LIVE EVENT: Conversations w/ Dr. Will Cole, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, and Emily Morrow
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This is the Pursuit of Wellness podcast and I'm your host, Mari Llewellyn. What is up, guys? Welcome back to the Pursuit of Wellness podcast and welcome to a very special episode of the podcast. Today, we are excited to bring you exclusive recordings from the Joy of Wellness event.

You guys may have seen this on my social media. We had a very special day. We teamed up with Give Joy, which is a local charity. I was so honored to pair up with them and do something for a good cause. We had an amazing day dedicated to insightful conversations and hands-on experiences and making a meaningful impact.

impact i brought in some amazing speakers who have been on my show dr gabrielle lyon dr will cole emily morrow and also jason kopp who has not been on my show yet but he is an amazing speaker with such a fantastic mission we are so thrilled to share these moments with you and i want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our sponsors without whom this event wouldn't have been possible special shout out to clean skin club

Jasper and Plunge, along with all of our other supporters for their invaluable contributions to this meaningful cause. These are brands that I personally use every single day that I'm such a big fan of who have supported me in my journey and I organically absolutely love. So it was so special to have them at the event today. So without further ado, let's dive in to the Joy of Wellness event recordings.

I'd love to welcome my first guest, a leading expert in functional medicine, Dr. Will Cole. So excited to have you here. I mean, you and I have talked a few times, but it's great to have a live audience today. Normally we're on a microphone. What's up everybody? How you doing? I'd love to just start by hearing about your story, how you got into functional medicine, a little bit about what you do. Yeah. So I grew up in a home that really

was into health. Health was part of the culture. And my dad was a bodybuilder actually in the 80s and 90s. And I thought it was normal to have your dad lubed up with baby oil and like turquoise Speedos. And my mom with like the massive camcorders and getting the pose right, you know. But we'd go to the health food store and like buy all this stuff. It was like part of the

Just the culture. So I was--and then I outpaced my family. I made them look like the standard American at a certain point because I was interested in the latest superfoods and the--it wasn't called biohacking, but it was optimization at that point. And my first job in high school--I'm going way back, Mari. You didn't ask for all this, but...

My first job was at the finish line at the mall selling shoes. And I used my paycheck to go to the health food store to buy all the random super foods and herbs and things that I would be reading about. So I wanted to be formally trained in that, in functional medicine. It wasn't even called that at that point. Clinical nutrition, health sciences. But yeah, and I learned about functional medicine when I was in school.

And I went back home. I was in school in LA and I went back home to Pennsylvania to start the first functional medicine telehealth clinic. So I've been doing this online healthcare thing for 15 years.

and it's just born out of that weird kid that like packed bell peppers at his lunch in high school when, you know, I was weird then and I guess I'm weird now, but yeah. Weird in the best way and everyone here is such a big fan of you. I've already had people come up to me asking to meet you. I feel like you have just become such a--

amazing part of the health industry and it's so cool to hear the origin of that story. Thank you so much. I know functional medicine really focuses on root cause rather than just symptoms. Can you talk about why focusing on root cause is so important? Yeah, I mean look, I mean the United States spends more on health care than any industrialized nation. Yet we have the most chronic disease, we have the shortest lifespan,

And the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting a different result. We have to do something different to see something different. And we spent a lot of money on it. If it produced results, I'd be all for it.

But the training, the whole system is set on sick care. It's set on symptom management, disease management, which has its place, disease is being managed, but it's not the totality of how you deal with this issue. We don't have this chronic health epidemic because of a medication deficiency, because of a pharmaceutical deficiency. So it's just our perspective. It's not an either/or.

The best of health care, I think, should be a both and should be. And that's why a million multimillion dollar institutions like the Cleveland Clinic has a functional medicine center. It's because they see it. This is not woo woo anymore. And people realize we have to deal with this root causes to really improve.

address it, looking at the food, looking at the environmental toxins, looking at nutrient deficiencies, looking at unresolved trauma and its implication with autoimmune problems, metabolic issues, and mental health issues. - What would you say are some of the most common root cause issues you see at your practice? - A lot of it is tied to the foods that we eat and our gut microbiome's connection to the soil microbiome.

And people that eat better than the average American still are getting these random autoimmune problems. I mean, that's most of my patients, is that they are intentional with the foods that they're eating, and they're still struggling. So things are becoming more complex. So I think a lot of it has to do with environmental toxins. And we're coming at a point where we're at a tipping point in humanity where the pervasiveness is undeniable of things like microplastics.

and forever chemicals and herbicides and pesticides, it's unsustainable. And those are sobering statistics, but the human body is amazingly resilient. And you don't have to live in a BPA-free plastic bubble to live a long, healthy life. You just have to be vigilant. You have to be informed. You have to be empowered. So I would say the environmental toxin piece, I have to say, is...

one of the areas that we don't talk enough about. Because once you've cleaned up your diet and you're eating better than most Americans, what do you do from there? And I think that the environmental toxin and then the chronic stress, unresolved trauma piece are the two things that I think we need to be giving more attention. Yeah, I think the environmental toxins is such an important piece. And I'm noticing in my age range, even 30, 40,

Late 20s people are struggling with infertility hormone problems. I talk a lot about women's health on my show PCOS is really rising. So there's so many issues we're seeing from these toxins in the environment. What can we do to strengthen our immune systems at home, let's say to prepare for those toxins. Well, I think you'd need to make your life a cleanse instead of doing

some sort of fad crash program, I think what are you doing on a day-to-day basis and really cultivating these practices. So your gut is home to 75% of your immune system, which most of you know. So I think that focusing on things like soups and stews and broths, things that are easy to digest, strengthens a stressed out gut.

