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 This is episode number 1,236 with Esther Perel.
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Welcome to the School of Greatness.
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My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
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And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
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Thanks for spending some time with me today.
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Now let the class begin.
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 Over the years, I have had the pleasure of sitting down with psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author, Esther Perel.
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She is recognized as one of today's most insightful voices on modern relationships.
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And today I wanted to put together a collection of some of the most powerful moments over the years of having her on the show that have really transformed people's lives in their relationships.
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So this is a masterclass on that topic.
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 In this episode, we discuss the biggest obstacles people face in their relationships and what most people get wrong when they are dating, why even some of the happiest people sometimes cheat in relationships, how to build trust even when you've lost it with your partner, the expectations you should be setting in your relationships in the beginning and in the middle,
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 And so much more.
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And this is an inspiring topic for me because I have struggled in relationships in the past.
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I've done my own therapy.
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I've done a lot of work on myself.
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And it's a beautiful thing to be able to learn this information, put it into place and create peace within a relationship now.
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And so I really hope that you find the value from this as much as I have found the value from implementing these strategies in my own life and in my relationships.
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 So if you're inspired by this at any moment, make sure to spread this message, pay the message forward, share with a few friends, text them, post it on social media, make sure to tag me and Esther Perel as well over on social media.
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I'm so excited about this episode.
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And if you find inspiration from this as well, or helpful at any moment, make sure to spread this message with a few friends, text some people, post it on social media, and make sure to tag me, Lewis Howes, and Esther Perel as well when you're sharing on social media.
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 And if you are new here, make sure to click the subscribe button over on Apple podcasts or Spotify right now, so you can stay up to date on the latest and greatest on the School of Greatness podcast.
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Okay.
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In just a moment, the one and only Esther Perel.
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In this first section, Esther details the biggest obstacles people have to face in relationships.
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Let's dive in.
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 What are the core reasons or the core things you see over and over that either end or make a relationship challenging to be in the longer you're in?
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What are the challenges that come up over and over that you see?
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 So there's always three questions, right?
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What's a thriving relationship?
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A thriving one.
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Yeah, what can go wrong?
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And how do you fix it?
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So you started with the middle question, what goes wrong?
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I think there's a number of things in a relationship that become the kind of cornerstones of the demise, okay?
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And I'm not gonna list them in order, but they all are part of each other.
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 Indifference, and contempt, and neglect, and violence are probably the four most important.
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I'm not talking about big violence.
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Microaggressions are plenty.
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Indifference, when you start to feel like the other person fundamentally is not really caring about you anymore, or you don't care about them.
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What they feel, what they think, who they are, what they're about.
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You just don't care.
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You've lost interest.
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 But it's more than losing of interest.
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It's also when you are doing different, you degrade the other person.
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They're less important to you.
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They don't matter.
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And ultimately what we feel in relationships is that we matter.
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That is the essential reason for connecting to people is that we are creatures of meaning.
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I matter to you.
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I'm someone.
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 you care about me, you want my well-being, you're proud of me, you want good for me, you're benevolent, all of that.
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When you are indifferent, the whole thing goes.
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And then you start, there's that coldness that creeps in, that sense of estrangement, that complete disconnect, that.
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The second one is neglect.
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Neglect, when people just basically take each other for granted.
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 They take more care of their car than of their partner.
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Or their dog.
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Or their dog, anybody, anything.
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Their yard, anything.
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Anything gets attendance.
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Their business.
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Their business for sure.
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Their business for sure.
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Everything gets priority.
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Everything gets reviewed, evaluated, attended to, 360s, you name it.
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New input.
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My God, it's like people have this idea that they put it all in when they were dating,
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 And then once they seal the knot, it's like as if they tied the knot, it's like now they don't have to do squat anymore.
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And they go into this kind of complete sense of complacency and laziness.
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It's an amazing thing.
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They think this thing is just gonna live on its own.
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Like a cactus.
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Violence, violence, the abuse, the level of disrespect.
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I mean, most people talk nicer to anybody else than their partner when a relationship degrades.
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Because you can't get away with it.
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 Because you can't get away with it.
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Because if you talk like this at work, you're gone.
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Because if you talk like this with the police, you're gone.
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Because if you talk like this on the street, you're being punched.
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But with your partner, you have that sense that they're going to be there anyway.
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They're just going to take it because it's family.
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And family is this thing that doesn't deserve.
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So I've actually published data that we can take people with
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 gluten sensitivity and with leaky gut and with antibodies to gluten and
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 over a year period of time, take away the foods that they're sensitive to and heal their leaky gut, seal it up.
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And with the passage of time, those antibodies to the various forms of wheat disappear, disappear.
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They go away.
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It's like,
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 It's like you keep needing a booster shot for COVID.
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You literally lose the antibodies.
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You lose the memory that you were interested in gluten.
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And that's really exciting.
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What does that do to your body when you lose the antibodies to gluten?
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So I think that you can now reintroduce gluten.
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 and get away with it.
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In fact, I've written about this on my personal self.
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Years ago, we started doing autoimmune tests on everybody, including ourselves.
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There's markers for autoimmune disease, like lupus, like Hashimoto's.
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 And so my assistant comes running in she says doc you got lupus and I know I don't have Yeah, you know you have anti-nuclear antibody positive I said, huh that's interesting because my father's side of the family had massive psoriasis, which is an autoimmune disease and He was on methotrexate for 50 years long story short.
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So I
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 So I said, yeah, OK, I've got a very strong family history for an autoimmune disease, and I'm always experimenting with food.
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I said, that's really cool.
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I'm going to try to turn it off.
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And so I went two weeks perfectly following the Plant Paradox program.
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 Measured it two weeks later gone.
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Wow.
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Okay, that's that's good information If you stayed on that track, it would stay probably gone, but it was gone for years But if you went back on the so I decided to test it You know, you gotta experiment on yourself.
