Eat Smarter with Shawn Stevenson

Our guest this week is Shawn Stevenson, author of the book Eat Smarter. We discuss  the importance of our gut bacteria for weight management and the science behind why and how to keep it healthy.

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:38

Gib. Hello and welcome to another episode of intelligence for your life. The podcast. I'm Gib Gerard. Our guest this week is Sean Stevenson, author of the new book, eat smarter. We're going to talk all about the importance of our gut bacteria now we I had actually intended to talk with him about a whole bunch of things about that are in his book, eat smarter, all kinds of ways for you to eat the best things for your lives. How to have the psychology meeting. We didn't get to hardly any of it because we spent so much time talking about food diversity and gut bacteria and how fundamentally important that is. So we're going to talk about all of the ins and outs of that. In it may sound boring, but this is a very smart man who is, you know, a long time practicing nutritionist. He really understands this stuff, and we're going to have him back multiple times. But also you need to check out the book. So again, stay tuned for for my interview with Sean Stevenson. Real fast, here are two quick pieces of intelligence you can share with your friends. Before the 19th century, most families actually lived together for life, and some experts say we are headed to be living that way again. That's right. According to Pew Research report, as of this past summer, with covid and everything, 52% of adults under age 30 were living at home with a parent. That's the highest percentage recorded since the Great Depression. Historically, large family households were seen as practical, obviously, since everybody could contribute financially or with chores or child rearing or farming, and sociologist Catherine Newman says it's not a bad idea. She says it creates a sense of devotion. It's only been since the 20th century that parents were told if their kids didn't leave home in adulthood, they'd be emotionally stunted. So multi generational living is the new thing. Here's one more. Here's that activate your brain's chill out circuit, from neuroscientist Dr Andrew Newberg, first watch what you say. MRI studies show positive words light up the brain's reward system, while complaints activate the pain centers, adding a spoken positive effect, and can reduce stress hormones and produce relaxing mood boosting neuro transmitters. So talk to yourself with positive self talk. Stuart Smalley was on this another tip for staying calm when things go wrong. Psychologist Dr James gross says we should name our emotions. He says we will find that will immediately reduce the intensity of our emotions. Stanford University explains naming your emotions transfers brain activity from the emotional to the rational part of the brain and helps you calm down. So positive self talk. Name your emotions. I named my anxiety, Albert. That's not what it means. But regardless, I you know, Albert is always with me. Anyway, folks, those are two quick pieces of intelligence, positive self talk, multi generational living, and name your emotions. Take that with you. Do what you will with that information. A little intelligence for life. But here, most importantly is, I'm very excited for this to you my interview with Sean Stevenson. Sean Stevenson, author of Eat smarter, among other things, but we're really gonna bring me talk about eat smarter today. Thank you so much for being with us today. Really appreciate it. It's my pleasure. I'm pumped to be here. So your book, I mean, your book was huge. We were talking before we started about how it sold out in the middle of a pandemic. And I think I know why. I think I understand at least part of why. I mean, not only is the information really relatable, but like a lot of people, my gym closed, so my routine was gone. I'm stuck at home. I'm going to be reaching for comfort foods, and all of a sudden, I look down and and my belt is slowly disappearing under my midsection, and I think I gotta, I've got to be smarter about my approach to this. I think a lot of people had that moment, and I think that's why, I think that's why, that's why your book is doing so well, is that people realize that they that we've messed up our lives during this time? Yeah, I mean, it coming out at this time. I don't think it's an accident. You know, actually got pushed back almost a year because of covid related shutdowns and so. But I'm really grateful because, you know, at a time when there isn't a lot of focus on actually getting our citizens healthier, like, let's actually get our citizens our immune systems more healthy and robust, and just make us more resilient, less susceptible to all manner of infectious and chronic diseases. There isn't a lot of talk about that. It's 1% less than 1% of the media coverage. And so for book like this to come out and to take off like it did, you know, it was the number one new release of all books, fiction and non fiction when it came out. And it just really was incredibly heartwarming for me, because it just shows like we do care about this, yeah, but we also want to come along with some fun. We want to come along with some real, actionable science. Yeah, we want it to make sense at the end of the day. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think we live in a unique time in human history, right prior to the 20th century, prior to industrialization, and even in the beginning of industrialization, we didn't have this problem where this is like, the only time he's like. Last 50 years, really, where, where access to calories is not correlated with with material wealth. So, so the idea of being, of being being overweight, and being able to eat more than we than we need, is in these empty calories. It's, it's, it's available to everybody now, and it's, obviously we're dealing with some of the metabolic and and health consequences of that. So we need this now. I don't know that if you if it was 100 years ago that anybody would need this book, honestly, because because of where we're at right now. So right now we are living in a time where, for the first time, we're actually dying from over consumption, right, rather than not having enough, as you mentioned. But you just mentioned a very important transition point, which is this concept of calories, right? You know? And I love the focus that you guys have with here, with the show, is really looking at, how does this stuff work, being more intelligent around these and of course, the book being called Eat Smart, it's a natural marriage. But here's the thing, you know, I went to a traditional university, a private university, expensive place to be. And the very first semester that I had there, which I went because it had a great pre med track, but I took a nutritional science class, and I didn't take it because it was required. This was totally this was an elective, but I thought that nutrition, this nutritional science class, was going to teach me how to be more fit. Nutrition had to do with fitness, and there's nuance there with fitness and health. But anyways, I was taught on the very first day of class that if you can manage your calories, you can manage your body composition. If you manage calories, you can manage your health. And at first, I didn't used to tell this part of the story, but my teacher was incredibly smart. He was a really, really smart guy, but he was bordering on obesity himself. And at the time, I didn't really put the two together, but I knew that something just didn't fit, right? He's, he's one of those guys. He's not like, secretly, like, huffing down m&ms and honey buns between classes. He was doing, the things that he was teaching, which, at the time, you know, this was back in like 9798 that we were taught that when we work with patients in the future, we're going to be telling them to really watch their fat intake, be very careful, right, about consuming fats, and also so low fat was the thing that was repressed really hard with that, and also make sure to get in seven to 11 servings of whole grains. And he was doing that. He was getting in plenty of whole grains. But this was leaving out of the equation. What? What we know today, which, when I talk about a need smarter, is that there are seven things we now have science on that are controlling what calories do in your body. It's not just about the calories. There are things that control what calories do, and that's where the science is really at. I mean, it is So correct me. If I'm