#8: Social Health and Longevity: Navigating Life Transitions with Danielle Ruiz

Social Health and Longevity: Navigating Life Transitions with Danielle Ruiz

In this episode of Biohacking Eve, host Judith Mueller and guest Danielle Ruiz, CEO and Chief Medical Officer of Everest Health, explore the complex impact of general ageing, perimenopause, and menopause on women’s social health. They discuss the hormonal shifts that influence self-perception, relationships, and career performance, highlighting the vital role of social engagement in physical and emotional well-being.

Danielle shares insights from her work at Everest Health, showcasing how personalised interventions—from hormone therapy to lifestyle changes, EMDR, and hyperbaric oxygen treatments—can optimise health and longevity for women. The conversation also touches on the broader societal implications of ageing, gender differences in health, and practical strategies for maintaining well-being through different life stages.

Links

• Www.goeverest.com
• @goeveresthealth

Resources

• The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel van der Kolk
• How Not to Die – Michael Greger
• The Secret Life of Fat – Sylvia Tara
• HappyLight SAD lamp (Verilux)
• Countertop water filter

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction to Hormonal Changes in Perimenopause
01:06 Welcome to Biohacking Eve Health Optimisation
01:33 Guest Introduction: Danielle Ruiz
01:49 Everest Health: A Focus on Longevity
04:06 The Impact of Social Health on Women
07:08 The Role of Relationships in Women’s Health
08:06 Loneliness and Social Connections
11:28 Hormonal Changes and Their Effects
18:11 Lifestyle Interventions for Better Health
20:09 Technology and Social Interactions
23:44 Positive Behaviours and Role Models
27:29 Challenges of Changing Habits
28:17 Family Culture and Health
29:27 Evolution of the Healthcare System
32:21 Gender Differences in Ageing
34:50 Impactful Books and Recommendations
38:28 EMDR and Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment
42:22 Personal Health Investments
46:34 Final Thoughts and Takeaways

Insta/TikTok: @BiohackingEve
Website: www.BiohackingEve.com

Transcript

Really annoying thing is similar to our brain's self perception during the luteal phase. We're kind of in a hormonal luteal phase for perimenopause, and it comes with that instability. And we know that our self perception, not necessarily what we actually see in the mirror, but what we believe we see in the mirror is strongly affected by our hormones and our brain hormones, and so what we see is even even adjusting for age, BMI, economic status, education, marital women around perimenopause and menopause have a significantly lower self image, and that's definitely gonna affect how we interact socially, our confidence in our relationships, in our sexual relationships, our second guessing of ourselves, our ability to perform in our careers, so many different things. And of course, our testosterone, our estrogen are strongly correlated with how our brain perceives happiness and stress are cortisol levels and so we might be a little bit more on edge, a little more aggressive.
Welcome back to biohacking Eve health optimization for women with Judith Miller, where we shine a light on everything that will help you reach your best self as a woman, as unique and individual as soon you can be live long and prosper, my friend.
Hello and welcome back everyone to the show. Today we have Danielle ruse on the show.
Happy to be here, and thanks for the invite. Hi Danielle. So we're going to talk about all things women and social health today. But first of all, if you want to give us a quick rundown of your background or what are you working on, sure. So I am the CEO and Chief Medical Officer of Everest health. We're a longevity focused medical practice that treats patients globally, but we operate now. Our brick and mortar is in the DC area. We've been treating patients for the past three and a half years. Our brick and mortar opened six months ago, and really our focus is on the science. We are partnered with the Methuselah Foundation, which is one of the foremost longevity focused nonprofits. They've been around for about 25 years, and we've been working with them for the past 10 years in doing the research of what makes someone 20 or 90. If you look at someone and say they're probably 33 what makes them measurably 33 and what do we expect for them at that stage of their life? What are the measures of optimal health, lowest risk of mortality and morbidity in the long term. Of course, that is quite different for men versus women, sometimes even ethnicity or where an individual is born, and those metrics change over time as people age as well. So we started with that bundle of information and updated our ranges for what is expected of those labs. And then we started researching the interventions that are evidence based to be safe and effective in humans, to positively manipulate those numbers so that people have more years of generally healthy life and even optimized health. And at the point we realized that we could be actually doing something with this. I had been working in conventional medicine, mostly in elder care, nursing homes, case management, which bridges the gap of different specialties and end of life care for about 15 years, and seeing how much more we could be doing for patients and their families really, really motivated me to start this business and start bringing that 20 years of research that We've had that conventional medicine just hasn't caught up to, not just those ranges, those measures and those interventions, but really anything that is science proven to be safe and effective in humans to help extend those healthy years life that includes holistic, integrative, functional root cause, medicine, lifestyle intervention, syrup, supplements, vitamins, really, Whatever works. And there's a lot of stuff that works different for different people. It's also very personalized. So again, we know that men and women are very different from each other. Pre puberty, perimenopause, post menopause, were wildly different, and that has really, really strong implications on our physical health, our emotional health, our social health, and so that's what we've been doing for the past few years, is delivering those interventions to patients so they get healthy. You actually make a very good point. I think humans are all about seasons in the widest sense. So we say we have 24 hour cycles. Men have this predominant women as well, but it's very, very strong in men as women, we have a 28 hour cycle, you know, give or take a couple of days as well. And then you have the life cycle, if that makes sense. So you start off as a teenager, you go for puberty, you have your adult life, you have your child bearing years, and what happens after that? Because it's really about these life stage trends.