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So I was we were editing the longevity paradox in New York City and we I
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 We needed to do some more editing, finished on a Friday and I had to stay over for Monday to keep editing.
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So I said, you know, I got a whole weekend here, I'm gonna test the system.
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So I had pizza, I had bread, I had pasta, I had tomatoes, I had ice cream.
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And so I come back to Palm Springs and I test my anti-nuclear antibody and sure enough, it's positive.
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 Oh, wow, this is great.
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And so I said, I wonder how fast I can turn it off.
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So I went one week, retested, negative.
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So what does that tell me?
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It tells me that I can produce leaky gut in myself, but I can fix it really fast.
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What I've learned from my patients over 22 years is
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 When you've got really leaky gut, it's not gonna fix in a week or two.
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It can take three, six, nine months, a year.
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I have one patient and we just celebrated, it's been a year and a half.
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We're finally done with it.
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And the really cool thing, once you heal a leaky gut, you no longer have particles coming across your gut wall.
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 And 80% of your immune system is sitting lining your gut.
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All of your white blood cells are just there waiting because troublemakers can come through.
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And so if troublemakers are constantly coming through, the immune system is on hyper alert.
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And people hear about cytokine storm in COVID.
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Well, with the immune system hyper alert, they're ready to fire at any little thing.
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 Example I like to use believe it or not 95% of us are born With an antibody to the peanut lectin born with what's it mean when you have an antibody to that?
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So you literally have been Vaccinated this means you can eat the food and it won't affect you will it will affect you so 95% of us have it have an antibody where it will affect us in some way but
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 When I was growing up, every little kid had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at school.
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There were peanuts on airplanes.
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Yeah, baseball games, you're having peanuts.
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And nobody had a peanut allergy.
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Nobody had EpiPens.
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Now, of course, if some poor little kid brings a snack of peanuts, three EpiPens are coming out and kids are having these tremendous allergic reactions.
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 And you go, wait a minute, why is that?
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Why, you know, my generation didn't have that.
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Never had that.
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That's because back in the good old days, almost nobody had leaky gut.
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And so our immune system.
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Could defend against it.
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No, the immune system goes, yeah, I know that.
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I'm not very interested in that.
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You know, that's not a big deal.
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But now our immune system is walking around with oozies.
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 You know, and anything that looks even remotely worrisome, you're going, okay.
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And that's why all of us, I mean, autoimmune diseases are off the wall.
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60 million women have Hashimoto's thyroiditis in America.
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It's like, huh?
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And you know, when I was in medical school back in the dark ages, I mean, these were incredibly rare diseases.
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 They were so rare that these series of tests looking for autoimmune diseases, we called funny tests because we almost never ordered them.
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Let's get those funny tests.
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But now people use them every week.
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Oh yeah, I get autoimmune tests on every patient and it's shocking how many people have it.
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Okay, so gluten and lectin, so what are the main foods that have the most gluten or the most?
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Well, so wheat, rye, and barley have gluten.
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 Oats have a protein that cross-reacts with gluten.
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And I can't tell you the number of people who are eating oats that they're one of the culprits.
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What if it's when they say gluten-free oats?
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Run.
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 What does that mean when it's gluten-free oats?
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Basically means nothing because there's a protein in oats that isn't gluten But it looks a lot like gluten our immune system can't tell the difference similarly 70% of people who are sensitive to gluten react to corn as if it was gluten and that's why
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 So many patients, and I've written a paper about this, who are gluten-free, eating gluten-free foods, still have leaky gut and autoimmune diseases.
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And when we take away their healthy gluten-free foods like corn, like oats, like quinoa, then their leaky gut goes away and their autoimmune disease goes away.
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What about when you process the almonds or the oats into almond milk or oat milk?
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 Part of the problem with oats is that almost all of our oats in the United States have been sprayed with Roundup.
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And a ton of our organic oats have Roundup on them.
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And Roundup glyphosate,
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 is a major leaky gut disruptor in and of itself.
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So even if it says organic oats, gluten-free organic oat milk.
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No human being ate a grain until 10,000 years ago.
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 No human being ate a grain of rice until 8,000 years ago.
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These didn't exist.
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Human beings used to be as tall as you 10,000 years ago.
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Wow.
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Yeah.
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Then we shrunk down to my size after we started eating grains.
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Really?
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Yeah.
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We shrunk about a foot after agriculture.
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OK.
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Literally shrunk.
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Our brain sizes decreased 15% after the dawn of agriculture.
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Wow.
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 Because of the foods we're eating?
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Because of the foods we're eating, yeah.
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That's fascinating.
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Okay, so... Darn it.
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So when you process it into a milk, you know, what does that mean?
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Is it better?
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Is it worse?
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Is it the same?
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So how does the gut take it in?
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 It really doesn't make any difference.
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It doesn't make any difference.
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For instance, I'll give you a great example.
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Originally, the Plant Paradox program was called The Matrix, after the movie.
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And my editors at HarperCollins thought it was kind of too macho-manly.
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No, not touchy-feely enough.
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True story.
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And so we called it The Plant Paradox, and the rest is history.
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 Originally, almonds were not allowed on the program because I had a ton of people with autoimmune diseases that almonds, they would react to, even almond flour.
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 But the plant paradox, you know, take away a lot of stuff.
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And my editor said, hey, come on, you're a mean guy, you know, give us something, give us something.
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I said, well, almonds, the peel of the almond has the majority of the lectin.
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So I'll tell you what, let's have blanched, peeled almonds like Marcona almonds.
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That's why those people do that.
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And let's give them blanched almond flour.
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Okay, and everybody's happy.
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 So it works for 90% of people who just pick up the plant paradox with an autoimmune disease.
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They resolve their issues without even visiting me.
