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 A lot of people, when they hear about inflammation, they think of it as a bad guy.
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The key about inflammation is that you don't... 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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 Welcome to this special masterclass.
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We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today.
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It's going to be powerful.
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So let's go ahead and dive in.
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 What would you say are the best ways to reduce inflammation in the body quickly?
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Is it through food?
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Is it through medicine?
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Is it through fasting?
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Is it through, you know, less, you know, more sleep?
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Is it through a better environment?
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What would you say is the best way?
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So, you know, a lot of people, I think when they hear about inflammation, they think about it as a bad guy.
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 And what I want to tell you is that inflammation is normal, and it's just part of our immune system.
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So when you actually have a bacteria or virus invading your body, let's say you get a cold, your immune system sets up a little bit of inflammation in your nose, which is why we have a stuffy nose, a runny nose, and then it tackles the invader right then and there.
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 And then hopefully that's all that's all that matters.
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And by the way, another sure sign of inflammation is if you cut yourself in the kitchen, and you see that little cut will pretty quickly swell up, turn red and swell up inflammation.
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That's your immune system trying to tackle all the bacteria that might be trying to get into your skin.
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Inflammation is good, but it goes up
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 to protect you.
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And then it comes right down.
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I think about, I call it like a, like the volume switch in a car radio, like you get in a car, you want to hear some tunes, got to turn it on.
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But what the problem with inflammation is when it doesn't go back down, it keeps on going more, more, more, it's chronic and it keeps on going up.
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And that's like getting in your car and having somebody, a passenger,
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 turn up that volume and keep cranking that volume.
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And you're like, Hey man, turn that thing down.
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Right.
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Doesn't go down and you just can't go on.
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Right.
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And that's what happens inside your body.
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So what's it, what are the, some of the different ways to actually deal with that?
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Well, the first thing to do is think about lifestyle because we can actually give anti-inflammatories.
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 I could tell you to go out to take some Motrin, Tylenol, whatever, that'll take down your inflammation.
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But actually there are ways of actually doing, if you actually just, if you stopped and just calmed yourself and took some breath, did some breaths and start to meditate, your body's inflammation will start to calm down, okay?
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If you actually got a good night's sleep,
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 your body will start to, the inflammation will start to calm down.
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It's kind of like, you know, everything is going crazy.
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Just let everything, let the thing settle a little bit.
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So that's the inflammation settling down.
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Now there are foods that have a lot of anti-inflammatory properties that can be very helpful.
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So for example, cranberries have a lot of anti-inflammatory polyphenols.
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Chocolate even also has anti-inflammatory properties.
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Vitamin C is pretty anti-inflammatory.
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 strawberries, guava, red bell peppers, all really good.
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And I think that the other thing to think about is lots of fruits and vegetables, lots of fruits in particular, have anti-inflammatory properties.
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 So the key about inflammation is that you don't want to get rid of it altogether.
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Okay.
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Okay.
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Like if you, if you got pumped up on steroids, it would shut down your inflammation.
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You might get infected because you don't have any inflammation.
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You want your body to get its set point.
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You want to get back to balance.
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 So I think that, you know, there's lifestyle, there's a diet, uh, foods you can choose.
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There's sleep.
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All of these things can actually help to calm inflammation.
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It's a, not a single on and off switch.
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 I'm curious, what would you say are the most harmful foods then?
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If you said here are three foods that we should be eliminating, what would be those most harmful foods that cause the spike in inflammation consistently and causes a lot of these other diseases and cancerous cells to occur?
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Right.
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Well, I'll tell you three foods that actually harm the body's health defenses and including the immune system.
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 by ratcheting it up inflammation and then lowering the defensive properties, but also harm to your DNA, also harm your microbiome, also blunt and stun your stem cells and also wreck your body's ability to control his blood supply.
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So it's a lot worse than simply a cause of triggering inflammation.
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And by the way, that's the whole point.