So I think that's a powerful tool. I have patients do like week, a week or so, a month of just soups and stews. You know, when people get sick, like the cliche is like chicken noodle soup. It's not the noodle part that's making people better. It's like the other stuff. But protein that's soft and cooked, vegetables that are soft and cooked, the broth, restorative grounding things. So I think that that's a powerful tool.

I think sweating, making sweating part of your life

routine whether that be sauna or working out or I have some salt bath making sweating part of your routine is a good tool and then bringing in some sensible supplementation I think that a methylated B vitamin most people need to be on that to support methylation which is an aspect of detoxification I think optimizing vitamin D most people are deficient in it it is

Needed for regulating inflammation, which is a product of the immune system So those are some some tips that I would say that everybody should be doing. I know you talk a lot about inflammation Yeah, how can inflammation be negatively impacting our health? And what are some things we can do to offset that inflammation? So inflammation it's a product of the immune system. It's not inherently bad. It's

It is defending us against viruses and bacteria and healing wounds. And healthy measured inflammation is important. It's chronic inflammation. It's this forest fire that burns in perpetuity that's the issue. So that's the commonality between autoimmune problems, metabolic issues, mental health issues. I mean, in the West, we'll separate mental health from physical health.

But it's one in the same mental health is physical health. So understanding the cytokine which are pro inflammatory cells, how are they impacting that how our brain works? I could go on and on. I mean, you really can't find a health issue that's not doesn't have inflammation as a link, at least the commonality of it. So what do we your question was, what do we do about the Yeah, what are some things we can do to offset that inflammation? Yeah. So

Would look at four things I call it the inflammatory core for if we decrease these in our life And there's better for you swaps for each one of these I'm not making blanket statements, but I would say number one would be added sugar which most people know But even though like the nicer sounding euphemisms for sugar just be mindful. You're not gonna avoid all of them Not saying you have to avoid all of it, but just be mindful of the amount of grams of added sugar it's hidden in a lot of boxed packaged foods and

which is fine, but it's just, you have to know the labels. You have to read the labels and know what you're getting. Number two would be conventional dairy. I love dairy as a whole, but it's like a shell of itself, the way that people are consuming it now. It's homogenized and pasteurized and denatured and injected with synthetic, but it's just not what it is in its whole raw form. So I would say that. The next thing I would say would probably be, you know, I

I'm never going to get friends when I say this, but alcohol. Did I just lose friends? Yeah, sorry about that. Then everyone's like, the wine, the wine, Dr. Cole. What's the resveratrol? But the reality is...

The reality is that those studies are largely funded by the alcohol industry. The research is very clear. The healthiest amount of alcohol is none. There are redemptive aspects of wine, like the resveratrol, but there's way better ways to get resveratrol in, I promise you, like fruits and vegetables.

But it's not as fun, I know, it's not as fun. But the reality is there's just better, and there's so many things with our alcohol industry beyond the alcohol part too, like the mega purples, the colorings, all the things. The pesticides, herbicides, wine can be high in mold too. There's a whole host of reasons why I would say alcohol. I'm not asking you to be a puritanical teetotaler like me, and I'm really not, but...

But I would say to renegotiate your relationship with alcohol. Yeah. Yeah. So that was three. I know I was going to say four, but, you know, I think there's a nuanced conversation about industrial seed oils like canola oil, vegetable oil, soybean oil. I'm kind of middle of the road on it. I think that when you look at polyunsaturated fatty acids, omegas 3, 6, and 9, the modern Western diet is not enough of a long chain omega 3s.

too much mega six which is pro-inflammatory in excess so I just think that there's instead of us fear-mongering about seed oils I think we can have a not ignore it but not over correct either and create this sort of orthorexic attitude around oils so I think that if you have a nutrient-dense whole food diet with a lot of whole food omega-3s the

occasional boxed health option, because people will say like, there's many amazing brands out there that have like amazing options, but it has some seed oils in it. I would much rather than have that than a lot of the other standard American diet. So I kind of have a moderate view on the seed oils, but I do think we should be looking at the over consumption of them and not enough of the omega-3s. So that would be my four. Start there.

start there for inflammation if the american population did that it would be a lot better i think there's like a gray area for everything right and i think in the health industry we tend to want to have like a black and white view and sometimes there just isn't so i think that's a really great point i know you talk a lot about trauma and mental health when it comes to health and gut health where does that come into play in the whole picture like how do you think trauma could be affecting our physical health