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But about 10% of people even visiting me, playing by the rules, still they're better.
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We can measure that they're better on their leaky gut, but they're not all the way.
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 And so we do these tests called food sensitivity tests.
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Now that's totally different than food allergy tests.
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Food sensitivity, believe it or not, basically says that if you've got spaces in the wall of your gut that undigested food particles, like let's just use almonds,
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 which would normally be digested into simple sugars, simple fats, simple amino acids and absorbed through the wall.
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Now pieces of food can potentially go across the wall undigested and your immune system says,
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 What the heck?
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I've never seen a piece of broccoli before.
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What's that doing in here?
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That's foreign to me.
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And I'm going to attack it.
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And I'm going to make a memory of what that broccoli looks like.
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And any time I see anything that looks like broccoli, I'm going to attack it.
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So we see these people.
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 who are having almond flour cookies and almond bread.
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Almond milk.
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And almond milk.
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And then we test them for food sensitivity and up comes almonds.
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And I've just got some wonderful story.
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I had this woman with psoriasis, horrible psoriasis, on two drugs.
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 And anyhow, we got rid of all of her psoriasis, got her off of all of her drugs, and she had this two-inch patch of psoriasis in the middle of her back.
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And that's all she had.
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Still left.
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Yeah.
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And she says, look, I'm really happy.
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It's nowhere else.
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No one sees it.
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Who cares?
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But isn't that, and she goes, isn't that interesting that there it is?
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And I said, yeah.
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I said, would you mind if we
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 of food sensitivity and just kind of see if there's a couple things that we ought to get rid of.
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And sure enough, almonds pops up.
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And so she got her results a couple weeks before I saw her.
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And so she comes in and she said, I've got my results.
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And guess what?
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She said, I've given up almonds two weeks ago.
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It's down to an inch.
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It shrunk 50% in two weeks just by getting rid of almonds.
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 And she did that for another two or three weeks?
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Yeah, and then I was gone.
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And then I was gone.
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Wow.
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Isn't that interesting?
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Yeah.
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I think they were food sensitivity or food allergy tests, one of the two.
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Because I had a little patch of psoriasis right here, like a little different skin.
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You know, it was like kind of a raised, a little different patch.
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It wasn't like spreading, but it was a little patch here, and it kind of come and go.
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 And on all these tests I took, they were like, you have no sensitivities, no, like, sensitivities to allergies.
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I'm not sure which one it was.
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They were probably allergy tests.
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We used to do those.
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I never thought they were any good, even though I did them.
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Gotcha.
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Gotcha.
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I never thought I got used to them.
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The sensitivity is better.
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Sensitivity.
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 Anyway, they said that I didn't have any allergies or sensitivities.
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I'm not sure which one it was.
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But a lot of it, what I realized, was based on stress.
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It was based on a lack of sleep and a lot of stress that I was facing, internal emotions that I wasn't able to process, and essentially abandoning myself in certain occasions, which made me kind of feel like I had a heightened immune system, I guess, which I think was the cause of this.
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And stress in itself can actually produce leaky gut.
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 Really?
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Oh yeah.
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I have particularly a number of women who can point literally to the day and hour that their autoimmune started, their leaky gut started.
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A sudden death of a mother, for instance.
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Divorce.
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Yeah, divorce is right up there.
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 So were they still eating like perfectly to, you know, the diet they were supposed to eat?
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But they were like, why do I have this, you know?
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Yeah, I mean, they were eating, quote, a normal diet and they've been fine up until that event.
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And then stress heightened the leak.
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Right.
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And then kind of once you produce that leak,
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 Then your immune gates are yeah, they're open and interesting enough your immune system actually comes up to the border of the wall your gut and you know There's a war going on there.
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And as the war goes on you actually have friendly fire so your own immune system worsens the problem and
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 And so it just perpetuates.
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The other thing we've learned is that viruses are actually really good at making leaky gut.
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And my humble opinion is a lot of the long COVID we're seeing is actually because of leaky gut from COVID.
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COVID loves to attack the mucous membranes of us, including our gut.
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So a lot of people present with COVID with diarrhea, for instance.
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 Mmm, so we've got a gluten lectins wheat rye barley oats the nightshades the nightshades tomatoes peppers Goji berries.
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Wait a minute.
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Goji berries are supposed to be healthy for you, right?
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Goji berries are actually nightshades
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 Darn it.
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They're actually American plants.
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They're called the wolfberry in America.
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And they were taken over to China in trade, in Colombian trade, and they grew extremely well.
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But yeah, goji berries are nitrates.
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And potatoes.
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And potatoes.
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And potatoes.
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Not sweet potatoes.
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Not yams and sweet potatoes.
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Sweet potatoes are fine.
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But potatoes are... And beans.
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But beans you can detoxify really easily.
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 with prolonged soaking, prolonged cooking, but most importantly, a pressure cooker.
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And there's two brands of beans now, I have no relationship, Eden and Jovial, that soak and pressure cook their beans.
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Before they ship, they send it to you.
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Yeah, and you know, people say, well, you know, you hate beans.
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No, I have beans several times a week.
0
SPEAKER_01
There you go.
0
SPEAKER_01
As long as they're pressure cooked.
0
SPEAKER_01
 So what about potatoes?
0
SPEAKER_01
Is there a way to eat potatoes?
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so most of the lectins are in the peel.
0
SPEAKER_01
The skin.
0
SPEAKER_01
The skin.
0
SPEAKER_01
Same with tomatoes and same with peppers.
0
SPEAKER_01
So if you take the skin off the tomatoes... Skin off and deep seed the tomatoes and peppers.
0
SPEAKER_01
Then you can eat them in sauce or...
0
SPEAKER_01
 Exactly.
0
SPEAKER_01
In fact, in Italy, you cannot make tomato sauce without peeling and deseeding tomatoes.
