus little pieces that count as carbohydrate.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh my goodness. Yeah, I was so confused because that's crazy. And because I was confused because like the product you were looking at, the product I was looking at, corn syrup was, I think, the first ingredient.

Melanie Avalon:
And I was like, how can it be the first ingredient when there's hardly

Marion Nestle:
any sugar in it. When there's hardly any sugar in it, that's how, because it counts as carbohydrate, not sugar. So I thought that was well worth knowing. I was very amused, and I thought that Nestle Nutritionist was really nice to tell me.

Marion Nestle:
And then I looked up corn syrup and saw right away, of course. Of course. These are little chains of glucose, and they don't count as sugar, because they're bigger than two.

Melanie Avalon:
Are there any other ones like that, you know, of like loopholes?

Marion Nestle:
i think there are lots of them i mean this is this you know i mean always when you see the sugar split like that so corn syrup something else in sugar. If they put all the sugars together the sugar would always be the first ingredient by a lot.

Marion Nestle:
And so that happens a lot they use different kinds of sugars i guess the other one is these fruit purees. Fruit purees are not fruit they were they may have been food at one time but they're far beyond fruit i mean they're basically sugar.

Marion Nestle:
Isolated from fruit and so that's another way of getting a lot of sugar and without calling it sugar.

Melanie Avalon:
I think also the rules around the minimum amounts of things, how you don't have to list it or quantify it if it's below a certain amount. Then they'll just adjust the serving size to make it so that with the serving size, they can get these lower amounts of things and not really count them in the serving size.

Marion Nestle:
Yeah, I mean, the new serving sizes make that more difficult. The one they were changed a few years ago, it makes that more difficult. But, you know, I mean, the food companies hire people to try to make their products look good on food on food labels.

Marion Nestle:
And most people don't read food labels very carefully, don't understand them. There's very good reason why they don't understand them. They're not very easy to understand. And the way I like to explain it is that when the nutrition facts panel was being designed, the FDA did focus group testing on several different designs, and nobody understood any of them.

Marion Nestle:
And so they picked the one that was least poorly understood. But nobody understood any of them. I mean, they're really hard done. You have to know a lot to understand the food label. Most people just look at calories and sugar.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, friends, this next conversation was so, so fun. I just had so much fun, A, prepping for this show, and then B, getting to interview Daniel Vitalis. His show, Wildfed, is so cool. He goes to all of these different places and hunts and gathers, food items from that particular culture or place, and then cooks it at the end.

Melanie Avalon:
It is so, so cool. Like things you would never think of. And then talking to him, we just talked about so many cool random topics. He is truly a modern day hunter -gatherer, which is super amazing. It was really hard to pick what to showcase.

Melanie Avalon:
Like for example, we did talk about aliens. I wanted to put that in here, but I did not. Instead, I picked a very cool part of our conversation about kind of recontemplating whether or not plants are alive and what that actually implicates and means.

Melanie Avalon:
Please enjoy this conversation with Daniel Vitalis.

Daniel Vitalis:
Beneath that, we should ask ourselves the question of like, what is food? And that's the bigger picture. We're sort of like, imagine like the Catholic church in the Dark Ages, where it's like, oh, you can't pray directly to God.

Daniel Vitalis:
You have to go through like the priesthood, and they are the intermediary between you and God or something like that. We have something like that going on with food, where there's so many steps and people between us and the source of food that we don't remember what food is now.

Daniel Vitalis:
There's like a gastronomic, cultural gastronomic amnesia or something happening. So if we ask the question, what's food? You know, we could start, we could get all metabolic or chemical, and we could be like, you know, well, food's caloric and all of that.

Daniel Vitalis:
But that's not really what I mean. It's like bigger picture. What's food? Like, here's what food is. Food is the body parts of living beings. It really doesn't matter what kind of diet, whether you're like on a full carnivore diet, which would I call like one end of the spectrum, or you're a full vegan diet on the other end of the spectrum, you're eating the body parts of creatures.

Daniel Vitalis:
So you know, if you're eating broccoli, you're eating the inflorescence, the flour of a being called Brassica oleracea, that's what we call it. That's a plant, which is a living creature. So it's a being, it's an entity, and its flour head is what we call broccoli.

Daniel Vitalis:
And we break that body part off and we eat that part of its body. And if we sit down to a bowl of sauerkraut, it's like, you're eating like a gazillion bodies. They're bacterial, but bacteria are living beings, so they're entities.

Daniel Vitalis:
So you're eating their whole bodies. You're actually eating like a whole civilization of them when you have a bowl of sauerkraut, right, or some yogurt or something like that. It's obvious when we're eating meat, it's like, hey, that's a leg or a wing or, you know, a gizzard or any kind of whatever body part.

Daniel Vitalis:
When you're eating a mushroom, it's like, okay, you're eating the fruiting body of a mycelial mass, which is a living creature. So we can't yet synthesize food. Like if somebody could develop the technology to synthesize food so you could take rocks and turn that into calories, like wow, that would revolutionize the world, but that hasn't, that technology doesn't exist yet.

Daniel Vitalis:
So all foods have to start off as living creatures, and we either eat them whole or we eat them in part. There aren't really any exception. You could be like, the closest exception to something you could get calories from that wouldn't be a body part.

Daniel Vitalis:
You could be like, okay, milk, but that's really a liquid tissue, like blood, so it's just a body part. Or you could be like, alcohol has seven calories per gram, as I'm sure you know, you know, wine enthusiasts.

Daniel Vitalis:
But it's like, you know, that alcohol is the excretion of the back, the yeasts who consume it. It's like just a body excretion. It's a liquid tissue. It's like, we can't synthesize food. So when we eat, we're all predators in that sense, regardless of like how we approach food or what diet we subscribe to.

Daniel Vitalis:
So food is living things, and you make yourself out of living things. And why I think that's important, this has Melanie stuck with me for years. This like burns in my mind. Most people build their bodies out of creatures they've never seen.

Daniel Vitalis:
They don't even know what they look like. So like how many people have eaten a cod, but how many people know what a codfish looks like? Like actually looks like, not the filet, but the actual animal.

Daniel Vitalis:
You know, so many people would not recognize a full grown lettuce plant. They might recognize it when it's young and it looks like the lettuce on their plate, but most people would never recognize a full grown asparagus plant.

Daniel Vitalis:
It's astonishing that we have reached that level of removal where we don't recognize, people can walk by on the streets, creatures they've been eating their whole life and not recognize them. And that's just astonishing to me.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, I was trying to think of anything that would be, I guess Bill does talk about cultures that eat clay, but that's not really caloric.

