Seasonal eating for longevity with Dr. John Douillard

In this episode of the Heallist Podcast, we explore the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern science with LifeSpa founder Dr. John Douillard, as he shares his perspective on how seasonal eating, breathing practices, and digestive health may influence vitality and longevity. Drawing from both Ayurvedic principles and emerging research, the conversation examines how our bodies interact with natural rhythms and what can happen when those rhythms become disrupted.

Through practical examples, Dr. Douillard discusses the relationship between seasonal foods and the gut microbiome, the role of breathing in supporting lymphatic and immune function, and why food preparation methods have long been emphasized in traditional health systems. We also explore how modern diets, highly processed foods, and reduced exposure to natural environments may affect gut resilience, microbial diversity, and overall well-being. Listeners will gain insight into simple ways of thinking about health through the lens of digestion, nature, and daily habits.

This conversation is shared for educational and reflective purposes, offering perspectives on longevity and wellness that integrate traditional practices with contemporary scientific inquiry.

Key takeaways include:

•  Seasonal eating may support greater diversity within the gut microbiome 
•  Breathing practices can play a role in supporting circulation, lymphatic function, and overall well-being 
•  Digestive and gut health are closely connected to broader aspects of health and resilience 
•  Modern dietary patterns may disrupt natural biological rhythms and microbial balance 
•  Small lifestyle shifts aligned with nature's cycles can have meaningful long-term impacts on health and vitality

Access Dr. Douillard’s free Seasonal Grocery Lists  to explore seasonal eating.  

Visit Heallist.com - your portal to holistic healing, connecting seekers and thousands of practitioners across the globe.

Follow @heal_list on Instagram.

Watch video episodes on Spotify & Youtube.

Transcript

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Yuli 0:00

Welcome to the Heallist Podcast, where we unpack the many layers of holistic health. I'm Yuli, founder of Heallist, your portal to holistic healers worldwide. Now let's go deep. Hello, dear friends, and welcome to the Heallist Podcast. If this content resonates, please hit subscribe or follow to support us independent content. Most of us are trying to get healthier by doing more, more supplements, more biohacks, more tracking, more rules, yet rates of digestive issues, sleep problems, inflammation, and burnout continue to rise. What if the missing piece isn't what you're eating, but when you're eating it? What if your body was designed to thrive by aligning with nature's rhythms rather than fighting against them? So our guest today is Dr. John Douillard, Ayurvedic longevity expert, founder of LiveSpa, and former director of player development at NBA's Brooklyn Nuts organization. He connects time-tested Ayurveda with modern science to share practical ways to improve digestion, energy, sleep, and resilience through seasonal eating, circadian habits, and even how you breathe. So in this conversation, we're going to try to explore why eating the same foods you're around might be working against your health, how modern habits disrupt our natural biological rhythms, and the simple daily shifts that can have an outsize impact on your longevity and vitality. So I'm really excited for this conversation. John, welcome to the show. Really excited to have you. And uh let's dive right in.

John 1:42

Perfect. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Yuli 1:45

Amazing. So I mean it's such a big topic. And I'm personally, I'm a big like longevity fan. You can call me a biohacker. I recently turned 50, so I definitely have like a vested interest to prolong my life. I have young children and I've been exposed to a lot of different philosophies and modalities and this holistic health journey and building the Heallist platform. And there's so much conflicting advice out there, right? There's so many different diets, and we're just overwhelmed by information, which is great, right? We love access to information that we all have all of a sudden. But there's also this really you know variety of opinions that makes it really hard for like average consumer, for average parent or a person on their health journey just to vet and filter out what's real, what's not, what's for them, what's not for them. Right. And that's why I love personally coming back to those ancient traditions because they they knew for centuries, right? Like people who practice Ayurveda, they they knew those secrets. We just kind of decided to suppress them for many years, and now we're we're so fortunate to have this wisdom kind of coming back. So talk to me about this kind of the the landscape today, of all those opinions, all of those traditions, and what you're doing and your philosophy fits.

