Health Longevity Secrets
A podcast to transform your health and longevity with evidence-based lifestyle modifications and other tools to prevent and even reverse the most disruptive diseases. We feature topics including longevity, fasting, ketosis, biohacking, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, stroke, cancer, consciousness, and much more so that you can find out the latest proven methods to optimize your life. It’s a mix of interviews, special co-hosts, and solo shows that you’re not going to want to miss. Hit subscribe and get ready to change your life. HLS is hosted by Robert Lufkin MD, a physician/medical school professor and New York Times Bestselling auhtor focusing on the applied science of health and longevity through lifestyle and other tools in order to cultivate consciousness, and live life to the fullest .
'Envision a world of love, abundance, and generosity'.
Health Longevity Secrets
Metabolic Freedom with Ben Azadi
What if your body wasn't designed to be sick? What if those nagging symptoms you've been fighting aren't problems at all, but messages—your body's desperate attempt to communicate that something deeper needs attention?
In this revealing conversation, metabolic health expert and my good friend Ben Azadi introduces his new book "Metabolic Freedom," explaining why an astonishing 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and what we can do about it. Rather than focusing on niche approaches like strict keto or extended fasting, Azadi presents a comprehensive framework accessible to everyone, addressing the five root causes behind metabolic dysfunction.
One of the most alarming revelations? You could have full-blown insulin resistance for 6-14 years while still showing "perfect" blood sugar readings on standard tests. Your pancreas compensates by pumping out massive amounts of insulin until it simply can't keep up anymore. By then, you're already deep in the disease process. Ben makes a compelling case for requesting fasting insulin tests rather than relying solely on glucose measurements that miss this critical early warning.
The conversation explores how true metabolic freedom means having a body that can effortlessly use whatever fuel is available—carbs, protein, fat, or stored body fat—to generate steady energy without constant snacking or stimulants. Ben breaks down the powerful healing cascade that happens during fasting, from completed digestion at 14 hours to enhanced cellular cleanup (autophagy) at 16-17 hours and increased brain-derived neurotrophic factor at the 24-hour mark.
Beyond food timing, we look at the devastating impact of environmental toxins he classifies as "obesogens" and "diabetogens"—compounds found in everything from plastic containers to cash register receipts that directly promote weight gain and blood sugar dysfunction.
Whether you're just beginning your health journey or deeply familiar with metabolic concepts, this conversation offers practical wisdom for reclaiming your body's natural state of health through a 30-day plan designed to restore your metabolic freedom.
https://www.benazadi.com/
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Bluesky: ...
Hey, Ben, my brother, it's so great to see you again.
Speaker 2:Great to see you, brother. It's been a while. Let's have some fun.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to talk about this new book that is coming out this week as this podcast drops. It's called Metabolic Freedom, and you've written a lot of books and you're a world expert on metabolic health. What is it about this book, or what message did you want to get out with this new book? That's changed from before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, thank you for that. This book I'm really excited about this one because it's not a niche book. I've written a keto book. I've written a fasting book, a sleep book, which is great. I love all of that.
Speaker 2:Still, this book, metabolic Freedom, which I'm holding up right here, it's written for the masses. It's written for the 93% of Americans that are metabolically unhealthy, and it just shows them. Look, your body is not built to have all these symptoms. Your body was not built with any of these flaws and your symptoms are not even the problem as you talk about so eloquently. Your symptoms are a gift. They're your body's check engine light. Let's find out what the causes are.
Speaker 2:So the entire first half of metabolic freedom is all about the five main causes that contribute to metabolic disease. When we hear the word metabolic disease, that means cancer, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, of course, high blood pressure, obesity, weight gain, weight loss, resistance, diabetes. It's all of these things that, unfortunately, 93% of Americans are dealing with. So what are the causes? When we identify the causes, we're aware of it. Then we could work on removing that interference so the body heals itself. So the second half of the book talks about the solutions. There's an entire chapter on keto, an entire chapter on fasting. There's an entire chapter on my favorite chapter chapter 10, on how your thoughts influence your metabolism. So it gets into the causes, the solutions, and then it's all wrapped together in a 30-day plan to achieve metabolic freedom.