Daniel Vitalis:
But it's not caloric. Yep, that's geophagy, right? So that's a great point. Salt's really similar. You know, we do require salt, but it's not caloric. So we're eating a mineral for the electrolyte balance, or we might eat clay because it has adsorptive properties, because if it's electrical charge, but that's really different than food.

Daniel Vitalis:
We can't really sustain ourselves on that.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, friends, I adore the work of this next woman, Loretta Breuning. I'm really excited actually, literally right now I'm prepping for our next interview, which is next week for me, not for you guys.

Melanie Avalon:
For you guys, it'll be in 2024. But Loretta Breuning, I honestly, she's another woman where if everybody read all of her books, I think it would truly change society because it's a quote, happy hormones are affecting everything.

Melanie Avalon:
So dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins, and it's not really what you think. Reading her work, you realize how much we idealize nature and the animal kingdom when really it's not the way the media might make it seem.

Melanie Avalon:
Actually animals have a lot of conflict. Maybe society isn't the cause of all conflict. She has fascinating theories about the role of serotonin, for example, in social hierarchies. So maybe you shouldn't feel bad about wanting to be popular.

Melanie Avalon:
Pretty cool idea. There were so many parts of our conversation I could have included today, but I decided to pick one that is something I'm really interested in, which is the existence of matriarchies and patriarchies.

Melanie Avalon:
And what does that mean? Please enjoy this conversation with Loretta Breuning. There's often a lot of debate about society now and the patriarchy and is that a real thing? So are there patriarchies and matriarchies in animal systems? And how might that apply?

Loretta Breuning:
So what I challenge is the idea that everything would be perfect if women ran the world. So I do not buy this at all. And the more people try to force you to believe that, the more I say, well, how scientific is it if they have to force you to believe it with shaming and shunning?

Loretta Breuning:
So the evidence I use in most of my books, but most thoroughly in status games, is all of the various species with what could loosely be called matriarchies, although they take very many different forms, that whenever women have power, that there's conflict and aggression.

Loretta Breuning:
And so it's a mammalian thing. And there's female conflict and aggression and male conflict aggression and combined conflict and aggression. And I use examples from all different species that, you know, the famous one is when females control the mating hierarchy, that's what's very motivating to animals is who controls and what behaviors control my genes should survive versus your genes should survive.

Loretta Breuning:
And lots of negative energy goes into making sure that my genes survive rather than yours with hundreds of examples.

Melanie Avalon:
The example that really blew my mind. I just have to ask you, so is this true? I mean, I know you talk about in the book, but this, so you talk about hyenas. Oh, yeah, isn't that my? Ha, ha, ha. Okay, you can correct me if I get this wrong, but basically the idea is that hyenas, if there are twins, they're female.

Melanie Avalon:
Wait, are the twins always female?

Loretta Breuning:
They almost always have twins. And if the first one is female and if the second one is female, it will eat it. So they've evolved the external appearance of males. And it seems weird, like that natural selection could select for something that specific.

Loretta Breuning:
But basically, when they have the external appearance of a male, they don't get eaten. The bottom line is that if you look at an adult female hyena, a certain subspecies, they have the external appearance of male genitalia.

Loretta Breuning:
But they're not functioning male genitalia. They have functioning female like every other mammal, but with the physical form of a male. I know that sounds hard to believe, but... That's my question.

Melanie Avalon:
What's mind -blowing about it is from evolution, how that develops.

Loretta Breuning:
Yes, well, I'll give you a really good book on how these things develop in a less gross example. It's called The Beak of the Finch of how a finch is beak. Like Darwin talked about this, but like one finch has a beak that's slightly longer and one has a beak that's slightly wider.

Loretta Breuning:
And the longer one is better at getting nuts from this tree, but the shorter one is better at getting nuts from that tree. And so then these people that did this really close research, they saw that actually the same trees, it's just one year there's more rain, so the nuts are better for this kind of beak.

Loretta Breuning:
And the other ones starve to death. So then you only left with the ones with that kind of beak. But then another year there's less rain and then the other. So these different beaks evolve within like a few years because all the ones with this kind of beak reproduce.

Loretta Breuning:
And all the ones with that kind of beak, even if they don't starve to death, they starve to the point where their reproductive system shuts down.

Melanie Avalon:
So like with the hyenas, because I think it, you talked about it, it was like that, how the clitoris changed to look like the male version. So it's like, if there was a hyena that was born, that looked like that a little bit, that would survive.

Melanie Avalon:
Wow. That's pretty mind blowing.

Loretta Breuning:
But then there's, you know, really other mind blowing examples of what's called female power. So I explain them in the book lots. There's so many examples and they're all different. And that's what it's like.

Loretta Breuning:
What do they have in common is that the young are more likely to survive and that the behavior is caused by chemicals.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, yeah. So it just seems like, because we, especially in today's society, we put so much energy and effort into, you know, analyzing the patriarchy and would it be better as a matriarchy? And is that natural or is that not?

Melanie Avalon:
But it just seems like the takeaway is that all species and animals have hierarchies, and it's just determined by whatever the system is at that moment.

Loretta Breuning:
I don't believe in the patriarchy thing for two reasons. So one is males don't cooperate with each other. They compete all the time. So this whole idea that men are getting together to keep you down is just an illusion.

Loretta Breuning:
Men are putting each other down as much as they're putting you down. It's just that you're having a thin skin about it, whereas other men aren't having a thin skin about it. So that's the first thing.

Loretta Breuning:
Second thing, my father was a very quiet, unassertive man, and my mother was very assertive, but not out of strength, but out of fear and panic. And then my son is quite short. So I observe in the natural world and in the human world.

Loretta Breuning:
So the taller males get more power. And I read studies even that when a taller male talks, people literally think that what they say makes more sense. So they say, oh, I didn't follow him because he was tall.

Loretta Breuning:
I followed him because he was smart. Now, this is unfair. Nobody earned how tall they are. And yet, should my son be unhappy his whole life just because he's short? No. Is the tall man happy every minute because he's tall?

Loretta Breuning:
No. He's just busy fighting off other tall men. So it's just a waste of your life energy to obsess over these things. And in the natural world, the bigger males, oh, there's all kinds of this debate over whether they have better social skills or in which one.

Loretta Breuning:
But the bottom line is animals are always making a choice about who to follow. And they tend to follow the individual that they think is going to keep them safe. So if you have proven better at doing this safety behavior, I'm going to follow you.

Loretta Breuning:
And maybe if you're taller, then you could see predators at a greater distance will follow you. So just take responsibility for you are deciding who you follow and everybody else is deciding who they follow.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, friends, I love this next guess work and I love the topic that I picked from our conversation because it tackles two things that are super important to me. One is supporting brain health and preventing cognitive decline.