Isn't that that impact social health? Yeah, absolutely. I I've seen in terms of the way that the practice has developed. Of course, initially we thought that all of our patients would be elderly, would be quite aged, and, you know, at the decline of their life, and we bring them back, back from the cliff, and some of those are our patients, but a much greater population of our patients are individuals that are starting to see changes of age. They're seeing their parents really decline, and they don't want to experience that. And these are individuals who are maybe newly diagnosed with a chronic illness, or are experiencing very much changes with our hormones. In the world we live in, we have so many things that alter our hormones that this is much bigger issue than what we've seen historically, and the statistics are starting to catch up with what we're seeing in our population globally,
but it's wildly different from a social aspect as well, and that's an important thing. Our emotions our social environment have a really strong impact on all of us together, right? If we think of the human body as an organism where all these little parts play together, we're like that as a society too. And when one individual is experiencing distress, it affects everyone around us. So it's important to all of us.
And actually the interesting part is, for those of us who have children, have had children, etc, that actually plays a major point, because you go from going the caregiver, and in many cases, primary caregiver, to sort of operating more at a distance. I mean, there's also the impact on the bond, the pair bond, the couple's relationship that this has, which I think, is you get look at the nuclear family, and they look at how this radiates out. Basically, do we have any statistics on,
obviously, we've got divorce statistics officially, but do we have any statistics of the underlying reasons of why these things actually happen, and how many of these are based on, you know, the couple basically hasn't talked to each other in 20 years. And now that the kids are moving out, things are changing. Any ideas on that? You know, I'm sure there's more research than I have access to Currently, there's so much to learn, which is wonderful, but we do see drastic differences in terms of relationship benefits and relationship expectations and those impacts in terms of gender differences. So for women, we see a significant difference in the benefits and the negatives of marital status. For example, with men, consistently across the board, if they have a relationship at all, or particularly with marriage, they have longer lifespans, whereas with women, it requires that relationship to be something that's positive. That's true for all family relationships, for friendships as well. We see a significant benefit, a significantly linear benefit to global health for women with positive relationships, but if they're conflict rich relationships, then it has a really, really strong negative impact on health, similarly with with loneliness. I mean, we would likely imagine that men experience more loneliness, but really, women experience more than 10%
more loneliness as men and the physical effects on health are much more profound than in men. We see difference in the benefit of social circles with men, it's not as profound with women. We require a minimum of 85 people in our social circle to be able to get a reduced risk cardiovascular disease. Then the next step up is 220 people, and those aren't necessarily your besties, but we really require a broad web of social connections that have different benefits and different interactions in each year. Do you know how these numbers differ for men?
Yeah. So for example, the negative effects of loneliness and the frequency of loneliness is 13% for women, 5% for men, which doesn't seem like a really huge percentage, but that's quite a bit more, especially when you take into effect the significant effects in terms of health and social impact that loneliness carries. We saw that with COVID. We see that with cardiovascular disease as well. We also see changes with social involvement in terms of the risk of heart attack. For women, if they have a lower social involvement, they're one and a half times as likely to have a heart attack for the first time, let alone follow up heart attacks. We also see serious changes with social interaction and social health with immune system markers of inflammation, particularly interleukin eight and C reactive protein, which for individuals, aren't necessarily briefed at all of the little acronyms, those are really, really strong immune and inflammatory markers, very strongly correlated with risk cancer and cardiovascular disease, and we see that it 15%
Percent less likely to experience those elevated immune markers with individuals who don't experience that loneliness, that have higher social involvement and more enriched varied social involvement. And when we say women feel 10% more loneliness, does that mean 10% of women feel more lonely, or women in general, feel 10% more lonely on whatever the scale might be, than men, 10% more women. So what we see is not necessarily increased
strength of emotion, but more incidents of that loneliness, more people being impacted by that lack of social involvement and a greater need for it. There's also the other aspect regarding loneliness of experiencing loss. As your age, you have more people in your circle, also in your close circle, who are getting ill and also dying eventually. How does that affect women, you know, versus men, for example?