It's massive. My last book was called Gut Feelings because it was born out of conversations that I'd have with telehealth patients of looking at both the gut side, the physiological side, and the feeling side, the mental, emotional, spiritual side. So it's a significant role. I have every new telehealth patient fill out what's called an ACE score, ACE questionnaire, adverse childhood events or experiences. So it looks at really

heavy stuff like sexual trauma physical abuse growing up neglect growing up substance abuse growing up and the higher your a score the more likely there is according to research to have autoimmune problems and Metabolic problems even something like this trouble losing weight like we think it's just our lack of willpower but is it our neuroendocrine axis in the hyper vigilant state not knowing it's protecting you and

So we have to look at it from mild things all the way to extreme health issues. The role, not the totality of it, but it's a piece of the puzzle for most people. And a both-and approach even there is how you move the needle for somebody that's bending their wheels. For somebody, again, most of our patients are already eating cleaner than most Americans. They're doing all the things. They have a supplement graveyard, which I lovingly call it. It's like

I think it's working, but it's like all these supplements. And they're still not where they need to be. They're better than they would be, but they're not where they need to be. They're not where they want to be. And dealing with vagal tone, which is the largest cranial nerve in the body that's responsible for that parasympathetic, that resting, safe, grounded, digesting state, digesting being part of that, their gut health is typically not in a great place.

So supporting vagal tone happens with both and approach. Like improving gut health improves vagal tone. But also what are we serving our head and our heart on a daily basis?

and really looking at the content we consume on social media that's perpetuating the hypervigilant, looking at past trauma that we're ruminating on and it's living in our body that we need to release. Those are a lot more complex and nebulous. It is a lot more prescriptive and easy for me to say these foods, like I just did about the food part, it's pretty black and white. There's gray areas, but it's a little bit more, yeah, there's science and data around this and people can see it

with their meals. The abstract conceptual stuff, but it's still very much just as physiological. It's a lot more to unpack and it takes time. It's nonlinear, but it's powerful to address it. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, having gone through my own personal journey, so much of it was mental for me and the weight loss just kind of came with it. So I 100% agree.

for someone who comes to you and maybe they're starting their fitness journey, they don't know where to begin, maybe even someone here is wanting to start their wellness journey, what would you say is the first step? I think looking at those at inflammatory core four would be one of them. I think that's a good first step. I think supporting gut health with some soups and suez is another good step. I think that dealing with the stressing about-- this is more of a mindset thing, but I think it's important.

stressing about healthy foods, stressing about fitness, stressing about wellness isn't good for our health. And I know people know that, but it's like we need to check ourselves because there's so there's a blessing and curse. There's a double edged sword with the age that we live in. I am a massive advocate for free speech and the democratization of health information, of information as a whole, of people of people.

Diversity of thought and ideas on social media. I think it's amazing, but we need to be empowered as consumers of information to know when we maybe meet something or unfollow something and it's not personal. It's just from your own mental health.

I call it Jomo, the joy of missing out. And it's like the antithesis of our FOMO culture. And you need to get a bad case of Jomo. We all do. Because it is like, and it's easy for like introverts like us, maybe. It's like, we're like, yeah, we... I love a little Jomo, yeah. But there's some people that are extroverts and they're like constantly...

That it's tough for some people because they're they always feel like they have to know more and it's never because introverts, extroverts, it doesn't really matter. It really everybody is prone to it to a certain degree. But I think we just need to be discerning consumers and have healthy boundaries with ourselves and have healthy boundaries.

with information. I think because that's, I think there's a problem within wellness of orthorexia, of disorder eating around healthy foods. And there's that spectrum. You may not be diagnosable as orthorexic, but it's like you're in the constant fight or flight stress state around healthy foods. And I think that we need to sometimes just like check ourselves about that. Yeah, I think at a certain point, it can get counterproductive and it can feel like

you're obsessing so much that it kind of defeats the purpose of wellness to begin with. I completely agree. And with the amount of information out there coming at us, it can be a lot. I mean, I have a show where I have different people on every single week and I feel overwhelmed. So I think it's such a fair point. I think now is a fantastic time to turn to the audience and get some questions. I'd love to hear from you guys. Don't be shy. Ask. I mean, ask anything.

how you doing i'm eric nice to meet you uh what do you got what are you doing now for your current fitness uh regimen um me i love weight training so i have a home gym nothing fancy nothing like this place i'll tell you that but it doesn't feel welcome everybody but you know i do traditional weight training 45 minutes a few times a week i wa i have a

treadmill desk at my telehealth clinic. So I'm getting a lot of like zone two exercise. I'm there 10 hours a day. I'm not walking on that thing 10 hours a day, but three to four hours a day, I'm just walking and typing. And so I, that's mainly what I do. I love getting out in nature and hiking. I live in the woods. So it's just really meditative for me. So those are my main, my main things. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah.

You talked about sweating. What about the cold? Yeah. Well, plunge is here, so we want to represent the cold plunging here too. And I have a plunge, to be honest with you. I have a plunge at my house. And I think it's great. It's a tool that I recommend to telehealth patients. All of these things like high-intensity interval training, sauna therapy, I guess bond charges here, right? They have a great sauna blanket.

and cold plunging. These are hormetic effects in the body. These are good stressors. But like any stressor, you can overdo it. So they would tell you this too, all those companies. I know them. They would start off low and slow. With cold plunge, it's

Higher temperature, low time. But over time, decrease the temperature, increase the time. You only need 11, 15 minutes a week spread out over the week. And do one, two, three minutes or more at a time pulsed over the week. The thing with women and their

The fluctuations of estrogen and progesterone and the impact that has an inflammation their their immune system. You have to be extra intuitive about that and not pushing it more isn't always better for anyone, but that definitely applies to women. So you just want to be smart because I've seen someone and they see amazing changes.