Melanie Avalon:
For that, I cannot recommend enough reading Mark Milstein's work, the age -proof brain. And of course, I get to include something I'm super passionate about, which is the role of line in health and in particular, how it affects the brain.

Melanie Avalon:
I was torn between this clip and one that's super cool, about seven seconds and how you can use that as a hack to remember everything. That's just a teaser, so you'll have to listen to the full episode for that.

Melanie Avalon:
But without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous conversation with Marc Milstein. Historically on this show, I've had people in two camps for Alzheimer's specifically and diet. So I had the sure size at Loma Linda who run the Alzheimer's, I'm not sure the department there at Loma Linda, they propose a very heavily plant -based diet for brain health.

Melanie Avalon:
And then I've had Max Lugavere, who is very much on the other side of things as far as the importance of animal products. Where do you fall on the spectrum when it comes to diet and brain health? And I know that's a huge question and we're running out of time, just briefly.

Marc Milstein:
I know that's a good question. I think there's room for both. So what I would say is that the diet that we see a lot of evidence for is something in the world of Mediterranean -like diet. There's the mind diet that is kind of like a Mediterranean diet mixed with a hard, healthy dash diet.

Marc Milstein:
And it focuses on a lot of fruits, a lot of vegetables. I should say more vegetables than fruits, but it includes fruits, because blueberries is a fruit, some other fruits too, but it includes nuts, beans, there's lean meat, there's fish.

Marc Milstein:
That sort of diet, we just have a lot of evidence that it's beneficial. Purely vegetarian diets, plant -based diets can be really good too. I think there is a concern that if somebody is on a vegetarian diet, just to make sure that they're getting adequate B12 and choline, which are important for the brain, and those are often, specifically choline is often found in more meat products.

Marc Milstein:
So I think that if we look at all the data, it's diet is individualized, and there's room for some versions of these diets that people find, one diet is not the cure, it's not the perfect diet for everybody.

Marc Milstein:
But we tend to see that in all this complexity for diet, there's some pretty simple takeaway rules that apply. And one is minimizing the processed food. I was just actually reading a study this morning that was really interesting that they found that if people had 20% of their diet had processed food in it, they had about a 30% increase risk of developing dementia or memory loss.

Marc Milstein:
And the average American is having 56% of their diet processed food. And so really just something that's just really simple, whatever diet you find works for you, make a part of it to minimize the processed foods.

Marc Milstein:
It doesn't have to be completely eliminated because they actually found in the same study that there is room for an indulgence here or there, people who had most of their diet, like most of their diet was minimally processed fruits, vegetables, lean meats, if that works for the person, fiber, then the impact of a small amount of these ultra processed ingredients didn't seem to have much of an impact.

Marc Milstein:
But when it's in the 20% region or more of the diet, then we're getting concerned. So I think that things that are too restrictive are hard to follow for people. That's why Mediterranean like diets are more easy.

Marc Milstein:
They're more lifestyle based. There's a lot of good, tasty, healthy food there. But again, within these parameters of look at your plate, try to have a handful of colorful fruits and vegetables, not to just throw out study after study, but another study that came out a few weeks ago is that just think about broccoli, spinach, kale, beans, tomatoes, tea.

Marc Milstein:
You might not love all of them, but some aspect of those things in your diet, the study found that people who have those things in their diet lower the risk of memory loss or dementia by about 30%. So there's these flavonols that we believe are very protective to the brain.

Marc Milstein:
So minimizing the processed foods, adding these brain healthy foods on the plate, most meals is a really good first step. And then beyond there, I think there's room for people to say, the max diet, the max look at your diet is something that really works for me, or the loma linda diet is something that really works for me.

Marc Milstein:
And I think there's room for these different avenues.

Melanie Avalon:
How about the recommendation in the mind diet to have one glass of red wine per day?

Marc Milstein:
Yeah, that's, I always like, I do a lot of speaking and the only time I've ever gotten a standing ovation was when I said that. So that was people, you know, alcohol is one of the most controversial aspects of brain health.

Marc Milstein:
You look study after study just conflicts. And I think that if the mind diet, it's included in a moderate amount, there's evidence that wine has some anti -inflammatory benefits, antioxidants, it can have some relaxing benefits.

Marc Milstein:
But the only caveat is, is that, well, I'll just start, I'll take one step back. This is what we know, past moderate alcohol intake, there's a lot of evidence that's not good for the brain. We're not at the point where we would say people need to start drinking for their brain health.

Marc Milstein:
That's not what we're saying. But we would say that moderate alcohol, there's evidence in the mind diet that it can be a benefit, but there are people who have underlying conditions or genetics that make alcohol not a good choice for them.

Marc Milstein:
And they should just, you know, once or twice a year, just bring it up to your doctor and just say, based on everything you know about me, is there any reason why I just want to be more careful? I want to be aware of anything that's going on with me individually.

Marc Milstein:
But I think that there's, you know, this evidence, it can be a benefit in moderation, and then taking that one step to make it individualized.

Melanie Avalon:
I think you said that the APOE4 gene made it, there were not the benefits associated.

Marc Milstein:
Yeah, so that's what we see. So if you have certain underlying genetics, or let's say you have a condition where alcohol might exacerbate that condition, and then that condition also impacts your brain health, then you want to say, okay, let me just think about what is a right amount for that individual and taking it to the point.

Marc Milstein:
And also saying, we always want to look at the, it's not one factor, it's all these factors together and thinking about how do we leverage sleep and diet and exercise and eating and all these things together to say like, what is the right formula, you know, per person.

Marc Milstein:
It's not that everybody has to be on this strict, strict plan, but saying, like, okay, which of these things are things that I can do easily and simply in a way that I can optimize my life and, you know, feel my best.

Marc Milstein:
That's a really big measure of this is how are you feeling day to day and keeping it simple and saying, what are these things that I can do that can have a big impact.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, friends, this next woman, I just adore what she's doing. I adore her as a person. I actually did video interview for this interview because she's somebody I've been following for so long and I just needed to capture that moment on video. And her energy and her presence is just so calm and encouraging and kind and beautiful. And she's had so many incredible books that have changed people's lives, like The Root Cause, like Hashimoto's Protocol and her most recent book, Adrenal Transformation Protocol, I think will be so, so helpful for so many people, especially women, when it comes to burnout and how to actually fix that in a way that's not like, oh, just go and don't do anything for a month and stop drinking all coffee and all of that because Dr. Wentz knows that's not always completely doable for everybody. I think you guys will really enjoy this part of our conversation and especially the answer to does adrenal fatigue actually exist. Let's find out. Please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Izabella Wentz.