Yeah. I mean, certainly when we begin to experience loss that contributes to loneliness, our circle shrinks. That's also where we see positive benefits of new relationships being formed. For women,
I certainly see that with patients. There are certain patients in particular that lost their parents that were primary caregivers of their parents or chronically ill children, where there was no hope for them to be able to get better.
We also see higher levels of stress in women, particularly around perimenopause. Particularly around perimenopause, we have more likelihood of having sleep issues. So that's an interesting change in life, because prior to that group of that demographic, that age range, men actually experience more sleep issues, sleep apnea, Insomnia, Sleep interruptions, and then that gets completely turned on its head. In in that 50 year age group, about 36% of men experience like disruptions, and that boosts to 56% for perimenopausal women, a lot of that is just hormone driven, as well as those additional stressors and our our change in ability to navigate those emotions that are coming with that period of life. We see changes in cortisol. We see changes in the the HPA access, that hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access, that
is a beautiful system in our body that communicates with these organs on top of our kidneys, and it produces all these different hormones that keep each other in check and balance the way they're supposed to and As we approach perimenopause, that really changes. There's four different types of perimenopause. For some people, there's a very steady, stable, predictable decrease in estrogen. For some people, it just completely tanks within, like a year of menopause and it's just over. For other women, they experience actually a peak of estrogen just before menopause and a drop off. And all of those play into how we're able to navigate the social changes, the emotional changes that come around menopause at the most inconvenient time for us to have to manage all of those changes,
and it also has an effect on us physically, which then in turn affects us emotionally, our physical Health, our self perception, affects how happy we are and our immune system and inflammation as well.
He made a very interesting point that the estrogen levels once they go from there, let's call them steady state again within the cycle, etc, but once they go from a regularly steady state to either complete drop off or whatever it might be. How does that directly and indirectly affect our social interactions?
Yeah, so most
of it's going to be indirect, because our hormones aren't necessarily something that we can feel overtly. Cortisol might be an exception, where if you get into fight or flight, you feel it, you know, there's adrenaline coursing through. You feel the crash after that. That's kind of an exception to the rule. But what we see with those changes of estrogen is we also experience changes with progesterone, testosterone, cortisol, oxytocin, melatonin, all those do important things. So this is where we start to see for different women, different patterns of perimenopause, different types of sleep alterations, where maybe they're waking up in the middle of the night because they're having a cortisol and testosterone boost is too early. It's supposed to make us motivated and get us to wake up in the morning, but it's now pushed earlier, because our hormone cycle, that 24 hour circadian cycle is now altered because of our monthly cycle being completely out of whack. We also see changes with our body composition, more difficulty putting on muscle, more body fat being held around the viscera. The really annoying thing is similar to.
Our brains self perception during the luteal phase. We're kind of in a hormonal luteal phase for perimenopause, and it comes with that instability. And we know that our self perception, not necessarily what we actually see in the mirror, but what we believe we see in the mirror, is strongly affected by our hormones and our brain hormones. And so what we see is at a statistic population level, and certainly in my patient population, even even adjusting for age, BMI, economic status, education, marital women around perimenopause and menopause have a significantly lower self image, and that's definitely going to affect how we interact socially, our confidence in our relationships, in our sexual relationships, our second guessing of ourselves, our ability to perform in our careers, so many different things, and of course, our testosterone, our estrogen are strongly correlated with how our brain perceives happiness and stress, our cortisol levels, and so we might be a little bit more on edge, a little more aggressive, which maybe we can put that into our careers in a carefully balanced, positive way. We're also experiencing more pain, so a lot of the reception receptors in our brain, dopamine, serotonin and our opioid receptors. So that's like our body's internal morphine pain control. Not only do we have that increase of those inflammatory hormones, inflammatory markers, so we have more pain, literally, but our brain is also perceiving more P, perceiving less happiness. And this is also where we kind of see women start to engage in behaviors that aren't supportive of happiness, aren't supportive of positive health, like relying on food for happiness, getting that quick dopamine, relying on alcohol for happiness. In terms of gender differences, we see that men actually experience on a population level, less stress, less intense stress during stressful situations, and less stress resilience than women, but women tend to internalize their stress.