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 Right?
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Like we try to take the silver bullet approach to everything.
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Let's match this, let's match that.
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And what I'm telling you is that the body is this system.
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So either you introduce something good to it and you'll probably light up a lot of good systems.
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And if you put something bad to it, you'll probably trash a lot of it.
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Right?
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Okay.
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So what are some three foods that actually we know can trash your body's health defenses?
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One is soda.
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 So sugar sweetened beverages like soda.
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All right.
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So you know, the favorite ones.
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It's tough, right?
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Because I wish I could go back to my younger self and say put down the doctor, eight cans of Dr. Pepper a day, you know, when you're like eight years old, man.
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 I'm telling you, this is one thing that I always try to coach people on.
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If you really, really love sodas, try to come off it just by going down one can a day, because most people drink multiple cans.
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Go down one can a day and get to as low as you can because the added sugar
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 actually overloads your body, your body's ability to be able to handle the sugar and then it makes you inflamed just by the nature of the sugar.
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I cut out I cut out soda years ago.
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I mean, maybe I have it once in a couple months or something for like a treat.
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But yeah, it used to be almost an addiction probably for how much I drank it growing up as a kid in the summer as you're just drinking it nonstop like water.
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 But then when I learned about nutrition more, when I was playing sports and realizing this is making me tired, it's not quenching my thirst, that's when I said, okay, I need more of a competitive edge and kind of cut it out of my life.
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 Not only, not only does it, does soda, actually the sugar and soda cause inflammation, it really wrecks your microbiome, your gut bacteria as well.
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Your gut bacteria just can't tolerate that much sugar.
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Okay.
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And then guess what?
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And then, you know, you say, well, wait a minute.
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That's why we have diet soda, right?
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Turns out that those artificial sweeteners and soda screw your microbiome, your gut bacteria even more.
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 Ooh, more than regular can of soda.
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More than a regular can of soda.
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Come on.
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So if it says zero sugar and it's a soda or a pop, you're saying that could be more harmful than just the- For your gut microbiome.
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Gotcha, gotcha.
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Right?
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Because a zero sugar is actually to prevent glucose spikes in your body.
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 But in point of fact, it actually wrecks your gut microbiome.
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And remember what I told you that gut microbiome communicates your brain, communicates your immune system, communicates your healing systems.
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That is not a system you want to screw with.
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And so that's why, you know, I try to tell people, you really got to watch out for those artificial sweeteners.
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They do some bad things.
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So that's one thing.
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 So what are the best before we go to the next thing?
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What are the best sweeteners we should be looking for when we're adding something into food or we see it on the packaging?
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Well, natural sugars in fruits and vegetables, people go, well, I don't want any sugar then.
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But what about in a peach?
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There's nothing better than a summer peach to me.
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And that natural sugar is OK, because when you eat the peach, you're not just getting the sugar.
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You're also getting all these other bioactives and a fiber and everything else.
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 hundreds, hundreds of thousands of, of natural chemicals that are good for you from Mother Nature's kind of pharmacy with an S. Okay.
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So that's different than just, you know, having sugar in a glass.
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 High fructose corn syrup, not good for you.
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Maple syrup, a good way to sweeten.
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Honey is also a good way to sweeten as well.
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Monk fruit is actually a really, really sweet tasting gourd, actually a shell that is also a decent sweetener.
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 Stevia, actually pretty powerful sweetener.
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I've been doing some research on, I haven't been able to find anything wrong with it, but for people that are looking at stevia, be very careful.
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Pick up that package and look at the side of the box and read what's on there because a lot of things that are called stevia actually have a lot of other things added to it.
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So you wanna get the purest of, I always tell if it's in a box,
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 look at what's inside it before you buy it.
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There you go.
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Okay, so soda and pop is the number one thing.
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That is one of the worst things you could be eating to or the things that could cause more disease and cancer in your in your body.