Izabella Wentz:
When we've been stressed out for a long time, our body will shift into this state known as adrenal dysfunction. The scientific term is hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis dysfunction. This happens over time because initially when we're stressed, the body gets the message to produce more cortisol.

Izabella Wentz:
As that goes on for too long and we still keep having stress, exposure and perception of stress, the body will eventually compensate. Some of the cortisol receptors can become saturated, desensitized.

Izabella Wentz:
And essentially what can happen with time is that the body still senses stress and so our brain will send a message to the adrenal glands to produce stress hormones, but then the adrenal glands don't respond properly.

Izabella Wentz:
And there seems to be this communication breakdown along the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis where it's like, yes, I'm stressed and yes, I need to make cortisol, but my adrenal glands are not doing it.

Izabella Wentz:
And usually it's because you've been in a chronic stress state. So, people are like, oh, adrenal fatigue doesn't exist. And I'm like, okay, why don't you do a PubMed search for hypothalamic pituitary axis dysfunction?

Izabella Wentz:
Because that's actually what it is. So that's the scientific term for it. And I believe that the kind of, I guess skepticism around it comes from the term adrenal fatigue, sounding a lot like adrenal insufficiency, which is another name for addresins.

Izabella Wentz:
People would go to their doctors after reading something online or maybe working with their naturopaths and they'd go to an endocrinologist and say, can you test my adrenals? And the endocrinologist would do the tests for addresins and they would say, you do not have addresins disease, right?

Izabella Wentz:
So this is, I feel like I've been talking about it a lot and I'm like, this is kind of like a nomenclature thing where it's really the naming of it that got people confused and the initial theory about what the mechanism of action was behind this.

Melanie Avalon:
So basically, when people think adrenal fatigue, they think the adrenals literally cannot produce cortisol, but really they're just not. I'm just choosing not to or they're not hearing. Are they not hearing the message or are they hearing the message and choosing not to?

Izabella Wentz:
I think it could be one or both of, a bit of both of these. I think the key is that they're physically going to be healthy, but they're not producing cortisol at the right times and the, in the right amounts.

Izabella Wentz:
Some of the theories behind that would be the receptor desensitization. So that cortisol receptors maybe pick up the messages and they don't send it forward. But it is, it is something that is very, very common to the point where a lot of the symptoms are so common that they get brushed off, but you can actually test for adrenal dysfunction through some integrative tests as well.

Melanie Avalon:
So when they're testing for adrenal dysfunction, what do they test specifically?

Izabella Wentz:
Some of the tests that I find the most helpful are going to be things like the Adrenal Saliva test, and this is cortisol. You can test your cortisol secretion throughout the day. Generally, we want to have a healthy cortisol response first thing in the morning, and then that you should have a kind of gradual decline of cortisol production throughout the day so that in the evenings, you can rest and sleep.

Izabella Wentz:
The cortisol levels can be tested throughout the saliva, and then there's also a Dutch profile test that looks at your cortisol levels and your cortisol metabolites in your urine. This is another test that we can do.

Izabella Wentz:
These tests, they're not going to be approved by your insurance, and the endocrinologists may not be utilizing them. Generally, if you're going to an integrative practitioner or a functional medicine practitioner, this is a person that may be able to order those tests for you, or you can self -order them online.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay friends, this next conversation was a surreal, crazy moment. I did P90X. I was one of those people. I've known about Tony Horton for years and years, so to actually interview him in real life was crazy.

Melanie Avalon:
And on top of that, he looks the exact same as he did back when I was doing P90X in high school. Like this man does not age, and his energy is still just profoundly crazy and overwhelming and there. He's kind of like Mark Sisson.

Melanie Avalon:
Like they both have that just forever young vibe. And Farmer Lee Jones and Wim Hof also have that vibe of just like the overwhelming, empowering, captivating, amazing, inspiring energy. That is Tony Horton.

Melanie Avalon:
And for today's clip, if you know Tony Horton, you probably know about muscle confusion. Is it real? Let's find out. Please enjoy.

Tony Horton:
There would be things that I would change about P90X, but we would have had other avenues in which to get it out to the world. I mean, that was that, you know, P90X was king for quite some time. It was not, it didn't compete with anything.

Tony Horton:
So, you know, there were aerobics workouts and martial arts workouts and then there were like bodybuilding workouts. But, you know, my thing was the whole muscle confusion thing. It's like, you know, of course Arnold comes on and says, I do my Arnold.

Tony Horton:
There's no such thing as muscle confusion. It's stupid, it doesn't work. I go, yeah, because it's a made up term. We made it up. We made it up because Billy Eidel, when I trained Billy Eidel, he used to call me muscle Confucius, right?

Tony Horton:
That was his thing. And so I'm the CEO of Beachbody. Oh, that's funny. Why don't we just call it muscle confusion? Because that's kind of what it is, even though it's not a real thing. We're just giving people, we're just keeping people from plateauing by stimulating different body parts in different ways so that they're avoiding the boredom, injuries and plateaus that comes from doing just the elliptical over and over again and expect, you know, you can do yoga.

Tony Horton:
Yoga is amazing because it is balanced and it's got a lot of balance and strength and flexibility and mindfulness, all at once. But don't plan on being able to run faster. Don't think you're gonna get up a mountain on your bike very, very well.

Tony Horton:
Don't think you're gonna be able to pull yourself over a wall or do a pushup or a pullup ain't gonna happen. So my whole idea was to make sure that we gave everything. I would have had 24 workouts, which is what I have in the Power of Four, a brand new program on Power Nation.

Tony Horton:
It's 24, which I figured like, that's enough. That way we can create multiple calendars and multiple sequences. And the weird thing is that people were doing P90X, oh man, this event that I did in Tampa last week, I've been doing P90X since it came out, no four, but I've done it 37 times.

Tony Horton:
Really? You should stop. You should stop that. You should stop that. You look great, but oh my God, I mean, how many times can you hear me say, back up like a pterodactyl? God, I mean, come on. How many times do you wanna hear Phil say, don't, you know, or me having me say, don't smash your face or whatever.

Tony Horton:
I mean, I don't know. I mean, people, they fall into these patterns and I still get residual, so I guess that's okay. But I think the idea here is, and the reason why I would, I would probably take about eight moves out of P90X that I think could be injurious.

Tony Horton:
That word, injurious. For certain people, like the dive bomber push -ups, no, those aren't ideal for a lot of people who have like shoulder mobility issues and a couple others. But the variety thing, which still, like where's the program out now?

Tony Horton:
Show me the program out now that has martial arts and has plaudi and has epiret, berberex and shoulders and arms and back and chest and legs and plio, you know. They all stick to their guns, you know, and do their one thing.

