From Traditional Medicine to Holistic Health | Dr Thomas Hemingway

Dr. Thomas Hemingway M.D. graduated from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine in 2002 with the Doctor of Medicine Degree and then completed a residency in Emergency Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006.  He received his Board Certification in Emergency Medicine from the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) in 2007.  Dr. Hemingway has special interests in holistic health and wellness, preventative medicine, and nutrition.  He believes health and wellness are both possible and sustainable through simple strategies that address the root cause of health challenges. 

Follow Dr. Thomas Hemingway and purchase his upcoming book at ThomasHemingway.com.  Also check out his podcast, "Modern Medicine Movement" available on all podcast apps.

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Transcript

Ep 84 - Thomas Hemingway

Greg: [00:00:00] Hello, my friends. Welcome to the Greg Krino show.

Welcome to the show, everyone. I'm your host, Greg Krino Thank you for joining me. This is the place where we talk to experts and people with unique experiences so we can become better critical thinkers and ultimately gain a deeper understanding of the world. Before we begin, I need your help growing this audience, and you can do that by going to the bottom of your podcast app, giving me a five star rating and friendly.

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Finally, if you have any ideas for the show or you have any feedback, you can email me at GregKrinoShow@gmail.com. All right. In today's episode, we have Dr. Thomas Hemingway. Thomas was an ER doc for many years, and then he got into holistic medicine. So now is interest lie in wellness, preventive medicine, and nutrition.

You can follow Thomas Thomas, hemingway.com. He also has a book and he has a podcast. So check that out. His podcast is called the modern medicine movement. And with that here he is Dr. Thomas Hemingway. . So you gotta, you were an ER doc. Hey, why did you get into that? And then why did you move on to more preventive medicine? 

Thomas: Yeah, so I've always been one of those guys that likes to be able to kinda fix everything, you know, as a kid, I would take things apart, put 'em back together.

I come from the era where we watched you're probably super familiar shows like Doogie [00:02:00] Houser. And then when When the first ER, show, you know, with George Clooney came out, I was watching that and I, you know, I was kind of intrigued by it. I always loved studying, you know, the body and how it ticked, so to speak and just being able to kinda be the guy who could help out no matter what the scenario that was kind of always something I wanted to do.

I have a lot of physicians in the family, but interestingly enough, none of them um, ER docs, actually primary care radiology couple of dentists, you know, nobody in ER at all. And so it was just kind of something that uh, I, I enjoyed, I enjoyed being able to help people in a time of need, you know, somebody fell and dislocated their shoulder.

Like I could put that in for you, whether it be on the street, whether it be on a rocking boat, out in, you know, Cabo, you know, I've done it in all sorts of places throughout the world, in and out of the hospital. And it's just been such a rewarding area to be. But you know, one day, ah, it was over a decade ago.

I, I realized, you know, [00:03:00] we have in this country, we have amazing, you know, acute hospital sort of emergency care. You know, if you're dying of a heart attack or you like I said, dislocate your shoulder, or get heaven forbid like where I work you know, have worked in Hawaii, attacked by a shark. Like we can take care of you.

Like we have great, you know, acute sick care, but we are so terrible in this country at keeping people well, and actually preventing so many of these diseases. I mean, I had, I started to have guys in their thirties coming in with like the big time, what they call the widow maker, you know, heart attack where literally they'd be coming in with these massive heart attacks in their thirties.

And I, you know, I'm coming up on 50 now. I'm like, oh my gosh, these guys are a decade plus younger than I am. And they're like, literally. Potentially gonna die of a heart attack. Like something's not right here. Like something's not going right in this country. The trajectory is just all off, you know, where the sickest nation that we've ever been.

And one of the [00:04:00] sickest in the world, our obesity rates are climbing upwards of 60 to 70% and all of these illnesses that I'm starting to see. So regularly heart attacks, strokes, cancers, diabetes, and this complications. And then all of the, you know, obesity things and complications with respect to that are literally preventable.

I mean, 99% of this is preventable and what are we doing? We're missing the boat here. So that's when I just had this big aha. Like I gotta do something a little bit different. What I'm doing is great for that moment in time where I'm helping somebody in need, but in the big scheme of things, I just felt like I wasn't really doing.

Good to, you know, prevent all of this in the first place I've seen so much heartbreak. I mean, literally young people dying in a heart attack or even cancer. And most people don't know that most cancer is preventable as well. So it, you know, just kind of triggered something where I'm like, I gotta do more.

I gotta do differently. And I actually came full circle when I was a kid. You know, I was actually kind of one of these geeks [00:05:00] that used to read, you know, these books that were in those days considered kind of, kind of real voodoo medicine stuff. Like I, I read, you know, Deepak Chopra's original couple of books, you know, quantum healing and stuff like that.

I'm like this stuff is cool. Like the body is so much more than we give it credit for. And there's the mine, there's the body, the spirit, the soul, you know, the emotions, all of this interplay. And it really does work together and it can work together for our good, you know, and be highly beneficial to our health.

Or if those things are going haywire because we're watching the news all day and have all this negative energy that can affect us. You know, to the converse and be detrimental to our health. And so I kind of went full circle to what I used to kind of read and love to do in my early years. And then I went to medical school and I kind of got almost chased outta me.

Like I took a class and in those days, and it was kind of like cutting edge. It was called alternative medicine. You know, we gave a, gave it a label like this is not real medicine or mainstream medicine. This is alternative medicine where we talked about some of this, you [00:06:00] know, holistic kind of stuff.

But it was, you know, out of a class of 200 kids, there was maybe 10 people on that class. So nowadays, thank goodness. We're starting to get a little bit more traction. And people are realizing there's a lot more to health and wellness than just what ends up on the end of a prescription pad. So it, you know, that there's so much there and it just gets me excited to see how much we can do to help people without, you know, necessarily a pharmaceutical.

So 

Greg: When you're in medical school, I, how do they approach, how do they approach I, I guess what's their problem solving technique and I'm gonna kind of work my way through this question cause I'm not quite sure exactly what I'm asking, but you know, they have like normal medicine, quote unquote, then they have alternative medicine like what do they use as kind of like their foundational principles or documents in, in medical school.

So when they're like trying to teach you about cancer and they say, okay, here the causes here, the solutions. [00:07:00] And then, oh, by the way, these people over here are alternative and this is how they approach. Is there, are there like, is it, was it a cultural shift that happened recently? Like what do they use?

Do they use like studies? Do they use only a certain group of, or only a certain organization to get their ideas from like where do all these ideas go into medical school that become normal medicine and where do the alternative medicine ideas? Oh, that's a great, 

Thomas: yeah, that's a great great question.

Yeah. And honestly you know, I'll just call it sort of traditional Western medicine adopts this practice of sort of, looking for a diagnosis. You know, they want to call everything something, right. And they use like the old school, you know, we'll call, 'em like the medical textbooks, like, Harrison's and the pathophysiology book.

And it's all based on not truly underlying, cause it's more, you name a disease and you find out more or less like what's happening, but not necessarily the cause of the disease you. In medical [00:08:00] school are mostly taught nomenclature. So how to name and identify something, you know, how to make a diagnosis.

It's all about making the quote unquote diagnosis. And then like, almost like a kneejerk response. You go and are taught kind of what pharmaceutical agent or what treatment is available for this. And it always goes to first and foremost, pharmacology, you know, we took years of pharmacology which is, you know, the study of basically different medications or pharmaceuticals and how they can play into this.

And so the whole dynamic is really, you know, you look for the name, we have all these classified, you know, diseases, the nomenclature, there's a book like tones thick, I mean, inches and inches thick called the I C D nine. And it gives a code for every, you know, disease. And then once you have a code, you know, once you have a diagnosis, You basically look for what are the available therapeutics and [00:09:00] largely these are you know, pharmaceuticals.