Then they feel like okay more is going to be better because I felt so good doing this and they just push it too hard And that's okay You learn about your body and you kind of loosen it up next time and increase the temperature decrease the time take some more time off So it's a wonderful tool, but I just think again this overdoing it thing It's like it's our natural predisposition, especially a lot of us that are into this stuff We do have that type of personality. We just kind of have to

take it easy sometimes, but they're wonderful tools. It lowers inflammation, it increases brain function and focus. I've seen it be a game changer for people with fatigue and brain fog. I can go on and on. It's a great tool. - So for somebody who's been in the industry for a very long time, you grew up with somebody who was in the bodybuilding world.

Why do you think it's so socially acceptable now? Because for a long time, you would never see as many people as you do in a gym. What do you think made bodybuilding so accepted nowadays? I think wellness as a whole is growing in there, an aspect within the community. I think that's really what it is. I think it used to be marginalized more.

the bodybuilding world and just wellness as a whole is the crunchy weird thing or was like the super uh elite bodybuilder but now it's more democratized as a whole and i think the internet had a lot to do with that i think when you see

depending on your algorithm, you're seeing bodybuilding content all the time. I think it inspires the average consumer that otherwise, you look at the-- in the '90s, people were not seeing that stuff. You'd have to go to Barnes & Noble and get the magazine and really be interested in it versus being in your face. So I think it's the phone that really made it more pervasive.

Hello. What are a couple of daily non-negotiables that you do to manage stress? That's a good question. I start every day

without fail for the past 15 years when I go to the clinic. I'm like kind of a routine guy. But you need to balance that out. You need to have grace and lightness and be okay with that. But every day, I start my day off with prayer and meditation. When I first wake up, but when I get to the clinic, we do sort of the team that's there with me, like there's seven to 10 of us there at a time. We're all praying together.

for our team and for the patients that we're going to see for that day. So that's a great, beautiful grounding practice that we have as a community, but also a connection to God. So that's a powerful tool for me, and it's a non-negotiable. I think another non-negotiable for me is

Spending time with my family, I think is another one like that's another community piece is I think that Just having people in your life and my team I applied my team to this as well They're like my extended family like having people in your corner that you trust that are just authentic people That you'd get to do life with and I don't mean that in like the fluffy vapid sense but I'm like really like people that would be

go through life with you on a deep level. So I think that's another non-negotiable. And then the food pieces, like the way that I just, those foods that I mentioned, that's how I live my life. So that's a non-negotiable.

And it doesn't matter if there's a holiday, it doesn't matter if it's like I'm on vacation. It's just, it's so intuitive for me where it's not like a list of do's and don'ts. It's just I love feeling great more than I want something that doesn't love me back. So I think it's that sort of seeing self-care as a form of self-respect. It's more of a mindset piece. But when you have that mentality, all the other things are kind of like commentary. It doesn't really matter so much. So those are some non-negotiables for me. - Kind of tapping into that,

women's hormones fluctuation piece. What do you think the benefit is of women kind of eating differently and exercising differently throughout the month? Yeah, it absolutely should be part of the conversation. And I think

The variable is we don't want to then put all women in a category and say, well, this is the rule for women. Because it's who is she? Who are we talking about? And how is she doing the thing we're talking about? Because those are massive differences. And when you look at labs all day long, like me, you cannot, there is, yes, some low-hanging commonalities between women, right, as I mentioned. But does she have more...

insulin resistance? Does she have more autoimmune problems? Does she have more metabolic problems? Those tools of working out and fasting and cold plunging, she's going to, a lot of those hormetic things will actually make her better, generally speaking, right? And this, again, she's not just diagnosed anyways, but as a general rule, without looking at the full context of the case, those people tend to do better with these things.

And then they hear online a women can't intermittent fast or women can't go low carb. If she checks in with her body, your body is going to tell her differently. So but if she doesn't have those issues, maybe she has lower thyroid issues. Maybe she's leaner. Maybe she's stressed out.

Well, those hormetic things like high intensity interval training, fasting, cold point is not going to be good. So I think instead of it being about like men, women and making these broad statements, yes, women, there's a bigger conversation to have. But even then, she has to check in with her. And like from a clinical side, look at these variables, like where's insulin, where's blood sugar, where's your thyroid levels, where's your menstrual cycle? And how can we tap into these things?

but be a little bit more flexible with it and know when to loosen up because more isn't always better. You spoke about the importance of the mental health piece and the trauma and specifically releasing trauma. And there are so many different modalities available in that world these days. So I'm curious when it comes to actually releasing the trauma, if there's something you feel is most effective. Yeah.

Yeah, so that's sort of the feeling side of gut feeling. So yeah, it's in every patient protocol for us. So the, I mean, the simple like DIY, like anybody, everybody should be doing the baseline stuff, right? So some sort of grounding, breath work, meditation practice. And then people will tell me, some people will say, well, meditation's not for me, right? Those are people, they're typically the people that need it the most. That's why we all suck at it.