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Okay, that's number one.
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Number two,
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 processed meats.
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Now, all of us that were kids grew up, you know, at the, you know, eating deli meats, turkey and a ham, right?
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I mean, like, that's basically you, what did your mom, what did your mom pack in your lunch bag, right?
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Yeah, exactly.
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Okay.
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 That's a relic of the 1950s, you know, of this sort of ultra-processed foods that are everywhere, laden with chemicals.
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That's not what we want to be doing.
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Now, I have to say, it doesn't mean categorically that hams or sausages are bad for you, because if you go to Italy,
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 or if you go to places in Asia or Latin America, where they create dried meats kind of the old way, they're not putting chemicals in there and they're not manipulating it.
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But here, where you go to the deli counter and like, take a look at that deli meat, like that's not, meat doesn't come like that, okay?
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So here's the thing.
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 Processed meats are actually classified by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen, you know, linked to the causation of cancer.
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You got to eat a lot of it.
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But a lot of people actually eat.
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I mean, how many hoagies or so?
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 Right.
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Um, and I gotta say, you know, like when I was growing up as a kid, I love those kind of like fancy kind of, uh, like the deli meats and stuff like that.
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Totally not good for you.
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So that's not good for you.
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Uh, it also damages the gut microbiome, uh, and it can actually damage your DNA.
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So you want to kind of be cut down or cut out, uh, sodas and processed meats.
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And then the other thing is really a category and I call these ultra processed foods.
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So.
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 Things are in a box or in a can that, you know, like are instant this or, you know, scoop it out and eat it quick.
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You know, I don't want to name any particular products.
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I don't want to call any products out, but I think we all know the stuff, a lot of stuff we grew up with and were advertised on television to kids.
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 You know, the frosted this, the pop that, the things that used, you know, like the TV dinners, like things that used to be like instant foods.
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Gotta be really careful about that because if you take a look at the packaging, and I'm telling you, there's one thing your viewers can get from me about things to watch out for, whatever you buy.
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 Pick it up, if it's in a box or in a can, and look on the side.
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Don't look just at the label.
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Look at the, I mean, at the name of it.
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Look at the side and see if you recognize the ingredients.
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If you start, you know, if you start losing track and you can't pronounce and you don't know what most of that stuff is,
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 It's an ultra processed food that harms your DNA.
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That lowers your immunity.
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That screws up your gut microbiome.
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It impairs angiogenesis.
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It actually causes our cells to age faster.
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Those telomeres burn down faster.
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Oh man.
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By those processed foods.
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Yeah.
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 Ultra processed foods, ultra, right?
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What's the difference between ultra and processed?
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So look, processing is technically any type of food you manipulate.
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Like if you pick a tomato and you cut it up and you make spaghetti sauce at home, that's processing, you're processing it, okay?
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If you're taking flour in an egg and you're making homemade pasta, you're processing it.
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I'm talking about ultra processed.
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You know, there's a term called extrusion.
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Have you heard of this?
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Yes.
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 Okay.
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So basically you've got these die cut machines that like this goop gets thrown into and like the big oil, like crazy oils get thrown in there.
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And then it just like pushes out, uh, like Play-Doh chunks of food that get cut and dried.
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That's what I'm talking about.
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Like that's the ultra processing it takes, I guess, maybe the definition is it takes food and transforms it into a form you don't recognize.
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 You know, if you look at the root word, you know, coming from the Greek and the Latin, it means to set on fire, right?
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And so there are these... Inflamed.
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And these are some of the outward symptoms we might think about.
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It's just like pain, swelling, bruising, burning, aching, those type of things.
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But there's a massive, the majority of the inflammation that folks are experiencing oftentimes go unnoticed.
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There are these little kind of chronic low-grade fevers or little fires burning.
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 that are contributing to a lot of different metabolic disorders.