wrong, thermodynamically, it's still calories in, calories out, but there are ways that you can eat where your calories in can stay more or less the same, but the amount of effort and the way that your body burns them will actually increase your calories out from your resting metabolism, so that you're, you're, you're going to have a net fat loss. Is that, is that the way to think about it? Because thermodynamically, we have calories in, calories out. There's no, there's no question about that. Okay, so the problem with that overarching assessment is that, well, let's start with what a calorie is, and even that this is a new term. This is a newfound entity that, you know, if we go back and this was, again, I went through and took people through the history of the calorie, I think it's important to understand when it first hit the scene, this wasn't anything to do with nutrition. It was used nutrition. It was used in physics and engineering. Sure, it's the amount of energy it takes to raise one milliliter of water one degree Celsius, correct? And then we go from we still Wilbur Atwater is a person who really made the transition into the nutritional domain. And we use the Atwater system, actually, for packaging. But that's kind of a footnote. But here's you just brought up one of the issues that's using a bomb colorimeter to measure the energy in food right now, the thing is, you might be the bomb, you might absolutely be the bomb, but you're not a bomb colorimeter. And the way that food is utilized in your body, and the way that it breaks down is radically different than the metric that's used to measure it using a bomb calorimeter. And as a matter of fact, companies don't use that anymore. They just do math to put what's in the in the food products on the calorie labels. Nobody's actually measuring. There's grass like, generally guarded as safe, and there's like, generally regarded as the calorie content in certain foods. And that's what companies are doing now. So when we're having this conversation about calories in, calories out, it completely ignores the complexity of human digestion, sure, and so that's one of the big metrics to understand. And this is highlighted in the journal Cell this was a really great study. They discovered that there's a certain bacteria found in mice, which I'm going to bring this. Back to humans in a moment found in mice that actually blocked the mice intestines from absorbing as many calories from their food. It didn't matter how many calories they're bringing in, their bodies were not absorbing the calories. Now you take this over into human studies, and this was conducted by the Wiseman Institute, and I mapped this out a little bit more. I know we should be in a little bit more summarized here, but research that the Wiseman Institute and the same thing in my clinical practice, they identified that there's a certain bacteria cascade, a certain microbiome makeup associated with obesity. And so in my practice, I could have somebody, and, you know, I've been in this field for 19 years, over 10 years in clinical practice as a nutritionist, I could have somebody send out to get a stool sample. I've never met the person, never seen him before a day in my life. Have them send out to get a stool sample, which basically I send you a kit you poop into, like, yeah, you know not the nacho basket, yep. And then you send it in, and then I get the report back, and I can tell with extreme accuracy whether or not the person is obese based on their microbiome makeup. Wow. So here's what the researchers found. This is the biggest part of this particular epi caloric controller. So this is above caloric control. So what the researchers noted was that, okay, we've got folks that we know that they have a microbiome makeup associated with insulin resistance, diabetes and obesity, and so they took fecal samples from folks who had this microbiome makeup and implanted it into lean mice. And then they took fecal samples from human subjects who had a microbiome associated with leanness and implanted that into lean mice. Those mice stayed lean eating the same diet, but the mice who received the fecal transplant from folks with the microbiome associated with obesity even though they're eating the same diet. Suddenly these mice became insulin resistant. Suddenly they became obese. Suddenly they gained body fat even though they're eating the same thing. So conversation about calories in, calories out, again, is completely ignoring the complexity of digestion, and one of those big epi caloric controllers is the makeup of our microbiome, and the science on this is just incredibly powerful, I mean, so I think what's important for me to take away there is like, while calories in, calories out, remains true, what you're talking about is the factors that determine calories in and how much energy we expend on a given day or while we're resting. It's not as easy as just reading a food label and then reading your Fitbit. And that's where, that's where this notion really, really falls apart. And also, our gut bacteria affects how many of those calories we actually absorb. Because, to your point, we are not bomb calorimeters. We are not just little chemistry sets walking around. We're much more complex organisms than that, and these things all affect us in different ways. I want to, I really want to push on this. How do we begin to build the gut bacteria that you're talking about? Because that feels like that would solve a lot of our problems. Yeah. Okay, so two things, I'm from St Louis, that's where, you know my practice was for many years, and St Louis University, so I'm just highlight. I think it's cool that, you know, researchers at the University around the corner from me did this work. It was so fascinating to go through this, but they were, they were noting the same thing when you took identical twins and we found one twin, but this was the prerequisite. We had to have one twin that has the microbiome associated with obesity and one who had the microbiome associated with leanness. Even though they're eating the same diet, they're from the same household, and you don't get any more identical than identical twin Right, right from the same egg. But sure enough, after they map this out and follow the twins over a number of years, the twin with the microbiome associated with obesity became obese far more frequently. And this is just one of those things that, again, is continue to be overlooked, but we're really going to change this. So what do we do to really optimize? Yeah, this for us. Give me that skinny person bacteria. Do I take a pill? How do I get there? So did you just brought up, I love that. You just brought up the exact thing that happens when we look at this through the lens of allopathic thinking, of allopathic medicine. So when we find that bacteria that blocks the intestines from absorbing as many calories from the food, let's just bottle that bacteria up and sell it. Yeah. I mean, I know, I know fecal transplants are a lot more complicated than just taking a pill, but, but, but, I mean, why aren't we there? So the problem with that is that when you there's this idea of a quote, side effect. So maybe I'm taking this, this particular pill that brings in a certain bacteria cascade. But what does that do to my other bacteria? And what does it do if we start to proliferate this particular bacteria that blocks my intestine from absorbing as many calories. Sure, there's a good chance it's also going to block my absorption of key nutrients. There's a good chance that's going to disrupt the microbiome cascade in a way that maybe I'm not producing as many short chain fatty acids from my gut bacteria that's protecting my gut lining and now I'm. Thing, autoimmune issues, you know, related to my diet. So the list goes on and on. There's this term side effect, but it's not a side effect. There are no such thing as side effects. They're direct effects, because a side effect is looking at something in a vacuum, right? The human body. It's in parts like, I'm going to take something for my pancreas, and that's the end of story. Your pancreas is connected to everything about you, from your brain cells to your toe cells. And so one of the things I saw, you know, in my practice, which was, you know, folks were coming in all the time on statins, like statins were the hottest thing smoking. And sure enough, we got some early data, which now everybody knows at this point, well, hopefully, if they don't know, I'm going to share this and anybody can and anybody can go to Dr Google and look this up, but we found out that folks taking a