0
SPEAKER_01
You'll never open a jar of Italian red peppers and see peels and seeds because they're gone.
0
SPEAKER_01
You'll never open a can of chili peppers in the United States and see peels and seeds because they're gone.
0
SPEAKER_01
Because the traditional cultures have always known to do this.
0
SPEAKER_01
And how'd they know?
0
SPEAKER_01
Because their mother told them and blah, blah, blah.
0
SPEAKER_01
 And yeah, I mean, the Italians wouldn't eat tomatoes for 200 years after Columbus brought them back.
0
SPEAKER_01
Their native son, because they knew how bad they were for them.
0
SPEAKER_01
In fact, Americans didn't start eating tomatoes until the late 1800s.
0
SPEAKER_01
 because they were believed to be, you know, deadly.
0
SPEAKER_01
Really?
0
SPEAKER_01
And they were part of the deadly Nightshade family.
0
SPEAKER_01
And then this, I've forgotten his last name, I think it's Colonel Mitchell.
0
SPEAKER_01
He wasn't a colonel at all.
0
SPEAKER_01
He stood on this, he put an announcement in the paper in a suburb of Philadelphia that he was going to commit suicide by eating a bushel of tomatoes on the courthouse steps.
0
SPEAKER_01
 And he proceeded to eat a lot of tomatoes and he doesn't die.
0
SPEAKER_01
Seriously.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I actually talked about it in Plant Paradox.
0
SPEAKER_01
And that actually opened the floodgates to Americans eating tomatoes.
0
SPEAKER_01
 They said, okay, he's fine, so we can start eating this.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, look, he didn't die.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yay.
0
SPEAKER_01
It's a myth.
0
SPEAKER_01
But people thought if you eat this, it's going to kill you.
0
SPEAKER_01
It's going to make you really sick.
0
SPEAKER_01
Make you sick.
0
SPEAKER_01
Interesting.
0
SPEAKER_01
And we still have a lot of people who do react with pain to the nightshade family.
0
SPEAKER_02
So potatoes are fine if they're peeled, is what I'm hearing you say.
0
SPEAKER_02
Just don't eat the skin.
0
SPEAKER_01
Or pressure cook them.
0
SPEAKER_01
Or pressure cook.
0
SPEAKER_02
Then they're fine.
0
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
0
SPEAKER_02
Are there any others that you have in mind?
0
SPEAKER_01
 Well, peanuts and cashews.
0
SPEAKER_01
Cashews are actually poison ivy.
0
SPEAKER_01
They're the same plant as poison ivy.
0
SPEAKER_01
And why anybody would want to munch on poison ivy is beyond me.
0
SPEAKER_02
But they taste so good.
0
SPEAKER_01
Well, I agree.
0
SPEAKER_01
I used to love them.
0
SPEAKER_01
But I haven't had a cashew in I don't know how long.
0
SPEAKER_02
 So what do you see when people are eating cashews, when they take the food sensitivity tests, who stop eating cashews?
0
SPEAKER_02
But there's probably a number of foods they're eating that affect them, then they remove them all.
0
SPEAKER_01
Correct.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, we remove them all.
0
SPEAKER_01
And some of them make people cry.
0
SPEAKER_01
 I have an executive high up in one of the social media companies who developed just a devastating painful autoimmune disease and the meds were making him even sicker and long story short, he got referred to me and we did these tests and among other things, he was sensitive to both egg whites and egg yolks.
0
SPEAKER_01
 And so, out he goes.
0
SPEAKER_01
Now, the problem was, this guy lived on omelets.
0
SPEAKER_01
He had an omelet every day of his life.
0
SPEAKER_01
He loved omelets.
0
SPEAKER_01
And he was, I can't do this.
0
SPEAKER_01
I said, look, come on, help me out here.
0
SPEAKER_01
I said, we'll get him back, I promise.
0
SPEAKER_01
We gotta fix the leak.
0
SPEAKER_01
And sure enough, his pain went away.
0
SPEAKER_01
We got him off his meds.
0
SPEAKER_01
So about nine months in, we could measure his leaky gut's getting better and better and better.
0
SPEAKER_01
And he's a happy guy, but he still wants his omelets.
0
SPEAKER_01
So, nine months in.
0
SPEAKER_01
 We retest him and now he can tolerate egg whites, but he's still not good with egg yolks.
0
SPEAKER_01
But now he's a happy guy.
0
SPEAKER_01
He can have an egg white omelet.
0
SPEAKER_01
Here's the best part of this story.
0
SPEAKER_01
So, we go over this data.
0
SPEAKER_01
Two days later, I get a phone call from him.
0
SPEAKER_01
And he says, oh, I'm in such pain.
0
SPEAKER_01
I said, what'd you do?
0
SPEAKER_01
I have an omelet.
0
SPEAKER_01
 Well, I had an omelette for breakfast, an omelette for lunch, an omelette for dinner, and then I just had another omelette.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I'm in such pain.
0
SPEAKER_01
What'd you do that for?
0
SPEAKER_01
I said, you know, you haven't seen this in nine months.
0
SPEAKER_01
You gotta put it in easy.
0
SPEAKER_01
Slowly, yeah.
0
SPEAKER_01
 I got it, yeah, dumb, sorry.
0
SPEAKER_01
The light bulbs went off this morning.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was dumb.
0
SPEAKER_01
But now he's eating egg yolks.
0
SPEAKER_01
So the really cool thing, the really cool thing is you can retrain the immune system and you can seal leaky gut so that you can have these foods back as long as you take some precautions.
0
SPEAKER_02
 Okay, so what would be some of the alternative foods that we could eat and consume if we got rid of all these?
0
SPEAKER_02
Because it sounds to me I'm just eating broccoli and cauliflower all day.