I mean, they all physicians know that other things play into it. I mean, it's like, you can't deny, you know, how much somebody's diet or they're overall, you know, what their day looks like. Do they exercise? Do they not exercise? Do they have a good emotional, you know, life are they well balanced? You know, all these things, we all sort of have this intuition that they matter.

But in medical school, you're not really, they don't get the same kind of weight. It's all about what you can immediately show in a laboratory. You can show, okay, this disease tissue looks like this under the microscope. And it has at the chemical level, these receptors, which respond to these different therapeutics.

So if you have high blood pressure and these receptors respond to this. Thing called the alpha blocker will then you prescribe an alpha blocker. However, you know, interestingly enough, most of that is preventable in the first place by diet and lifestyle changes. And you're not really taught that. I mean, there's kind of this like, [00:10:00] you know, little bit, you know, that, that plays into it, but it's more about just naming a disease process and then going straight to some kind of a pharmaceutical that's how we were taught.

So I don't blame, you know, the traditionally trained Western guys like that was me. Like, that's how I was trained too. That's how you pass the test. , that's how the tests are sort of set up, you know, you gotta name the pharmaceutical that matches the diagnosis. And so I get it and at the end of the day, you know, we could get super, you know, I don't wanna call it philosoph, but I mean, when you look at, you know, who basically sponsors medical education, like where does the money come from?

It comes from big pharma. Like that's, who's paying the bills, they're giving money to medical education. And so, duh, we're gonna learn all about pharmaceuticals and it's important that we do. And I'm not saying I'm not trying to downplay the potential importance and the utility because there's great, you know, pharmaceuticals out there that can be very helpful in certain situations.

[00:11:00] However, it's way too over emphasized. And when you actually get to the root cause of an illness, you see that there's so many other factors that play into it. And nowadays, thankfully, it's still coming up super slow, but nowadays they're starting to be some traction into the data behind this cuz there is data behind it as well.

This isn't I'm just not making this stuff up. If you look at the current research and literature, there's actually tons of data that shows how your food. Can act like medicine, how it plays into either your wellness or your sickness, you know, the whole concept of what this metabolic health means, you know, 88% of us, we keep hearing this figure thrown out there.

88% of us are not metabolically healthy. Well, what the heck does that mean? You know, and there's tons of data behind that and we can get into the weeds if you want but it's really how we were trained. We were trained to recognize and name a disease. And then what was the go to agent? Like, that's just how we were trained.

And that's what we'll call traditional [00:12:00] Western medicine. That's the approach for better or for worse , that's what it has been, you know? 

Greg: Yeah. It sounds like it's a failure to keep digging in a sense. Yeah. So you have a symptom, you have a disease that causes that symptom. Okay. Here's the drug that will prevent this symptom, but then you have to say, well, what caused.

What caused the cause. Yeah. Let's go a little deeper, deeper caused that cause, and then just kind of keep going and eventually you get down to li lifestyle decisions. I'm sure there's genetic components as well. I, you know, I find it hard. I think just from a layman's perspective, I find it hard to know who's being a quack and who's not like, cuz you hear there's, everybody's got opinions on health.

Yeah. I mean you could go on forever on the internet. Everybody has some idea and like how do you know, how do you know? I know is there now you're saying that there is data to back it up. There are some studies. So we are [00:13:00] starting to see this get into the traditional medicine now.

So that's good. So it's no longer considered, I guess, alternative, but you talked about metabolic, you know, metabolic. Yeah. And there's data to back that up now. So if we're not metabolically healthy, you said 88% of us are not. 

Thomas: Yeah. 88% of us are not. So . 

Greg: Wow. That probably includes me cuz 88.

Percent's a pretty high number. 

Thomas: Yeah, no, I mean almost nine outta 10 people. 

Greg: yeah. Can you explain that and how we become metabolically healthy? Yeah. Yeah. 

Thomas: So, in a nutshell they take several factors into consideration, whether you may be overweight, whether you have high blood pressure, whether you're cholesterol profiles, maybe elevated there's this whole thing that, that actually I learned in medical school called the metabolic syndrome, or they called it in those days, syndrome X, and it was characterized by elevated blood pressure, obesity altered cholesterol profiles and leading you towards sort of what this ultimate, you know, cause of [00:14:00] death is for most people, if by the numbers, this heart disease.

So all of this sort of predicts. What your risk of heart disease. You know, the more these factors you have, if you're overweight and you have cholesterol problems and you have high blood pressure, you know, for example, you have all three, then you're gonna be, you know, having a much higher chance of having heart disease.

Then if you have zero or then if you have one of them. And so they kind of came up with the term gosh, it's been decades now but what they've done now is they've kind of dug a little bit deeper, like you were saying, they've now come up with additional ways to look at this one, one common term you hear thrown out there is insulin resistance is kind of one of the underlying you know, couple levels deeper than just kind of the superficial metabolic syndrome.

Metabolic syndrome is more, you know, do you have this? Yes. Do you have this? No. You know, it's just kind of adding up some, you know, quick little factors, whether it be being overweight, high blood pressure. You know, cholesterol problems, things like that. You just kind of add up those risks and then you [00:15:00] say, okay, you have either, you know, three outta four things, you have one out of four things.

And every one of 'em is some kind of, you know, problem. If you wanna call it like that, a metabolic problem. And if you go a little bit deeper and you look at well, what the heck causes, let's say. High blood pressure in the first place? Well, there's a lot of factors. One of 'em is what you eat. And one of 'em is genetic.

You know, another is what you do, you know, with 24 hours in your day, you know, do you move your body at all? Exercise has been shown to low, lower blood pressure over the long term while you're doing it. Of course it has to raise it. So you can get blood to all the important places while you're doing it, the muscles and the brain and all that.

But over the long term, it lowers your blood pressure. So then all those factors kind of come into play. But what goes deeper is this whole process of, you know, either you can call it inflammation. I think inflammation is one of the roots of everything because if a lot of people like to talk about insulin resistance and that's a big problem, I mean, what that means is [00:16:00] that if you eat food, you know, and there's any carbohydrates in there, which unfortunately our diet in the us and most developed countries is predominantly carbohydrates.

Whether we're willing to admit it or not. Like that's the truth. And here in the us, let's just take us, for example, 50, I think 9% of the most recent study I got off of PubMed. 59% of our diet is not only carbohydrates, but highly processed ones. You know, the highly processed grains, the flowers, the sugars, all the things that basically we buy in a package, you know, anything that comes off the shelf package with a barcode, it's gonna have some kind of process carbohydrate in there.

And those things, every time make your blood sugar go up, right? The blood glucose goes up and then your body responds and says, Hey, we can't let the blood sugar go too high because that causes problems sugar of any kind, as we know, it's super sticky. Right. Have you ever like, not, you're not at the stage yet, but when your kid spills [00:17:00] something that might be, say like a juice or oh wow.

Whatever else. And that stuff, like, if you don't clean it up right away, Oh, my gosh, it dries. And it has got the most horrible sticky residue. It's super sticky. Well in your body, you know, elevated sugar or blood sugar or glucose as we call it is also really sticky. It sticks to everything. It can stick to your blood vessel walls and make them kind of brittle.

You know, it can stick to the kidneys and give you kidney disease. It can stick to, I mean, it sticks to everything and there's a measurement of that. This is getting pretty popular. Now people are familiar with this term called hemoglobin A1C. When I was in medical school, we only used this in the context of diabetes and we didn't talk about it.

Like for the other, you know, in those days, diabetes was probably 20% of the population now. It's like 60% of us have either diabetes or prediabetes. It's ridiculous. Like two outta three, nearly two outta [00:18:00] three adults have either diabetes or prediabetes. And so this number, so it's a blood test called hemoglobin A1C actually measures this kind of stickiness.

It measures the glucose sticking to that red blood cell. It's called glycosylated hemoglobin. And it's basically the sugar that sticks to the red blood cell and it can be measured. And the cool thing about it is it can give you an estimate of kind of where your blood sugar has been for the last three months.