statin had a 30% increase incidence of developing diabetes being on that statin. Wow, it's not a side effect. It's a direct effect, because it's all happening in the same human body. So that's not the way to look at this, but so I want to make that clear, because we tend to do that like even people are, you know, consuming tapeworms, to consume their calories, like the craziest things that will go through. So how do we do this in an ethical way, in an intelligent way, smart way, right? Well, the one thing that because I think, I think a lot of people walking around going, I I have access to all the calories I want. If I can get something that interferes with that, I can deal with the side effects as long because, because calories are so cheap and easy to acquire. I mean, I know they're not side effects. I know that this is bad thinking. I acknowledge all of those things. I'm just, I'm just saying, I think that's where that, that's where that thinking comes from, is I can fix, I can fix not getting enough calories. I have a hard time fixing having too many calories. Yeah, you just said it, you know, it is a big, you know, conundrum in our in our society today, because it is one of the things that we're dealing with. We're oversaturated with caloric, you know, energy everywhere that we turn. So what's the, what's the most practical thing that's also proven by science to be effective. So one of the most remarkable things that we've seen, and this is very simple, is that as your diversity of microbes goes down, your rate of obesity goes up, right? So this is this is very important. As your diversity of microbes goes down, your rate of insulin resistance goes up as your microbes go down, your rate of heart disease goes up, your rate of inflammation goes up. These things have a direct inverse relationship in study after study after study. And now here's the big issue. So how does this all work together? Well, it's been noted, and one of the studies that I break down is that when we go and look at the microbiome diversity of somebody who's eating more of an indigenous kind of diet, right, more of a hunter gatherer diet, not really inundated by our natural, you know, our conventional way of eating today, they have approximately four times more bacterial diversity than we do here in the Western world, Right? So just to give you a little bit of a scope of what that looks like, just say I have, right now, 4000 different species of bacteria in my gut. And that's not when I'm saying this stuff. I don't want people to be freaked out. We all have, yeah, tremendous. We have, like, two pounds of microbes in our in our bellies. Am I correct in saying that our as a human body, we have actually more bacterial cells and foreign DNA than we have in our of our own cells, our own DNA cells. Is that correct? It's it to say that the number isn't even remotely close. All right, we've got literally 99 over 99% of our genes are microbial genes. If we go gene for gene, most of the genes that we carry as a human are from the microbes that we carry. They have genes as well. Yeah. And one of the studies, also that we've kind of broke down, is how you know inflammation, damages, specifically from pesticides, damages bacterial are bacterial genes. You know, it's crazy. I'm able to circle back and talk about that, but we have 10, 2050, times more bacteria than we have human cells. You know, it's not close. And then don't even get me started on viruses. We have 400 trillion virus particles in and on our bodies right now. So we got the human microbiome. We have the human virome, and we have the Human Microbiome all the fungi we carry. We have archaea. We have so many different things, these microbes that make us up. And so yeah, let's get, let's get to the biological diversity of our of our biome. So go ahead, as you're saying, 4000 bacteria. So we say, I have 4000 bacteria that I have the a person who's eating more of a natural human diet, who's been, who hasn't been inundated by what the way that we eat today. So I've got, I've got 4000 they've got 12,000 different species, right? So it's if I've got, we'll just say I got 10,000 they got 40,000 and again, as your diversity of microbes goes down, your rate of obesity goes up. Interesting. And so here's the number one thing. We can do to help to which, unfortunately, some researchers believe that we have many species that have gone extinct here in the Western world that protect our health in many different ways, and many endangered species in our gut, you know, if you want to use the analogy of seeing your microbiome like a rainforest, yeah, but I don't believe that it's just over and done, you know. And so the number one thing that we see in the research is that as you increase your diversity of foods, as you increase your diverse diversity of probiotic, I'm sorry, prebiotic, not probiotic, prebiotic fibers, you directly increase your ratio, your amount of microbes, because you can take all the probiotics you want. And I was doing this in my practice. I was having everybody having everybody on probiotics, but I was missing the point, probiotics cannot proliferate and do their jobs if they don't have their preferred food source. And so those are the prebiotics. All right? So this is just like anything. If you don't have food, you've got to move on, or you're going to die off, right? And so prebiotics enable the probiotics to proliferate and then create post biotics in you, for you. So these are the products that the probiotics create and protection that they provide against things like obesity. So what do we do with the prebiotics? Where do we get them? Anybody can go to Google and look at best prebiotic foods. But I'm going to give you a little sidebar, because this is really, really important. You're going to find things like asparagus, Jerusalem, artichoke, onions, garlic, apples. That's cool, but it's missing the point. Every single food operates as a real food. Let me be clear, real food. Every single real food operates as a prebiotic for some different strain of microbes, all right, every single food. So we want to eat more of a diversity of foods. And even if we're eating healthy now, and I know this is going to resonate with a lot of people, we can find ourselves getting kind of caught in meal prep gone awry, where we're eating the same food. Sure, in fact, psychologically that can be a real ease for a lot of people, is you, you just like, look, I'm doing me even the rock the guy is as metabolically elite as it gets, but he eats just a lot of cold water, oily fish, grilled oily fish, like, that's, that's, that's his MO and then, you know, he throws in his cheat days, but it's like five meals a day of a little thing of deep water, cod, yeah, but you've also got to look at these are all factors that eventually, that our healthcare system is going to get to. I know it eventually, but right now, the big term is personalized nutrition, and you've got to look at what is, what is his background, right? Where is it? Where's his genes coming from? Right, his DNA, what's the closest food source and where he comes from, right? What's in his DNA? Right? A lot of seafood, right, right? And so if you try to eat his diet, and your ancestors are from, we'll just say, you know, I don't know, Brazil or mine's Italian, so, so, yeah, Mediterranean diet works. There's gonna be fished there too, you know. But the the array of fish, and also the percentage of seafood, is going to be different, right? But I was trying to think of somebody who doesn't have access to water, so just, we'll just say, smack dab in the middle of the United States, like I was, but even still, like my grandfather took me fishing that kind of thing. So yeah, it's going to depend on that. So we take that into consideration. We look at your microbiome makeup and some of these other factors that we'll talk about here. But the most important takeaway from this point is that every single one of us has a unique metabolic fingerprint. All right, all of us have a unique metabolic fingerprint. And nobody's talking about this. There are a lot of these cookie cutter diets, which many of these diet frameworks are wonderful, truly, they have saved lives. They've helped people to achieve incredible goals. But so often, there's a large percentage of people who don't get the results that other people get, and it's because, and this is what I want people to understand, there has never been anybody in the history of humanity who has a metabolism just like yours, who has a microbiome makeup just like yours, never, and there never will be. But here's the