John 3:17

Well, I I think you're absolutely right. You know, when you have something, practices, lifestyle, diet, behavior that have been around for thousands and thousands of years, right? And it's something that we should look at and study and evaluate. Today, in kind of our modern science world, we just kind of look at science, and really science can prove whatever it wants. You know, coffee is good, coffee's bad, wheat's good, wheat's bad, you name it. There's going to be studies on both sides of the aisle, and nobody really knows what to believe. You know, you have a lot of influencers, you know, who are telling you to do this and do this and do that. But what happens is those recommendations keep changing. And, you know, one minute they're saying you should, you should never eat broccoli, and then all of a sudden, you know, vegetables are back. And you see a lot of the influence are great because they're trying to figure it out, and that's beautiful, and I love that. But what you have when you have a traditional system of medicine thousands of years old, and you have modern science to back it up, that's a really great place to start because after thousands of years, this stuff doesn't change. Like we have a diet for every new season, it seems like a new tweak. It was keto. Now we know keto is not really that good for us long term. So we don't do that anymore. So now we're trying to do carnivore. Well, that's not going to be really good long term either. So we keep bouncing around, trying to figure out what's going to give you the symptomatic relief of generally what the previous diet left you craving, right? I mean, years ago when when the Atkins diet first came out, which is a high protein diet, people were having like 80% protein, then they're having kidney issues. So they started to, and they were craving the carbohydrates, and it was a best-selling diet. And then Pritikin comes along, which is the next best-selling diet, and he said, you know what, you can get all the same benefits and more if you eat 80% carbohydrates. And it was like, oh my God, that next best-selling diet just gave you permission to eat, but the other diet said you can't, and you're craving it, so boom, you got a best-selling diet. What's really neat about Ayurveda is that, you know, if after it didn't, if it didn't work after 100 or 200 years, they would have stopped doing it. So, what I do at LifeSpa is I write articles about the ancient medical practices, and then I find science to prove them. And if there's no science, I don't write about it. So when

The Three Harvests Of Eating

John 5:40

you have both of them, I feel like that's a really great safe place to start. And one of the things that they said historically was that you should, this is so logical and almost stupid even to say, but we should eat with the seasons, right? That everyone, every critter, every human on the planet historically, they had to eat with the seasons because we didn't have refrigerators. And but what we now know is that the microbes in the soil are dramatically changing from one season to the next, to the next. And we know that the hunter-gatherer tribes, that the bugs in their gut would change from one season to the next, to the next. Ours doesn't. They know that in the springtime, that time of year when you're getting a lot of fiber in your diet from a lot of vegetables and roots and things like that, you have more what are called actidobacteria, which are helping you get energy from fiber. And at the end of the summer, when you have all the fruits and the vegetables and the grains, and you have more starch coming out of the ground, we actually have more of the bacteria deeds, which are bacteria in your gut, that actually help you digest the starch. In fact, we have an enzyme for starch called amylase, which we started to make our own as humans about two million years ago, or hominids two million years ago. Before that, we didn't have the enzyme to digest starch. And all of a sudden, at two million years ago, we had that enzyme, which is probably because we were eating starch, like eating grains and barley off the grasslands in Africa. And they did find gluten in the teeth of ancient humans two and a half million years ago, according to studies of the University of Texas. So the idea is that the diet, the fuel supply changes historically in nature. You get a high carbohydrate diet in the summer, end of summer, fall, you get a very low carbohydrate diet in the spring. Think about the spring. Is there any pasta or pizza coming out of the ground? No. It's a time of year where you're calorie restricted, religions are doing all their fasting. There's nothing coming out of the ground. It forces you into a fat-burning state to make energy. Your bugs change in accord with that. You burn fat, stable fuel, you reset fat burning, you detoxify, you lose some weight in the springtime because there's no food coming out of the ground, right? And in the winter months, you know, we have a more higher protein, higher fat diet. Think about the squirrels eating nuts and seeds. That's what they're doing. So the best-selling diets, the high protein, high-fat diets, the low-carb diets, the high carb diets, they all exist in nature. And the nutritional cycle is an annual cycle. So it takes a year to complete. You can't get everything every day because nature didn't work like that. It takes, it takes a whole season for you to for the nature to muster up a nut or a grain or a fruit, right? You can't have that all year long. So the idea is you make some beautiful, gentle changes from one season to the next, to the next.

Yuli 8:35

Listen, it makes a total sense to me. And I noticed as I've been on this healing journey, when you start listening to your body, it actually tells you what it craves. When it truly listens not to like your emotional eating, right? For example, I love salads in the summer and the spring. I can absolutely not have a salad in the winter. My body just like rejects the idea of it, right? So I I've been trying to listen to that already. But my question is if this makes so much sense and people who know, they know. How come there hasn't been like a big diet or or that was named after like the seasonal diet, or hasn't been like this big trend? Because we know things are trending, and this is what it takes, right, for the mass population to embrace a concept. Do you have any theories behind it?