Newsflash if you say meditations are for you, that's why they call it a practice It would be like me if I never worked out in the gym I showed up to the gym and said I'm sore. I'm like I can't I'm not good at this Well, no, it's like you that's why you're there to actually get stronger And when you look at it from a physiological standpoint the nervous systems dysregulated so the sympathetic is overactive the parasympathetic the vagus nerve is actually weak and

Poor vagal tone. So of course you're going to suck at when you have a weak nerve, but you need to strengthen that weak nerve, just like you'd strengthen the muscle in the gym. So that's just a word for everybody. These practices, it's OK. Start off low and slow. Do with what's comfortable with you, because a lot of-- it's going to bring up stuff, as you probably know. But like, so definitely I'm not saying to be aggressive with it, and don't do anything that you're uncomfortable with. But you have to progress and lean into these practices, even when you suck at it.

So I would say breathwork meditation more not advanced but other tools that I've seen great success with is EMDR type of therapy. You need a facilitator therapist for that. It involves eye movement but just kind of retraining the nervous system to not respond in the hyper vigilant way off of past memories that will come up. I've seen great success with DNRS.

which is that's more of an online. It involves some somatic practices, body movement and breath work. And I like some of the active

wearable. So I typically have a patient pick up one or two active things, like things that they would have to go see a therapist or we will facilitate it with them. And then something passive, like a device, like Apollo Neuro. I've seen great success with out of the University of Pittsburgh's psychiatry department and Sensate, these other vagal nerve stimulators. There's some that you put on the ear as well that I've seen good, but I like them because they don't replace

EMDR, the breathwork, the somatic stuff, but they're a great tool because it's not another thing that you have to add to your list. It's like something that you, if you're already overwhelmed with this stuff, you just wear it and it like does the work for you and it's supporting that parasympathetic. So those are some things that I like. I think we are at time here guys. Thank you so much for the lovely questions. Thank you so much Dr. Will Cole.

Up next, we have a nutritional therapy and integrative health practitioner, someone I love so much, Emily Morrow. Emily, you have such an interesting story in how you got into this field, and I'd just love to share with everyone where you got interested in this area. For sure. Well, first off, I'm just so grateful to be here, and I'm so grateful to be here.

It's so weird thinking back to how I even got into this space because I am a nerd, a complete nerd, doing coding and graphic design and everything behind the scenes. I'm not someone who's ever wanted to be in front of individuals and be in that space. I was a collegiate athlete and suffered some concussions and my health completely collapsed after college. I couldn't look at computer screens anymore. And so the trajectory of my life, that's me.

Sorry. Changed very quickly and ended up going into a hospital and they diagnosed me with several different autoimmune disorders and was told I needed to be on a liver transplant list. And your whole life kind of shifts in a moment when you're told that and there's nothing else you can do. But something within me just didn't, that didn't sit right with me. So I ended up exploring several different other options with functional medicine doctors and there actually was options.

They ran extensive testing and there was a leaky brain barrier that was impacting my gut that was triggering that autoimmune. And I had grown up in a very moldy home. So the mold levels were through the roof. The heavy metal counts from growing up in a home that did not eat the best. It was...

Tostitos and ramen and playing soccer afterwards, McDonald's and Taco Bell every day. So the diet was not as clean as it could be and learned so many incredible things from these doctors doing it a different way that I wanted to step into that space and empower and educate in the same way. I know a lot of people come to you struggling with acne, myself being one of them. I found Emily, what was it, three years ago or something?

I came to Emily and I had been struggling with cystic acne for 10 years of my life. And we did extensive lab work together, found, I mean, considering that I live a healthy lifestyle, I was shocked to see that I had heavy levels of heavy metals, ocrotoxin A, a few other things. And you and I worked together to kind of heal them naturally. And it was a really cool journey because I learned a ton about natural healing and

What would you say are some of the most common issues you see in the lab work of people who maybe have acne and people who are struggling with other forms of inflammation issues? It's all tied together. That's what I think has been super empowering for the acne members is they'll do this lab work and realize that their menstrual cycles become easier. Some have gotten pregnant in the process.

of identifying the triggers for their acne and addressing that. And it's never the same for one person, but it's never an isolated thing. And I think that

There's this idea that if you just fix this one thing, all of your health issues will go away, but it's usually a plethora of different things, whether it is your day in and out habits. Dr. Will Cole just spoke to that so beautifully of what are you doing that first and last hour of your day? Are you consuming social media? Are you getting outside, exposing your eyes to the sun, getting a good deep breath, and getting a good breakfast in instead of running out the door with a quick little coffee and no food in your stomach?