biggest part, your metabolism a week from now, the person a week from now, your metabolism then, is not like the one you have now. It is always changing. It's always in flux. And if we don't start to understand the things that control our unique metabolism and be able to change as we change, that's when we have the healthy foods that we feel good about. We have a body composition we like, but then the weight starts coming back a year later. Have to be able to adapt and change, and a big part of that change to keep our eye on is to continue to add a diversity of foods in all right? So, I mean, so I hear you saying, like, look, we with These Healthy Foods, we need to eat in in diverse proportions, right? So you don't just have the sliced apple and the and the salmon every single day. You can't live like that unless you are one, unless that is just you. But not everybody can you. And so we need this diversity of foods in order to keep our microbiome as diverse possible. Can we supplement it all? Because I know that some, for some people, access to different foods is difficult, especially right now. Does like psyllium husk help us get to you know, there's sort of the active ingredient in every fiber supplement out there is psyllium husk. Does that get us? Does that help move the needle at all? Or is it just, is this key for for really changing our microbiome? Is that going to be just eating diverse that's a great question. And there's, there's two parts. So number one, I also want to share, I mentioned earlier that one of the studies finding that, and this was published in Scientific Reports, that pesticides create pro inflammatory state in the gut and disrupt our microbial gene expression. All right, so when I'm saying that, it's not a joke, this is one of the big things not talked about, pesticides, herbicides, rodenticides. These synthetic chemicals are designed to kill very small things by disrupting their their nervous system or their endocrine system, or both. Our bodies are made of very small things, single celled organisms right in our gut, these things absolutely wreak havoc. So I just want to mention that, just to reiterate what I talked about earlier, but you just mentioned, for example, using psyllium husk. Yeah, this is looking through the lens and you know, like you just mentioned as well, like, it's a different circumstance right now, but not really, because there's always been, in recent decades here in the United States, what they're called now is, quote, food deserts, which is where I grew up, right? We're on food stamps and WIC and getting food from, you know, charities and food pantries and things like that. I know what that's like, but there's always a way it's really just about access and education and so bringing in a supplement, this is the big point I want to make, is that. So with psyllium husk, you've got to keep in mind that whenever you eat any real food, any real food, you're also eating that food's microbiome. All right, you're taking that on. So when you eat a blueberry, you're eating that blueberries microbiome, when you eat an avocado, you're eating that avocados microbiome, when you eat spinach, you're eating that spinach microbiome. There is an array of microbes and things that we can't see, and we really barely even understand right now, that we take on as part of our own microbiome, creating the diversity and so having something that doesn't necessarily have any life to it, or especially like something we're consistently doing all the time, it's not that it's bad, per se, but it would be something still to have diversity with. Like you don't want to just start jamming down psyllium husk every day, necessarily. You know, you might diversify and have, you know, some ground flax seeds, which isn't very expensive, or some ground chia seeds, or, you know, whatever it is. But we just want to keep that in mind, to not look to one thing, because the word supplement really gets a little bit skewed today, too, because the word itself means supplement, to supplement something right which we want to supplement an already healthy, real food based nutrition protocol. But we can't just say that and take away the joy. That's the big problem as well. You know, inherently in the concept of a diet, there's this psychological there's a psychological leading point, or just perception of deprivation restriction. I can't have, and it's very much against human nature. Sure. You know, even if we just have the illusion of freedom, we like freedom, right? And so having that psychological burden, you know that putting yourself into this framework where you're taking stuff away, where, when we look at a diet or nutrition protocol, it should be more about adding in. It should be more about pleasure and part of this, and how it's kind of been, how it's kind of gone awry. And I just think it's important, especially, again, with the context of your show, is the intelligence of our bodies to recognize nutrition and food, sure, right? So there's this, this term that I'm really working really, really working hard to impress upon culture. It's something called post ingestive feedback, right? Post ingestive feed, it's like eating to satiety, that kind of thing. So this is more so this is a neurological association to the nutrients you're consuming and flavors. So this is the science of flavor, all right? So put it like that. So as we evolve, we just say, 25,000 years ago, our ancestor, you know, your ancestor, was out and about their gathering, and then they came across a new berry that they never saw before. And we'll just say that the berry is safe. We're going to take that into account. But they ate the berry, and their body, your brain, begins, essentially taking, like, sticky notes and, like, writing notes about the nutrition that came along with that food, right? So you ate this berries kind of start, it was kind of sour and a little bit, little bit sweet. And then your, your brain is like, Okay, I got some boron, I got some calcium, I got some essential amino acids, I got a little bit of omega threes from the seed. Needs. And so your your brain, your biology, links up a flavor, links up that flavor sensation with the nutrients that comes along with that flavor, sure. And so when you become deficient in those particular nutrients, your brain will elicit a craving for that particular food to get those nutrients back in your system. Right? That's how we evolved. And of course, like, there's incredible animal studies that we've utilized to be able to really see this firsthand. But animals do this all the time. It's like, why are they eating that thing? Or, you know, even if they get sick, you know, if they contract the virus, they'll go and start eating a different thing. Like, you know, one of the studies was done on sheep, and if they contract an infection, they've started eating, like, some some weird, like, twigs. It's just like, why are they doing that? They they've linked up this post ingestive feedback. Now, here's the problem. Food manufacturers have really hacked it, muddied up the water. Yes, yes. So they can use there's, and I'll just give one example. There's a machine. It's called a bomb. Sorry, not bomb colorimeter, but it's a gas chromatograph where you can isolate flavors, right? So you can actually isolate the particular chemicals that make certain flavors happen. And so now you can make a thing taste like a different thing, right, which does not have the nutritional profile of the thing that your brain thinks it is, so that's it, smoke flavor, but it's not actually cooked meat. You go, and now your brain is thinking it's getting cooked meat, and then you get it, and then 10 minutes later, this is like the Diet Coke problem. 10 minutes later, your brain goes, Wait a minute. I thought we were getting I thought we were getting, you know, saturated fats and all 12 essential amino acids, but we didn't. We got something else because it was exact, smoke flavored, you know, Doritos Exactly. Yeah, that's perfect. And you know, it's, it doesn't have to be perfect, but it just muddies up the metabolic waters and the cognitive waters, just enough to screw things up. And so now there's such a there's such confusion in our metabolism, in our inner in our link up with where nutrition is coming from, that again, we're we're developing. So this is a big takeaway. Chronic nutrient deficiency leads to chronic overeating. All right, chronic nutrient deficiency leads to chronic overeating. And a big driving force of that is, you know, just what the biggest mineral deficiency in our country is magnesium. For example, magnesium is responsible, responsible for over 650 biochemical processes we know about. So what that means is there's 650 things that your body can't do or can't do efficiently if you're deficient in magnesium, that is messed up like we're we're walking around. 