You know, we can all get our blood drawn immediately and say, okay, your blood sugar is 65, or it's 160 and you know that number instantaneously. But if you get this hemoglobin A1C number, it tells you kind of where it's been on average over the last three months. And so when we look at that, we can kind of see.

You know, if we have, you know, elevations in the blood sugar which makes not, like I said, it makes everything sticky. It sticks to the blood vessels, the kidneys, it causes all these issues, but you can get a good, kinda big picture really quickly. And in the body, you don't want elevated blood sugar [00:19:00] because it kind of ruins everything.

You wanna have enough, right? You wanna keep your brain going. You wanna have enough for the essentials, but you don't wanna have too much floating around. So that's what insulin does it takes that blood out of, or the glucose outta the bloodstream and puts it into the cells and stores. It stores it for later, you know, and the primary mechanism is it stores blood sugar.

As fat because 96% of all of our stored energy in the body is actually in the form of fat 96% of it only 4% in readily available glucose in the form of what's called glycogen. Glycogen is like the storage form. We have it in muscle. It's called muscle glycogen. We have a bunch in the liver. Well, not even a bunch, really about 150 grams or something in the form of liver glycogen.

And that just keeps our baseline glucose at a happy level. But after let's say an hour of exercise, even probably less than that, maybe 30 to 45 minutes of exercise, we've already depleted available glucose in the [00:20:00] form of glycogen. Then if we continue to exercise, we can start to think about, Hey, maybe we can burn some fat, like a lot of us wanna try to burn maybe a little bit of fat that we got over the pandemic, you know, that extra 10 pounds or whatever it is we wanna get into that.

And we can't even go there unless. Unless, you know, we were able to kind of use up those you know, stored glucose or the glycogen which often for many people, we are constantly just burning sugar because that's what we reach for. You know, we get a little bit hungry. What do we reach for?

We reach for some kind of snack that has carbohydrates in it. And so that kinda elevates our blood sugar temporarily. We get a little dopamine rush. We're like, oh, this is great. And then about an hour and a half later, it dips again. And we're like, oh crap, I need to have another fix. Maybe it's the granola bar.

Maybe it's the candy bar, maybe it's chips, crackers, whatever, something that came with a label. And we dip into that. And so we're on this constant roller coaster, a blood sugar going. Then dropping, then it goes up then dropping and it's this [00:21:00] insulin and blood glucose roller coaster that really messes with us because we don't have that kind of steady energy all the time.

It's kinda like an up and down and up and down and an up and down and an up and down. sorry, we're getting kind of a little bit tangential here but the, you asked about, you know, what this looks like in the big picture. And I was mentioning that having elevated blood sugar is not good for you, right?

It sticks to everything. It causes what we call end organ damage to the blood vessels, everywhere from the brain, you know, making you more at risk for a stroke, the kidney making you more at risk for kidney disease. The heart, of course, the one that is the primary killer worldwide heart disease is the number one killer worldwide.

And it's essentially at its root. The cause of it is the inflammation that results. From having this imbalance in blood sugar and insulin, like that's kind of at the base of the cholesterol is not the player that we used to think. It's a little bit different than we used to think. And we can go under that later if you want to, but it's not good to [00:22:00] have these roller coaster rides of glucose and insulin.

I'll just leave it at that for now. you, 

Greg: you know, I'd never heard anybody explain it like that. And I like that explanation about the physical stickiness of sugar, because it is obvious when you reach for a jar of syrup or you spill some juice on the counter, it gets sticky. We all know that. I never thought I never transferred that to body.

And that does make sense. You wouldn't want that sticky crap all up inside of you for however 

Thomas: long it stays there. Yeah. Clogging you up. It's called glycation. Glycation is that fancy term, but that's what it is. It's just the stickiness. Yeah. Okay. 

Greg: So stay away from sticky things. That's 

Thomas: pretty, yeah, pretty much.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. If you're pulling it off the vine or out of the ground and it comes in the form of a vegetable or a fruit, and there's a little bit of sweetness there, that's just fine. It's a totally different type.

Greg: Yeah. Yeah. That's what I've always said is the best thing sometimes is just an apple, you know, if you're gonna reach for something, like I find an apple wakes me up and recharges [00:23:00] me as good or better than anything. While we're on the heart thing, I actually have a question for myself and I've heard this from my coach.

Actually, he is, he's probably pushing 70 by now. Very healthy guy. He's been doing marathons and he is a cycler hir , super athlete. He went into the doctor and found out that he needs a triple bypass because of it's called C a CS C and I I forget the, what it stands for, but it's like a buildup in your arteries over the course of many years that you wouldn't even detect unless you had this test.

So you can be a perfectly healthy per person have this. I should look it up. 

Thomas: It's CAC test. It's a calcium score. Coronary calcium score. Yeah. That's what it is. 

Greg: That's what it is. And he said, if he had this test back in his forties, when it typically starts happening for people, he could have avoided this bypass.

So, you know, can you kind of explain what that is? And I mean, is it a thing, I mean, can [00:24:00] you be perfectly healthy for your whole life? And then all of a sudden, be 70 years old and need this bypass and having done everything correct. 

Thomas: So, so you can't be, let's just say it the way it is.

You can't be quote, unquote, perfectly healthy. You can. Okay. You can feel reasonably healthy and not be, let's say Subject to symptoms that you can recognize and have this going on, because what happens is it's kind of a indolent slow progressive thing. It's a very slow, steady process. This buildup of what we're looking at there is calcium.

So calcium shows up really well on a scan. Be it any kind of x-ray scan. This is usually done in a CT a computed tomography or cat scan and calcium just lights up. I mean, it's super bright, really easy to detect. And so they've found that this kind of, they give it a number, right? Like how much of this calcium do you have in your coronary artery?

You know, those small little blood vessels that feed the heart by [00:25:00] how much they light up on this special type of cat scan. And it's kind of a, it's not actually the calcium, let's just say, that's the problem. It's the calcium is how we can measure it. The calcium gets deposited along with cholesterol, along with inflammation into the blood vessel wall.

And over time, that thing was a garden hose. And now it's just a little tiny straw, you know, that doesn't provide the same kind of flow as it did 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. So slowly. This process builds up and the way that you can quickly measure it or get a pretty good kind of guesstimate of how clogged these arteries are in a way that doesn't involve sticking catheters inside them, and then injecting a dye, which is how they did it.

When I did my medical training, we always did these things called angiograms and it's super invasive, right? You gotta have a catheter put into that small little artery that feeds the heart, and then you inject a dye and you see on the [00:26:00] x-ray, it was an x-ray that they were doing. How, you know, if the thing allowed a lot of this flow to go through or not, or if there was a narrowed area, you would watch it kind of real time.

That's the way we used to do. It's called the coronary angiogram. And we still do use that to treat it like if somebody has a heart attack and that one of those blood vessels closes off acutely or all of a sudden, then they actually use that technique to find where that blood vessel is. And then they can put that little catheter in there.

They can put a balloon to. To open up, you know, kind of push that, that clot and stuff out to the side and kind of open that up. And so we still use that technique, but the coronary calcium is a nice way to noninvasively you know, study your likelihood of having a heart attack. And it's actually, it's nice for two reasons.

One, because you don't have to get any needles or pokes to do it. So it's not invasive. And two, because you can get a fairly decent amount of information from just one test, right? It's looking at the, they just call it the co the burden the [00:27:00] sort of the calcium burden. And that's the score, right?

The lower, the score of the better. So if you go in there and your calcium score is zero, like you're crushing it. That's what you want. Right? Like your baby's calcium score right now is zero. There's no significant calcium deposits in his coronary arteries. And we hope that it'll stay that way. And that's you know, very different from your friend, the water polo, You know, coach that you had that now maybe his score is I have no idea what it is hundred or something high, you know?

Yeah. And so they're like, oh my gosh, like you have all of this kind of narrowing of your blood vessels at any day. Like maybe you could get one of those clots for me, and then you would feel it. Then you would have the, you know, classic pain in your chest going down to your arm, maybe get sweaty, get dizzy.