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And the reason that our bodies are doing it is really the inflammation is sending out a distress signal from different tissues to recruit and call in the immune system to support in defending against infections and repair, and the list goes on and on.
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Inflammation is actually not a bad thing.
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It's a healer, right?
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Right.
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If we would get a wound, we would never heal without inflammation.
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 If we got an infection, it would be deadly without inflammation.
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It's an important part of our evolution and our health.
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What's the difference between that and chronic inflammation?
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Right, so what we generally think about is acute inflammation when we think about like a short-term intrusion, maybe an injury or an infection, for example, which the inflammation might last a few hours, even a few days.
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But if inflammation is lasting for a long amount of time and also showing up in the wrong places,
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 it can be devastating.
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And so now we're talking about chronic inflammation.
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And if we're venturing into chronic inflammation, we've got to look at what are the underlying components?
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What is creating the fire?
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What is throwing gasoline on the fire as well?
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And so if we take one of the conditions that you mentioned, so right now here in the United States, we've got about 242 million of our citizens are overweight or obese.
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242 million.
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Out of how many?
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 Right around 330,000.
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330 million?
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I'm sorry, 330 million, 340 million.
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So 240 million are obese.
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So we're looking at somewhere in the ballpark of 70 to even upwards of 80% of our citizens.
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How is that possible now?
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Exactly, that should be the question.
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How have we gotten this far?
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Is it just food is too accessible or the wrong kinds of foods are too accessible to so many people now?
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 The you know social media is it laziness is it why have we?
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Shifted from being a healthy nation.
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I don't know probably 67 years ago to an unhealthy nation Yeah, it's really a perfect storm of all the things so I the first thing to look at and to ask is what's going on because
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 Our genes expect certain things from us our dna expects certain things To have healthy outcomes or healthy cell replication healthy expression And so we've got to look at what are the things our genes expect of us our genes expect us to move right for example we're the most sedentary culture in the history of
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 humanity and recorded human history, we're the most sedentary culture to ever exist right now.
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All of humanity, or just USA.
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Right, especially the U.S.
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We're the LeBron James.
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We're the king of sedentary behavior.
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We're the Homer Simpsons of the SS.
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Dope!
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 Yeah, we're really leading the league in these things.
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And so that's number one.
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Also, our genes expect us to get adequate sleep.
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And this is something that we've talked about multiple times in the show, but it's built into our evolution.
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And if you think about sleep, it's very strange because you're incredibly vulnerable, you're unconscious.
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You'd think we might evolve out of it just for safety.
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But the thing is, so many wonderful
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 absolutely amazing things take place during sleep that we just haven't found a way to replicate, right?
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So even with the reduction of inflammation, which we'll talk about more, you know, we have microglial cells in our brain, which are, it's kind of the brain's immune system, and it's primarily active when we're sleeping to reduce inflammation, to clean out metabolic waste, and things of the like, so.
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What would you say are the five biggest benefits of the greatest night of sleep consistently?
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 Like what are the five main benefits that you get if you get deep REM sleep for seven, eight hours a night consistently, no interruptions, no light exposure, all the things you talked about in your other books, Sleep Smarter, what are the five main benefits that come from that versus
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 you know, interrupted sleep, four hours of sleep, you know, staying up late with the phone, you know, having coffee late at night, all that stuff, what's the benefits?
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We'll just power pack bullet point with these.
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Number one, and this is because our culture, we are,
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 I always like to connect to something visceral.
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And people, we care about how we look.
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And so, nobody's waking up like, I wanna look so old today.
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I wanna get my George Burns on.
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I wanna be as old as possible.
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Or I wanna feel bad today about the way that I look.
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Or they're not waking up like, I just wanna look terrible and feel terrible today.
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 And in my clinical practice, I never met one person.
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And people might argue these things and get into a, because of our cognitive biases, I never met anybody who wants to be unhealthy.
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Every single person wants to be healthy.