60% of US population is chronically deficient in magnesium. A big role that it plays is the management of stress, you know, the parasympathetic nervous system, digestion, you know, muscle relaxation, cognitive performance, the list goes on and on and on with all the different benefits. It's important. It's it's utilized for signal transduction in the brain, you know, so your brain cells being able to talk to talk to each other, which is kind of important, right? So having this is the case. So you're say, your body's deficient in magnesium, you're deficient in vitamin D, you're deficient in amino acids, so your body's going to compel you to eat something to get those nutrients in. Sure, that's what it is. That's what the driving force of hunger and natural hunger? Well, that's why you can be full and still want to eat more food, is because you didn't get whatever your body needs. I mean, that's that's a common that even if you're listening to your body, and I want to in a second, and I know we don't have a lot of time left, but I do want to talk about the psychology, psychological implications of what we're saying in a minute. But I do want to finish this, this idea of how we can expand our food diversity to keep that microbiome going. So, yeah. So to your point, there are these foods that we crave, and you say there's nothing wrong with hunger, but so that we're going to start reaching for the foods to get the in this case, magnesium. So keep going. Yes, yeah. And just to give an example, really quick, I think this is important, because I mentioned and some of these things could be so just meta that it doesn't have any real world connection. So when I say 650 biochemical processes, one of the things so we talk about number one, how food controls our metabolism, which most people have a rudimentary understanding about. But I think it's doing a disservice when we look at food through that one lens of controlling our body composition. Food also controls your cognitive performance. It literally controls everything that your brain is able to do. Your brain is literally made of food. It's made from the food that you eat. It is that important so our ability to have thoughts, emotions and feelings and and to be able to, you know, have ideas, all of these things are driven by the food that we eat. And humans are incredibly resilient. We can definitely people are building rockets on like vending machine consciousness, you know, like we are incredibly resilient, but just imagine what we can do when you put the really good stuff in our body. So there was a double blind, placebo controlled study. This is the gold standard of clinical clinic. Trials, and this was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's disease, and they found that improving your magnesium levels in adult test subjects who already had cognitive decline so they were in their 50s and 70s could reverse their brain aging by upwards of nine years, right? So literally, the physical appearance of the brain. So like the the brain activity and the cognitive performance, suddenly their brains are almost 10 years younger by getting their magnesium levels up. All right. So this is one simple thing that we can all do. So how do we do this? Number one food? First, we don't want to just jump to supplements, but then still, it can supplement a good diet, like, why aren't we just drinking a shake for calories and then taking a bunch of pills to get this sort of diversity of of of elements in our system? That's I understand why food, why food is better, but why is it any different than what you're talking about? This is perfect. That's a perfect question. So this, again, this goes back to that first university class that I had nutritional science we were taught that first day. Of course, you know, calories are the tip of the spear. If you manage calories, you can manage your body, you can manage your health, but also make sure you get in all your essential vitamins and nutrients. Here's the problem, which, again, he encouraged all of us to take a multivitamin. Have patients take a multivitamin. Here's the problem that we have now, again, this is 20 something years later. We have so much evidence to affirm what I'm about to say. At the time we were taught, for example, get vitamin C. Now we know there are so many different forms of vitamin C, there are so many different forms of magnesium, there are so many different forms of vitamin D, there's so many different forms of B 12. The list goes on and on. And so when we take a synthetic supplement, are we taking the one we actually need? Right? You're just getting you're just getting whatever process they used to make that one version of vitamin D or C or B 12. There you go. So already, right off the bat we're missing. One of the unique elements about food is that it has a vast array of these nutrients. So it has a vast array of different forms of vitamin C, but then it also has bio potentiators that enable your body to actually utilize it more intelligently. Yeah, you got to just think about from a rational perspective, of course, how long have humans been eating food versus, how long have we been using isolated right and right, right, right, right. So you just got to think about the connection with, what are your What are your genes expect you to eat? Or, what are you, what is your DNA going to do when interacting with this nutrient? Okay, so I heard recently, and I think this is, this is appropriate, you know, to eat around the outside of a grocery store. What that means is, like, usually the the outer aisles that so the the far left, the far right, and then the back aisle, that's where you're going to get most your whole foods. It's going to be produce. It's going to be meat and dairy and then and an eggs, that kind of thing. And in the middle that's going to be frozen foods, processed foods. And I don't, I watch a lot of food documentaries, but I don't know if you ever saw the documentary King corn, but one of the great lines is that we have this perception of diversity when we walk into a grocery store where we look around and we see all of these different foods, all these different colors, but really it's just cleverly rearranged bits of corn. And so my concern is that for a lot of us, we think we're eating a diverse diet, but what we're actually getting is cleverly rearranged bits of corn, and we're not actually able to execute what you're talking about. And in the Food deserts are the worst place for this, because that's mostly rearranged corn and soy, and it's all they're all processed the same way, and then ref flavored. So how do we begin to unpack that where we're sure we're getting what we're supposed to be getting? Yeah, it's great. So I've been what you're talking I've been in a lot of those documentaries over the years, and, you know, it's something I've been talking about for probably about 17 years, because it, I mean, it became, some of these things become so blatantly obvious when you come across the right bit of data. And also just being able to just be very logical when you step into a grocery store like you, like you mentioned, it looks like this vast array of different products, but the reality is, most of the food is the same, like 12 things, just packaged different ways, and predominantly corn, soy, wheat, you know, if you especially those middle aisles, like you talked about, so that can be a good kind of moniker or tenant, you know, to look at the outer perimeter of the store, but I don't think people really understand the extent to which they're encouraged not to do what I'm what you're talking about. And this really goes back to and I really wanted to make sure people know this. And I'm so grateful because you know, some of the higher ups at Target stores, for example, got an early copy of the book, and they did a national promotion with with eat smarter, even though I'm literally talking about the stuff in the store, you know, because it was done in a really kind of graceful way and kind of non intrusive. But people need to know this stuff. So one of the coolest studies. Which is also kind of messed up too. But this was published by gem, you know, the Journal of the American Medical Association. They wanted to find out, because what's actually leading the cause. So let me actually give a little nugget of why this makes