We see a significant increase in stress levels around menopause, in particular, likely from a multifactorial sense, because there are more stressors. You are caring for your aged parents, you are having a newly emptiness. You are experiencing changes in your relationships. You're seeing friends pass away. You're reassessing all of your relationships. You know many people around perimenopause are thinking, Are these people that I want to have around for these next years of my life, this next period of my life. Are these good for me, and should I change that? How could I change that same thing with our career? Many women are thinking, Wow, is this kind of the end for me? Is this now too late? What can I do with my life, to bring joy to myself, to contribute to the world, to feel purpose, and that the stress response being internalized is something that really turns against ourselves.
That's a good question. What can we do?
Yeah, so part of our Methuselah protocol, that body of measures and interventions that we use at Everest health is a lot of not just hormone replacement therapy and supplements and herbs that support our emotional and cognitive balance, that help brain health and those brain hormones, those body hormones at all working together, but also lifestyle interventions, we really kind of sleep on all of the wonderful things that we can do and Be active in taking charge of our life, to positively affect our health. So some of those things would be mind, body connection, work, nature, bathing, gardening, going for walks, outdoors, particularly for a circadian rhythm that reset of bright daylight and seeing green, just seeing green things like literally, there's tons of research on just seeing plants as being positive for our stress levels and our ability to perform memory tasks, things like deep breathing exercises, yoga, pilates, where we feel the world around us, we really tend to stay in a highly sympathetic activated state, so That kind of fight or flight state where we're not necessarily feeling that adrenaline rush all the time. I think a lot of us can relate that we're maybe a kid and you don't experience that rush of emotion except when you like skin your knee or something. As adults, we feel those things multiple times a day, and we just kind of have to like stuff them down. And as a result, we stay really, really overstimulated, and it really numbs our brain to the things that can make us happy, and it really turns up the things that make us anxious. I
think that's also a really good point on cognitive load. How are you seeing that changing over the seasons of.
Life, and how have you seen that changing with the advent of technology, you know, always being online and all the rest of it? Yes, yes. So I mean, this isn't necessarily unique to age, although we do see more difficulty with social interactions as more technology is being required for social interactions that there's less engagement between different age populations. So for example, being able to actually connect with your toddler grandkids who are across the country is going to become more difficult, and it already has in past decades, where we do have research showing that it's more challenging to stay socially connected without using technology. We also have tons of data, as I'm sure you're aware, and the listeners are aware, that screen time is not good for us, actually depressing and abysmal. How, like two hours of any screens is strongly correlated with increased risk of anxiety, depression, poor sleep, poor interactions, poor self worth.
Two hours is nothing that's not talking about social media, that's talking about TV, no Instagram, that's just checking your emails, basically, yeah, love us. Are immune to that, right? So that's definitely a challenge across genders, Across Ages, we absolutely see not just because of the use of technology, but with a trade off, instead of engaging with the world around us, things that are tactile, things that involve our senses, that take us out of ourselves and allow us to actually experience and enjoy the world we live in, that we're just kind of surviving, we're not actually living our lives. What I did see, particularly with end of life care and with nursing home care, is
most of the time it's not conscious, it's subconscious, but when we're depressed, when we're anxious, when we're not doing things that give us purpose and joy, we make decisions that result in us dying sooner. We don't make those decisions that make us go out and do volunteer work, join a running group, eat more salads. We may say okay to another like, you know, six glass of wine every night, because who cares? You know, you're just trying to get any little bit of dopamine and serotonin, any little bit of happy hormone in that moment, because deep down, you kind of feel like that's all you have. And so that's also where therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR, mind body connection, work, food as medicine also is a really, really important aspect of our overall health. A lot of people don't realize how much research shows that the foods we eat strongly impact our emotional and then social, of course, physical health, whether that's our gut microbiome or whether that's like, you know, to just describe, in general, fake sugars that can affect our blood sugar and then our stress hormones and inflammatory response. It really is everything we do, and what we try to do is just make that less complicated or more personalized, so that you're not having to look at every article that comes your way from every potentially biased media source.
And it sounds like it's not so much the risky decisions to obvious decision, but it sounds like it's the everyday, small decision, as you say, you know, the sixth glass of wine, etc.