And that part I think gets overlooked often because it seems so simple, but that matters. And we see those trends and patterns of stress and dehydration and inflammation in lab markers. Another thing we tend to see is that infection overload. We are inundated with toxins on a daily basis. And though we have these built-in detox mechanisms, the buckets are overflowing. I love

of cellular medicine and studying that. And we have these barriers. We have our skin barrier, we have our gut barrier, we have our respiratory tract barrier. And strong barriers can prevent those foreign pathogens from invading and causing these immune and inflammatory responses. But those are built in mechanisms that are there. And then just like a hospital, you have backup generators. When those fail, you have these T helper cells

that come in and help, but we are now seeing where even those are failing because all the soldiers are burned out. We're losing those soldiers just because of the inundated toxins and chemicals and stressors and

parents having to worry about what their kids are eating at schools or at the grocery store. So that plays a role. We see a lot of blood sugar dysregulation, just getting back to the basics of how to eat and combine protein, fat and carbs and a lot of nutrient deficiencies. And when you study cell membrane medicine, you need cholesterol and it gets demonized a lot in the industry and immediately a statin is the solution. But that's what helps form that outer cell membrane, which is essentially the

the wall and the guard to your cells. And so we're avoiding these cholesterol-based foods and we're actually compromising those barriers and then not absorbing our nutrients because our gut can't absorb it. And now we have these foreign pathogens who've just taken over inside our body.

100%. I think that was something really interesting for me to learn as I was experimenting with my diet and you encouraged me to use real butter and eggs and all the good, good whole foods. And carbs. Yeah, that was a big thing for me. You hated carbs. I did. I went through a phase of hating. I feel like all of us girls went through a phase of hating carbs. You sent me a photo of one potato and one meal at first. I was super proud of my potato. Every time I eat a potato, I think of

I love potatoes. It was a big moment for me. But yeah, now I incorporate healthy carbs and all the good foods and I'm feeling better than ever. I know you're a big fan of herbal medicine. How did you begin to, I mean, there's so much out there. And I remember when I was working with you, we were trying all these different herbs I'd never heard of. Where did you begin to learn about those? I love herbs.

elements of Chinese medicine. And when you take an herbal supplement with a ton of herbs, you don't really know what's helping. You don't really know what's hurting. And so when you take isolated herbs that are supporting the strength of the organ systems, it allows the body to actually operate in a way where it can handle those pathogens versus this really intense killing protocol where you're just wiping everything out and

I love herbs specifically because they don't just do one thing. They might have a priority. You might have neem that specializes in pathogen loads, but also strengthens the health of the immune system to be able to handle things like viruses. And so you can cycle in these different herbs in a very gentle way where it's not overtaxing the nervous system.

I remember one specifically called Elysium that we were using. It was just so interesting, like the amount of benefits it could have. Even for fertility. Right. And breastfeeding. Right. Amazing. And women's health in general. How could toxins in the body be affecting people differently? So for me, for example, it showed up as acne. How could it show up differently in others? I always say you have to go back to...

the largest alarm system. So when people start having compromised energy levels and disruptions to their sleep, that should raise red flags, regardless of the toxin or overload, because your glymphatic system, which is part of the brain, is draining in the middle of the night.

And if you have people that are consistently waking up in the middle of the night, especially on that 2 to 3 a.m. hour or around the 4 to 5 a.m. hour, just inability to fall asleep because their cortisol is dysregulated, that should be the largest alarm system. But I think it becomes people's norm where they just are like, I'm just going to take a lot of sleeping medication or I'm going to just know that every night I wake up.

But energy is going to be a big one. From there, it's going to be dependent on the person. You could have two people living in a moldy home. One person have symptoms of brain fog and the other one not be experiencing brain fog at all. And there's people whose GI maps, which we did look at yours, look the exact same. One person's dealing with acne and one isn't. So you have to begin to peel back the layers and assess, well, what are their androgen levels?

Someone who tends to have higher androgen levels, those toxins are going to increase those androgens and some of those inflammatory markers where that's now triggering excess oil. And so if someone maybe has super low androgens, they're not experiencing that shift. It might in their body manifest in a way of I cannot build muscle. I'm trying and I cannot build muscle. Interesting. So what would you say are some of your...

favorite methods for detoxing? Like, let's say we find out, I mean, I think everyone here probably has some toxins to, you know, we can't really avoid it now. I remember when we were working together, we were doing sauna, we were doing the, remind me what that was called? Castor oil packs. Castor oil packs. What are some of your favorite methods for detoxing? Those are two of my favorites. I absolutely love detoxing.

infrared saunas and being able to detox through your sweat. And then I love castor oil packs and being able to just place that over your liver. It's so easy. You can do it while you're watching a television show. - Can you explain a bit further? 'Cause I remember when I was doing it and I was like kind of posting about it, everyone was like, "What is that thing?" 'Cause it looks a little medieval. Can you just explain what it's doing? - Does anyone else use castor oil packs? - Okay.

It's kind of as the name implies. There is a wool cloth and now brands have come and actually created methods where you can tie it because it needs either heat, pressure or both. So sometimes you would put castor oil on over your gut, belly button, liver and then go into the sauna. Castor oil just has

a host of beneficial properties and lowering inflammation of the liver of the gut. And so you're essentially putting the castor oil on that wool cloth and tying it around your liver. The biggest thing I think people notice when they start it is their digestion starts improving. They start being able to go to the bathroom more and then they're sleeping through the night because they're taking the burden off of that liver a little bit.

Yeah, we found that my liver enzymes improved dramatically after doing that. So I think that's such a fantastic method. I know you mentioned mindfulness and, you know, stress management are so crucial when it comes to healing. What are some of your favorite tools there? Mm hmm.