John 9:23

This is a good question. I wrote a book called The Three Season Diet, and the reason why it's not four seasons is because, and I think that's why maybe no one read the book, because they all thought, I didn't know there were four seasons, but there's three harvests in nature. And that's how we interact with nature. We have a spring harvest, which is a low-carb time of the year, low carb harvest. We have a summer harvest, which is a high carbohydrate time of the year, typically the end. And then we have a fall harvest for winter eating. So we have a winter, winter is sort of a dormant season. So you have a spring harvest, summer harvest, and a fall harvest, which you then carry as best you can into the winter. And that's gonna be your higher protein, higher fat diet, a time of year where you're gonna probably eat more protein, eat more fat, probably hunt more because nothing coming out of the ground. And every traditional culture knew that if you were gonna hunt all summer long, you would end up with nothing to hunt in the winter and starve to death. So cultures had periods of scarcity, restrictions of eating certain foods, restrictions of hunting too much, and overhunting, because that was part of their survival. Some civilizations didn't make it, like Easter Island, but most cultures figured that out, that there are really important periods that we need to follow. And that's such a simple logical idea. So I wrote a book about it, but nobody read it because they thought there's he doesn't even know that there's four. I don't know. So I actually put together grocery lists for people to make it really easy. And they're on my website, they're free. You can download them. There's like a winter grocery list, and there's a spring grocery list, and a summer grocery list. And here's how simple it is to get the right bugs in your gut for the right season. And here's why that's important. There was a study done in the university at Stanford University, and they took mummies, thousand-year-old bodies in museums from New Mexico and Arizona, and they measured their microbiome, figured out how to do that. And then they compared their bugs to our bugs, and they had such a massive amount of diversity in their gut compared to our modern humans that they concluded that that was an extinction event. So, how do we get the right bugs? And it's not just eating probiotic, which can be fine. It's getting the right bugs in the right season because the bugs carry the circadian rhythms, the intelligence. If I took all the bugs out of you, you would be a completely different person. The whole psychobiotic thing affects how you think. They even did studies where you take a toddler and they can figure out what their bugs are and what they're going to be more of an artist or an engineer or, you know, whatever. It's like these bugs are running the show, and yet we have such a sterilized environment. And how do you get the right bugs for the right season? The winter bugs to boost immunity when you need it the most, spring bugs to decongest you, summer bugs to dissipate heat. This is nature's intelligence. And plants have what are called bacterial endophytes on the plant. They're synergistic related, just like our microbiome is so unique to us. And if you take that away, you destroy the intelligence of us. And if you destroy the intelligence of the plant. So when you start eating seasonally, you start to inoculate very gently, and you know, with organic foods or coming out of your garden the very best you can. So all you really need to do is take the grocery list for the right season you're in, circle the foods on here that you like, and give yourself permission to eat more of those foods. It's that simple. Take this to the grocery store, you'll find these are my winter foods. And guess what? When I go into the fall, I can start eating some grains again. But in the spring, I'm going to really reduce them a lot. So you don't eat wheat every day of the year. I know wheat's got a bad rap because it's like, you know, the hard to digest food. And that's the other thing. What we've done because our digestive system has become so weak that we have just bubble wrapped our diet. We just take everything out. Now people just say, okay, don't eat wheat, which is, I get that. You don't feel good eating it, don't eat it. But then it became don't eat wheat and dairy, and now nuts and seeds and beans and rice and legumes and nitrates and oxalates and gorgrogens and nitrate and nitchays and the list and lectins and phytic acids, don't eat, don't eat, oxalates, don't eat. So we start bubble wrapping the diet, and those harder to digest foods create a level of hormesis, a little irritation in your intestinal tract that actually creates gut immunity, which is 80% of your immune response. And if you bubble wrap the diet, eat baby food, you don't create a reason for gut immunity, you don't get it. And that's one of the reasons why our immune system is now being compromised. We did lousy in COVID, because we've many, 74% of the American population have some type of digestive disturbance that's affecting their gut immunity. And our solution is well, just don't eat or take digestive enzymes and do the digesting for you. It's not enough. We have to go upstream and troubleshoot where the digestive issue is and fix it so you can have a wider birth of foods that you can eat throughout your entire life. Just like you were when most people were 18, they could digest anything. And when they're 60 or 70, can't eat this, can't eat that, can't eat that. So that's a big problem. There was a study done where they had, and I'm not trying to tell people eat wheat, but again, clearly if you don't feel good eating anything, don't eat it. Sure, but let's go back and now really fix the problem. So they had a group of folks that were wheat eaters and a group of folks that were gluten-free but didn't have to be. So they were, you know, they weren't celiac, but they didn't feel good eating wheat, so they didn't eat it. They measured their blood and they found that the people who had ate wheat had four times less mercury heavy metals in their blood than people who were gluten-free that didn't have to be. The wheat eaters had significantly more killer T cells compared to the folks who were gluten-free but didn't have to be. They had more good bugs and less bad bugs than the people who were gluten-free and didn't have to be. So the research is definitely in that when you bubble wrap your diet, that you end up much weaker as a result. So we have to, and when you eat seasonally, you're not eating all that food every day of the year. The oxalates don't come every day of the year. Again, there is a seasonal approach. So the body gets ready for these changes in the diet. You have more digestive strength in the winter to digest the nuts in the season, the heavier, hard to digest things. You have weaker digestion in the summer because the food is cooked on the vine. It's being cooked on the vine for you, so you can actually don't have to cook it as much. You don't want to heat the body up and cook things in the summer when it's already too hot. But in the winter, you want fermented foods, which are lactic acid fermentation. They're going to heat you up. You want warming foods to warm you up in the winter, and you have a strong furnace on there to cook the food and keep you warm in the winter. This is a beautiful, logical way nature works, but now we have the science to back all that up. And all you got to do to align yourself is just like take the grocery list, circle what you like, and eat more of it. You don't have to eat only these foods. Those there's asterisks on here on each list that are the superfoods for each season, but you just try to get medicinal doses of the right food in the right season in an organic way that we're out of your garden. And now all of a sudden you're starting to create an alignment. And this is Nobel Prize-winning science when we have circadian disruption, where people's biological clocks are completely out of sync with nature's rhythms. And that is a dangerous road to hoe. Thousands of years ago, they knew that. They made very strict requirements of when to eat and how to eat and all this. And now we're just beginning to understand that it's a really big deal. And with all the