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Now, with that said, this is where sleep really comes into the fray, because over the years, me being a nutritionist, I really, me being a nutritionist, I thought that food was everything.
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Because it was for me, it was my bridge.
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But there's many paths to the goal.
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 When you're sleeping, it is the most powerful anabolic state that you can be in.
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So you're just teeming with what we call these, quote, anti-aging hormones, the release of human growth hormone, for example, that really, it's also known as the youth hormone.
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And also, in that lane of body composition and overall health and fitness,
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 Researchers at the University of Chicago did a very simple study They brought folks in and they wanted to see what would happen with their weight loss They put them on a calorie restricted diet and they wanted to see what would happen with weight loss when they were well-rested versus when they're sleep-deprived and so they put them under both conditions and I love studies that do that it put people under both conditions to see what would happen.
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Uh-huh
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 And so they allow folks to get eight and a half hours of sleep in one phase of the study, and they tracked all their metrics, their weight loss, et cetera.
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And then they sleep deprive them for the other phase.
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So they just get eight and a half hours, now they're getting five and a half hours.
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Tracked all their metrics.
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Same group.
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Same group on the same exact calorie restricted diet.
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Same calories, yeah, everything.
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But when they were sleep deprived,
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 when they were sleep deprived versus when they were adequately rested.
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When they were getting enough sleep, they lost 55% more body fat just by sleeping more.
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It doesn't even make sense.
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Everything is the same.
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This is what I love too, it's a ward study.
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So they're under the conditions where they can track everything.
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Now here's another part of the study I don't often talk about is that they actually did biopsies.
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 So they actually took fat cells to see what would happen with their fat cells under the different conditions.
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And what they came to the conclusion was that your fat cells actually need sleep too.
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Because when the fat cells were not adequately rested, their fat cells actually became more insulin resistant, which should become like, that should put up a huge red flag.
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Because insulin resistance is one of the classic signs is carrying more belly fat.
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 So the fat cells themselves, looking at them versus when you're well-rested versus when you're sleep-deprived, your fat cells themselves become insulin-resistant.
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And it's just gonna lead to downstream problems with your liver, lipogenesis, the creation of new fat, the list goes on and on.
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So that's just one thing.
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So number one.
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Number two, the cognitive performance.
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And I love this study.
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This was published in The Lancet.
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And they wanted to see what would happen when physicians, they took physicians and had them to complete a task.
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 and tracked all their numbers.
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And they sleep deprived them for 24 hours, which is not abnormal in the field of medicine, and had them to complete the same task, which is a simulation of different surgical type of simulation.
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They made 20% more mistakes doing the exact same thing, and it took them 14% longer to do the exact same thing.
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And this is a big problem in our culture.
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Again, we mistake being busy for being effective.
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And so that's the number two thing, the cognitive performance.
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 Number three, and this, it parallels with cognitive performance, is the health of our brain.
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And so researchers at UC Berkeley did brain imaging scans, and we talked about this before, but they actually looked at the sleep-deprived brain, just again, 24 hours of sleep deprivation, and the part of the brain that's associated with executive function, right, so decision-making, distinguishing between right and wrong, social control, so the prefrontal cortex, the more human part of our brain, that part of the brain goes cold.
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The activity of that part of the brain just
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 Literally as we're more and more tired just shuts down with the lack of sleep and with the lack of sleep Coupled with more activity in the amygdala, which is very much more primitive driven by emotion very much concerned with survival of self and So that part of the brain just lights up like a Christmas tree or Las Vegas sign.
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You just came back from Vegas.
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So these changes happen in the brain very quickly and that leads into
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 Number well number three reduce cognitive performance so being able to manage our emotions being able to manage our decisions and then we'll go to number four is it's gonna lean into this as well with the brain function is I talked a little bit about this earlier during sleep is when your glymphatic system Which is the brain's waste management system waste management system cleansing it all out.
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It's ten times more active when you're sleeping than when you're awake and
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 And your brain is doing literally trillions of activities every second.