sense. If anybody's ever thought about, why on earth can you get a happy meal that's, you know,$2 299, with a cheeseburger, fries, soda and a toy, things that are very cost intensive to make. How can you get a happy meal for the same amount that it costs to get an avocado, right? How is that even possible? And this literally can fall off of a tree, and this thing over here takes so much it's so cost intensive to create. How is that possible? I mean subsidy, exactly, government subsidies. And so I wouldn't track this data down, because I wanted to find out, okay, we know that there's an issue here, but what is the actual outcome of the government subsidy? So Jama published a study, and they found that over the course of about 10 years of the study, 1015, years the study, the US government actually invested almost $200 billion right in subsidies of the same foods that primarily end up in those middle aisles and come through the drive through window, Right? All right. Well, it's why, it's why those foods are there. I mean, we look, we subsidize corn and soy, and we create these commodity crops that are only edible if you process them properly, and so we process them to the degree that we do, and that's why you're able to get Oreos for cheaper than you can get avocados. Yeah. And it might have started off again. It's all always about balance. It might have started off with a good intention to feed Americans. To feed Americans, but what the study found was that the people who had the highest consumption of these government subsidized foods had a 40% greater incidence of being obese. So we have like a one to one understanding, like when you consume the foods that are predominantly encouraged by our government, which when I say that, that means we're paying for it by Right, right? It's not really that cheap. We're all paying for it 40% greater incidence of being obese, clinically obese, not just overweight, obese. And then I just, I'm actually sharing a study today. We've got about 60 chronic diseases that are now confirmed to be connected to obesity, and about 400,000 deaths every year in association with obesity. So this is no small thing. So our government is literally feeding this problem. And when? And so what do we do about this? Really, right, right, right, right, right, right. And get me to, get me to what I can start doing today. So there's, there's, there's always with anything that's sustainable, there's going to be the personal responsibility and is going to be the community change, right? So we've got to look at the bottom up, change yourself, you know, so lifting yourself up, and also the top down, change. So from the bottom up, what do we do? So when I, when I was in college, and just I've even growing up, I never met anybody who even went to college, let alone, let alone graduated from college, as the first person my family to do so. And I was living in Ferguson, Missouri at the time, which is kind of, you know, famous or infamous right now, right but in that community. So when I leave my apartment complex, when as soon as I go out of the gate of the apartment complex, the first thing I see is a liquor store, then, within just a mile and a half radius, Papa John's, Domino's, Taco Bell, Dairy Queen, Chinese food. But now I'm hungry. Now I'm hungry. Thanks a lot. Sean, not like a nice Chinese food restaurant, but like bulletproof glass. Yeah, I know, you know, hot braised chicken, Arby's, Burger King, McDonald's, and by the way, they don't accidentally use yellow and red in their signs. That's also another hunger trigger. So we're being manipulated by just every step of this process, every step, every step, Krispy, Kremes, Jack in the Box, Wendy's. And I can keep going. But this, this, no, within a mile and a half of my apartment complex, I never I didn't know what health food was, what is, quote, health food. I didn't know what organic meant. I never saw anything regarding that we didn't have any gems. I didn't know what yoga was like. None of this stuff existed in my reality. So when I'm telling when I'm sharing this about personal change. I'm saying this from some of the worst possible circumstances right here in the United States, right, which is even beautiful compared to other countries, right? So what the number one thing for me, and I want to encourage this for everybody, not just for you, but do this for somebody else. The number one thing, the only thing I needed, was exposure. I just needed to know that it was possible. And so part of that was for me, I started, I was battling with my own health issues, and I was always placing the blame on physicians, like, why won't Somebody help me? I had this story. It's like, why me, why me, why me. But I finally asked, What can I do to get better? Right? And. When I did, I started to literally, because there's, there's a mental reflex is called instinctive elaboration, which I talk about as well, which your brain is really run on. Questions. Questions are the answer, right questions the answer. Your brain is constantly scanning your internal and external environment to find data to reaffirm the question that you hold dominantly, that your dominant question. So I finally asked, What can I do to get better? And it's just, so happens, there was a girl, a woman, that I've been talking to for like, three years, and, you know, on and off, and she graduated from chiropractic school, and after I made this decision, this kind of Revelation, to really do something to get myself healthy. Now, like, even though I knew her this whole time, now, she's taking me to Wild Oats, right, which was bought up by Whole Foods back in the day. But, I mean, it's, course, it's the other side of town, you know, 45 minutes away from Ferguson. But now I'm like, What the What is all of this? What does organic mean? What is this? You know, why they have so much more real food and your whole foods here, why is the middle aisle smaller? Why are they making juice? Why is there grass inside? Right? It was weak grasses, so. But my exposure changed, and, you know, just be already I was, you know, doing some different research in college, but now I use my skills and really focus on becoming a research scientist. And now you know, coming across studies, and some of the first books that I read were at this bookstore there at Wild Oats, and they had peer reviewed studies on improving bone density, which that was my problem. I had severe arthritic condition of my spine when I was 20, which is unheard of, right? And now I've got these peer reviewed studies talking about things like sulfur bearing amino acids and the importance of omega threes for my bone density. Nobody ever told me that. And so that exposure is so important, guys. So get yourself around people. It'll be very if you're hanging out with with us. You know, here doing this podcast today, we all go out to eat. We're probably not going to roll up and stop at Wendy's, you know, low probability. So get yourself today's episode brought to you by Wendy's Baconator, eight different styles of bacon in one sandwich. Sorry, keep going. It's not really brought to us by that. It's so just keeping that in context, you know. So really make it a mandate to get yourself like with social media, even though we're distance right now, get yourself around information that's encouraging with your health. You know, I know that the other stuff can be very attractive, but the stuff that's stressing you out, that's making you feel disempowered, that's making you feel inadequate, you can absolutely curate your social feed and just get yourself immersed in things that make you feel good, sure. So please do that. So number one, exposure and access. You know, even if I happen to be somebody that inspires you in this domain, just, you know, see what I'm up to, check out my my show. Check out, you know, just get yourself around that information. I promise you, it'll start to really change you from the inside out, because it's literally changing your brain. So that's number one. Number Two with that, simple change, right? Simple change. Most people are not the like overnight rip the band aid off, kind of people, right? Right? And how do we and also the money aspect, right? You, what you just described is is expensive. It's more expensive to eat with the foods you're talking about, a diversity of foods from a variety of locations that are organic, that don't have the you're talking about tripling some people's food budget at a time when they can't necessarily do it. So, yeah, we got to expose ourselves to this, but give us, give me a hack, or I can get through