I would also think that is probably different from men. I mean, men, I don't know, going through midlife crisis, buying a Ferrari and wrapping themselves around the tree, you know, something like that. But I don't feel we have that. I think it's different for us. I think it's also we talked on the negative behaviors. I think there's also the upside, positive behaviors that we are displaying also act as role models to those around us, to our children, to whoever might be. I mean, for example, I keep have lectured my parents on they should not be by Marjorie and all these kind of things, and in the kind of changes I've made over the years. Sure, it's very, very slow to trickle down, but I've actually been trickling down into other people in my life as well. So actually, speaking of of you know, other people in our lives, I think as women in general, things tend to be around our family, around the community, less so about ourselves. I think that is also big impact. I think that is also big strain, because you have this societal expectation that as women, you are so many things to so many people, you know. And I'm also thinking, What can we teach the quote, unquote, younger generation? So for you know, the elder ones, it could be our daughters. It could just be younger women, our lives in general, about this phenomenon of being so many things to so many people. But also, how can we make them aware of the dangers? For example, this, I mean, it's pretty much an automatic aspect of our socialization, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I think there's many things that can contribute to the younger generation having a better time than we have, and hopefully ourselves as well. To your point, being a leader in your own life and in those around you is a really beautiful way to frame the challenges that come with that time of life. For many of my patients, their biggest driver is fear based, right? So they come having had a new chronic illness, where they don't want to get old, or they see their parents, they don't want to turn into their parents. And fear is a really great motivator for the short term, but it is not a good motivator for the long term. But the the benefits of fear to actually make us do things is not great from a behavioral psychology point of view, instead finding positive spin on things, taking all of those challenges and saying, You know what, I'm going to provide a good model for my children. That's something that a lot of patients have specifically verbalized, that, you know, I want to eat healthy, because I don't want my kids to grow up in a soda drinking household like I did. It was so hard for me to stop drinking soda, because that's what my parents did. I don't want to do that to my kids, or I want to show them that you can have a good time without drinking alcohol. I want our Thanksgiving or our family anniversary to be something that's active. Let's go hiking together instead of just like sitting on the couch and watching TV and gorging ourselves. And they're really taking on another role, which is being that matriarch in the family, building a family culture. I think in our generation, particularly post COVID, a lot of people are reassessing how they approach health and how much they can actually positively impact their health, and they're taking charge of it.
The challenge with that, then is how that affects our relationships. So for a lot of patients, they start building new friendships, ones that are aligned and open to a healthy lifestyle, and it can be a little destabilizing, particularly with therapy and and the changes that come from introspection and personal growth. Sometimes our loved ones don't like that they like in the long term, but for those first few months, it can be really, really challenging to how that interpersonal conflict can pop up. And so being aware of that, having the expectation of that challenge, is really useful. I think, the acknowledgement that there is so much we can do is one of the biggest aspects for the patient population. That's, let's say, over 75 seems to be around the age range. Patients have a really, really hard time making change, because they just don't believe they can do anything for their health. But there's much, much more difficult the longer we've stayed in a habit to change it, we're less motivated and we're less able to do so. They're really, really ingrained in us. So being able to take a step back and maybe scheduling time once a year or once every few months to review your journals, to review your level of happiness taking. You know, there are really great validated questionnaires of quality of life, well being, self worth, anxiety and depression. Of course, some of those things can be really helpful for a touch point to say, actually, this is where I need to be focusing my attention.
You made a very good point on family culture of saying we want our Thanksgiving to be something active, rather than sitting on the couch. You know, eating Turkey and Turkey is probably one of the less bad things you can eat. But
there's a really interesting book. It's called boundless parenting, by Ben greenfields, and one of the things he talks about is having a family constitution. Everyone gets around the table. Obviously, his kids are very young when they wrote that, but wrote it together with the kids. And it's all about, what are our values as a family, what are the things that we actually want to work on? Is that, you know, could be volunteering together, could be going out for hike in nature, these kind of things. So I think that's a really nice way to address a topic that, as you said, these kind of changes are not easy to bring about. So I think having everyone on board, everyone feel involved, and have a say in that could actually be quite interesting in terms of having everyone involved and having everyone to say Holistic Health, and actually incorporating social health into the current healthcare system, which is really sick care system. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, you know, when we opened the brick and mortar, we were trying to go fully virtual, both for my convenience of staying at home, but also for access for patients. So we do still see patients virtually for that reason, but we looked at the history of healthcare here in the United States, and from a perspective of if we're going to be kind of building something that's what we think healthcare should be from scratch, how do we get here so we don't have the same pitfalls? And part of that started even as early as the 1930s where we went from having a community, village, family doc.