Fiber And Bile As Daily Detox

John 17:25

blue light and everything we have, it only makes it worse.

Yuli 17:28

All right. I have like 10 follow-up questions. This is so good and so much helpful information. First of all, I just wanted to clarify what those bugs mean. Like you mentioned bugs and then good bugs, right? Are we can you just dissect it to people who maybe not heard of it before? Like, what are we talking about? Is it like actually bacteria that sits in our food? You know, we're learning, like you mentioned COVID. During COVID, we were taught to like scrub our food with soap and get rid of the bad guys. Like, what are we talking about? That's the first question.

John 18:03

Well, we're just talking about the fact that, you know, our intestinal tract is full of microbes, little bugs that you can't see. And what's interesting is thousands of years ago, before microscopes were invented, they talked about invisible bacteria and invisible bacteria. And what they said was thousands of years ago, they said don't, then there's good ones and there's bad ones. They mentioned that. And they said the key to keeping balance is don't kill the bad ones. Take care of the host of the environment, the ecology of the gut. And that ecology of the gut is going to be supported by seasonal fiber that changes from one season to the next. So think about in nature, you have grains harvested at the end of the summer, which are high in fiber. And that slimy, soluble fiber is slimy. It's like chia seeds or flax seeds or oatmeal. It's really sticky. And that soluble fiber heals your lining. And it also attaches to bile and takes the bile to the toilet. And the bile is your Pac-Man, gobbling up toxins in your liver, cleaning the villi of your intestinal tract. And the fiber attaches to that bile and takes all the toxins to the toilet. Now, if you don't have enough fiber or the right kind of fiber, up to 93% of that bile with all the toxins in tow, get absorbed right back to your liver. It dumps it in your liver, and you start the whole process over again. That's not, that's a textbook medical fact. So Hunter Gathers had about 200 grams of fiber in their diet per day. I think for fun, your listeners, if you want to challenge yourself, just try to eat 50 grams of fiber for a day, one day. Just see how ridiculous it is to get 50. To imagine getting 200 is something I can't. And this was research from Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard professor, who wrote the book, The Story of the Human Body. So it's a real scientific fact, at least from that perspective. So like it's just mind-boggling, but that fiber is so critically important to take the bile to the toilet. So guess what you do the next day? Make brand new bile to clean your intestinal tract, keep your digestive system functioning really well. And if you don't have enough fiber, your bile, again, another textbook fact, your bile will get reused 17 times. Go into your intestinal tract, no bile, will go back to the liver, gobble up some toxins, get dumped into your intestinal tract, no bile, back to the liver, 17 times before it's finally discarded as broken down bile. So that's why fiber is so critical. And the soluble fiber, you get in the winter when it's cold and dry, right? All our skin dries out in the winter. Our inner skin dries out in the winter. We get constipated, right? That's why when you travel and flies, very vata, nervous system aggravating, very dry up there. So you get constipated. What does nature do? Has the antidote in the harvest of the fall, which is soluble fiber, slimy fiber to lubricate your intestinal tract during those dry, cold winter months. And it's fertilizer for the good bugs. And the good bugs eat the soluble fiber and the bile eats the fiber. It's like such a cool thing. But if you don't do it, you pay a price. And then in the summertime, when it's when it's hot outside, you get insoluble fiber, which is like your celery and things that don't make, when you cook them, they don't become gooey and slimy. And that's going to scrub your