0
SPEAKER_01
So what are some of the alternatives that are also... I mean, there are great pastas out there made out of cassava flour.
0
SPEAKER_01
I make one at GundryMD made out of sorghum flour.
0
SPEAKER_01
 Again, have no relationship, jovial, makes phenomenal pastas out of cassava flour.
0
SPEAKER_01
Cassava flour.
0
SPEAKER_01
Cassava.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it's like taro root.
0
SPEAKER_01
Oh.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I tell you, I actually, one of the restaurants, Italian restaurants in Montecito keeps, you know, cassava pasta for me, and I just had a big bowl of penne pasta a couple of nights ago.
0
SPEAKER_01
And it doesn't affect your, you don't feel like this.
0
SPEAKER_01
No.
0
SPEAKER_01
 And it's got the mouth.
0
SPEAKER_01
And it's got this mouth feel.
0
SPEAKER_01
It's really good now.
0
SPEAKER_01
It's al dente.
0
SPEAKER_01
So the idea that you have to suffer these things is old school.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I think one of the big benefits of the plant paradox being so popular is that consumers
0
SPEAKER_01
 wanted alternatives and companies rise to the occasion and they're making lots of stuff.
0
SPEAKER_01
There's lots of now pasta sauces, peeled and deseeded tomatoes, you know, again, there's lots of pressure-cooked beans.
0
SPEAKER_01
So it's actually, it's been exciting to watch
0
SPEAKER_01
 These things come about right?
0
SPEAKER_01
What about so what other foods we got the cassava flour pasta?
0
SPEAKER_02
What about I mean?
0
SPEAKER_02
So there's actually
1
SPEAKER_00
 increasingly now a lot of fairly safe ice creams out there that can use alternative, like coconut milk as an example.
1
SPEAKER_00
There's actually some ice creams that use a sweetener called allulose, which I'm very high on.
1
SPEAKER_00
Allulose.
1
SPEAKER_00
Allulose is a rare, actual sugar.
1
SPEAKER_00
It was first discovered in figs.
1
SPEAKER_00
 but it has no caloric value.
1
SPEAKER_00
And they actually, it's primarily produced from corn, but before everybody has a fit.
1
SPEAKER_00
 by GMO allulose.
1
SPEAKER_00
Most corn in the United States is genetically modified, and that's a whole other story in itself.
1
SPEAKER_00
Most corn in the United States is sprayed with Roundup, as is all our wheat, as is all of our everything.
1
SPEAKER_00
But allulose is actually a prebiotic.
1
SPEAKER_00
So a prebiotic is fiber that feeds good gut bacteria.
1
SPEAKER_00
 So get non-GMO allulose?
1
SPEAKER_00
Allulose.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it's easy to find.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's on the internet.
1
SPEAKER_00
A lot of stores are getting it.
1
SPEAKER_00
But it's starting to appear in bars.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's starting to appear in ice creams.
1
SPEAKER_00
Protein bars and stuff like that.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_01
Any other... What about for like the nuts?
1
SPEAKER_01
What's a replacement for nuts?
1
SPEAKER_00
So, number one nut, and we'll talk about this in a little bit, is pistachios.
1
SPEAKER_00
I love pistachios.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Pistachios have so many crazy health benefits and their number one health benefit, spoiler alert, is they are the highest source of melatonin of any food.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Really?
1
SPEAKER_00
Really.
1
SPEAKER_00
And everybody says, well, wait a minute.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don't want to go to sleep after I eat pistachios.
1
SPEAKER_00
It turns out that melatonin is only one of two actual antioxidants that are used in mitochondria to protect mitochondria.
1
SPEAKER_00
The other one is glutathione.
1
SPEAKER_00
 All the other antioxidants that people talk about, you know, vitamin C, vitamin E, blah, blah, blah, have absolutely no effect on oxidative stress in mitochondria.
1
SPEAKER_00
There's only two, melatonin and glutathione.
1
SPEAKER_00
So melatonin is not a sleep hormone.
1
SPEAKER_00
Melatonin has a much higher purpose.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And that is to actually repair mitochondria to uncouple mitochondria.
1
SPEAKER_00
We'll go into that for sure, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
So pistachios is the number one.
1
SPEAKER_00
Can you have too many nuts of pistachio macadamia?
1
SPEAKER_00
So if you want to gain weight, macadamia nuts are the way to do it.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I've actually had some weight gaining challenges for some of my really skinny people.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And if you want to gain weight, macadamia nuts are the way to do it.
1
SPEAKER_00
Mac, what about pistachios?
1
SPEAKER_00
Pistachios are pretty hard.
1
SPEAKER_01
Macadamia nuts are so good.
1
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I know.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's part of the problem.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's why you gain weight.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you really do gain weight with macadamia nuts.
1
SPEAKER_01
So you can have more pistachios.
1
SPEAKER_00
And walnuts are great.
1
SPEAKER_00
Hazelnuts are great.
1
SPEAKER_00
Pine nuts are great.
1
SPEAKER_00
 So, pecans do have a lectin I wrote about in the Plant Paradox Cookbook that we often see on food sensitivity tests.
1
SPEAKER_00
Pecans.
1
SPEAKER_00
Pecans.
1
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, I just tell people go easy because, you know, I went to medical school in Georgia and it's the state, you know, nut.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
Healthy economy.
1
SPEAKER_01
What do you think is the best diet or food eating plan to go on to help you reverse age?
1
SPEAKER_00
 Believe it or not, my keto, my new keto program.
1
SPEAKER_01
Really?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
To help you reverse age.
1
SPEAKER_01
Why do you think that?
1
SPEAKER_01
What's the difference between that and the plant paradox diet?
1
SPEAKER_00
So this is the plant paradox taken to its kind of ultimate conclusion.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know, the plant paradox had a ketogenic diet.