Tony Horton:
And then the boardrooms and the injuries and the plateaus kick in. You know, there's a lot of people who graduated from insanity, which blew out a bunch of knees because it was legs every day, which is like, okay, whatever.

Tony Horton:
It was great for some people. Some people do the best shape of their life because they were in their 20s and they were athletes. You know, everybody else was like, holy smokes. Same thing with P90X. If you, you know, if you push too hard and you lifted too heavy and you did too many reps and you weren't listening to your body, you got hurt doing that too.

Tony Horton:
You know what I mean? And they would graduate from those two programs and go on to CrossFit and other super competitive. Now, another one with CrossFit, I've done CrossFit classes and had an absolute blast and really pushed the envelope.

Tony Horton:
But I'm in this business. So I knew where to back down. I knew where to back off. I knew how to, you know, I went to a guy wanting me to do getups with 80 pound sandbags and I did one round of it and I went, yeah, I'm going to 40s, dude.

Tony Horton:
But apparently nobody used to talk back at this coach and I did because I didn't care. I cared more about my getting out of there, you know, unscathed and everybody else was in there, didn't care how badly this guy beat them up.

Tony Horton:
So, you know, ask for what you need. Don't be pushed into something that could hurt you, right? So a lot of people just have to, you know, speak up and they don't. So that would stay the same. But as far as how the industry has changed, I think if it's working, if you're tracking what's happening and you're getting the success that you want in a relatively reasonable period of time, then keep doing what you're doing.

Tony Horton:
But too many people are doing stuff because everybody else is doing that stuff and they bounce from one diet to one program after another after another, you know, searching for the holy grail because, you know, one category of folks like, they're disappointed that they haven't lost 25 pounds and they look amazing in three weeks, you know what I mean?

Tony Horton:
Or there's the other category of people who are doing something for six months and see very little change and are broken all the time and go, oh, and then they just jump right back into it again. When you were supposed to stop doing that, stop doing that and do something else so that over the course of, I mean, no matter what it is that you do, whether it's diet or exercise, within three weeks you should see improvement.

Tony Horton:
in your physique, in your energy, in your flexibility, in your strength, in your digestive system, in your brain function, in the quality of your sleep, in your love life, these things should change.

Tony Horton:
I mean, I'm talking maybe for some incrementally. But if you're not paying attention and you just wrote about it, you're just doing it because that's what you did in high school or that's what your friends are doing and you're not seeing the results and you're broken all the time and tired all the time, then you're eating the wrong stuff.

Tony Horton:
You're taking the wrong supplements. You're hanging out with the wrong people. But we're so, you know, we treat diet and exercise like religion and it's not that. Not even close. It's not even close, so.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, friends, it was a situation where I got pitched for the book and I was like, I want to read that. And I'm trying to remember, I think this was actually one where I saw like a list of books that I got pitched and I just zoned in on this one and I was like, that looks so interesting.

Melanie Avalon:
And it was Jackie Higgins for her book, Sentient, which is all about our senses that we're not aware of and how we learned about that from animals. Such a cool read and then connecting with Jackie, she was such an amazing human being.

Melanie Avalon:
She spoke to me all the way from the UK. It was hard to decide which aspect to include in today's show because there were so many mind blowing things. I mean, just listen to the full episode for crazy things with animal senses as well as our own.

Melanie Avalon:
But I decided to go with something that I think most people are pretty interested in, which is the role of pheromones. Do they exist? What do they do? Let's find out. Please enjoy this fabulous excerpt from my conversation with Jackie Higgins.

Melanie Avalon:
So pheromones, are those real? Are we actually attracted to people through these senses?

Jackie Higgins:
So pheromones are certainly real. Whether the kind of the love potion for humans, the love pheromone that we can't resist is real is not yet proven. There's some really interesting studies happening at the moment on babies.

Jackie Higgins:
I think Benoit Charles at the University, a university in France, and I don't know whether the work is yet published, but I know he's looking at pheromones that are detected in mothers' milk that enable babies to guide them towards the breast and help them with breastfeeding.

Jackie Higgins:
So that possibly will be the first human pheromone to be a love drug between mother and child of another kind. But there are definitely pheromones in the animal kingdom, and I talk about the very first pheromone to be discovered, which was bombacol, which comes from the silk moth.

Jackie Higgins:
But there are also lots of interesting, and that's what the chapter looks at, lots of interesting ways in which smells subconsciously, subliminally plays to perhaps our sense of love or attraction. Really interesting study on the MHC genes you mentioned in passing, the major histocompatibility complex genes, which essentially are genes that look after our immune system.

Jackie Higgins:
And there's been some really fun studies on getting members of the opposite sex to smell sweaty t -shirts. And they make choices on which smells they prefer based on it. And when the numbers are crunched, what they find is a woman might choose a man who has compatible genes with her MHC complex.

Jackie Higgins:
The idea being that by having babies together, you'd create babies with stronger immune systems. So there are many ways in which smell does get involved in dating, in attraction, but we have yet to find the human kind of love drug.

Jackie Higgins:
Titania's love, Puck's love drug for Titania. But there are scientists who think it will be found, it's been found pheromones. I mean, since that discovery of bombacol in moths, pheromones have been found nearly everywhere throughout the animal kingdom in so many different places.

Jackie Higgins:
I think most recently in elephants. So the idea that this is another theme of the book, the idea that we think we're special, that we're different, is to me as a zoologist a bit of a nonsense. We have a deep evolutionary past with all these creatures.

Jackie Higgins:
We share commonalities in many different ways. So I'm of the belief that we will find a human pheromone, whether it's as as compelling as people fear, whether it's it completely banishes free will, I doubt.

Jackie Higgins:
But I think it would, you know, I suspect that we will find one and it will be, it will encourage attraction. It's all in the gray areas rather than the black and white.

Melanie Avalon:
I find it interesting that, I guess I don't really know enough to make this statement, but it seems like there is a lot of studies on it. So I find it interesting that it's not more crystallized yet in the research.

Jackie Higgins:
Yes, well, it's highly political as well. I mean, it's, so the evidence when it comes is gonna have to be watertight. Okay, that may sound...

Melanie Avalon:
If and when it comes. Because I was thinking about it because you mentioned how in the studies it does seem to indicate like with the genes that opposites likely attract. And so then I was thinking, well, that's interesting.

Melanie Avalon:
So maybe evolution set us up for mating and procreation in the beginning, but maybe it didn't set us up so much for longevity in relationships. Because I've heard the opposites attract, but similarities stay together is what they say.

Melanie Avalon:
So I just wonder if it's hard to like find the perfect partner who's your opposite, pheromone -wise, but similar as far as like personality and getting along and all of that.

Jackie Higgins:
I think the thing is we use our brains and we're not dictated by our senses and there are very many other things that come into play when we're thinking about attraction nowadays. So, I think it's more complicated than just smell.