this. Yeah, yeah. Like when I lived in Ferguson, and, you know, I got exposed to all of this great nutrition information, I was also suffering from this other condition called broke all right, so it affects a lot of us. But here's the thing, so number one, we've got to be honest about this, which is, it's still about priorities. Because, you know, my next door neighbor at the apartment complex, he always had the new Jordans, right? You know, you can it's a priority thing. Number one, first and foremost, I started to invest in my health, in my in my body. And the crazy thing is, when I did that, I started to make more money. And crazy, here's the craziest part. Within a few years, the companies that I was buying these different foods from, you know, like I was buying, you know, go Gib berries, you can find anywhere now. But I was like, they weren't at store. So I was, like, ordering them from the Tibetan School of Medicine, yeah, which was crazy, but anyways, but now, within a couple of years, all these companies started paying, buying my food for me. They were sending me all of this stuff because I had made an investment, and it became part of my my universe, right? So invest in yourself. It's going to come back in a magnitude. But also, Ferguson did have a farmer's market. They had a farmer's market, and I could get three, you know, bunches of of kale for the same price that it would cost at Whole Foods, right, right for one, for one, right, right, right, right, right. So there's always a way, right? So there's CSAs. There's, you know, community gardens, so many different things like that. And also, of course, then you get to the to the bare bones of like, what are the most inexpensive but highest leverage things that we can do? Right? Give me some of those. Give me some of those. So this was a study, this was published in medicine and science and sports and exercise, found that just a 2% drop in your body's baseline hydration level leads to mental impairment, Oh, for sure, requiring attention, motor coordination, executive function. The list goes on and on. We're trying to have more energy. We're trying to be able to look for this next nootropic, you know, I want the limitless pill. The number one thing is water. Yeah, number one thing, and this is something here in this country, we all have access to. Yeah, there's nuance with water, of course, but just ensuring that you're getting your hydration levels met, this was game changing for me. I mean, look, that's my I run, I run marathons. I've done a lot of backpacking, and you know, the joke in backpacking is, there's the 3c of making sure, and it's the first thing you worry about, and that your urine is clear, copious and frequent, and if it's not those three things, then you are definitely not properly hydrated, and you need to be drinking more water. I love it. I love it. I mean, I know that's like we've gotten. We've talked about some look body processes that we all we all do, we don't always talk about, but it's important to know, like to your point, you know, hydration, if you do any kind of outdoors or extreme sports of any kind like that, that is, that is step one, is making sure that you don't get dehydrated. Every single survival book will tell you you can survive, like a month without food. You're you're all sorts of stuff will happen to you when you start to go for too long without food, but you can't survive three days without water. That is the first thing you have to secure when you are lost in the woods, is a fresh water source that will not make you sick. And that is, right, that's it's a super important part, and it's something that a lot of us underestimate. We take all these diuretics. We're all drinking a lot of coffee, and that all that doing, all that's doing, is dehydrating us even more, although there's been some research that the water and coffee actually does counteract some of its own diuretic effects. But the bottom line is, you need to be, you need to be drinking water. We it's, it's, it's, it's too important. We've talked too much about it. There's too many studies like you're saying, and how it's connected to everything and all of the processes that we're talking about. And you talk about magnesium earlier, and how important that is for making your brain healthy. If we don't have the water, the magnesium is not getting through our body in the right way. And these processes are actually, you know, are actually not going to help us if we don't have enough water. So that is your that is really good, actionable. First step is to make sure that we are hydrated. Yeah, thank you for that. And by the way, when you just mentioned magnesium, it's an electrolyte, right? Sodium is an electrolyte. So sodium literally enables your your brain cells to have transduction, to actually communicate and talk to each other. So, you know, so it's not just the water, but also having some structures, some minerals in the water, that's going to be helpful. But I want to give people something that is much more visceral, because even with, like, you know, I'm out here competing, I need to make sure that I'm getting hydrated. Or, you know, the cognitive side. That might not be the trigger for you, but what if I tell you how water can actually make you burn fat faster. Go tell me. Give it to me. Give it to me. This study. So this was really crazy. This was it's something called Water induced thermogenesis. And what the researchers discovered was that simply drinking 17 ounces of water just within a couple of minutes, made the test subjects instantly have about a 30% increase in their metabolic rate. Basically, they they burn like 30 calories more by doing nothing different but just drinking water, 30 to 50 calories. And so with that said, what we can do here is simply by getting meeting your hydration needs, you're going to burn, you know, upwards of 200 300 more calories a day just by drinking water. It's not because of the temperature of the water. It's because water makes everything work better, yeah, because all of your hormones related to fat loss and fat storage, your neurotransmitters, they're all operating in a water medium, so a couple times a day. You know what? One of the things that I encourage people to do is to start their day by taking an inner bath. Right? Take an inner bath. I can feel it when I chug water the first thing in the morning. It's like I can just feel it moving through my body. Obviously, it's psychosomatic, because you can't really it's it's not going the places that I feel it, but it like tingles from my head down my shoulders. I feel like a coolness through my chest. I can feel the water bathing my insides. I don't think it's just psychosomatic. It's like there's some, there's some really hardcore evidence to support that, you know, because, again, water is unlike, like you just mentioned, with food being a necessity, water is one of the macronutrients that's not talked about. It's one of the major five macronutrients. We talk so much about proteins, fats and carbohydrates, and there's a lot of infighting about those things, and hardly anybody's talking about water and also alcohol, by the way, which we talk about any smarter, dehydrates you. There's a lot of nuance there with alcohol, but we're not taking anything away. That's the key as well. So here's the thing. So with with water, it's it's so quickly absorbed through your intestinal wall and makes its way into your bloodstream so quickly, makes its way into your brain so quickly, your brain has the blood brain barrier, which only allows in very specific nutrients. Yep, right. So it's like, we call it neuro nutrition. It's very choosy, but they're expressed like you get like an Express Pass at a toll booth, their express lanes for water. So important, your brain is upwards of about 80% water. All right, is crucial. It's the most water dominant organ in your body, next to your lungs. So get start, start each day by taking what I call an inner bath, because we wake up in the morning. Whether you realize it or not, you're actually very, very dehydrated, right? Because when you're sleeping, your body goes through so many different metabolic processes, and I talked about this in my first book and sleep smarter years ago. All use water, yeah. And so your brain, for example, there's the glial cells your brain has. So your brain, again, that blood brain barrier, your brain has its own cleaning systems called the glymphatic system. Your brain is doing millions of processes every second, and there's a lot of metabolic waste that needs to get cleared out. And so when you're