Who was expected and responsible for and expected themselves to kind of know everything to then having specialty care, which really fractured medical care. Nobody knew what anybody else was doing. Nobody had to be responsible for you to actually get you healthy. Then, of course, privatized insurance more lately, the issue of basically almost nothing. Being prior authorized and non medical personnel and AI being the ones who determine whether you actually get the care you need or not, is really a challenge, and that's why we have a membership model. At this point, we're quite a bit more affordable. The other players in the field generally our average of about $40,000 a year. Ours is 3500 to be able to be as accessible to as many as possible. We're still exploring other options for insurance to wake up and for other organizations to be able to make this something that everyone should have. Everyone has the right to have access to the best health care possible, to have optimized health to live long live. Well, then we see from it, from an economic perspective, aside from the ethics and the morals of the social impact on society of you know, having older generations who remember things like the concentration camps or remember Rwanda and so these things don't happen again. Remember even economic changes and decisions that were made that were not helpful for humans, if those eating is not happening again. But just from an economic standpoint, we spend so So, so so much money on healthcare. We spend so much passive economic cost on caretaking, particularly with women around that age group, not just in physical, actual dollars of what we spend, but what we're not making, because we're having to step back from careers to take care of aged ones, most of the time, significantly longer than eight hour work days for many, many women, that ends up being close to a 20 hour work day. Part of that is the insurance situation, right? I mean, people are living longer, living about 20 to 30 years longer, but those are all Ill years. Those are years of dependence, of misery, and it's completely unnecessary, and it's certainly not helpful for us, for society, actually, let's stick with that a little bit longer, because there's also some gender difference in aging, but also in the kind of diseases that we're getting. Talk us about for that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we certainly see less differences now, as these diseases of aging are happening earlier and earlier. So, you know, 50 years ago, heart attacks happened to 50 year old men. That's not really so much the case anymore. Certainly, there's difference between like testicular cancer and breast cancer in terms of rates, but we really are starting to see more unified diseases of aging and genders as they're starting to happen earlier, which is part of why is this such an important issue? We do see, of course, some gender differences in disease types, but things like diabetes, metabolic syndrome, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, decrease of brain tissue. We see this happening younger and younger, and people are starting to view it just as like a normal part of life that, oh, well, I'm 50, so I have high blood pressure, you know, what else do I expect? And that's not true. We see that even with emotional changes, one of the biggest limiting factors in patients addressing their mental health is not because of stigma anymore. It's because they see it as normal. They see that need to, like, you know, be a little tougher. Everybody else is anxious, everybody else is depressed, too. So whatever, you know, I just need to perform better and be better when that's not the underlying issue.
Certainly in terms of cognitive decline, we see differences for men and women,
particularly when it's driven by something that's anatomic. So for men, they tend to lose their sense of hearing earlier. Women tend to lose their sense of sight earlier. Part of that is hormone driven. So estrogen is a strong determining factor in our development of cataracts and the need for reading glasses. Also part of that's because of the type of work we do. That might change over time, as all of us are using screens constantly, we're already seeing in children, greater need for glasses, for nearsightedness, because of our eyes just being used to only being at one focal distance. But we see significant changes with brain tissue, brain volume, brain health, and, of course, dementia and a cognitive decline that comes with that decline of our senses.
Interesting. I'm gonna throw a couple of careful questions that you know, so, um, I always love to ask people about the books that really stuck with them, the books that really changed their life, and also the.
Books that they have gifted the most. What are yours? Yeah,
I mean, there's lots of books that I enjoy from a purely pleasure standpoint, but in terms of life changing, professional perspective, changing, I really, really enjoyed how not to die. There's a million books out there about nutrition, and I will say every one of them, including this one, has its own bias. So I will say it's fantastic. About 200 pages of the book is just references. So fact checking it sometimes the research is a little bit skewed toward the Vegan, Vegetarian side of things, a little bit over extremist but in general, the research is absolutely phenomenal in terms of food as medicine, plants being important. Generally, Mediterranean style diet has so much research behind it, but that book has been really, really helpful for patients and for friends in terms of practical application of what a diet should look like. I usually recommend that they just read the first person, unless they really want to get into the details. The body keeps. The score was also absolutely phenomenal. So Body Keeps the Score is a book about internalized physical
physical
output of emotion and trauma, things like digestive disorders or pain syndromes, immune autoimmune disorders as a direct result of emotional change, which in the past, we would have written off as it's in your head. Now we know that, yeah, like, everything's in our head, this is a real thing, and that's actually talking about the history of EMDR, which is a form of therapy that's been incredibly helpful for many, many patients. And then the secret life of fat actually was a really fun read. It's an older book. It's probably been out for about 12 years now,
but a lot of people in the US, 76%
don't have a normal, healthy BMI, because
being healthy, being able to attain a normal and healthy body adipose tissue volume, is not the norm. That is the challenge. And so many patients, one of their primary goals is is to get healthy from the perspective of body composition, and it's almost impossible. It's almost impossible after a certain point, particularly with the changes of perimenopause and menopause, those hormone driven changes socially. I mean, our world is really designed for consumption on evil purpose is really, really designed to steal our health for their wealth and The Secret Life of fat was really, really helpful in understanding the underlying effects of fat as a tissue and as an organ that fat produces its own hormones. It manipulates our brain. It manipulates our stomach and our gut. It's doing stuff in our body that we're not aware of, and it likes its friends. It's not trying to get rid of them. And so it was really, really helpful in building that aspect of our protocol, and also in training our staff, to be able to have no judgment and have so much compassion and understanding for the almost everyone who is doing the best they can and their body is just not letting them become healthy.