Jackie Higgins:
I think smell is part of the story and it's part of the story in a way that is surprising and intriguing, but there are very many other important factors. And looks, I mean, the way someone looks. So yes, it's complicated.

Jackie Higgins:
We are complicated. I don't think we're other, but we are in comparison to other species. You know, there are very many commonalities, but we're complicated in different ways.

Melanie Avalon:
All right, friends, we have another fabulous, beautiful, incredible, empowering woman up next, Gabrielle Lyon. She is a dear friend. I adore her and I cannot recommend enough. Everybody, like the entire world, needs to read her new book, Forever Strong.

Melanie Avalon:
It is a complete paradigm shift as far as the role of muscle in health. Like I thought I knew about the importance of muscle and protein, and I knew I was going to enjoy her book, but I didn't realize the depths of the research and the science that it was going to get into.

Melanie Avalon:
It is mind -blowing. Read her book and it will change the way you view your body, you view your food, you view your health, you view everything. And here is just a tiny excerpt from our conversation.

Melanie Avalon:
I cannot recommend enough. Listening to the whole episode, it is that good. Please enjoy this part of my conversation that I had with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.

Gabrielle Lyon:
We are at the precipice of changing another paradigm. For the longest time, it has been believed that it is only the strength that matters. And from a cognitive perspective, it doesn't make logical sense.

Gabrielle Lyon:
It doesn't make logical sense that it is only the strength that matters, not the mass. Because what happens when you have low muscle mass, all the things that we talked about, low muscle mass will be a precursor for elevated levels of blood glucose, potentially insulin resistance, potentially elevated levels of triglycerides, etc.

Gabrielle Lyon:
What is going to happen when we directly look at skeletal muscle mass? I believe that it is going to change what we have thought about as the importance of actually laying down more of that tissue. Wow.

Melanie Avalon:
So I'm just thinking about how much, you know, if obesity was partly a proxy for the muscle issue and if that was just left out of all of these studies, it's kind of mind -blowing that insinuation is there.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, question about the strength versus the mass. So when it comes to, because they'll often say that muscle, and you talk about it as well, is highly correlated to longevity and mortality, does that go for both strength and mass equally, or is one more than the other?

Gabrielle Lyon:
Right now, people will talk about strength. The majority of the literature just focuses on strength. But there has been a recent few studies that showed that low muscle mass, again, I believe that these are population -based studies, so not as ideal as we'd like, but that the low muscle mass increases risks of both morbidity and mortality.

Gabrielle Lyon:
It really is the loss of tissue, but we just haven't caught up yet.

Melanie Avalon:
Why is grip strength what they normally look at when it comes to strength and longevity?

Gabrielle Lyon:
I believe differently than... So grip strength is considered just the standard, the gold standard for longevity. I'm not exactly sure how they decided or correlated that. But if you really dive into the literature, there's a few things that you may see that grip strength may be determined at birth.

Gabrielle Lyon:
So there is a possibility that grip strength is not going to be the ultimate outcome. But again, the challenge with muscle and the challenge with some of these metrics is oftentimes much of it has been repeated over time.

Gabrielle Lyon:
But if you look at some of the younger literature as it relates to younger individuals, there is some evidence to suggest that grip strength is determined at birth. And if that's the case, then it kind of throws out what we think about as it pertains to training for the improvement of grip strength.

Gabrielle Lyon:
I'm actually really glad you asked that question because people always talk about grip strength and I'm on the fence. I think that that is another potential mistake.

Melanie Avalon:
If you were to hypothesize about why grip strength would be a good indicator of longevity, like is there anything special about our hands, our hand muscles, or is it really just that's what they picked and went with?

Gabrielle Lyon:
I don't know. I mean, for me, it's not something that I've spent a lot of time addressing or thinking about because on a very fundamental level, I need to be able to answer the question, how is this translatable?

Gabrielle Lyon:
For me, I'm much more interested as a geriatrician or someone who trained in geriatrics is how many times and how fast can someone get out of a chair? How fast can they walk? What is their balance like?

Gabrielle Lyon:
Do I care about their grip strength? I mean, some people do, but again, I have to be able to answer the question, does this make sense? And what am I really looking at? Okay.

Melanie Avalon:
And then actually related to that, so that's really interesting about it potentially being determined at birth. When it does come to strength and mass, what is the role of genetics? What is the role of muscle contraction, so mechanical, like the actual mechanical action of the muscle?

Melanie Avalon:
And then what is the role of the brain, especially going back to what you were talking about earlier about looking at the brains of people with obesity. Does the brain influence the size and strength of our muscles?

Gabrielle Lyon:
Yes. So let me circle back and mention this idea of group strength. So people talk about it as this just indispensable bio marker, by the way. And looking at it, they believe that it's somewhat of a reliable bio marker for overall quality and strength and that when that is lost, that would essentially show signs of accelerated aging.

Gabrielle Lyon:
But again, I'm not so convinced that that is the overall metrics. So I just want to mention that because if we are talking about genetics and changes, I think that there's a lot of other things that potentially could impact grip strength.

Gabrielle Lyon:
And again, how do we correlate that all? I just want to make sure that I kind of close that out. I thought that that's important. Because I have their grip strength. I hope not. I hope they are at home determining how much they can squat, how fast they can run a mile, how many push -ups can they do, rather than thinking about grip strength as this indispensable bio marker for a young or middle -aged adult.

Gabrielle Lyon:
Maybe for an older adult is that it's easier to measure and easier to test. Again, we have to have enough sense that if we're asking the question and saying that there is a correlation or how is this relating, what is the real answer that we're going for?

Melanie Avalon:
Okay friends, next up, this book was so crazy to read, especially because I'm also the co -host of the Intermittent Fasting Podcast. And so I talk about intermittent fasting all the time, and I thought I knew a lot about fasting.

Melanie Avalon:
Boy, I knew nothing about the history of fasting. And then I read Steve Hendricks' book, appropriately titled, The Oldest Cure in the World. I'm a fan of that. And who knew fasting had such a long, complicated, windy, twisty, turny, oftentimes dark history.

Melanie Avalon:
And speaking of dark, just wait until you hear about the role of fasting in women and religion, and all of that stuff, particularly with anorexics. It's a really heavy topic, and I actually really wanted to include it as well, because when I posted about it on Instagram, whoo, it got a lot of debate.

Melanie Avalon:
So I knew the content was really resonating with people in some sort of way, as far as just making people think about things. So I'm definitely curious to hear what you think. Please enjoy this excerpt from my conversation with Steve Hendricks.