intestinal tract and increase your transit time so things go through you faster. And that just helps kind of create a nice intestinal scrub for you. But it's all for the bugs. Your bugs are in charge of making your microbes have an level of intelligence. And we sort of evolved around these little microbes to calculate. They keep them happy. But we've done a bang up job keeping them unhappy with processed foods and pesticides, make sure we kill all the bugs, which we're eating sterile food. And a lot of our herbs are sterile. People take an herb and they soak it in alcohol, and now it's sterile. There's no intelligence to that plant. Now, in Ayurveda, we always use the or herb with its natural occurring microbiome. It's so critically important to have that intelligence because when you do it that way, you're actually helping the body restore function. When you sterilize it and take away the herbs, the bugs, the intelligence, you end up with something that is more like a drug. It's sort of doing the job for your body. Your body becomes dependent on that pillar of powder. And now you've got to take it forever, or you got to keep taking higher doses of it. And this is the medical way now is just get on a drug, stay on it for the rest of your life. As opposed to traditional cultures, like, no, get on, get better, get off. In fact, historically, doctors were only paid if their patients were healthy. If they got sick, they'd stop getting paid. So they had to go, they're motivated to actually keep their people healthy. Now we're definitely motivated to keep people sick. And it's sad, really. So that's the idea of just starting to do things that are intelligent. We have science to show when you have foods with microbes and herbs with microbes, they're actually restoring function to your body. There's no side effects or side benefits. But when you take something as an extract and take it away or take a drug, there's going to be a consequence that's not part of what your body goes, I don't know what that is. I mean, there's no microbes here. Like it's like there's no intelligence that we respond to. And that's the beauty of traditional cultures. They were in resonance, they were aligned. They respected nature in a way that they wanted, they, they, and they were so careful about healing the intestinal lining because they knew that's where the rubber met the road. And that's your detox pathway, that's your digestive assimilation pathway. And, you know, in our culture, what we do is we see, oh, there's you have SIBO, let's take a bug and let's take a micro antibiotic and just kill everything. And that leaves you so vulnerable for opportunistic, not wonderful and desirable bugs to all of a sudden take over your microbiome. So we just have this concept is just knock out the symptom and you're good. And the tradition was, you know, nature had a plan, a very specific plan from season to season to season. Even the different herbs that are in season, because they carry the bugs at the right time for the right season. So it's it's a beautiful dance. And that's the way I try to help people understand is this is logical. This is not some weird Indian system. You have to learn Indian words. This is a study of nature. That's what it was. And we don't do that in our culture. We just give you the newest, latest biohack, which might be good, but it might not be so good. You know, we don't know because it's a brand new idea. And yeah, we're we're experimenting on people. It's not great.

Food Intolerances And Gut Immunity

Yuli 25:06

So are you saying that some of those intolerances and increased allergies that we're seeing out there, they m there's a potential that they might be due to this non-seasonal diet and not allowing our gut to kind of recover. Like people who are suddenly sensitive to like wheat or specific ingredients, which is, I don't know the exact numbers, but there's definitely an increase from all of a sudden. I don't know if we just can measure it better or people have more awareness and diagnostics, but it seems like it's more than that.