I don't love when people say stress is bad because stress is needed for survival. If a bus is coming, you need stress to be able to get out of the way. If you're trying to change your body composition, you're putting stress to the muscle. So I always say when you are thinking about stress, you have to think about

the recovery process and the mitigation process. That's how my brain sort of communicates it to clients and others that I teach in this process. But it's going to depend on the person. One of my best friends and business partners, she lowers her stress by listening to crime podcasts. That's not me. That's not me. She will listen to them all day. I will be up all night with nightmares if I am listening to crime podcasts.

but that helps her. And so I always say if you are reading someone else's methods of reducing stress and you feel more stressed, that's probably not the best thing for you, right? But there are things that I think can be beneficial for everybody. I'm huge on before each meal taking five deep breaths. It's something simple you can add in that's gonna start activating the very first part of digestion which starts in the brain. It's gonna really bring your nervous system into the fact of I'm about to eat this food.

instead of just devouring it really quickly. Another thing I really love is the sun. I think that the sun is so, so, so powerful for our body. Just when you go sit and you feel the warmth of that sun, you can almost feel your stress decreasing. And now that the sun sets at like 5.30, I'm already experiencing that I need the sun again because it's dark at 5.30

in the evening. And then from there, it just depends on the person. I was listening to a podcast the other day that said reading a book before bed has a 68% supportive method of lowering stress hormones. I've always been a big reader. I love reading, but other people might hate reading and that doesn't help them. They might want to listen to relaxing music before bed or light a candle and take a bath. But I would say, think about things that bring you joy, make a list, and that's your mitigation process in buffering the stress response.

Just to hop back to toxins, a practical question for anyone wondering, what's the best way to test for heavy metals and mold and things like that? There isn't one perfect test. And I think that that's one important thing to recognize because our cells, our fat cells store toxins. And so unless you're actually taking a fat cell out and testing that fat cell, you're not going to get the full picture.

you can see what's being eliminated. There are hair tests. You can see some metals and minerals through a hair tissue mineral analysis test. Real Times Labs offers a urinary mycotoxin panel. Vibrant offers a total tox panel, which I'm a huge fan of because you can get this full picture of BPA, phthalates,

glyphosate, heavy metals, mycotoxins, viral loads, all in one panel. They have a 2.0 with even markers for Lyme disease and that can be a constant trigger to the immune system. And then I love patterns in blood work as well. So you kind of have to look at everything and their symptoms as a full picture to know what's going on because if someone comes back and yeah, their aluminum's a little high but they're thriving and there's no other patterns and they don't have the symptoms, it's not as big of a concern.

So can someone ask their regular doctor for those tests or should they find an integrative health practitioner like you? Most...

I use the word most because there could be ones that offer some of the tests, but typically they're not looking at running urinary mycotoxin panels and hair tissue mineral analysis. They will look at your CBC, CMP, and some specialty markers, but for the most part people are either going to the website directly, a lot of them are now offering the ability, like Real Time Labs does that, Mosaic I believe is moving towards that, or going through a functional provider.

I love that they're starting to do that because it should be accessible for everyone. Also guys, I just have to say Emily has such a fantastic Instagram page to follow if you're interested in these things. She has amazing resources, posts. If you have ever struggled with acne, highly recommend following her. I think now is a great time to open for a Q&A from the audience. Feel free to ask anything, guys.

I'm curious about the castor oil packets that you're talking about. Can a normal person buy those? Do you get them on Amazon? Do we have to go back and... Amazon. I love the brand Queen of Thrones. She's the one who really, I feel like, spearheaded the whole thing. And it's just in a pack on Amazon. They send you the whole thing. Didn't you tell me it should be in a glass bottle? Ideally. Hexane-free castor oil in a glass bottle that's protected from light would be the most ideal. How often?

Some will do it three to four times a week. Other people do it when they sleep before bed. Others once, twice a week as they feel like they need it. So it sort of depends on the person. Hello. When it comes to mold exposure, if you, like, for example, I just found out that my air conditioning has, like, a ton of mold in it. How long does it take if you're doing all of these things for your body to, like, really detox and reset? Yeah.

It would depend on how much your actual body has obtained from that environment. It's been really interesting running panels for families because they're never identical. You would think they've lived in the same environment for a long time, but someone might have, as we talked about earlier,

more of those nutrients that prevented some of those pathogens from coming in and camping there. But I would say for the most part, if someone has a significantly high level, it can take anywhere, you know, I go off body bios protocol, six to 12 months to get those mycotoxin levels down to never zero. You're not going to see that, but a limit where it's not over the top.

Hi, I was curious, what are some of the practices you recommend to individuals while coming off birth control just to best support the process? There's a really great test called a spectra cell. It's a micronutrient panel just because birth control tends to deplete quite a few nutrients. So one thing you want to do is replenish what's been lost and

but your liver is the crossroad and junction of those hormones. So if you can really support your liver, maybe get a Dutch test, see how those pathways are working. You want it going down the right pathway versus the wrong pathway. But I'd say supporting your liver, making sure your gut is, and fiber is binding to some of that excess estrogen and removing it would probably be one of the best methods.