Melanie Avalon:
I don't remember which culture or time it was, but there was one example where women could fast because it was the one thing they could do. Like men would go on vagabon things, and they could do all this other stuff, but the only thing women could do was fast.

Steve Hendricks:
Yeah, during the Middle Ages, so fasting really took hold in Christianity, you know, probably 100, 200 years or so after the death of Jesus, who didn't have much at all to say about fasting, like most Jews who fasted him, he surely fasted, but he didn't have much to do with it.

Steve Hendricks:
Early Christians didn't have much to do with it. But eventually, Christians decided that the church fathers who ran Christianity at the time, that fasting could basically be used to subjugate women. The problem was, was that men were these, you know, very holy devout creatures, but yeah, they were a little bit weak, right?

Steve Hendricks:
And they were tempted by this, you know, temptress woman who, you know, got it up, just put down here to, you know, torment the male Christians was almost the view. And so the idea was that you could neutralize female sexuality by getting women to fast.

Steve Hendricks:
So, and sexuality was important because by this time in Christianity, the sort of sexual being had come to be seen as impure and tainting and so on. And fasting was supposed to dry up the moist humors in women that were supposed to be behind female lust.

Steve Hendricks:
And if you took fasting far enough, it could obliterate womanhood, womanhood, it could, you know, pair the hips, get rid of breasts and buttocks, it could end menstruation. And this wasn't supposed to be a punishment.

Steve Hendricks:
So, so the church father said anyway, this was supposed to be something to aim for, to make yourself more holy and your reward would be becoming a bride of Christ. And this was quite literally meant there, some of the creepiest erotic writings of late antiquity is so creepy, isn't it?

Steve Hendricks:
Are these, you know, scenes where Christ is uniting with his, you know, virgin brides in the heavenly bridal chamber or something. So, so this is, it's just obscene and it's, it's not to say that every woman in Christianity, you know, fasted herself to this near starvation.

Steve Hendricks:
But that was certainly the ideal that was held out. And so you find by the time you get to the Middle Ages in the Renaissance, the vast majority of saints who are women in, in the, you know, Catholic hierarchy who have been sainted are these fasting saints.

Steve Hendricks:
They, they have these very anorexic traits, some of them literally starve themselves to death. Most of them just starve themselves into illness and probably an early death because of it, though of course we can't say for sure.

Steve Hendricks:
And so, and that brings us to what you just referred to Christians, devout Christians were supposed to be, you know, practicing some form of asceticism. It didn't have to be as, you know, crazy as what the saints were doing and so on, but it needed to be something.

Steve Hendricks:
Lots of forms were open to men. And one of the biggest ones of the day was called mendicancy, which is just going around homeless from town to town begging, saying, you know, I'm a monk, I'm a brother of Christ, you know, please give me food or whatever.

Steve Hendricks:
And your penance was to have a, or not penance, but your, your sort of duty was to have a life with few possessions and to live on the goodness of others. When women tried that, there were a few who did the most famous as known as Claire of Assisi, when she tried it, she was told, well, this, you know, homeless vagabonding is not in keeping with, you know, pure womanhood.

Steve Hendricks:
So get back into your abbey and forget this kind of thing. And so what was open to her, what was open to her was the power over her own body. So on the one hand, while it was a very misogynistic, very horrible set of doctrine that were being, you know, handed to girls and women throughout Europe of this time, on the other hand, some of them did this kind of reclaiming thing.

Steve Hendricks:
Well, okay, if you're kind of, all you're going to give me is the power over my own body, I'm going to use it to starve my way to, to heaven, they would basically think. So, so you have these, you know, that's how, that's how you, one theory anyways, to how you got so many of these fasting saints, there was just nothing else or very little else left over that they could do that would achieve for them the equivalent amount of holiness as the men were achieving through their asceticism.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah, that was such a crazy, ironic dichotomy that on the one hand fasting was used to really oppress these women and repress their sexuality and control them. And then on the other hand, it was like the one thing the women could do to assert themselves.

Melanie Avalon:
Like, it's so ironic. And my sister came over the other night and I was telling her about the book and about all of this. And I was telling her about, you know, these saints who actually were probably anorexic and, you know, died from that.

Melanie Avalon:
And then they were canonized as saints. And I found the page in the book that you mentioned with those passages of the Bride of Christ stuff. And I was like, you have to read this. It's just, it's fascinating.

Melanie Avalon:
And so you can still see, you talk about Catherine of Sienna, who is one of the probably anorexic saints that died. You can still see her body, like parts of her body places.

Steve Hendricks:
Yeah, so, you know, there's this creepy thing in Catholicism where they have these in churches and cathedrals, these reliquaries and the relics that are in the reliquaries are often the body parts of saints.

Steve Hendricks:
So when a saint would die, sometimes it's a whole body, but, you know, people everywhere wanted a little bit of something. So they might chop off a finger and send that to one town, chop off a foot and send that to another town.

Steve Hendricks:
And so anyway, her body is scattered around Italy. Catherine of Siena was perhaps the, well, no doubt about it, was the greatest, most powerful fasting saint she had an influence over the popes of the time.

Steve Hendricks:
She had an influence over, you know, various princes and so on and their political dealings. You know, she helped propagate one of the crusades that was happening in her era. She died very early, almost certainly because she had weakened herself too much through too much fasting.

Steve Hendricks:
So she died in her early 30s. She died in Rome. She was from Siena and someone chopped off her head at some point and brought her head back to Siena. And if you go into the cathedral in Siena, you will see her head still there.

Steve Hendricks:
You can Google it. It's online and it's shocking how well preserved it is, given that we're talking about something, kind of forget the dates, but six or seven centuries ago. But yes, it's this creepy thing that is done in a lot of Catholic churches to take these various body parts.

Melanie Avalon:
Do you think this theme, because I think we'd like to think that we're beyond this, but do you think this theme has kind of continued with like maybe not as much today with the health at every size movement or yeah, yeah, health at every size movement, but like Parisian fashion and you know, runway models.

Melanie Avalon:
Is that kind of like a continuation of that theme?

Steve Hendricks:
Yeah, you know, it's a very good question, Melanie. And I'm not sure. I went into such detail about how fasting has been used to oppress women, because food and how much you should and shouldn't eat is, of course, still being used to just ruin women's lives, even if it's in a much more secular way of, say, Paris Fashion Week than a dictum from the Roman Catholic Church.

Steve Hendricks:
I don't know. I never found a scholarly article or report or something that drew a very clear line and said, this is why we're having trouble today. But the parallels to what was going on in the past and what is going on today with women's bodies were strong enough that I just wanted to lay that out there and your astute to notice that like to ask whether there's a connection.