1
SPEAKER_00
 program.
1
SPEAKER_00
But people were shocked with the amount of carbohydrates that were available to them in my ketogenic program.
1
SPEAKER_00
And nobody could quite figure out why, but it was really effective, particularly at losing weight.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I didn't even realize why until I was writing The Energy Paradox.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then it was like, oh my gosh,
1
SPEAKER_00
 why this works has been sitting here in plain sight.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I didn't see it.
1
SPEAKER_00
And no keto expert has ever seen it because we've all been kind of led down the garden path that ketones and being in ketosis is, you know, it's a miracle fuel and burns fat and makes you an efficient fat burner.
1
SPEAKER_00
And let's look at it this way.
1
SPEAKER_00
 If you become an efficient fat burner, which is what every keto says that you will be, efficiency means you get more out of something, you get more efficiency.
1
SPEAKER_00
In other words, if you want to save gas, you buy a Toyota Prius, which is very efficient.
1
SPEAKER_00
 at getting the most miles out of a gallon of gas.
1
SPEAKER_00
On the other hand, if you want to be fuel inefficient, then you buy a Ferrari, which is really good at wasting gas.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, there might be other reasons to have a Ferrari rather than a Prius, but we won't go there.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Fat has nine grams, nine calories per gram.
1
SPEAKER_00
Amino acids and carbohydrates have four calories per gram.
1
SPEAKER_00
So fat has more than twice the calories by weight of carbohydrates or proteins.
1
SPEAKER_00
So if you become an efficient fat burner and you're eating fat, then you ought to gain weight.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Why don't people gain weight believe it or not a ton of people gain weight on ketogenic diets?
1
SPEAKER_00
Why is that because they're actually reading the wrong kinds of fats and the book shows why?
1
SPEAKER_00
Eating the wrong kind of fats to do this you get most people eating a high saturated fat diet, you know cream cheese and bacon and
1
SPEAKER_00
 Actually become insulin resistant and insulin and they actually develop high bleacher and that insulin Goes up and insulin is actually the fat storage hormone So when you're eating a lot of fat, you actually can get fatter and fatter and I profile a patient of mine who I call Miranda in the book and
1
SPEAKER_00
 who had been doing a true supervised ketogenic diet for two years, and she had gained 30 pounds in two years and was really pissed.
1
SPEAKER_00
She was like, all the experts say that you're supposed to follow this.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, she was doing it.
1
SPEAKER_00
She showed me her food diaries.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And yet when we measured her, she was insulin resistant, she had high insulin levels, she was pre-diabetic, and she was apoplectic.
1
SPEAKER_00
Literally, what are you talking about?
1
SPEAKER_00
I'm a saint on this diet.
1
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, this is what we see.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's why 60% of people who try a ketogenic diet give it up quickly.
1
SPEAKER_00
 because they don't see the results that are promised.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it's clear after I wrote Unlocking the Keto Code why people aren't getting the results that were promised.
1
SPEAKER_01
What are people doing wrong on the old way of doing the keto diet and how should they approach it now with the new information?
1
SPEAKER_00
So one of the big problems is that, and this is shocking information,
1
SPEAKER_00
 You look at normal weight individuals in the United States.
1
SPEAKER_00
50% of normal weight individuals are metabolically inflexible.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I've used those terms before, but let's define it again.
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay, what is that?
1
SPEAKER_00
Normally, you and I can burn glucose to make ATP in our mitochondria.
1
SPEAKER_00
But we can also, if glucose runs out,
1
SPEAKER_00
 burn free fatty acids, fat, as a fuel.
1
SPEAKER_00
And normally, the second glucose runs out, we should be able to switch over to burning fat as a fuel.
1
SPEAKER_00
Just very much like a hybrid car.
1
SPEAKER_00
 When you're running on gasoline, the battery, which we'll call fat, is being charged.
1
SPEAKER_00
When the gasoline runs out, the battery can discharge and power the vehicle.
1
SPEAKER_00
50% of normal weight people are metabolically inflexible.
1
SPEAKER_00
They can't do that.
1
SPEAKER_00
They can't switch on to burning fat.
1
SPEAKER_00
They can't switch to burning fat.
1
SPEAKER_00
Interesting.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Now you look at overweight people, 88% of overweight people are metabolically inflexible.
1
SPEAKER_00
They cannot switch over to burning fat.
1
SPEAKER_00
So how do you switch over then?
1
SPEAKER_00
And get this, 98.5% of obese people are metabolically inflexible.
1
SPEAKER_00
They cannot make the switch.
1
SPEAKER_01
Is that meaning they can't make the switch on a day-to-day basis?
1
SPEAKER_00
 On a 24-hour basis... They can't switch and burn.
1
SPEAKER_00
They can't.
1
SPEAKER_01
But if you intermittent fast for a couple of days... I'm glad you asked that.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Have you been reading up?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so it turns out that when we have, and metabolically inflexible people have normally high insulin levels.
1
SPEAKER_00
Simplistically, insulin is a fat storage hormone.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's why back in the old days when we gave people insulin who were diabetics, they got fatter and fatter because we were injecting them with the hormone that stores fat.
1
SPEAKER_00
 So when we eat, insulin comes up, insulin knocks on your muscle cells and says, hey, Louis just had a great meal.
1
SPEAKER_00
Here, I want to sell you this stuff.
1
SPEAKER_00
Open the door.
1
SPEAKER_00
And your muscles say, oh, yeah, good.
1
SPEAKER_00
I'm hungry.
1
SPEAKER_00
Give it to me.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you're insulin sensitive.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, unfortunately, most people
1
SPEAKER_00
 Insulin levels are high almost all the time because your muscles are full, they don't want anything to eat, they go away, don't come back, but insulin keeps trying, so it keeps pushing.
1
SPEAKER_00
When insulin is high, it has a second effect.