Tell us about EMDR.
EMDR is eye motion desensitization and reprogramming. It works in what would visually appear similar to hypnosis. It is not hypnosis, but essentially, it uses either a visual tracking or an auditory tracking, for those who are blind or who are auditory learners, to cause your brain to hack into the memory forming mechanism. We're very, very visual and auditory creatures, and you'll notice, probably with me, way too much. But in general, when people are conversing, when they are thinking about something, when they're trying to remember a phrase or an event or talking about something that's really deep to them, they're not looking directly into your eyes. They're kind of looking up back and forth, and they're visually tracking and re experiencing that memory. And so that on reprogramming hacks into that. It uses a therapist, of course, to guide questions around your core beliefs, phrases, hurtful things, maybe you say to yourself that hold you back, definitely, core memories, traumas as child, where they form, how we perceive the world around us, how we interact with the world around us as adults, because we're still stuck in that child like undeveloped way of processing that information. So for example, would be like, road rage. Someone cuts you off and you're like, oh, you know, maybe they're in labor, or maybe they didn't see me there. You know, there's still.
Many different things that could be, but we immediately jump to a very visceral, very, very strong reaction for many of us, or perhaps it's, you know, our husband or our child Saying something to us that's perfectly benign, but we respond so strongly because it's based in a core trauma or core belief or core phrase that we say to ourselves, and getting really very free, especially in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy. So first, you learn all about yourself, you learn all of these things, and then the CBT that cognitive behavioral therapy gives you the tools to be able to have new coping mechanisms, to have new core beliefs that are now helpful for you. Those things may be true to your perspective, are they like helping you? Another thing that we use in the clinic, which has been really, really helpful for a lot of patients, it's used in the military as well for post traumatic stress and other emotional mood disorders, is hyperbaric oxygen treatment. So it actually increases the oxygen concentration and penetration in the memory centers of the brain to be able to bring those memories in a safe space to the surface, process them and get rid of
them. Okay, that is a H Bot Application I have not heard of before. We've had a couple of patients to the point now where we tell them ahead of time before their first dive. It's not a common occurrence, but we've had a couple of patients with an emotive response. One patient who had recently broke up with her boyfriend, and she was very much dwelling on that. And it was kind of a beautiful thing to see. It took her by surprise, but she had this very strong emotional response, very controlled, and it was very with purpose, the way that she was verbalizing all the emotions that she was feeling. And another older gentleman who experienced a lot of internalized anger towards different individuals in his life, and in the same way, he didn't come out punching, but he was expressing, like, I'm really feeling so upset about this and this and this, and expressing how to change that. That's been really beautiful to see. We generally recommend to patients. I mean, this is something that you could combine. You can schedule therapy at the same time. You can do meditation or guided imagery breath work, or you can also take a nap if you are not feeling like you're ready to dive into that aspect of things
super interesting. So, um, one thing I always like to ask is, what's a purchase of $100
pounds, euros, currency, of a choice, or even less, that has most positively impacted life, say, in the last two to three years, and perhaps also one under 1000? Yeah? Um, I really, really like our countertop filter. It filters out fluoride. It tastes amazing. It's really reduced our consumption, our use of plastic bottles and hopefully, ideally, micro plastics as well. From that perspective, it's something that makes people want to come to our house because our water happens to taste good, which is lovely. The biggest thing for me this year has been purchasing a happy lay. So that's something that basically stimulates sunlight. It is 30,000 Lux versus overhead light, which is like 700 very, very bright, but not painful, light that the research abundantly shows is as effective as antidepressants for seasonal affective disorder. It's been phenomenal for me, for my patients, and it's very easy to incorporate many interventions are hard, and we see from behavioral psychology perspective, things either need to be easy or pleasant for us to do them long term. Thankfully, this is both. So I just have it in in my little home gym, and I turn it on in the morning, first thing for 30 minutes is the dose, and it's incredible for energy, for sleep quality, too, because it's similar to going outside and getting a walk in the morning, it just wakes up your circadian rhythm, and it starts that timeline, whereas in winter time, your body just has no idea what time of day is,
and any other investments, I think you mentioned your vegetable garden. Oh yeah, that would definitely be more on the expensive side of things over especially if I, you know, break it up over the many years. But that brings a lot of joy, brings a lot of nutrition, and keeps me outside and active. So what we see for particularly long term, for the aged, it's not necessarily high volume, high intensity workouts, although the weekend warrior template is great too, but what we really see is the greatest benefit comes from all day general activity and particularly functional cross training type activities, like you're squatting down, you're standing up, you're reaching, you're stretching, you're twisting, you're turning, all these things that we kind of don't do when we're just sitting in a chair, or even when we're going for a walk and going in just a linear line. Now.