Speaker 2:And I'll say this, rob, there are three key studies that I looked at the last few years that really convinced me and inspired me to write the book. And the first study was a Mayo Clinic study from 2016. I put it in the book. In this study from Mayo Clinic, they wanted to determine how many Americans live what they consider an active, healthy, fit lifestyle. So they based that off of four characteristics. The first one, the first criteria, was that they don't smoke cigarettes. The second criteria was that they exercise, either moderate to vigorous exercise, for a total of 150 minutes at the minimum per week per week. The third criteria was that they ate what they consider a healthy diet, which in this case was just the minimally processed diet. And the fourth criteria was that if they're a female, they have a body fat percentage under 30 and if they're a male, under 20, and the study concluded that only 2.7% of Americans fit that criteria.
Speaker 1:Wow, wow.
Speaker 2:That's it, bro, and then in 2018, and you've spoken about this study. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill study showed around 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and then in 2022, we had studies showing or a study showing it's closer to about 93%. So we know we have a problem. So that's why I wrote the book. I wanted to get this information out to the masses and look even if you're already well into the weeds of like metabolic health and keto and fasting and carnivore, you're still gonna love this book because I get into the science.
Speaker 2:There's 275 references but it's also an amazing book to buy for someone to get them into this world, because the way I talk about keto is very not dogmatic. It's about understanding that it's a metabolic process. The way I talk about fasting is more using language like meal timing right, so it just helps people get familiar with these terms that when you say it, hey, let's do keto or fasting or carnivore, they think you're nuts. But when it comes from a third party and it's written in a way for the masses, they're going to be more open to those changes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that's such an important point. I mean a little editorial comment. Even though I'm a doctor, I work in a medical school, I wear a white coat, at least when I do podcasts. And even though I'm a doctor, I know that doctors can't make me healthy, doctors just make me less sick. And doctors can't correct our metabolic health. We can get pills and surgery for symptoms and manage diseases, but if we want to reverse metabolic health, people have to go to experts like you and learn how to manage factors like you talk about. It is a great book Lifestyle and Toxins. We can dive into a little bit too. But that's the secret and it's it's, it's on us. We can't look for our doctors to uh, you know, to fix our metabolism really. And and this book is great because it it is written for everyone I can hand it to my grandmother and she will. She'll love it, she'll understand it, but, like you say, it still has all the references. So, uh, you know you could. I could also hand it to my doctor too.
Speaker 1:Yes, even doctors have doctors, right. So yeah, so it's a great book. You know I can't say enough super things about it. One of the things you're known for, among many things, in metabolic health, is the concept of metabolic flexibility, and you talk about that in the book. Why is that so important? And well, first of all, what is metabolic flexibility and why is it critical for long term health and weight management too?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and you know metabolic flexibility my good friend Marxist, and really coined that term and made it popular and it's really cool because he actually endorsed the book. So it's cool to have the king of metabolic flexibility endorse metabolic freedom, which, essentially metabolic freedom, is metabolic flexibility.
Speaker 2:To your point, rob, what is that? That means we have a metabolism that has the ability to use whatever substrate is available for fuel. Okay, so let's unpack that real quick. That means, when we have a healthy metabolism that's metabolically flexible and free, we could have carbohydrates and use that for energy, even fat loss, and feel good. Or we could use that for protein, amino acids or fat. Or we could burn our own body fat and use that for energy and feel good. We could even use oxygen and sunshine, right? This is the point. When we have a flexible metabolism, we could use whatever is available at the time to produce energy and feel good.
Speaker 2:Now, unfortunately, those 93% of Americans that are unhealthy, they're not metabolically free, they're in a metabolic prison. They're sugar burners and you talk about this as well, rob. They're not able to burn fat for fuel, they're only burning sugar and glucose, and there's nothing wrong with burning sugar and glucose, unless you're only burning sugar and glucose. And what happens is you start to produce high amounts of insulin, right? Insulin is not just a hormone that signals fat storage, it's an energy sensor, and it's the first domino to fall that will trigger a cascade of metabolic diseases high blood pressure, fatigue, prediabetes, pcos, full-on diabetes, cancer, heart disease. I could go on and on, but it's with the insulin rising that first starts to happen. And the crazy part, when I started looking at the studies like the Whitehall study too, and a few others I put into the book. These studies show you could have full-blown hyperinsulinemia, in other words, insulin resistance for on average six to 14 years, with perfect fasting blood sugar levels and perfect A1C levels, because your pancreas is producing massive amounts of insulin to clear that excess glucose until it goes deaf to the screams and those receptor sites for insulin cannot hear the message. There's a dramatic increase in blood sugars. Boom, you're diagnosed with prediabetes. Or maybe you don't even test and don't even know, and eventually it leads to diabetes. So I make the case that one of the most important tests to get done is a fasting insulin test. It puts you in the driver's seat. You want to see a fasting insulin in the single digits. Three to seven is optimal. And what's crazy, rob and I know you know this, I'm preaching to the choir here, but what's crazy is that blood fasting insulin report. That reference range is usually between 3 and 25 or 3 and 28. And if you're 17 or 22 or 15, your regular doctor will say nothing to worry about here. But that is insulin resistance and if you could tackle that right off the bat, it will never lead to type 2 diabetes. Because when you have type 2 diabetes, by the way, it dramatically increases your risk of dying from all other diseases. It's actually pretty rare to die from type 2 diabetes. It's what it's linked to.