dehydrated and when you're sleeping, by the way, your glial cells is glymphatic system is 10 times more active when you're sleeping, just again, like cleaning house, creating cognitive connections, laying down myelin, all this stuff, but there's a lot of metabolic waste when you get up in the morning. Drinking Water literally helps your body and your brain to flush these metabolic wastes out. Because, contrary to popular belief, when you quote, burn fat, when a fat cell empties its contents, we'll just say, you know, some storage triglycerides. It can get reabsorbed somewhere else. We've got to get it out of the system, you know, we got to get it shuttled over to the mitochondria to actually, quote, get burned. So again, all of this hap is happening in a water super highway. Get up in the morning, drink at least 20 ounces to 30 ounces of water to start your day, just within the first 30 minutes. Whatever that looks like. For you, some people don't like the taste of water, which, you know, some people like it doesn't have a taste. You know, there are subtle differences with water, with water taste. So I'd encourage you to try different types of water, different TDs, total dissolved solids, with minerals. And also, like my wife, in the morning, she doesn't like to drink room temperature or cold water. She likes hot water with lemon, so that's what she's been doing for, you know, as long as we've been together, really, and I've been doing my inner bath for about 15 years every single morning. So first thing I do to start my day, yeah, it's super important. And look, I've taken up a lot of your time. We have barely touched what is in the book Eat smarter. So link to where to buy eat smarter is in the show notes. You need to get it. I mean, we, there's so many things I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to talk we, we barely touched food and metabolism. We've barely touched our we spent most of today talking just about the microbiome. And if this is how much information we're getting about our microbiome from Sean, then then we really, we all need to be reading this book. We also trying you you need, you need to come back. Because I really, I want to go. I want to talk more about the psychology of food and how we can start to get into the kind of foods that we're supposed to be eating, and we can break some of our habits. I understand that it's a complicated topic, but I really want to, I think that for a lot of us, the psychology of how we eat is super important. These habits that you're talking about, where we're reaching for the same five foods that is connected to stuff that goes back for a lot of us to our childhoods, and we need to be breaking those habits up. So I know you got to go, but I do want to have you back so at least we can talk about that the book again. Eat smarter. Link to where to buy in the show notes. Sean, if people want to follow up with you, where can they follow up with you, perfect. I appreciate it so much. And of course, I'll be happy to come back. Is really, really fun, where people listening to this awesome podcast, they can find my show is called the model health show. The model health show. And, you know, I'm people may not realize this, you're a very good looking guy. The Model health show is the fact that you're a model that's that's. So it's important for people to know, not a model. I'm not, well, your PR people sent over a lot of pictures of you working out, and you are a model. So that's, that's where the model health show comes from. Well, I'll take but I'm just really wanting to set a model for what's possible, you know, especially coming from, come from, but also helping people to create their own model of health. And you know, that's what we really strive to do. Really strive to do. So people can follow my my show. There the model health show. And also, you know, you can pick up the book anywhere books are sold, Barnes and Noble, bam, Amazon, all that good stuff. Also, the audio book so freaking powerful. I love the fact that the audio book is out now, and it's just like taking off. It was the number one audio book and nutrition and health in the US when it came out. So I just want to keep the momentum rolling. Really work on getting our citizens Healthier, Get our communities and our families healthier. It's so, so important right now. Link to the model health show website where you can get all this other stuff, as well as the link to, again, the audio and the the writ. Book of eat smarter Sean, one last thing. And I ask it to everybody, what is one last one thing we can all start doing today that will make our lives a whole lot better? Oh, that's that is such a tough question. I know, I know, you know. I'm just gonna share what comes up for me. I would say just talk with somebody who makes you feel good. Talk with somebody that that that brings a smile to your face. Talk with somebody who makes you laugh, or that just that cares cares about you, that you know cares about you. It's so important right now, my oldest son, he just started his college, but he just sent me a video from his high school. This was back in we moved from St Louis recently. We're in Los Angeles now, but, man, he sent me this video from one of our local news stations that I've done a lot of work with these guys. And it was a report on the high school kids there, Lafayette and Marquette, which I went to Lafayette when I was a kid as well, and that's where he went. And the shocking rates of suicide that we're seeing with our kids, and the there was about 800 kids surveyed, and 500 of those kids thought about taking their own lives. And this is something that's also not being talked about during this time in isolation, that should get a lot more consideration. I was so proud of this news station for doing this work, but that's why I did work with him back when I lived there, because they did stuff like this. But he's my son. Has lost several of his friends that he went to school with, and I really just enough is enough. We have to talk to each other. We have to really just be there for each other, because so many people, it's just like I didn't know. You know, we don't see the symptoms the further we get away from our humanity that's when we start to lose track of who we are and what we're all about. So talk with somebody today that you care about, check in on them, extend some love, send a couple of texts out just to let people know that you appreciate, that you're thinking about them. And again, this is a big part of our overall health, is our community and our connection and loving each other. Sean, we have so many ways that we could be connecting with people right now, even though we're isolated and you're really you're speaking something that that a lot of us have lost, and we've been so isolated, it's so painful, we need to use the tools that we have. We're staring at our screens all day. You know, first off, fill your feed up with the good things, not the bad things, the things that make you be better, not the things that make you feel worse. And then put down the social media and actually get social face time, the friend zoom, the friend text them. Don't just be scrolling through social media all the time and watching Netflix, not there's anything wrong with either of those things. But yeah, I think, I think that's that's huge. I think we all need to be doing that. We're social animals, and for a lot of us, we haven't really been taking advantage of what we could be doing right now. So Sean, you're amazing. I really appreciate your time today. We just We I have no choice. I have to have you back. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. That's it for our show today. Thank you guys so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate, comment and subscribe on Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcast. Helps us out a lot. Just hit that like or hit that subscribe button, hit hit the Rate button. There's a lot for us. So please, please, please help us out by doing that and share this with a friend. If you share this with one person that doubles our listenership, folks, if you want to follow up with us, facebook.com/john, Tesh, we're spending a ton of time there. You can check us out there. Also, John is on Instagram. At John Tesh underscore, if I'll, I have Gib Gerard. Can you find me at facebook.com/girard, at Gib Gerard. On Instagram and Twitter, try to respond every mention the show, every DM, every every suggestion that you guys have, I try to respond to because, most importantly, I do the show for you guys. So thank you so much for listening. You