John 25:41

I went started practice in 1984, and those problems didn't exist. You know, everybody ate rice and beans. It never had problems. I mean, people some people were sensitive to wheat. We take them off of wheat, take them off of dairy. But rice and beans and nuts and seeds and all this list of people things that people can't digest. I mean, people can't digest beans anymore. That's what's the staple for the planet, right? Rice and beans are a staple around the world. And now we have people saying, don't eat beans because they have lectins on them and you can't digest them. Those lectins, I wrote an article all about the science behind the benefits of lectins. And all you hear is like, oh, these are bad because they're irritants. Well, they're creating gut immunity. They create that hormesis, a little bit of irritation that makes you adapt and become stronger. You know, because it's easier to just blame it on the food as opposed to trying to figure out what's actually broken in your digestion. There was a study that showed that when you don't break down your protein and your fat, your gluten, your dairy, you know, even a greasy fried food, that's the fat. You should be able to digest it. Not that you should eat it, but we should be able to eat it. And the study showed if you don't break down those proteins and fats, they will go incompletely digested into your intestinal tract. And the molecules, because they weren't broken down, are going to be too big to get into your blood. It's a little oversimplification, but what happens to those molecules is they get uptaken into the collecting ducts of your lymph. And the lymphatic system is what lines your intestinal tract. Your gut immunity is also called the gut-associated lymphatic tissue. Your lymphatic system is 80% of your immune response in your intestinal tract. And that's where all the bad stuff that's undigested, the pathogens that get in there, that's who's going to try to knock that out and take care of you. And if that lymph gets congested, you'll get extra weight around your belly and hips. You get, you know, your ankles will swell, your rings will get tight, your lymph can't take the trash out, which is one of its major jobs. Your lymph can't take deliver the immune system, one of its major jobs. And the lymph can't also deliver fatty acids, it's a major job, which is giving you energy, making sure your skin, which is a phospholipid layer, has been fed and deliver fatty acids for your hormones. So when you go to the doctor, they say, oh, you're low on your hormones. We're going to give you, you know, bioidentical hormones. I get it. That might be what's required, but wouldn't the first step be, hey, why don't we check your lymphatic system and see if you're delivering those fatty acids? Maybe we can also help your body with hormonal precursors, botanicals that actually can help the body make those hormones. Because if you're not making, you're not getting those fatty acids through the lymph, you're not making any hormone. So the idea is that we just go right to the, let's, oh, the gas tank it says, well, we'll just fill it up for you without ever asking, can the body do this? I mean, it's been doing it for millions of years. Why all of a sudden now we have to do hormones? And I get it, some people need it and it's fine. But I think most folks would say, you know what? I want to give it a go on my own. I don't want to become dependent on a pill or a powder for the rest of my life. And that's the beautiful thing about it. So your lymphatic system, which is where all the undigested proteins and fats go, is carrying your immune system, delivering fats, and also taking out all the trash. And that system in Ayurveda is the system of longevity. That's the first system that's evaluated. And so if you don't have that working, like for example, the first studies that came out regarding long haul COVID were linked to congestion of the brain's lymphatic system. So they only discovered the brain's lymphatic system about 15 years ago at the University of Virginia. But Ayurveda talked about that thousands of years ago and literally gave therapies to clean it out. So you didn't hear anything about the fact that long haul COVID was linked to brain lymph congestion because there was literally no medical application for that. But when you look in the Ayurvedic text, they say the diaphragm is the pump of your lymphatic system for your brain. It's the cerebral spinal fluid, which is your brainwasher fluid, that's pumped by your diaphragm. So breathing techniques, and there's many others, but breathing techniques are critical. And when you have COVID, guess what? You can't breathe. And when you can't breathe, you can't pump the cerebral spinal fluid. So it makes logical sense. You're probably going to have a lot of inflammation in your brain that you can't really get rid of. So that and your brain is responsible for regulating an immune response. So you end up with a compromised immune response to the immune event, right? And the diaphragm is so critically important. Again, Western science tells us that it's the pump of your entire lymphatic system. Has anybody ever told you that? And studies show when you strengthen your diaphragm, you can, there's 15 studies showing it can reverse your heartburn, your GERD, your reflux indigestion. How many times have you gone to your medical doctor for heartburn and they give you a breathing technique? Never. But in their medical journals, there's studies showing it'll reverse that. And a recent study showed with elite athletes that 91% of the athletes didn't have a diaphragm relaxing and contracting fully. So from the point of view of lymphatic flow, from brain lymph, cognitive function, mental clarity, autoimmunity, all these things are linked to brain function regulating the immune response. And if the diaphragm is weak, your lymph gets congested, you start holding on to water, your ankle starts to swell, you get joint pain, your skin starts to break out, you get breast tenderness and swelling around your cycle. These are lymphatic conditions. You get brain fog when you eat wheat. That's protein, gluten, that didn't get broken down.