Speaker 2:And one more point here I know I'm going on and on. I'm just so excited about this. We spend $4.6 trillion on health care in the United States every single year. If this was the GDP, it would be the fourth largest GDP in the entire world. One out of every four healthcare dollars are spent on diabetes, primarily type 2 diabetes. This is a lifestyle condition that's treated with medication. You cannot reverse a lifestyle condition with medication. You reverse a lifestyle condition with lifestyle changes. So I talk about that in the book. And metabolic freedom is you are just. You have amazing energy levels, you have your goal body weight, you're lean, you're healthy, you're fit, you're able to travel like I do when I travel on an airplane. I don't eat the food there, I'm just using my body fat for energy. I feel amazing. You're not relying on snacking and grazing every two to three hours just to have a short burst of energy, or four-hour energy drinks. That is what metabolic freedom is and that's what I want for the world.
Speaker 1:And so it's such an important point. So what I'm saying? If I go to my doctor and they tell me, hey, my fasting glucose is good, my hemoglobin A1c is good, if they don't check a fasting insulin, I could be missing a significant abnormality that's been going on for years to decades before that, and it's almost like you know and I've seen this on social media that if you go to a doctor and they check your LDL cholesterol but they don't check your fasting insulin, you should go to get time for a new doctor, because arguably, fasting insulin and metabolic health is a greater risk factor for a heart attack, as far as hazard ratios, than LDL cholesterol, which is a whole, you know another, another subject in itself, but I love the concept of metabolic freedom. What I just?
Speaker 1:I mean, obviously we're going to, we're going to read the book, people are going to read the book, but what? What are the? Just the nutritional points that you would hit? If I want to be, if I want to be, you know, have metabolic freedom, I want to have metabolic flexibility. What does that look like for my diet in broad strokes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So chapter four talks about that, the processed foods that we want to start removing or swapping out with whole foods. And I make it really simple. I show you how to shop at the grocery store. Again, it's written for, like the person who has no idea. We want to get rid of these, what I call frankenfoods, or food-like substances in the book that are highly inflammatory.
Speaker 2:Our metabolism is not designed to use them for energy, so there's different sets of them. We have high fructose corn syrup, which is found in. Some people consider healthy products like quick oats and turn oatmeals that have flavors in it. It has high fructose corn syrup. It's found, of course, in sodas. High fructose corn syrup is a poison to the mitochondria and it creates fatty liver disease. We all know about our mutual friends Richard Johnson and, of course, dr Perlmutter and a few others out there looking at uric acid levels rising, and it's because of the high concentration of fructose from high fructose corn syrup. So that's found in a lot of processed foods.
Speaker 2:Along with that, in processed foods there's usually also there's usually seed oils in them and there's you know what's cool Rob is man. We've been talking about seed oils for a long time and right now it's super popular, which I love to see, but there's also a lot of confusion because it's so popular. But seed oils are a big one. There's a couple of studies I referenced in the book. Dr Martin Grutfeld has a study looking at the aldehyde content produced from French fries cooked in seed oils vegetable oil, canola oil, for example and he showed in his study that a five-ounce serving of French fries cooked in vegetable oils produce the same amount of aldehydes, which are carcinogenic, cancer-causing, as 25 tobacco cigarettes, meaning one french fry cooked in vegetable oil is equivalent to a tobacco cigarette smoked. So if you're a parent and you're watching this and listening to this, obviously you don't want your kids to smoke cigarettes. But if you're allowing them to have fried chicken nuggets, chicken fingers, french fries from McDonald's, you're essentially giving them cigarettes on a plate in terms of the aldehyde content.