Like you don't get those symptoms until there's either a complete blockage or like a significant one. , you know, when you just have 30%, 40%, 50%, which are all a lot. The blood's still getting through, it's still getting through, but you're not [00:28:00] having the chest pain and the classic heart attack, you know, symptoms.

Like he was probably like, I don't get it. Like I'm 70, I'm still doing stuff. Like, how is this even possible? How come nobody told me about this 20, 30 years ago, you know, because we didn't have great, we didn't have great tests for it, but the process starts. Now, I mean, it literally starts as kids and teenagers, young adults, like this process of the buildup of calcium.

Let's just call it that even though that's not exactly what's causing the issue, but it's calcium is basically a marker of in inflammation over time. So anything that gets inflamed and stays inflamed chronically, ultimately there's gonna be some calcium deposits that end up there. It's if you have, you know, I don't know if you're a right-handed guy, but maybe playing water polo.

You were using that right arm a lot. And so maybe now decades later, if we did just a regular old x-ray of your right shoulder, we could see calcium in there and that calcium deposits in those tendons, they call it Calci tendonitis. That's the medical word for it, but [00:29:00] it basically shows that over the years of all your play and use of that arm, you had inflammation that caused these calcium buildups and it is kind of similarly in the blood vessels, it shows basically a record of inflammation.

Over time. So it's not the calcium causing the heart attack. It's just a marker of the ongoing chronic inflammation. I don't know if that helps 

Greg: so what you're telling me is I should use my heart less, so I don't overstress it and get calcium. Am I taking the wrong lesson? No, that's 

Thomas: the wrong lesson.

So, so it's a marker. It's a marker of inflammation. Yeah. So inflammation is good in the short term. So actually you want, like, if you fall down and hurt yourself, you want the inflammation to happen. Say you cut yourself. You know, like my kid, the other day, whacked himself with a skateboard and he had a pretty decent wound on his shin.

And so in the first hours today is you want that inflammation to go in there, the blood flow to go out to that wound and to heal it up, like you want that to happen? It's part of the healing process. But if [00:30:00] that, you know, wounded on his leg stayed inflamed for the rest of his life and it never got better.

And went away that inflammation would end up as a cancer. Like ongoing inflammation for the long term is not good. It's great in the setting that we need it, which is injury. Or if we get ill, we get some kind of sickness. Like many of us had in the last couple years, you want that to happen in the short term so that your body can heal itself.

But what you don't want is you don't want that happening every day, 24 hours a day for the rest of your life is that will cause like, in this gentleman's case, it'll cause some blockage of the blood vessels because of that ongoing inflammation, which is primarily caused you ready for the me stating the office.

Yes. Primarily caused by what ends up on the tip of our fork. Like what we eat is either very inflammatory. And in our case, in the Western world we call it. Standard American diet, or I like to just call it the sad diet to abbreviate it. The standard American diet is full of inflammatory foods, right?

The highly processed grains, flour, [00:31:00] sugars, and oils that are really inflammatory. And they cause this over the years. And then we can finally measure it with this coronary calcium score that your friend had. So yeah, 

Greg: His was like in the thousands. But I assume he is a very healthy eater. He's always been Ave, a big exerciser, which brings me to my next question. Me personally, I tend to solve my problems with exercise and it's served me pretty well.

I'm in my late forties now. I'm still. Roughly the same weight I was in college. I feel like I'm okay. But I can tell here's a, there's definitely a decline happening and I'm having to rely more on other things. And I'm wondering if I need to kind of change some, be more strict with my diet. Like, I pretty much take everything in moderation.

I'll have, you know, a piece of cake, every, you know, one maybe a couple times a week or I'll have the cookie I'll ha I'll have things that are not that great for me. And I say, okay, I can have these things. As long as I go out and run five miles. I'm [00:32:00] good. Should I start changing that a bit and saying, okay, I can no longer just rely on beating myself up in the gym.

I need to actually do the diet thing. Like, yes, I know that's to eat better. Great question. How much can I get away with is my question? How much can I get away with just exercising and just kind of eating whatever I 

Thomas: want? Well, you know, you, Mel, on the head, you know, as we get a little older.

We'd start noticing that it makes a little bit more of a difference. You know, in high school college, we probably feel like we could have eaten all the junk food in the world and we just hit the gym and like, we were totally fine, like no big deal. But what's interesting about what you said is that unfortunately what's been ingrained in the popular dogma is exactly what you said.

And it's no different from what I was taught in medical school, we were taught, oh, as long as you're exercising and you burn off those calories, it was all about the calorie, right? It was, you either operate operated with a calorie deficit, which meant you exercise more than you took [00:33:00] in. So you're gonna lose weight or in excess, you took in too many calories, you didn't exercise enough and you're gonna gain weight.

Like it was always taught in that simple minded calories in calories out approach, but that's wrong. Right. And the reason it's wrong is. We are alive. We are humans. There are trillions of processes going on in our body. Every second of the day, we are not, what's called a bomb imeter, which is basically a glass, you know, flask that's closed off that you burn or incinerate food inside up to see how much heat was generated.

Like that's how these original experiments were done nearly 200 years ago now to determine, you know, why we say that a gram of carbohydrates has gives off exactly four kilo calories, or if fat, it was nine kilo calories or protein, four kilo calories that this actually came from experiments in basically a vacuum where they burned these, you know, food types and they just calculated how much heat was given off [00:34:00] or how much the water in that experiment, you know, absorbed the heat and.

like, that's not how our bodies work. Our bodies are , we're not burning these calories in a vacuum with nothing else at play. Food is information. It tells our body what to do. It either turns on, you know, the cells and genes and functions or turns them off. And so it's way more complicated than that.

My, my favorite shirt of all times, I have to be honest. It's a shirt I saw Disneyland, you know, I got six kids. I've been to Disneyland a couple of times over the last few decades. And this guy had a picture of a raccoon doing a deadlift, like hold, holding up so much weight. The bar was completely bending like four or five plates, at least on each side.

And it said, I work out so I can eat garbage. Like that's the wrong, like we all know raccoons, eat, whatever kind of garbage is available. If you've ever seen one. I mean, they always attack the trash cans. Right. They want the garbage, like we in our Western culture somehow have got this all backwards and mixed up where we think that we can just exercise our way out of whatever it is we eat.

Like, it doesn't matter that [00:35:00] much, as long as you, like I said, at the beginning operator, the calorie deficit or equal, and you're taking in the same as you're burning off. Like, it doesn't matter. Like how could that even be true? That's like saying having a cup of broccoli is the same as eating a couple of Oreo cookies, like in what world or universe or place could that ever be true.

You can ask your kid in two years is an Oreo the same as broccoli. He's gonna be like, I love the Oreos and broccoli sucks. Like, no, of course it's not the same. Like even a kid knows it's not the same. So how could we think that in our body it's gonna have the exact same result or consequence we can eat broccoli or we can eat Oreos.

And as long as we stick to, you know, the right amount of calories for how much we move in a day, like we're. Well, maybe, you know, your waistline doesn't change or what's on the scale, doesn't change, but what's happening in your body is highly affected by that those are those silent things that have to play into what we talked about at the outside, the metabolic health that you can't determine just from a number on a scale or from, you know, what number of [00:36:00] calories you've eaten and or burned like it, it's not that simple.

We're humans, we're alive. And there's so many processes, highly complicated that occur every second of every day, which are both miraculous and are both devastating. It just depends. But we get to choose each and every day, multiple times a day, how this is gonna go food can be our best medicine ever. The most healthy option, the most amazing medicine or a food can be a slow poison.

And we get to pick every day, three times a day or even more if we're snacking and things like that. So it does matter. It's not just the calorie equation. Calories are originally designed in science to measure energy. Produced in the form of heat and doesn't really equate that well, when we're studying humans, that's the short of it.