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And there's a lot of metabolic waste that takes place.
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And you have to have this cleansing system, this cleaning system, or you're gonna have a buildup of things like amyloid beta plaque, for example, which that is strongly, strongly correlated with Alzheimer's disease.
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It's an inability of the brain to clean itself.
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And also insulin resistance in the brain we can talk about later.
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But we're wondering again, why are these issues going up?
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Why is brain inflammation going up?
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 These are the things, are we getting enough sleep for the processes that normally just naturally wanna happen?
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They do it on their own, are we getting that?
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The final thing.
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So four is the cleansing.
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Right, right.
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Cleansing.
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Cleaning, so this is associated with disease prevention of the brain, longevity of the brain.
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 And number five, this is tough.
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There's so many different things that this can benefit, but I would say for me and you as well, we wanna be able to perform.
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We wanna be able to use our body and our mind to compete, to get out and to play, to have a good time.
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And one of the fun things that I talked about in my first book, Sleep Smarter, was research that was done on basketball players, collegiate basketball players at Stanford.
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 And they found that simply by increasing the amount of sleep that they were getting, not training more, not doing anything else differently, this shaved a full second off of their sprint time just by increasing their sleep.
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They significantly improved their free throw shooting and their three-point shooting just by getting more sleep.
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And these are things that we just kind of
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 On a periphery, you kind of know that, but at the same time, are we utilizing it?
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So some of the greatest athletes in the world right now, sleep is a part of their training.
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LeBron James, it's a part of his training.
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Usain Bolt, same thing, it's a part of his training.
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Now Serena Williams, the list goes on and on and on.
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These things weren't taught to us when we were in high school.
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It was just like, get up at 4 a.m.
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and lift.
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Just go right into somebody, you know what I mean?
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Make a play, make a play.
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Keep your head on a swivel.
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 But today, it's really built into the system.
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Also, the strength training programs are built into the system, which is beautiful because, again, when we were in high school, it was very, I mean, some stuff was starting to take place with folks being in the weight room, but it wasn't a big emphasis.
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Whereas now, if you look at different sports, like a good friend, which is so weird for me to say this right now.
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This is like the coolest thing.
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I actually got chills.
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 Ozzy Smith, right?
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So have an opportunity.
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St.
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Louis icon, man.
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Icon.
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When I was a kid, my two idols were Ozzy Smith and Michael Jackson.
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Wow, yeah.
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I tried to wear the Thriller jacket to school and I got drove.
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That was not a good look.
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But Ozzy Smith could be my role model and I could just, I wanted to play, I wanted to compete, to play baseball.
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 And so I actually met him at the gym.
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And so he was there, I think he was probably in his, around in his mid 60s maybe at the time.
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But he was there getting strong.
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And he was one of the first, if not the first high level elite baseball players to really embrace strength training, way back in the 80s.
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And the reason that he did it, funny enough, was he tore his rotator cuff and he didn't wanna be out.
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Like this was back in the day where it's just like literally you do whatever it takes to get on the field and he wanted to be there for his team.
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 And so he just had to find out a way to strengthen everything around it because he didn't want to have surgery.
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He would have been out for a year at the time.
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And now, you know, of course, surgeries have advanced tremendously since then.
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But so he found that he strengthened everything in his shoulder, but also he started throwing from a completely different arm angle.
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 Still wants 13 Consecutive gold gloves crazy.
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It's crazy.
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It's crazy Backflipping at the same time, right?
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He's out there backflipping with the glove on it's cool It's so powerful, but it's a big part of what our genes expect is to Is to be strong in some different domain and we talked about this before the show that translates over into our lives as well You know so that strength if you can train your body
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 Chronic inflammation was the root cause of a lot of different kinds of serious chronic diseases.
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And that just fascinated me because when I was in medical school, I was taught that cardiovascular disease had nothing in common with cancer and that had nothing in common with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease.