Speaker 2:So I talk about the dangers of seed oils and linoleic acid and how long it stays in your body, which the half-life is two years, and swapping that out with saturated fats the fats that are like the boogeyman to your doctor and monounsaturated fats. So butter, ghee, beef tallow, coconut oil, duck fat, lard from healthy sources, avocado oil, olive oil these simple little swaps go a very long way. And the last part here I make the case that look, if you just looked at the ingredients list, that will get you down the right path. Because if you look at an avocado or an apple or whatever whole food is on that produce section, there's no ingredient list Because what you see is right in front of you.
Speaker 2:But when you go and buy cereal or oatmeal or Quaker oats or whatever it is that's packaged, there's a whole list of ingredients, because it's artificial foods and it has ingredients you cannot pronounce. So we need to make these swaps. We need to start lowering our total carbohydrate intake to lower insulin. We need to get rid of snacking and grazing and just have three meals a day and get familiar with dropping insulin, increasing protein and fat, and it works really well. You will see changes within a week, within a matter of days, making these simple little swaps that I outlined in chapter four.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's such a great point. You mentioned food timing In the book. Fasting is a major theme. So what is fasting and why is fasting healthy? What is?
Speaker 2:fasting and why is fasting healthy?
Speaker 2:Fasting is one of my favorite tools to harness this inner intelligence, this inner physician within the body, because when you remove food from the equation and all of the energy and resources and bandwidth required to process food, you create a process that I talk about in the book that I actually got from Dr Pampa so I want to give him credit but it's called energy diversion.
Speaker 2:Energy diversion where you're diverting energy away from digestion because you're not eating, you're fasting, and it's diverted towards healing, to your brain, to your liver, to your kidney. I mean the inner physician in your body will direct it where it needs to go. So it's one of the best ways to remove the interference. You know, rob, it's interesting that you asked me this question because I know that this is being released. The week of the book launch and the last few days I posted a couple of videos on my social media channel and one video was on Instagram and it was 90 seconds and I outlined what happens in your body when you go without food for 100 hours, which is like a four-day fast, and that video has over 5 million views in like five days on Instagram.
Speaker 2:And over 3 million views on the Facebook reels and then I made a long form YouTube video on it, like 20 minutes. That has 1.3 million on.
Speaker 2:YouTube and I share that not to brag, but to impress upon people that a lot of people want to learn about fasting and it's super cool to see. They're just so fascinating with all the changes that happens. So I'll give the audience a kind of an outline of what happens in the body right between, and I think your audience will love this because the reels are crushing. So let's talk about it now, right?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah the first 14 hours there are two main things that happen. So the first 14 hours without food, you're going to notice um more energy because you complete digestion. It takes about 14 hours and it's different for everybody, but about 14 hours to go from chewing food large intestine, small intestine out the colon. So you complete digestion, so that energy is being diverted to the brain, blood flow to the brain. You have more energy. 14-hour mark there's a huge increase in energy. There's also insulin that's going to drop. So you're going to notice you look lighter and feel lighter.
Speaker 2:Around that 14-hour mark, as you continue with that fast, around the 16 to 17 hour mark, there's a process that starts to get enhanced, called autophagy. Autophagy is the cellular cleanup process and the way that I explain it in the book is a refrigerator with groceries. A refrigerator with groceries has expiration dates. They all have expiration dates on them and if you never let excuse me, if you let all those groceries expire and instead of throwing them away, you kind of just shove them towards the back of the fridge and buy new, fresh groceries and come back the next day and open it up, disgusting environment there's going to be. Disease will manifest in that environment. Well, the human body is like that refrigerator. We have cells, mitochondria, proteins that have an expiration date.
Speaker 2:Autophagy is the process of cleaning out the junk, so this starts to get enhanced around the 16 to 17 hour mark of a fast. It's like Pac-Man going within yourselves cleaning out the junk and you don't even have to think about it. All of this is happening as you're just functioning at a high level with your job, your relationships, whatever. It is Okay as we continue with the fast. At the 24 hour mark there's a gut reset. There's studies showing and I know these studies are more in mice, but intestinal stem cells are being produced in mice around the 24-hour mark. But for humans you will notice that if you have things like acid reflux, gerd bloating, a lot of that starts to get resolved around that 24-hour mark. You're way past digestion, you're lowering inflammation. Amazing things happen.