Greg: and I also find that I can't do as much when I eat the crap. So if I have the cup of Oreos or the big cup of broccoli, I can physically work out more after the broccoli than I could with the cup of Oreo. So even if they are the same calories, I can't do [00:37:00] as much on the back end anyway, cuz I'll have this big sugar crash or this big stomach ache or whatever.

So eventually it, you get back to the idea that you said that the, what you eat matters the same or more than the amount of calories. So yeah. Yeah. It's now what about what about alcohol? Who's worse off the guy that has a big hunk of cake or the, you know, a big double scoop ice cream or the guy that has a six pack of beer.

yeah. You know, cause alcohol, I find that the hangovers I've been drinking a lot less lately now because of the kid. I just, yeah. I mean, hangovers beat me up more than I would say the cake would, but I know that there is, you know, there is a parallel between eating light crap and drinking light crap.

Is there any studies out there saying like how much alcohol is worth? How much cake? I mean, can we can we even begin to make that comparison? Yeah. That's I wanna say, I wanna learn how much fun I can have. I wanna know what I can get away 

Thomas: as compared to cake. Yeah, I don't think I've seen, I don't think I've seen that study.

Alcohol compared 

Greg: [00:38:00] to cake. I just wanna know what I can get away with how much fun can I have? 

Thomas: Yeah, they're both calorically, you know, dense. They're both what I would classify as calorically rich and nutrient poor. The difference is alcohol is a neurotoxin, like no at any amount there, and there's no disputing this alcohol is a toxin.

In fact, we study it in medical school and we actually put it in a category of toxic alcohols, you know, and ethanol, which is the primary ingredient in most of our favorite drinks is a toxin. It's a toxin. So. Even the argument, like everything in moderation, it kind of falls apart a little bit with alcohol and you'll hear the studies that are popular.

That'll say, oh, you know, it's great to have some wine with your dinner because that improves your cholesterol profiles. And those are only half. I hate to say it. They're only half truths. if you talk to people that study, let's say the brain, for example and this is gonna be a wake up call, I think to many is that [00:39:00] no amount of alcohol is safe for your brain.

Alcohol is always a toxin for your brain. And we notice this, right? If we have a little too much fun one night and we get up the next morning, we're kind of, not only do we feel crappy from the hangover part, but we're like what the heck was I even doing? What, like your memory is shot.

Well, duh, alcohol's a toxin. So there's a guy in many may. I've heard of him, Dr. Daniel Aman who studies this kind of thing. He's looked at. Thousands and thousands of brain scans. And what he'll tell you is that the amount of alcohol you drink is directly related to the size of your brain, inversely proportional, right?

The more you drink, the smaller your brain, like it's that simple, the more you drink, the smaller your brain, it shrinks your brain. And if your brain is shrinking, kinda like a muscle, right? It's not gonna be working as well. You're not gonna be able to do all this stuff you normally could do, whether it be mathematical computations, or even if you're a highly trained athlete.

And you're using those neuro pathways for fine tuned behaviors, you know, on a balance beam [00:40:00] or whatever that is, your brain's not gonna work as well. When you drink alcohol, we all know that, like we're not gonna go out and get drunk before a sporting event because we're gonna perform horribly. Like, we all know that, but you know, it's fun to have a little this or that.

Right? Like I but there's no, unfortunately the answer to the question is there is no amount of alcohol that is safe. For your brain. Like it's not, it's a toxin at any amount., 

Greg: unless you really want to shrink your brain, which is a whole other discussion I probably need a different guess for that, but that's the big re biggest reason why people drink alcohol is to precisely shrink their brain so that they can perform better at certain other areas.

But I digress 

Thomas: on that one. Yeah. Yeah. So there's no study that compares alcohol to cake that I'm aware of. I'm gonna have to do a quick PubMed search after this, but yeah, they're both full of a lot of not so good stuff. They're very calorically dense almost no nutrients, very little nutrients.

Greg: yeah. I find that even having like two glasses of. I, I feel it pretty bad now. I mean, I might as well have 12 [00:41:00] glasses of wine. I mean, if which maybe I'm taking the wrong lesson again from that but I dunno so far I've been cutting back on the alcohol quite a bit and it's been helping, so yeah, I wanna hit another one though, that people rely on is is caffeine.

And I'll tell a personal story here and let you kind of think about your answer, but so caffeine I'm sadly back on caffeine, quite a bit now, due to the lack of sleep and the job that I have, I'm an airline pilot by, by trade. And so I'm having to stay up at horrible hours and it's bad on my body, but for about a year and a half, I was able to not drink caffeine.

And I felt really good and I was able to get over it pretty quickly. Now the first week sucked, but you can get through it. But then you hear, well, some, sometimes a little bit of caffeine is okay to help you perform better. What are your thoughts on caffeine? That's the other big drug that people rely on?

Thomas: Yeah, so caffeine. Yeah. It depends on what you're looking at. So in the short term studies, yes. [00:42:00] Caffeine can boost both your athletic performance, as well as your sort of brain performance in the short term. Over the long term, it doesn't far quite so well and caffeine. You know, I hate to compare it to alcohol, but , they both, you know, are substances that affect our body.

And you've, I think you've said it beautifully. You've noticed that in this timeframe where you didn't, you know, drink things or didn't have caffeine, like you performed amazing, like it was great. And then, you know, you got back into this you know, I totally get it right. You're up all hours of the night with the newborn right now.

And you gotta operate on pretty crazy hours when you fly. If you gotta do a long. A hall flight and you're, you know, you gotta be on your game for 12 or more hours. And this includes the middle of the night. Like, I totally get it. I feel you, I did that for many years in the hospital where I worked all night, many nights in a row often.

And it sucks. Like sometimes you gotta have a little caffeine to just get you through that current task in front of you, but there actually [00:43:00] are ways. And I don't know how you were able to do this for a year or so. I'm assuming you were still, you know, flying in those times, right? You were still flying.

Greg: Yeah. Well, I kind of oversold that. I did cheat it a little bit. If there was like a 3:00 AM flight at the time when I was doing this, I was not doing the long haul flying. So rarely was I having to actually fly during the middle of the night. But when I did, I would take like a little bit of I would just take like a little bit of a little shot to get me through that, but I wasn't doing like the morning cup every morning that I'm doing now.

And so what happened was I did this for about a year and a half where I only used caffeine. If I was up during those really bad hours, which was very rare now I'm kind of, after having gone back through training and done more of the long haul flying where I'm up at these hours all the time, then the caffeine kind of worked its way back into my diet.

So now I'm having my morning cup as I usually have. So I'm gonna try to go back to what I was doing before, but I was doing precisely that where I would not rely on caffeine. I [00:44:00] would get up have I'd have a, maybe a decaf or I'd have just nothing and be fine throughout the day. So it was possible, but yeah, man, it was tough when my routine was to be up at those horrible hours.

Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. And there's it's so caffeine's definitely a quick fix for that sort of thing. It obvious. Enhances your awareness, you know, it, it gets you through whatever that task is. I, and I get it. I used to consume some of these super low quality, you know, highly caffeinated beverages working night shifts decades ago, and, or I'd have to consume something to keep me awake so I could make my drive home after being up all night.

And I'm kind of embarrassed to say that, but I didn't wanna crash my car. So I was hitting the gas station, filling up my tank and grabbing either a monster or red bull, like that's, you know, got me home, but it wasn't awesome. It wasn't awesome for a lot of reasons. Yeah. You know, for all the crap that they put in that stuff.

I mean, it's amazing how full of garbage they are, but it got me through that short term. So I totally get it. I've been certainly as guilty as [00:45:00] anybody, you know, on the caffeine thing and. When you want to get rid of it in your life, you can't just stop it cold Turkey without, like you said, you notice it for a couple of weeks.

You're like, oh my gosh. And then once your body kind of gets to its new sort of happy state, the equilibrium, you know, you don't really need it anymore, but you actually have to change some other things in your life to be able to go without it. And that's, you know, simple things like you gotta get appropriate sleep.