That's been really, really wonderful from a lot of different aspects.
It's a final question for me, what is an unusual habit, or perhaps a more absurd thing that you're left to
do? I guess along the same same lines, be outside is really, really important for my mental, emotional, social, physical health. For many people,
maybe we haven't tapped into that or haven't explored that aspect of ourselves. So I really enjoy foraging. I got really into it during COVID, from perspective of, you know, what, if the world really ends and then I have to go find food out in the woods, and I got really, really into it. I got a bunch of books and a bunch of applications, and it's brought me so much joy. It hits all the spots for me, because there is the novelty and dopamine of of discovery, of searching for something and finding it. Finally, after three years of new tastes, I love to eat, there's new flavors that probably you know, who has gotten to taste this random thing on in the woods? Nutrition aspect, things that grow wild are almost invariably very, very rich in antioxidants, in nutrients and medicinal components, partly because they're grown slowly and we haven't manipulated them to have high sugar content and to be overly quick and productive. It gets me outside, gets me active, walking up and down hills and listening to the birds and just breaking away from really anything else. It demands my attention in all of those senses.
Good stuff, actual final. Final question for me is, what are the one to two, three things that you think would really move the needle if your clients, patients, fellow practitioners would know about them and actually practice them. And it's probably something obvious, but, I
mean, that's kind of the annoying response to the question is, I mean, you already know exercise and eating healthy. I think the biggest challenge when it comes to longevity and longevity medicine and longevity research is one how much contradicting information there is. So looking from a population level, we can say, generally, exercise at all is going to be an important thing, increasing general activity. Mediterranean style diet that's rich in plants and antioxidants, macro, micronutrients. Sleep, quality is really, really important. I think more people are becoming aware of that. But to complicate things, the other really, really important aspect is personalizing it. So we've seen really great evidence for tennis, specifically for longevity. We see really, really great evidence for ping pong, table tennis. For cognition, particularly in the elderly, you might not like that, you might not be able to do that. And so then we look for what's going to fit the mold for you individually. There was just recently a really great article
evidencing something as simple as like 20 squats an hour or going for a five minute walk after eating, being strongly correlated with better metabolic health in the short and the long term, which, of course, has other benefits associated with it. With sleep.
Men and women have different needs for sleep. The research is still new. They haven't really wanted to research women for this too much, but we see a huge difference, not necessarily in insomnia, but different sleep cycles for women, meaning we tend to have changes in our circadian rhythm based on where we are in our cycle. Many, many women experience middle of the night awakening, or overly early awakening, when we're ovulating and when we're on our period, which makes sense, because our testosterone changes, our cortisol changes, and those are the things that wake us up. Of course, during perimenopause and post menopause, we see changes with that as well, we also have different temperatures. Our temperature is strongly regulated by our hormones, and we run hotter than men do depending on the individual, an average of one and a half degrees Fahrenheit. And so that is why women are more cold sensitive. I can tell you, like for sure, most women are washing dishes in much hotter water, bathing our bodies in much hotter water than their spouses. And part of that is just because that's what's comfort comfortable to us from a purely gender standpoint, also means for sleep. We have different needs in terms of maybe room temperature or wearing socks or having different types of cooling sheets and pillows to keep us comfortable. So for many, many couples, that means two different comforters, different types of pillows, different bed clothes, different needs for different people, and not expecting ourselves to just fit the mold of of whoever in the relationship.
Makes it more of the obvious decisions that explains a lot, trust me,
super Danielle, thank you so much for coming on. Very, very lovely. Have you? Thanks so much for the time. Appreciate it.
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