Speaker 2:And around that 24-hour mark there's a surge in brain-derived neurotropic factor, bdnf, which you know is miracle grow for the brain. You know it makes me think this and I know that religions didn't understand this when they started implementing fasting, because every religion implements fasting, but the BDNF is like a religious experience, like a spiritual experience, where you're just more creative. You're more for me. I'm more connected to God. You're more connected to source and studies are showing there's an enhancement in BDNF. So you're more creative, more focused, and it makes sense. Your body wants to keep you alive, focused and creative to go find food, but you're using it for your day to day. So all of this is happening during a fast and I'm not going to go through the whole 100 hours here, but I gave you 24 hours. It's magical in the body.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's so exciting. You think about it, fasting. If we evolved, you know, as hunter gatherers prior to 12,000 years ago, when, between the one meal to the next meal, we're fasting, you know, and we're you know we go into ketosis, it's metabolically healthy state and the humans that survived to pass on to their genes were the ones that had the least brain fog. Their hearing gets better, their vision gets sharper, they think better, that BDNF kicks in and everything. So you can see we've evolved to really sharpen up our skills during that, during that window there. Well, speaking of fasting, then how do we know, like, if, if you know, 12 hours is good, 24 hours is better, 100 hours is great, 12 hours is good, 24 hours is better, 100 hours is great. How do you decide? What do you recommend for people to do, or what? When do you? When do you stop? Or You're right, you're?
Speaker 2:right? It's a great question. I'm getting my book here because I have a graph that your audience probably can't see. We all explain it and it shows hormesis right. And hormesis is the principle that you apply a stress, you adapt to the stress and get stronger. So fasting is a stress. In this example, it shows regular exercise as the stress and it shows that when you do the right amount of exercise at the right intensity for the right duration and you recover, you stay in what's called this hormetic zone where reactive oxygen species go down, antioxidants go up and and, essentially, less inflamed and it extends your lifespan, you get healthier and stronger. But if you do too much exercise, you lose those benefits and the opposite happens. Fasting is also a stress. So if you do the right amount of fasting, you stay in this hormetic zone where you get all the benefits we're talking about here. You don't do any fasting and you're just grazing. No benefits, do too much fasting, lose the benefits. So how? The question is, how do you stay in that zone? How do you know A couple of things I talk about in the book.
Speaker 2:There's two key metrics you could look at Actually, it's three, three key metrics that I talk about in the book to know if fasting is working for you or against you. Or insert other stressors cold plunge, red light therapy, sauna, whatever it is. These are all stressors, right, so insert whatever it is. How do you know if it's working for you or against you? The first one is this how do you feel? Do you feel like I was explaining, more energized and focused and creative during a fast, or do you feel tired and depleted and low in energy, hangry, hungry and angry? That's a sign. It's the latter, that you're not adapting to it and you're not ready to do that schedule yet. You got to build it up. After you do a cold plunge or a sauna or red light therapy, you should feel better After that, just like fasting. You should feel better during the fast. That's one metric. Now let's do tangible metrics.
Speaker 2:Heart rate variability is something that I use and I talk about in the book as a gauge to see if you're adapting to the stress. Heart rate variability is looking at the variability in your heartbeat it's not your total heartbeat but the variability and it's looking at your nervous system to see if your nervous system is adapting to the stress. So we know we have two primary branches to the nervous system. We have our sympathetic branch fight, flight, go, go, go really important in spurts, but you don't want to be locked there. And then we have the opposite, which is the parasympathetic branch rest, digest, detoxification. Somebody who has a higher heart rate variability is doing a good job at balancing out that nervous system, meaning they're applying the fasting schedule and they're adapting to the stress. They're recovering really well because they're seeing their heart rate variability increase. You want to find your average and increase it.
Speaker 2:If you see your heart rate variability plummet and maybe your resting heart rate is above normal, maybe you're not getting good sleep, this is a sign the stressors that you're applying it's too much. You're not adapting to it. That 18-hour fast didn't work for you. It worked against you.