Like you can't just live off of four hours of sleep, which is what I did for decades in my early medical training. And in practice, I just didn't sleep that much. I thought I'll just do, like they say in that cure song, I'll just sleep when I'm dead. You know, like, I don't need to sleep. Sleep is for a whims.

And I got so much to do. I, you know, I was working a lot of hours and plus I had newborn babies and things and I, I wanted to, you know, be there with them and I also had to work and I also wanted to go surfing. And so I had all these things on my list. And so sleep was the only thing I felt like could kind of budge a little bit [00:46:00] because nobody was.

Checking me and asking me at the end of the week. So how many hours of sleep did you get this week? I didn't have to tell anybody I could do everything. I wanted check off all those things on a list and if I slept four hours. So what, at least that's what I thought but that catches up to you that catches up to you as you can.

I'm sure. You know, share in your last couple of months where you haven't been sleeping much. Like, oh my gosh. Like you feel like you have to reach for that cup of coffee. Yeah, I totally get it. I totally get it. Yeah. 

Greg: it's brutal. , how I heard about it was on another podcast where a guy was saying, Hey, I tried this whole non caffeine experiment.

And I was like, all right, I'm gonna do it. So next day, no coffee. I got through it. It was day two where it was like, oh my God, I'm tired. And then day 3, 4, 5. It was the headaches. And then after about a week, the headaches went away and then I was still a little bit tired. But then I would say by like 10 days, 14 days, I was pretty much back to normal.

So you can do it. It's. And then it was nice because I could skip the Starbucks. I would save money there. I wouldn't have, I [00:47:00] could, I saved time getting up. I wouldn't have to take that 10, 15 minutes to make the pot of coffee so we can really have some benefits, but it's tough. Cuz coffee tastes good.

You know, it feels good. It's so. You know, like I said I'll get back there but having a newborn and a job that keeps me up at all hours is that's tough and I can't get rid of those two things. So yeah. Yeah, no, I'll have to find a 

Thomas: way it's definitely, it works for when you need it. And like I said, if you just look at the medical literature and it's studied and you know, those sort of both exercise performance, mental alertness, things like that, it works, you know, whether it's the best thing for sort of long term health you know, probably not.

Yeah. But you know, there's worse things out there, right. I mean, we could all be asking for prescriptions for Adderall or some kind of, you know, hyped up drug that like a lot of people are taken nowadays because we feel like we need something like that. Right. And there's even a new prescription medicine a few years ago.

Right. For shift workers that you can take legally, that's basically [00:48:00] a type of amphetamine, you know? I mean, it's like, wow. So coffee is not the worst thing ever. And there's definitely short term benefits, but I think over the long term, if you can figure out how to. Live without a lot of caffeine and just do things sort of in a natural way, which is hard and phases of our life.

Yeah. Like for me too, I couldn't really do it with zero caffeine for a couple of decades, but I, yeah. Yeah. It's definitely one of those things where it's a love hate, and it's, it can help you in the short term. But yeah. I mean, you feel great when you're off it for a while too. 

Greg: yeah it was nice.

I wanna hit another, a couple of topics if you have the time. Now cancer is a big one and you mentioned how diet and inflammation and lifestyle can contribute toward that. I have a question about this, because I, of course I agree with all that, but I've had a few friends, disturbingly get cancer in their thirties and forties and they seemed healthy and it was brain cancer.

[00:49:00] I mean, can diet and an exercise. Affect brain cancer. I feel like brain cancer's one of those things that, how do you know, how do you prevent that? You know, I know about lung cancer, you know, that's one, you know, you cannot smoke and you probably won't get lung cancer. Although I've had a friend get lung cancer and was not a smoker, so, you know, what can we do and how much of, I guess that type of cancer is caused by lifestyle.

Thomas: Yeah. So you hit some really important things. And one that you didn't mention was just all of the potential toxins that we're exposed to, whether it be in our workplace, you know, maybe your friend that that got the lung cancer that didn't smoke. Maybe he worked in a place where he was spraying chemicals.

Like I, I had a friend that died in his early forties that ran a business, super successful business, where he sprayed that, you know, that truck bed liner, like if you have pickup truck, you spray the liner stuff on there. So it kind of coats it. So it doesn't rust or scratch. And you can throw anything you want in there.

And it's kinda like this protective coating. Well, [00:50:00] he did that for his job and, you know, he would get lazy from time to time and not wear as respirator. And the dude died in his early forties, basically from that toxic exposure from endstage lung cancer. And the dude never smoked one cigarette his whole life.

So there's definitely other things that play in its are something we're exposed to most of the time without even thinking about it. Like just take, for example, all of the bottled water that we drink comes in a plastic bottle. Well, we don't know for sure nowadays we're mostly, you know, most of the manufacturers are not using the really bad plastics, but if just a bottle of water sits out in the sunshine for a couple of hours, Like that ultraviolet radiation from the sun will expose so many of those plastic toxins to the water that's inside, and then you drink it and you have no way of knowing that cuz you buy the thing, it's in a refrigerator.

It's cool. Like you don't even think about that stuff, but yeah, but plastics is one, you know, just a new thing that we're not even really. The [00:51:00] data is still very in the early stages, but it's just like, look at what we're doing. Thank goodness. I can use our example. We both have corded headphones right now.

Many of us walk around with AirPods all day long. Well, what do AirPods emit? They emit EMF, which is just electromagnetic field. It's a type of radiation. It's a type of energy that we're exposing ourselves to. That can be potentially toxic. Right? When we were little kids, we just, we didn't have all of this stuff like AirPods and all these Bluetooth devices.

And we didn't have cell phones that sat right on our nightstand, exposing us to these EMFs all night long. Like we didn't have it. We had a microwave and we were kind of complaining about maybe that was causing some issues and may, maybe it is, or it isn't, but the data right now is still pretty early.

But when you think about your overall lifetime exposure to toxins out there, many of these things, we're not track. One is just what I said, the E the EMFs, another is all of the things that could come in our food, whether it be the plastics in the [00:52:00] containers, whether it be you know, the processing, a lot of times when food is processed, other things are introduced, or the machinery that is used is not well cleaned in between cycles and whether or not, you know, a certain temperature was reached causing parts of the food to get, you know, rancid, and then they bleach it later.

So we don't notice it, it doesn't smell rancid, you know, go to the Costco and you buy this giant, you know, one gallon, you know, bottle of what says organic canola oil. And it looks perfect. You know, you can, it looks clear, you know, that sort of Amber color. And you're like, how could anything be wrong with that?

That stuff is the most. Process almost. I mean, it's highly toxic stuff. If you look at what steps that went through, it's exposed to all sorts of harsh, industrial chemicals like toluene and bleaches. They have to deodorize it because it's basically stinky and smelly and rant and they have to make it look presentable.

Like all of these oils that we often have in our food, we either cook with them, you know, canola oil, sunflower oil, grape seed oil rice, brand oil, soybean [00:53:00] oils, probably the biggest offender. And it's in everything, almost everything that comes with a label has these bad oils in there. And we don't even think about it.

Nobody's talking about it until now. We're starting to realize, oh my gosh, like, although I don't smoke. If I eat fried food in soybean oil or vegetable oil, like that stuff has what are called acro lands, which are hardcore cancer causing materials that are found in cigarette smoke. I can get exposed to that.

Just having. Some run of the mill French fries from your favorite diner or, or big chain, like who knew I could be exposed to those kind of toxins just with the stuff that I put in my mouth. Well, well, I mean, it makes sense. Like we, going back to our previous question of the broccoli and the kapa Oreos, are they the same, well, hell you know, they're not the same.

They're very different. And so I think, and we all have cases where, you know, unfortunately young people get diagnosed with cancer and we ask, could that have been prevent. Maybe, you know, maybe not sometimes brain cancer is usually not genetic. There's a couple of [00:54:00] varieties, but it's usually some kind of an exposure history that we may not know about.