1
SPEAKER_00
It blocks the release of fat from fat cells.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Now think about it, if you and I just killed a bison, and we were gorging on bison, we would want to store most of what we ate as fat, because probably we weren't going to kill a bison for a while.
1
SPEAKER_00
So insulin, when it's high, is storing fat.
1
SPEAKER_00
But insulin, you wouldn't want to burn fat while you're doing that.
1
SPEAKER_00
So insulin says, no, no, no, it's staying here in the storage tanks.
1
SPEAKER_00
 So there was a very good purpose for that.
1
SPEAKER_00
But normally, if you and I stopped eating, after about eight hours, your blood sugar levels would pretty much be used up, insulin would fall, and then fat would come rolling out of your fat cells, out of your hybrid battery, and you'd start burning fat as a fuel.
1
SPEAKER_00
And everything's fine.
1
SPEAKER_00
 But if you go on a ketogenic diet when you're metabolically inflexible and all you're eating is fat.
1
SPEAKER_00
What happens then?
1
SPEAKER_00
You can't get to that fat and you crash and burn.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that gives you the keto flu, the Atkins blues, your athletic performance plummets.
1
SPEAKER_00
Your energy goes down.
1
SPEAKER_00
Your energy goes down, you get that headachy feeling.
1
SPEAKER_00
You say, give me some carbs.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
And your brain's going, what the heck?
1
SPEAKER_00
I got nothing here.
1
SPEAKER_00
I got nothing.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that's what's really cool.
1
SPEAKER_00
So normally, all of your cells, all of my cells, are delighted to burn free fatty acids.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's a great fuel.
1
SPEAKER_00
The problem is, free fatty acids are actually big molecules.
1
SPEAKER_00
And they can't get through the blood-brain barrier.
1
SPEAKER_00
They're too big.
1
SPEAKER_00
 So that's a problem.
1
SPEAKER_00
Everybody else in you can do fine, but if your brain can't burn free fatty acids because they can't get there, it could do it if they could get there.
1
SPEAKER_00
So we have this clever system that when free fatty acids are outflowing, some of them go to the liver and the liver converts them into water-soluble short-chain fatty acids called ketones or ketone bodies.
1
SPEAKER_00
 The liver can't use ketone bodies, so it throws them out into the bloodstream, and ketone bodies can get past the blood-brain barrier.
1
SPEAKER_00
So they can serve as a backup fuel for the brain during the time you're sleeping, during the time you're starving, or during the time you're eating a low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet.
1
SPEAKER_00
 But everybody got the idea, thanks to some research out of Harvard and the NIH years ago by Cahill and Veach, that because ketones could provide an alternative fuel, that it must be a super fuel.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that we should always try to be starving, in fact.
1
SPEAKER_00
Getting to ketosis, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, getting to ketosis.
1
SPEAKER_00
Getting to ketosis.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Well, one of the protégés of Dr. Cahill, Dr. Owens, in 2004, just fairly recently, showed that even at a full ketogenic output, a full ketogenic diet,
1
SPEAKER_00
 only 30% of our power could come from ketones.
1
SPEAKER_00
70% still had to come from free fatty acids and glucose.
1
SPEAKER_00
And even at full ketosis, your brain still has to have 30 to 40% of its energy met by glucose, not ketones.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so as I was researching this for the Energy Paradox,
1
SPEAKER_00
 I went, well, wait a minute.
1
SPEAKER_00
Something's not right here.
1
SPEAKER_00
Something isn't making sense.
1
SPEAKER_00
These aren't a perfect shul at all.
1
SPEAKER_00
But we clearly make them.
1
SPEAKER_00
And one of the reasons we make them is to keep our brain kind of going while times are tough.
1
SPEAKER_00
Makes sense.
1
SPEAKER_00
But they must be doing something else.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And that's when I discovered what ketones actually do.
1
SPEAKER_00
What do they do?
1
SPEAKER_00
They are signaling molecules.
1
SPEAKER_00
They are messengers to, believe it or not, tell mitochondria.
1
SPEAKER_00
Mitochondria are the little energy producing organelles in almost all of our cells.
1
SPEAKER_00
 to protect themselves at all cost, number one, to make more of themselves to carry the workload, which is called mitogenesis, and here's the best part, to protect themselves, they should waste fuel.
1
SPEAKER_00
They should burn fuel.
1
SPEAKER_00
They should burn it, but don't make it into energy.
1
SPEAKER_00
 they should become a Ferrari.
1
SPEAKER_00
Why is that?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, that was the $64,000 question.
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Because, think about it, if you're starving to death, you would think that you would want your mitochondria to become the most efficient, get every last ounce of ATP out of every last calorie in you, and the last thing you would want them to do is waste.
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 So a researcher by the name of Martin Brand in 2000 wrote a little tiny paper that
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 said, the paper's name, look it up, it's great, Uncoupling to Survive.
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Uncoupling to Survive.
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Sounds like a relationship book.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Well, we now, yeah, we think of uncoupling.
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Conscious uncoupling.
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Yes, yes.
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So, and I think we may have to get out the chalkboard, but, so what he said was, so if you're starving to death,
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 If your mitochondria die, then you're not going to be here.
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If they don't make it, you're over.
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And who cares about your muscles?
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Who cares about anything else?
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 You've got to keep your mitochondria alive.
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And it turns out making energy is really, really hard work.
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It is incredibly damaging work for mitochondria.
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And they injure themselves in the process of making energy.
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They make energy by coupling
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 protons with oxygen, if you will, marrying a proton to an oxygen molecule and they make ATP.
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Great.
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So it turns out that
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 Normally, you and me sitting here right now, 30% of all the calories entering into our mitochondria never couple up with oxygen to make ATP.
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They are uncoupled from making ATP.
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 So, in the mitochondria, there's an electron transport chain.