Speaker 2:There's one more thing you can do with the fast. I love this and I talk about it in the book. You can track or test blood glucose and blood ketones during the fast and what you want to see this is a sign that you're adapting to the fast. You're metabolically flexible. Green light to keep doing that fast. You want to see your blood glucose drop periodically throughout that fast and your blood ketones rise. That's the trend we want to see. If you see no ketones, or ketones dropping and blood sugars rising, it's too much of a stress for your body. Break the fast and try again. Fasting is like a muscle you want to build it up over time. I could do a five-day fast and adapt really well because I've been doing this for a long time. But somebody who's a pure sugar burner, grazing 17 times a day, they do a 20-hour fast and they will suffer. They need to start with 12 hours and build it up from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are such great metrics and I really recommend again the book for people who want to look at fasting and understand it and have these great tools to really do it. Now we're talking about longer fasts. What about? We hear about intermittent fasting, just like shorter within the day. Is there value of that and what do you recommend about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's definitely value in that. There's. There's definitely value in keeping all of your calories in a certain window. You know six to eight hours is a typical window that a lot of people practice and I like that. So that would mean, let's say, your eating window is between 10am andm and 4 pm or 6 pm right, where you have all of your calories, your protein, your fat, your healthy carbs. If you have carbs within that window and then you're fasting outside of that window, that works really well because you're allowing your body to lower insulin during that let's say, 16-hour fast.
Speaker 2:You want to use your overnight sleeping as that overnight fast, and I could tell you that a few years ago I used to bash breakfast. I used to say breakfast is the dumbest meal of the day. Our ancestors didn't crawl out of a cave and eat breakfast and I thought breakfast was just a stupid idea and I always told my clients to skip breakfast and have dinner. I actually believe it's better to do the opposite, that we're actually more insulin sensitive in the morning than we are at night and our circadian rhythm is actually better designed to process calories earlier in the day than later in the day. So the ideal schedule would be to have breakfast and lunch and skip dinner. Now, I know that, but for my schedule it works so much better for me to skip breakfast and that's what I typically do.
Speaker 2:I typically have my meals within like a 12 to 6-hour eating window, so I'll have a very early dinner. But I will say, as long as you're giving yourself 3 to 5 hours of fasting digestion before bed, that's a really good idea. You don't want to eat too close to bed. It'll destroy your sleep, lower your heart rate variability. You're going to wake up groggy with hunger hormone ghrelin just peeking through the roof. So give yourself at least three to five hours of fasting before bed. It's a good idea for everybody.
Speaker 1:And so the meals to skip. You can either skip breakfast or dinner, but skipping lunch doesn't really work because you don't have the sleep window right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it wouldn't make sense. I mean you could do that, you could do breakfast and then dinner, but then it kind of like it's not ideal or optimal.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, I want to be sensitive to your time here. A couple other points I just wanted to get to too. Like you talk about environmental toxins. Right, I can get my diet all together. I could, you know, get, get my lifestyle in place, but if there's some of these things, what goes on there then?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, we live in a world where I think this is the number one cause of metabolic disease environmental toxins. So much so I wrote a whole chapter in the book, chapter five, about this. There are two classifications of toxins that I speak about in the book. There are two classifications of toxins that I speak about in the book obesogens and diabetogens. So obesogens are chemicals, toxins that are in our food supply, water supply, cleaning supply, detergents, lotions, sunscreen that when they enter the body through eating, touching your skin, breathing it in it activates a pathway in the body called P-par gamma. And it's important to understand that the number one priority for the human body is is survival. It will do everything to survive in the moment, even if that means developing disease later on. So keep that in mind when I give you this example. When we have the toxins enter the body, innate intelligence activates PPAR-gamma. Ppar-gamma will shuttle those excess toxins out of the bloodstream, kind of like what insulin does with glucose, because glucose is toxic in the bloodstream. So are these toxins. The body doesn't want these toxins to enter your vital organs, so it shuttles them where, to your adipocytes, your fat cells, because the solution to pollution is dilution. So it dilutes these toxins and it puts them in your fat cells and hell, there's not room in the fat cell. Okay, let's increase those adipocytes, so it could increase your fat cells. Oh, we ran out of room. Let's increase those adipocytes so it could increase your fat cells. Oh, we ran out of room. Let's create new fat cells. And that's how toxins make us sick and fat. They're called obesogens.