It's if you dig deep enough, you'll probably find something and yeah, and all, I mean with this is that we need to be more aware. We need to be more aware of our surroundings. What are we exposing ourselves to on a daily basis, through our food, through what we breathe through, the headphones that we are using, like all of this stuff is exposing us to potential toxins.

and those are really big factors when they play into cancer. You know, it's not what it was in the old days. Right. It was like, if you worked at the shipyard and you were exposed to asbestos because asbestos, I don't know when I was in chemistry class, we had gloves made of asbestos. Why? Because you didn't burn your fricking hands.

When you touched those hot glass flasks, like we used asbestos gloves in chemistry class. We didn't know that it was gonna cause us issues or could cause us issues. That's just what we had. So thank goodness. We're getting more and more [00:55:00] information. We're a little bit more attuned to it, but a lot of it slips onto the radar, especially the stuff that is snuck into foods.

There's tons of toxic substances that are snuck into our everyday foods that come in a bag with a barcode or a box. You know, I say avoid the three BS, the food that comes in a bag, a box or a barcode, cuz most of that stuff has ingredients that are potentially. and you're not hearing about it. Nobody's talking about it.

Well, not enough people. The FDA certainly is letting it go under the radar. And we can't always rely on them because there's yeah, like you go to Europe or somewhere else. Most of their stuff has way less ingredients. They have way less of these artificial additives, sweeteners, all kinds of colors.

They don't let it, they don't let it you know, into the products in Europe, for example, in the us, it's like a free for all anyway, kind of digressing. But the bigger picture is there's tons of toxins out there that we're not thinking about, that we may be exposed to. That can cause cancer down the line and younger people.

And a lot of it besides toxins is gonna be related to diet and things like that. But yeah it's it's an interesting [00:56:00] problem. And it's unfortunately happening more and more. My, my friend for example, was in a school when she was a kid exposed to basically daily pesticide sprain, their school butted right against their playground was right against a field.

And in that field, they were constantly spraying it with pesticides and things. And. She came down with Parkinson's disease in her fifties, early fifties, kinda like Michael J. Fox, you know, you got it pretty young and like she's, she has the best diet. I mean, she eats incredibly healthy and she always pretty much has.

And it's like, how the heck did she get this illness? And it might have been traced back to whatever chemicals they were spraying when she was in elementary school. So you gotta go deep. You gotta, you know, look for these things, but what each and every one of us can do every day is just think about the things that we are exposing ourselves to, because there's a lot of toxins hiding and plain sight, you know, starting with just the plastic bottles that we drink, almost everything out of

Greg: Yeah. And there's a lot of you bring up a lot of points that I could go off on. I wanted to hit [00:57:00] one though just for the listeners is where is a good place to get this information? Where like reliable sources for studies. Cuz if I just go to Google and. Put something in, it's gonna spit out.

Who knows what 

Thomas: somebody's 

Greg: blog about this or that you mentioned pub med. Yeah. Are there any other ones, in addition to that are kind of good, like places where I can look at source studies. Not just articles that were filtered through some guy with a journalism degree, but actual source studies, 

Thomas: you said?

Yeah. PubMed references, almost everything. That's my go to, you know, just PubMed. Okay. And you can just type that in P B me D PubMed, and that will reference anything that's really printed in the literature and it even can be in a different language. It'll still find it. You may have to get help with the translation, but it'll find pretty much anything that's been printed more or less.

That's so that's my first source. I don't just go to Dr. Google. I actually go to the pub med website and if I can't remember it, I'll go to Google first and I'll type in pub med, and it'll take me there and then I'll use the search engine. And it's [00:58:00] actually, I find it pretty easy to use.

That's kind of my go to but there's several others as well. But that's the one that I go to first and foremost, just cuz it's the easiest, it's the one I can always remember and it's reliable and it has, you know, you can certainly trust it over blog that you're reading, you know, which may have great information.

Yeah. Or it may not, you know, you just don't know . 

 A great resource for not only potential you know, toxins, chemicals and things that could be found in food. It could be found in sunscreen, makeup, you know, any kind of cosmetic, a great website is E w g.org and that's environmental working group.

So E wg.org, they actually have an app that's free. You can be at the grocery store and you can be like later on. You're gonna be there going crap. What kind of sunscreen should I put on my kid? Cuz I'm in LA it's fricking summertime. I don't want my kid to get sunburn and you can be literally at the store and you can type in the name of the sunscreen and in this app or on the website, ewg.org, it'll tell you if there's known [00:59:00] issues with the sunscreen, if it has toxins in it and how safe it is, they rate everything.

You know, if it gets sort of a, the green light or it's kinda like a yellow or a red, obviously avoid the red light stuff. That's the bad ones and but it's super user friendly. E wg.org. I don't have any. You know, relationship with them. I don't get any kickbacks or anything. It's just a great website that has a lot of helpful information, both for food and for cosmetics.

I, I actually look to that a lot. I got the app on my phone, in fact, ewg.org. 

Greg: Good. I wanna do the same thing. That's great. Yeah, last one. How's the, so you got a podcast it's called um, the modern medicine movement. How's it been going? How do you like it? 

Thomas: Oh, you know, we're over two years in we're just about to hit our first big milestone.

I think a hundred episodes is coming up probably next month. And I do want almost every single week sometimes if I'm traveling and I miss a week or two. And so we're almost a hundred episodes in it's been a lot of fun to just share good evidence based, helpful information. I go by the date, I go by the science.

I mean, like I mentioned, I'm [01:00:00] always on PubMed. I'm looking for the latest studies and I try to share that, but just in a super chill. You know, simple approach. I don't get too crazy into the pathophysiology. I like to share, you know, kind of big needle mover type of things, what you can do, you know, each and every day, that's simple, that's easy, generally.

It's all free and doesn't cost anything. You know how you can hack your sleep and get the best sleep of your life. And I'll wait to get, I'll wait to talk about this with you, because right now there's not a lot of things you can do to make the baby not cry in the middle of the night. You know, the baby's crying.

You're gonna wanna go pick him up and hold him. And I would've done the same exact thing, but there's lots of simple things we can do. And I love to share that on the podcast, modern medicine movement. Thanks for mentioning.

 I got a big book release coming out in October. The book is called preventable five powerful practices to avoid disease and to build unshakeable health. And so that's coming out about, mid-October actually just talked to the publisher last week and it's We're a little bit behind. It's supposed to come out.

It's supposed to come out in [01:01:00] August, but you know, we're in August now and it ain't here yet, but you can go over to the preventable book.com. That's kinda like my landing page for, or my website's probably the easiest is Thomas hemingway.com. I got all the different links on my website, but it'll have one for the book and the book is gonna be, I think, just so user friendly and easy for people to both understand I gotta just mention the sleep thing. I love to make fun of sleep. At least I did for decades because I wasn't getting very much of it. So it's easy to kind of say, oh, look at these guys. They're so slothful they sleep eight hours a night? Like how can anybody do that? But what I realized is that sleep is one of those things that whether we want to admit it or not, it plays into almost every area of our life.

You know, it affects our mood. It affects our immune health, whether or not we're gonna get sick. I mean, we've all had the experience right where we were up all night and then we're like wanna go to Hawaii on vacation. And then the second day there, we start to get sick. And we're like, what the heck happened?

Well, dude, you were up all night. Your immune system took a major hit. And then on the plane, you're exposed to a bunch of people who might [01:02:00] have been whatever sick and you got sick. So sleep. I think it's one of the easiest things to talk about because it can be really simple and the first way to get a great night's sleep.

And most people don't even think about this is. it starts in the morning. Like if you can get your butt outside and just see the natural light for five minutes in the morning, just even with, I just literally do it. I walk outside my front door and I let the light hit me for five minutes. I just check out the beauty of the earth, wherever I am in the world.