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And now suddenly it looks like, you know, all of these things are linked.
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They have a common root of chronic inflammation.
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 And if that's the case, the good news is then there's a common strategy for dealing with them, if you can reduce inappropriate inflammation.
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So I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about inflammation.
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Inflammation is the cornerstone of the body's healing response.
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 So inflammation is good when you're in pain.
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Well, it's good, it's the way the body gets more nourishment and more immune activity to an area that's injured or under attack.
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So we all know it on the surface of the body, it's redness, swelling, pain, heat, but we aren't aware of it necessarily internally, and especially if it's low level.
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Inflammation is so powerful and it's so potentially destructive
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 that it's very important that it ends when it's supposed to end and stay where it's supposed to stay.
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So you don't want it throughout your body all the time.
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No, if inflammation persists, if it outlives its purpose, then it causes disease.
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And it looks now, if you can't produce enough inflammation, you're vulnerable to infection.
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 If you produce too much inflammation, you're vulnerable to allergies and autoimmunity.
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And it looks like if you've got low-level chronic inflammation going on for a long time, you greatly increase risks of cardiovascular disease, of neurodegenerative disease and cancer.
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 And so I think one of the best things we can do is learn how to contain it.
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So what are the factors that influence it?
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It's partly genetic.
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It's stress.
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Exposure to environmental toxins is a big one.
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Secondhand cigarette smoke is a very powerful pro-inflammatory agent.
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But diet has a huge influence.
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And that's one that's potentially under our control.
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And I think there's no question that the mainstream
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 North American diet is strongly pro-inflammatory.
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It gives us the wrong kinds of fats, the wrong kinds of carbs, and not enough of the protective elements, which are mostly in fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, tea, things like that.
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Yeah.
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So what would be the anti-inflammatory diet?
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So a base of high-quality produce.
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And the government always tells us to eat more fruits and vegetables.
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 The emphasis really should be on vegetables because fruits are sugar sources and you want to... Veggies, more veggies.
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More veggies.
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You want to avoid pro-inflammatory fats, which are things like hydrogenated fats, margarine, vegetable shortening, and the polyunsaturated vegetable oils.
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 So, you know, you want to eat...olive oil should be your main thing.
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Or avocado oil.
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Or avocado oil, yeah.
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Nuts, seeds, good.
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They're good, yeah.
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Yes.
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In terms of carbohydrate, you know, it's not that carbohydrates are bad, it's that you want to reduce consumption of quick-digesting ones, the ones that turn quickly into blood sugar.
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So, everything made with flour.
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 And that's all the snack foods, all the, you know, it's everything, yeah.
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And sweeteners in general.
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I mean, that doesn't mean you live without sugar completely, but you wanna really keep that to a minimum.
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So is this all flour or is this just more like... It's all flour.
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You know, I think the one of the... Like almond flour and... Well, that's a nut.
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So that's better.
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But with grains, I think there's such misunderstanding.
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You know, if I ask people,
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 To name a whole grain food, the usual answer I get is whole wheat flour or whole wheat bread.
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Whole wheat bread is not a whole grain food.
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SPEAKER_00
Where's the grain?
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And the FDA doesn't get that.
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They let that put labels on it saying this is a whole grain food and good for you.
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Most whole wheat bread is colored white bread.
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 You know, when you have a grain, the starch is tightly compacted, very dense, and it's surrounded by a, more or less, by a fibrous bran, and it takes time for digestive enzymes to get in there and convert the starch to sugar.
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When you mill a grain into flour, whether or not the bran is present, whether or not the germ is present,
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 You convert the starch into a material with an infinite surface area, and it's a snap for digestive enzymes that turn that into sugar.
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Thank you so much for listening.
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I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.
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Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links.
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SPEAKER_01
And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well.
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SPEAKER_01
 I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most.
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And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.
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And now it's time to go out there and do something great.