Speaker 2:Then we have a newer classification of toxins, called diabetogens. I don't see a lot of people talking about this or aware of this, but I found a study that I put in the book that shows around 33% of diabetes are toxicity related through these diabetogens. These are toxins that actually enter your body and disrupt beta cell function, triggering prediabetes and diabetes. It's crazy. So what can you do? It's not all doom and gloom. We cannot escape these toxins. We want to keep our detox pathways open. We have our downstream detox pathways open. We have our downstream detox pathways the gut, the kidney, the colon, the liver, the lymph. So I talk about strategies to do that.
Speaker 2:But some easy little wins for your audience here Drink out of glass, like I have here, instead of plastic water bottles, even if I hear people say, oh, I never leave my plastic water bottle in the car, it doesn't get heated. Well, think about the way it was transported to the grocery store. It was in a truck and it got heated. So those plastics, the microplastics, we're finding it in men's testicles and in our blood vessels. I mean everywhere. So you want to avoid plastic as much as possible. Glass instead of plastic water bottles, glass Tupperware instead of plastic Tupperware. Wood water bottles, glass Tupperware instead of plastic Tupperware, wooden cutting board instead of plastic cutting boards. This goes a long way.
Speaker 2:And then you want to also be aware of oh, by the way, on the topic of plastics, university of Newcastle study I put in the book shows the average American consumes a credit card size worth of plastic every single week, five grams. I know that's insane, bro. And then the other thing is the cash register receipts. There are studies looking at individual thermo receipts, cash register receipts, and it shows a thousand times more BPA in cash register receipts than canned food. So if you grab your receipt and touch it, that goes into your bloodstream, you put it in your pocket. Food. So if you grab your receipt and touch it, that goes into your bloodstream, you put it in your pocket. I see women putting it in their bra, say no to cash register receipts. So yeah, the whole chapter goes in depth into that and you just want to keep those detox pathways because that'll really help lower that stress load for you.
Speaker 1:One of the things I love about your work and the themes through all your work on metabolic health and keto and everything is the importance that you place on mindset and I believe that mindset may be the single most powerful tool that we have or factor in this. Can you just say a few words about your thoughts on mindset? A few words.
Speaker 2:Rob oh my gosh, you're right, it's the number one thing. So chapter 10 in the book is my favorite chapter and I probably will write an entire book about this chapter. I'll go in depth in an entire book. It's about how your thoughts influence your health or disease. So the chapter gets into the placebo effect, the nocebo effect, how your thoughts influence your DNA to produce certain proteins some of Dr Bruce Lipton's work. It gets into the longevity science of having a goal in life and living on purpose with your purpose. And of course, there's a huge part of that book, that chapter, that talks about the most important supplement for your metabolism, for anti-aging, for diabetes, for every condition, which is vitamin G.
Speaker 2:Vitamin G UC Davis has shown that those who take vitamin G have healthier blood pressure levels, healthier A1C levels. Dr Joe Dispenza did a workshop on 120 people where they took vitaminG for a few days and then they measured their cortisol levels and their IgA levels and essentially they saw a drop in their stress hormone and a boost in their immune system. A JAMA study this is a new one, rob, that I put in the book 49,725 nurses in this study and Harvard did this study published in JAMA. Published in JAMA. They showed that the nurses that took vitamin G every day had a 9% reduction in all-cause mortality versus those who didn't and 15% reduction in cardiovascular deaths versus those who didn't take vitamin G. So your audience might be already on Amazon searching for vitamin G.
Speaker 2:I don't have a coupon code. Rob doesn't sponsor the show, because vitamin G is gratitude. Everything I just shared are real studies on the practice of gratitude, and I have to just say this gratitude is not even a practice. Actually, it's not an intellectual, even a practice. Actually, it's not an intellectual. It's a feeling, it's an emotional feeling. So I encourage you to get your vitamin G every morning, throughout the day. There's no toxicity limit, it's free. But feel the gratitude, don't treat it like a checklist. Feel the gratitude and vitamin G is where it's at, my friend.
Speaker 1:Wow, it's such an important point In the book. It's so, so much information. I have to say this is the number one book I recommend to people for metabolic health. They want to understand how to get healthy metabolically and the great thing about it is you have a 30-day metabolic reset as part of the book. It is you have a 30-day metabolic reset as part of the book. Tell us about that.