Steve Hendricks:
And in the book, I don't say and I don't say because I don't have an answer. So possibly yes, possibly no. But regardless of whether there's a straight connection, I think we can learn from it. And it's not a super sophisticated message here.

Steve Hendricks:
It's just that women have been screwed over by usually men telling them what the hell to do with their bodies. And I especially wanted to be sensitive to that because, you know, I tell you, when I talk about, I mean, I've been talking about fasting with people for 15 years, hands down the ones who resist it far more.

Steve Hendricks:
The gender that resists it are women more than men. What definitely has to do with some of these themes, whether it's directly linked to what happened in history, who knows. But I think we need to recognize that and understand it and be sympathetic to it.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay, friends, this next conversation, when I remember having it, I can viscerally remember the experience. Of course, I tend to overwhelmingly love all of the episodes that I do. Sometimes I have an episode and it just, I physically feel the conversation in my body.

Melanie Avalon:
It's like I'm on a ride. It's like I'm at Epcot or something. That was this conversation. And I also had that experience reading the book as well. And it's a topic that isn't even really expressible because that topic is silence.

Melanie Avalon:
That topic is not something. It's an absence of something. Or is it a presence of something? Leigh Marz and Justin Zorn talk about that in their book, Golden, The Power of Silence and a World of Noise.

Melanie Avalon:
I cannot recommend enough everybody read it. It feels like a sigh of relief. Just reading this book, listening to this conversation. It's so, so powerful. I am so grateful for their work. Please, please enjoy.

Justin Zorn:
The most profound silence isn't even always auditorily quiet. It's not always the absence of all sound and stimulus, but it's the absence of noise. It's the absence of anything making claims on the consciousness.

Justin Zorn:
So sometimes, for us, I think for both of us, we've had experiences of profound silence when we're just so immersed in doing one thing that could be on a crowded dance floor or running the perfect line through roaring rapids.

Justin Zorn:
It's not always what we expected. For me, I write in the book about a moment of deep silence when my wife and I have twins and they were born just before the lockdowns in 2020 and had to spend a little bit of time in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit because they were born early, thankfully healthy, but it was a stressful time.

Justin Zorn:
And having a moment of just holding the two of them skin to skin in my chest amid all the nervousness and rumination and sounds of beeping bells in that hospital room, just having this moment of such deep connection together where it was like nothing else was real, no other noise could penetrate.

Melanie Avalon:
It's so beautiful. How about you, Leigh?

Leigh Marz:
What we might think the answer to this question could be when we conceptualize silence, that it's, you know, did it look a certain way and maybe be pristine, quiet in that auditory sense or maybe be alone.

Leigh Marz:
But really what we found in asking all these fascinating characters, neuroscientist, politicians, artists, a whirling dervish, a man incarcerated on death row and many, many more, this question in asking ourselves this question is that it was really surprising and that's really what gave the shape to this book.

Leigh Marz:
So my answer to that question, the one that wanted to be shared in this book, felt a little like that can't possibly be it. But the deepest silence I'd ever known also happened after the birth of my child.

Leigh Marz:
And it was at a time when I was in a cacophonous internal state of a postpartum psychosis. So many, many voices internally, unhelpful voices, we'll just summarize them as that. We're going on yammering and clawing for the mic and the attention and the spotlight.

Leigh Marz:
But at a certain moment I was asked a question, a really serious question from a psychiatrist who I think was trying to discern like what is the course of action with this woman? How far gone is she?

Leigh Marz:
What do we need to do to bring her back? He asked me if I'd ever lost my witness and when he asked that question, immediately all those voices parted. And what became clear to me is I just had this incredible sense of discernment, this ability to discern what was true.

Leigh Marz:
And my answer was yes, but only once. And in that moment I could feel something holding me a presence that I would call silence, this quietening of all that yammering, but also something bigger holding me throughout that chaotic experience.

Leigh Marz:
And it told me that I would be okay and I wouldn't need to be hospitalized and my relationship with my daughter would be beautiful and it is 17 years later. And then my marriage would endure and all these things were communicated in just like that.

Leigh Marz:
And that's the power of silence is that it's separate from time, it's separate from space. And we get transformed in those moments.

Melanie Avalon:
It's so interesting because the way we all now have described our experiences, it's interesting that it seems to be both a absence, so an absence of noise and a presence, which is hard to hold both of those at the same time.

Melanie Avalon:
Where have you guys landed then with defining silence and noise and sound? And you talk about that throughout the book, kind of the differences between those. Yeah, where are you now with that?

Justin Zorn:
It was really a journey. You know, we both felt this intuition around 2017 when we were both feeling pretty despondent about the state of the world, just the state of the discourse in the world and how people seem to be stressed out, yourselves included, the state of politics, the state of the environment.

Justin Zorn:
And we just didn't know how we could make change that would really be durable and effective. And we both felt this intuition, like, look to the silence, not just get it beyond the noise, but turn deeply to silence, absorb the silence, find the answers in no thinking or talking.

Justin Zorn:
So we wrote an article for Harvard Business Review about this, and at the time, we were still thinking about the definition of silence, really is mostly, you know, the absence of sound and stimulus. The article did really well.

Justin Zorn:
It really got a lot of people's attention to our surprise, because we thought it was a little bit out there writing about silence in Harvard Business Review. And, you know, as Lee mentioned, we followed the cookie crumbs and started interviewing this cast of characters about this question, starting with this question, what's the deepest silence you've ever known?

Justin Zorn:
And, you know, the definition of silence started to emerge through these answers, really. I mean, particularly in talking with academic psychologists and neuroscientists, people who've studied the brain and human cognition and the nervous system deeply, we first came to an understanding that noise is unwanted distraction, you know, and that could be at the auditory level, it could be at the informational level, or it could be at the internal level, which is to say that could be the unwanted distraction in our ears, on our screens, or where we take in information, or it could be the unwanted distraction in our heads, so auditory, informational, and internal.

Justin Zorn:
And we gathered a lot of research that we can get into, if you like Melanie, about how all of these levels of noise are on the rise, but in some cases exponentially on the rise of our world today. And then we came to this understanding that silence isn't just the absence of noise, like it is at one level, it's a space where no one is making claims on your consciousness, the place where no one is interfering with your perception or your intention.

Justin Zorn:
And then as you alluded to, there's this deeper level of silence that's a presence unto itself, this state of not knowing, this state from which inspiration and creativity, and even in some cases, a kind of healing can emerge.

Melanie Avalon:
All right, friends, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for taking this incredible journey with me. Honestly, I just feel like I'm on this crazy life adventure. Like what is happening? And I feel like you guys are all on it with me and I'm so grateful for that.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm wishing you all the happiest of holidays, the most sparkling of memories and moments. And here is to an incandescent beautiful 2024.