And I try to let that natural daylight hit my eyes in the first, you know, hour or so around sunrise. And that sets up your biological clock or your circadian rhythm for the whole rest of the day. And it's one of the best things to do if you ever have to travel like you like with jet lag and stuff like that, one of the best approaches to prevent actually get rid of ameliorate jet lag is just getting outside and exposed to that natural light.

Like here's an example. I just went to Portugal in April and I traveled, I think it was over 12 time zones. Like I basically went. You know, daytime [01:03:00] to nighttime. And I thought I would be totally screwed up. But what I did when I got there is immediately my wife and I, after we went to the car and got to our stuff, dropped off, we just went for a long, like couple hour walk and we were just exposed to the natural light.

And then we went to bed at the normal time for a Portugal, you know, whatever, like 10 o'clock at night. And the next day we felt amazing. Like it I had zero jet lag after crossing, like more than 12 time zones because I was out and exposed to the natural light and I got right on their routine. Like you gotta get on their routine.

Like if you get there and you wanna take a big nap, that's gonna totally screw you up. so getting out and exposed to natural light, it's free. It's easy. If you want to even get doubly effective. If you can, and it's not too cold, slip your shoes. And walk around for a few minutes barefoot and let your body kind of touch that local ground, get at a park or even just on cement, wherever it is, if you can even better at the beach and just get exposed to that field at that place, the energy, if you will.

And it sounds a little [01:04:00] who do voodoo kind of weird, but the energy, like the whole earth is energy. Dude. There's you can measure the electromagnetic field of the earth at all times, and you slip your shoes off and you get exposed to that in your local setting, that's called grounding or earthing, whatever you wanna call it, but that actually helps you get in sync with that environment.

So those are the top two things like to avoid jet lag and just get out and exposed to the natural light and slip your shoes off for a minute or two with a walk outside. And you'll get into that new time zone so much quicker and so much better. So I just thought I'd share that with you being a guy that flies a lot, just such a it's simple thing, 

Greg: you know, it's.

I'm sort of under different constraints as a pilot, cuz we go, you know, 12 time zones one way and then we'll lay over for 24 hours and then go 12 time zones the other way. And so, yeah, we're under a different sort of like I said, a constraint, but what I've found is that you're right. That the worst hours to be awake are that two to 4:00 AM right before the sun.

It's awful. And I've been, you know, in the cockpit, I'm like my I'm going [01:05:00] Crossey but I'm, you know, pumping the caffeine and I'm awake as soon as the sun cracks above the horizon. Boom. Like I'm good. I can stay awake. I'm all right. So the natural light definitely is the best way to keep you awake.

What I will say is that's a good, that's good advice to get outside and get on to the time zone that you're trying to stay on, like try to get into their routine as soon as. now for pilots, it's a little bit different because you gotta swing back around. You gotta go back to other direction. So if you, if your job is to be doing what I'm doing, which a lot of my listeners have that job, I just say, don't fight it.

So if you're new to the airline business, don't fight it. If you get to a place and you are tired, just go to sleep, wake up when you're gonna wake up, whenever you can get sleep and your body needs to sleep just do it. Don't worry about trying to get on the time zone. Yeah. But you're right. If you're traveling somewhere as a passenger and you're gonna remain there for a while, the quickest way, you're right.

Get outside, touch your feet on the ground, get onto their schedule. [01:06:00] And you know, I think I'm gonna try this soon is put the phone on the other side of the room. I might go back to a normal alarm clock, cuz I, you know, you wake up, you wanna check the time. So you look at your phone, next thing you know, you're looking at the news apps and then your mind's going and then you've lost the night of sleep.

So yeah, maybe putting the phone on the other side of the room. 

Thomas: That's a great, yeah, I couldn't agree more. And that's something that plagues us nowadays, right? Yeah. We can't live without our phone for two seconds, but an old fashioned alarm clock at least flipped your phone into airplane mode at night.

Cuz then it won't be lighten up and buzzing and doing things. And it also not gonna get that light, you know, emitted, you know, and then you don't get the EMS, like just put it on airplane mode or just put it in a different room if you can. And also put it on airplane mode, but then it won't be tempted, but that's so critical.

And I couldn't agree more when you need to sleep when your body needs sleep, please just sleep. Like we gotta, like the average is somewhere around seven or eight hours of sleep. I personally, I shoot for seven, seven feels amazing to me. And when I was doing shift work, working overnight in the hospital, that was sometimes kind of hard because you know, you had to [01:07:00] sleep during the day and.

Bright outside. And you know, you gotta get some really good blackout curtains and white noise machines and AC that's keeping the temperature at 68 or whatever. Like there's a lot of different factors that you gotta have in place to sleep during the day. But when your body needs sleep, absolutely answer the call and go to sleep, get some rest.

Like, I couldn't agree more, especially, yeah. With your job, you gotta get your sleep. Like, I hope that on average you can get around seven hours a night, whatever that is for you or in 24 hour period, like seven hours of sleep, however you. Get it like sleep. Is that critical? You should literally put it in your calendar.

You gotta get it. And if you need it. And don't, yeah, don't be afraid to take a nap if you need it. Your body's telling you something. 

Greg: all right. Thomas Hemingway, thanks so much for coming on, man. I learned so much. I'm gonna check out those websites and follow your show and looking forward to your book coming out in October.

So you've got a ton of stuff. So Thomas hemingway.com. Is that the big one? What about, do you have Facebook and LinkedIn and 

Thomas: Instagram? All those ones as well? Yeah, the easiest place is [01:08:00] probably Instagram, which is just Dr. Thomas Hemingway spelled with D R and then my name Thomas Hemingway, D R Thomas Hemingway.

That's on Instagram, Facebook just Thomas Hemingway. Look for the guy from Hawaii. kill Hawaii. That's where I'm from. And LinkedIn Thomas Hemingway. I'm on all the major platforms, Thomas Hemingway and on the link, I'm sure you'll throw out there. Just. Has all my social media on there, but probably the easiest to find me is on Instagram, which is just Dr.

Thomas Hemingway DRR, Thomas Hemingway, or just on the website, doc Thomas hemingway.com. Well, I wanted to 

Greg: ask any relation to the author. 

Thomas: Yeah. So we got, we actually do have some roots way back. Couple hundred years ago, we spell our name, obviously the same way with one, one M that's the biggest problem in finding me, if you put two S in my last name you're not gonna find.

And Ernest only had one M as well. So it'll be a little bit of an English little English refresh from your high school, reading the book old man in the sea or something like that, or farewell to arms , I've actually been to his place and the keys and oh, it's so much [01:09:00] interesting history that guy. A genius, but he also obviously was plagued with some other yeah.

Problems. Alcohol was one, no, no big surprise. You know, we kind of have all heard that, but we do have some very distant shared ancestry, but I don't go over to the parties with Muriel and no we don't have a place in Idaho or anything like that, but yeah, no close relation, but we do share some distant relatives and obviously got the same last name.

So it's kind of. Yeah. 

Greg: I went to actually I visited Cuba many years ago and went to his house there. So I saw that one, but yeah, that's I wanted to ask that one right off the bat. I was like, oh man, I can't let him go until, so that's cool. There's some distant relation there. Yeah.

Thomas: Distant, shared an ancestry. And the dude was a super interesting guy. Like I, I just think he's a fascinating human and one day maybe I'll get to Cuba, the place in the keys, obviously that was kind of where he went back and forth between Cuba and the keys and his fishing and all of that that he shared in those locations.

I mean, yeah. I'd love to check it out in Cuba sometimes. It's yeah, he was a fascinating human for sure. [01:10:00] 

Greg: Cool. Well, I'm looking forward to all of your stuff coming up. So, Thomas, thanks so much for coming on, man. I appreciate it. 

Thomas: Yeah. Such a pleasure, Greg. Thank you. Thank your listeners. Just appreciate you.

Good luck with everything with a newborn and yeah, just enjoy it, man. Don't fight it. Sleep when you can and just enjoy every minute, man. They grow up too fast. 

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