Speaker 2:Thank you, rob. Your respect for me speaks volumes because I have a lot of respect for you, so thank you for that. There's a 30-day plan, right? I mentioned at the end of the book okay, you learned all this stuff. How do you apply it? Because it's not information that will change your life. If information changed your life, every librarian would be a multimillionaire and a celebrity. That ain't the case. It's the application of that information. So this book was a beast to write and research.
Speaker 2:I spent the most time on this 30-day plan because I wanted to make it doable for beginners and there's an advanced section, so if you're not new, you could follow the advanced section. But it shows you for 30 days exactly what to do every single day. Every week we create different changes. You get slow progress and wins, and then we build and we stack that momentum, but we do something new. There's a few new things we incorporate every week. We create something called metabolic confusion, like muscle confusion. So we get you from burning sugar to burning fat. Then we start doing meal timing, then we start extending the fasting window. We manipulate protein, we manipulate fat. We actually have what I call metabolic flex states, where you strategically bring in healthy carbs, lower fat. So it shows you exactly what to do. It shows you there's a section on troubleshooting. If this comes up, what do you do? So it's all mapped out for you. You just have to follow it, and I'm excited about that part of the book.
Speaker 1:It's so great. Well, the book is coming out now as we release this, so is there a special place people can go or just buy it anywhere, or should they go to your website? Or, if they want to get it, what's the best way to get the book?
Speaker 2:The book is available everywhere Barnes and Nobles Books, a Million Amazon but I would tell you this if you order it over at metabolicfreedombookcom this week, we're going to give you something special. We have an entire course that I built out on the metabolism 12 lessons in there that I built out here in my studio that we're going to give to you for free. Not only that, there's exclusive interviews in that course with Dr Jason Fung, gary Brekka, megan Ramos, dr Daniel Pompa and Cynthia Thurlow. These are interviews I only did for this course and you could get the entire course with the interviews for free. When you go to metabolicfreedombookcom, when you go there, you're going to see different links to purchase the book. Any of those retailers are fine. The book's available on hardcover Kindle, audible I narrated the Audible. It was a pain in the butt and once you order the book you'll go back to that page. There's an order form where you put your name, email, order number and then you're automatically emailed the course with the interview. So metabolicfreedombookcom is where you would go for that.
Speaker 1:One thing I always ask people kind of in this climate now there's so many changes going on nationwide, with our government, with everything else what would you like to see happen most for metabolic health as far as changes in our regulatory environment or anything like anything come to mind with that or so many things we have?
Speaker 2:I just I would say it's a great question, right, really important question at this time, with the focus of metabolic health. It's really cool to see the focus on metabolic health. I forget who said it, but don't expect the government to save you Somebody. It's an old health. I forget who said it, but don't expect the government to save you. It's an old quote. I forget who said it. So the point being look, it's great that there's a focus on health and I hope the government continues to do that. I pray. We need it. We need a change, but you are in control. You are the only problem you will ever have and you're also the only solution. So just take ownership and focus on you. Don't even try to force other people to change, because people don't like being forced to change. They're resistant to it. They'll see your story, your inspiration when you start losing weight, when you start getting healthy, and they'll ask the question. So you just focus on you. Bob Proctor used to say if everybody swept their front porch, the entire town would be clean.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:So if everybody just focused on themselves and got healthy. Everybody else will follow suit. So focus on yourself. It's your responsibility. It's not your fault because of the crazy amount of information and influence with drug companies. It's not your fault because of the crazy amount of information and influence with drug companies.
Speaker 1:It's not your fault, but it's your responsibility. Yeah, great, great thought. The book is titled Metabolic Freedom A 30-Day Guide to Restore your Metabolism, heal Hormones and Burn Fat. And, ben, it's been a pleasure. I, as always. Brother, I highly recommend your podcast. Also, I have to say listen to it, watch it. It's full of nuggets and fascinating information. He has the greatest guests on there. I love your introductory comment when you start the podcast about our ancestral. It's so, so powerful that resonates with me every time I every time I see it. So again, please check out the book. It's you won't be disappointed. I can't recommend this book enough. Thank you so much, ben, for for taking the time to write this book. I know it's a lot of work. And thank you so much for spending time with us today and thanks for everything you do.
Speaker 2:Thank you, brother. I appreciate you and I had a blast. I'm very grateful for you.