Lymph Congestion And Brain Fog

John 31:45

It gets uptaken into the collecting ducts of your lymph, it goes into the lymph, goes into the brain lymph, and now you have a brain fog issue and you blame it on the wheat. It's not the wheat, it's the inability to break down that wheat. Now I get the glyphosate thing and the processed nature of the wheat, and eating wheat every day with wonder bread forever. Of course, that's not what we're talking about. Trying to get as close to nature as possible. But the research on wheat is, I wrote a book called Eat Wheat to kind of push back against this. That it actually reverses your risk of Alzheimer's. The whole grain brain thing, David Pro Mutter wrote the book that made everybody not eat wheat. He was wrong. I mean, the studies show that wheat will actually protect you from Alzheimer's disease. And I was on his podcast, he was on my podcast, we debated it. My mother said I won that debate. She's pretty sure I did. But the point is, is like, it doesn't make any sense that it's the grain that we've been eating for millions of years. I guess the processed nature, and that's the thing. But it's the broken down digestion that is allowing us to have more undigested proteins as fast, getting into lymph, congesting that lymph. And now we have all these, I can't get the trash out symptoms. I can't respond with an immune event properly, symptoms, and I can't get fatty acids that give me energy or hormones. Those are like three major things that people complain of: hormone issues, right? They can't, they've got toxic joint pain, you know, skin rashes, joint issues. I can't take the trash out, brain fog, and then of course your immune system. Like it's like a big deal. And thousands of years ago, they said those three things, that lymph, that if you get that better, that's the longevity ticket. They wrote about that 2,500 years ago. And now we still only hear about the lymph when you go to the doctor and you get diagnosed with cancer. But what's really interesting is in the medical journals, there's volumes of research about the lymphatic system, but none of it's in medical practice. And that's why I try to bring to the table, I say, hey, look, here's all the research, here's the ancient wisdom, here's the foods and the herbs to get that thing back online, here's how you reboot that digestive strength so you don't have undigested proteins and fats, a lot clogging up your lymph, and now you can't think, you can't walk, your joints ache, your skin breaks out. None of that has to happen.

Yuli 34:12

Well, this was incredible wealth of information. And I learned so much. Thank you. I want to bring in, it was also acknowledged for some of our listeners that it might be advanced, right? And I don't want to intimidate people by a lot of those terms because I think this is something, this is information that all of us should have access to, at least be aware of. So, one, we can ask the right questions if we do go to our doctor, and two, that we can take agency of our own health. So, on that topic, I would love to hear from you anything else, simple steps that our listeners can take outside of taking that wonderful seasonal grocery list to when they next time they go to a Trader Joe, whatever. And uh anything else that they could do to kind of realign with that ancient wisdom, with the way outside of growing their own vegetables, of course, and and all that.

John 35:09

For sure.

Diaphragm Breathing As A Health Tool

John 35:10

You know, the first thing is for folks is we live in a stressful environment. We all know that. And every time you get stressed, we breathe a little different. And the rib cage has one job squeeze the air out. And every time you get stressed, a little bit shallow breathing, that becomes normal. Another one stress comes along, that becomes normal. Next thing you know, you're breathing really, really shallow and your diaphragm becomes weaker. So the most important thing that you can do for longevity is get your lymphatic pump turned back on and get the cerebrospinal fluid pump turned back on. And that's what what Western medicine calls maximum inspiratory breathing. So you got to breathe in all the way. But if I breathe in all the way, that's sort of the same breath you would see if I saw a bear in the woods. I don't want to trigger a fight or flight breath. I need to trigger a calm breath. So we're gonna do the maximum breathing slowly. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna breathe through your nose. And as you breathe in through your nose, you're gonna feel your belly only, like a Buddha. Then you're gonna go to your chest, inhale, then you're gonna continue the inhale, go to your upper chest. And then to take it to maximum, you can take little sips of air all the way up. And as you go all the way in, you can't take any more in, you'll feel a little pull under the rib cage. Then when you breathe out, you want to make sure it's long and slow, contract your abdomen, squeeze all the air out. All of it, all of it, all of it. Then fill your belly, then your chest, then your upper chest. Take little sips, the max, all the way, and then out all the way slowly. So now I'm getting a maximum respiratory breathing. This breathing significant is shown to reverse heartburn, GERD, reflux, indigestion, lower your blood pressure as fast as the western medication, clean out the brain, lymphatic system, and like so much more, right? It's such a cool thing. And so, what you can do is you can do that right in front of your computer. You can also take it a little further by taking your arms up and reach. So now your ribcage is going up, and you do that same breath, your diaphragm goes down to contract, and now you're breaking up all the scar tissue and adhesions and rigidity of your rib cage. So you do this, bring bring your arms up and you feel your belly, and then your chest, upper chest, and then you reach and sip, and you're stretching. Like, you know, when you wake up and you see your dog goes in like that, and they open up and they yawn, we're doing the same thing. But we're getting the diaphragm to go down, rib cage to go up, you do 10 like that in front of your computer, all the way out with the exhale. Go to the side, you do belly, chest, upper chest, sip, sip, sip to max, ten like that, ten the other side. And now you've got this rib cage beginning up. Do that five minutes a day to just get that diaphragm turned back in on in the morning. When you get in front of your computer, you can kind of do it while you're booting up your computer, you know, kind of thing. Really simple. And the other thing is for your digestion, your spices. Spices have been shown to turn on your digestive strength. And there's five you should know about: ginger, cumin,