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The Nobel Prize was awarded to Peter Mitchell for this discovery.
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So, the mitochondria have these membranes, and in the book, I call it the mito club.
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 And the Mido Club is the hippest place to be for all the millennials.
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And the Mido Club, the patrons enter one direction.
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 And so we've got protons, and we've got electrons, and we've got oxygen.
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And it is the hottest place to be.
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And everybody wants to be in the club.
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And there's actually bouncers in the club.
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And those bouncers happen to be melatonin and glutathione.
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And they kind of keep things okay.
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So there's only one exit out the back.
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 And so the object of the game is, you know, for a proton and oxygen to couple and on the way they go and as they leave, they actually make the energy molecule ATP.
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 And that's how we make energy.
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So this is the electron transport chain.
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I mean, it is hot and steamy and lots of damage.
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Sometimes oxygen couples up with an electron.
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Those are free radicals.
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Those are reactive oxygen species.
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Those are bad.
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You don't want that to happen.
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And the protons get really mad because, you know, why are they coupling up with who they want to go with?
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 So everything's kind of really bad.
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Now, it just so happens that there are emergency exits.
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And along this row, and they're supposed to be closed except for emergencies.
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But these can be opened by what are called uncoupling proteins.
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And there happen to be five of them.
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So if things are really steamy, if chairs are thrown, punches are being thrown,
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 protons can escape out the emergency exits and not participate in making ATP.
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What happens when that happens?
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Things quiet down.
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Okay.
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Things return back to a nicer level.
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Okay.
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And more people can actually join into the club.
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So the point of all this is you can actually process more calories through the mitochondria
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 but you actually do a caloric bypass by wasting these calories.
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Before it makes ATP.
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Exactly.
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And that is beneficial, why?
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Lots of things.
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Number one, it generates heat.
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Okay.
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And it turns out you probably know that there is
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 brown fat and beige fat and white fat.
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So brown fat is brown because it is loaded with mitochondria.
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And brown fat makes heat.
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And it turns out that people who have more brown fat actually are much healthier than people.
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You're burning more fat too, right?
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Burning more fat.
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So how this whole discovery came about is actually one of the funniest things in medicine.
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 Back in World War I, it was noted that factory workers in Germany and France who were making gunpowder, munitions, were really skinny, despite eating huge amounts of food.
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And they were running temperatures.
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And nobody could figure out what they were doing.
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And then a couple of doctors at Stanford in 1930
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 said, I think we figured it out.
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These guys were using a chemical called 2,4-dinitrophenol, DNP.
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You can find it on the dark web.
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Anyhow, so, and they thought that this DNP was making them waste huge amounts of calories.
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They didn't know why.
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 But they thought they were generating it in heat.
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It increased their metabolic rate.
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And they go, oh my gosh, this is the greatest weight loss drug ever known.
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So they actually started prescribing DNP to human beings.
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And 100,000 prescriptions of DNP were written in the United States alone.
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 in the 1930s.
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And DMP was miraculous.
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A small dose, you could lose a pound a week.
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 At a higher dose, you could lose five pounds a week.
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I mean, think about that.
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Who wouldn't want that?
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Only one problem.
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So these guys got really hot.
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They ran fevers.
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It actually affected their thyroid.
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It caused cataracts.
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And this was before cataract surgery.
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And then there were a bunch of deaths because they got so uncoupled
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 that they couldn't produce enough ATP to stay alive.
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Interesting.
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And they died.
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Okay.
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So one of the first official acts of the FDA, when they were formed, was to ban the sale of DNP.
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Now, and every now and then you'll read on the internet about a bodybuilder who was using it and who died.
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 So, it turns out that DNP was the first known oral mitochondrial uncoupler.
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And the reason it was so effective is that it made you literally throw tons of calories out the back door, out the side door.
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Too many though.
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Yeah, too many.
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And it turns out there's a lot of research in controlled low-dose DNP.
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 lot of money looking into, okay, how can we find that sweet spot?
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And I talk about it in the book.
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So what we want to do
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 is there's a Goldilocks rule with mitochondrial uncoupling.
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We want just the right amount of mitochondrial uncoupling, just the right amount.
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So now we go back to ketones, and we go, okay, so what the heck, if ketones aren't this great fuel, what exactly are they there for?
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And it turns out that ketones are a signaling molecule to tell mitochondria to uncouple.
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 and to uncouple to survive, like Brand said, and to protect themselves at all costs.
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Now, most of us have accepted the mitochondrial theory of aging, that mitochondria eventually get so damaged and they're the powerhouses and kind of things fiddle out, and it's a pretty good theory.
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So the idea is let's keep the mitochondria
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 repairing themselves, not harming themselves by trying too hard to make fuel, and to actually tell themselves to make more of themselves simultaneously.
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In a way, try to make brown fat in all of our tissues.
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And it turns out, interestingly enough, if you look at super old people,
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 They have the most uncoupled mitochondria.
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Really?
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Really.
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Why is that?
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Because of the foods they eat.
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And it turns out, I mentioned 2,4-dinitrophenol for a reason.
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 It has a phenol group.
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And where have you heard the word phenol when I have talked to you?
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Polyphenols.
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Lots of phenols.
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All right, here's where it gets really good.
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All right.
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So plants have to produce energy.
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And they have their own version of mitochondria, which are called chloroplasts.
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And they take
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 photons from the sun and mix it with carbon dioxide and produce glucose, ATP, and oxygen.
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So it's actually the reverse electron transport chain.
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Photons, sunlight, just like oxygen is really damaging to mitochondria,
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 Sunlight is really damaging to plant chloroplasts, their mitochondria.
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So plants produce polyphenols to uncouple their mitochondria to protect their mitochondria from sun damage and also other stressors.
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And so the more a plant is under stress or even the higher