Five Spices That Boost Digestion

John 38:05

coriander, fennel, and cardamom. Those are the five digestive spices. And you can make a little spice pack, you know, in your uh in your from your spice cabinet already, probably it's all there. And you can sprinkle that on your food when you cook it. You can sprinkle it on your food when you eat it. We have a product called gentle digest, which is just those five spices, but you can do it at home. It's super easy. And the study showed it will turn on stomach acid, bioflow, pancreatic duadinal enzymes, and get that upper digestion turned on. So when you eat something hard to digest, it's broken down so it can nourish you, not end up in the trash can, which is your lymphatic system, and create congestion there. And the other thing that's crazy about spices is they've been shown to protect this is ginger, cumin, chorindrophenyl, and cardamom. It's shown to protect you from phieronical damage from cooking your food. When you cook meat, you create heterocyclic amines, which are cancer-causing, like the charred charcoal version, and when it gets brown and black on your meat. It's a cancer-causing agent, it's a carcinogen. The spices mitigate that and protect that from happening. It's mind-boggling. There's good science. I wrote a whole article on the science behind this. There's this mind-boggling. When you cook, make toasts, you create acrylamides, which are cancer-causing agents when you cook starch. Spices mitigate that. When you cook anything, it creates what's called reactive oxygen species, which are free radicals that damage the food. And when you use spices, which has been used for around the world forever and ever, now it turns out that they are really not just for the taste. They make everything taste better, different, but they're really important for our digestion to keep it strong, particularly in a world where we're getting clobbered by, you know, hard-to-digest foods and pesticides and all the stuff, processed food that make it really easy, and the stress turns the digestion down, makes it harder for you to digest your food. So these are little simple things. When you're breathing, now you're going to be breathing in a way that tells your body, hey, the war's over. I don't have to be in the fight or flight state all the time. And when I've spice my food, I'm getting a little, a little bit of a boost that's going to help my body digest the food versus give you a digestive enzyme, which literally tells you, don't bother. We're going to digest it for you. And then, of course, that the body becomes tolerant to that. And then you have to take more of them. And then it doesn't fix it long term. It gives you symptomatic relief setting up for another pillar of powder.

Yuli 40:36

Well, your wealth of information. I would love I have so many more questions, but we're also running out of time. So I maybe another time. Maybe there's a part two. But thank you so much for sharing it. And thank you for bringing, by the way, in breath work into the conversation because I feel like it's one of those things it is becoming popular, thankfully. But I feel like it often doesn't come with that a beautiful scientific explanation that gives people maybe a little bit more motivation to treat it as a medicine, as a tool, versus it's uh a nice mindful practice. Like I know firsthand breath work is not mindfulness practice. Like you mentioned, it's a brain flushing practice that I've been lucky to discover through the Kundalini yoga and through my meditation teachers, but it's it's something that doesn't get enough credit still. So thank you for that. And uh I wanted to give you a chance to kind of share a few last words with our listeners.

John 41:34

Sure. My website is at lifespot.com, and there you can get these grocery lists for free. There's right on the homepage, it's there's a little banner that says new here start here. So if you click on that, you'll get the grocery list for free. You can just download them. That's all at LIFESPA.com. And then while you're there in that new here start here banner, there's questionnaires like your the digestive health quiz, where you I give you a quiz to find out what part of your digestion is broken and how to fix it with herbs and foods and things like that naturally. There's another quiz called the lymphatic quiz where find out what part of your lymphatic system is broken and tells you how to use that, how to fix that with herbs and lifestyle and diet and things like that. So they're really simple things. We have over 1,500 articles on my website, all ancient wisdom, modern science. And you can type in your health concern. All that knowledge is for free. That's our business model. Put the knowledge out for free. You know, we'll and then we have an herbal company that we sell herbs with that I formulate. That's what pays the bills. But all the knowledge on the website is for free. So go there as a library. It's an incredible wealth of information to help you get back without jumping to the pillar of the powder right away, you know?

Yuli 42:48

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for all you do, for your service, and for sharing all this beautiful wisdom with us today.

John 42:55

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.