What are some home products and or like I know HVAC systems you can get like dehumidifiers, but you also want your air not too dry. But that can cause mold in your home and then cleaning products, especially as a mother, like...

What things do you recommend to keep heavy metals and toxins out of your household? There's several. I think it depends on what you want to specialize in. We have, I learned about these new air purifiers, the Jasper. We had them in our hotel and love the technology. I'm going to do a podcast with him to keep some of the mycotoxin spores and the VOCs controllable in your air environment. I'm really sensitive to scents and headaches and did not have a headache last night at the hotel, which is huge for me.

Other things you can do, especially if you know you're living in mold and can't remediate right away, is diffuse propolis into the air. They even make these little honeybee ones for kids' rooms.

which is super, super cool from Honey Bee Farms. Love that. I think those are really great. And then I would say from a cleaning perspective, Branch Basics is really great just from an overall cleaning perspective. And then BrioTech, they have that hypochlorous acid that allows you to clean the air, clean the environment. Because what you don't want to do is strip. Air has a microbiome. You don't just want to strip everything in the same way an antibiotic would strip everything in your gut. So it all comes back to that homeostasis as well, because you're never going to have a home that's free of all of it.

Emily, thank you so much. That was so fantastic. Round of applause for Emily. Okay, everyone, we have one more panelist here with me. Our next speaker is the founder of the Institute for Muscle Centric Medicine, someone I love and care about so deeply, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.

Dr. Gabrielle, I'm so excited to have you across from me. We have been working together for a bit now and I just think you are so incredible, as does everyone else. You're such a powerful woman in the health space and you're, you know, you advocating for muscle and protein, especially for women, I think is so fantastic. Can you just tell us a little bit about how you got into this field? Of course. Well, I thought we would all start out with 100 push-ups. No, I'm totally kidding.

So I did my fellowship in nutritional sciences and geriatrics. And I don't know if you guys have had the experience where there's always one person that changes everything. One experience, one client, one patient. And there was one for me. And during the time, so the truth is I didn't want to do geriatrics. The deal was in order for me to study nutritional sciences, to go back and do a fellowship,

I had to do geriatrics. And for those of you who don't know, that's over the age of 65. And I fell in love with one of these participants. And her name, we'll just call her Betty. She was a mom of three in her mid-50s. And she had done what everybody had told her to do. She had struggled with weight her entire life. Yo-yo dieted, lost the same 20 to 30 pounds every couple years.

And I imaged her brain at 50, and her brain looked like the beginning of an Alzheimer's brain. And I couldn't reconcile it because I knew that in 10, 20 years, what was coming for her? Not remembering her kids' names, the devastation of her family. And I thought to myself, wait, so what she represents is the same struggle that we see, I don't know, 70% of Americans go through?

that in the last 50 years we haven't been able to move the needle on obesity, to me it meant we were asking the wrong question. Because I would all agree that if you are able to ask the right question, then you'll get an answer that is meaningful. And for 50 years, even today, we're heavier, we're sicker than we've ever been. So I asked my colleagues, I was like, this woman has done exercising more,

eating less, following the food guide pyramid, she has completely destroyed her brain, her muscle, and her metabolism. What did they say? They said, well, that's just the way it is. That's just what happens. And that was not good enough for me because I felt so responsible that if we didn't begin to ask the question of skeletal muscle, she didn't have an obesity issue. And I think, you know, your original question is what got me into this is,

I think that I recognized very early on that obesity, being overweight, challenges with metabolism, they're not rooted in body fat. They're rooted in unhealthy skeletal muscle that begins decades earlier. And then if we begin to ask the question of how do we maintain and build healthy skeletal muscle, then we can totally move the needle. And it was an aha moment that changed everything for me.

Why is muscle so important? Why does it benefit us? It's not. See you guys later. Muscle is the organ of longevity. It is the only organ system that we can do anything about. How many of you think skin is the largest organ system? I thought that for sure. Wait, guys. This is totally a ploy. It's not. It's skeletal muscle.

It makes up 40% of body weight. I don't know, Khalil's pretty buff, maybe 60% for him. But the reality is skeletal muscle is a dynamic organ system that is so much more important than looking jacked and tanned. Helpful side effect. Skeletal muscle is the metabolic sink. It is, do you know that we burn fatty, that skeletal muscle, the majority of its fuel at rest is fatty acids? It's fat.

Skeletal muscle is the place where we store carbohydrates, glucose. You know, you hear about challenges with infertility, PCOS. These are diseases that are rooted in skeletal muscle first. We've all heard about obesity, fat, visceral fat, fat around the organs. But if we believe that skeletal muscle is an organ system in itself, then fat that infiltrates into that muscle would make that also visceral fat.

And so if we attack skeletal muscle from a metabolic standpoint as the organ of longevity, very helpful for mobility, activities of daily living, and also when you contract skeletal muscle through various forms of exercise, hence the push-ups before we start, it releases myokines. And myokines are peptide hormones that travel throughout the body that affect the brain.

improve BDNF, helps neurogenesis, helps mood, helps inflammation. Exercising skeletal muscle helps balance inflammation. The more healthy skeletal muscle mass you have, the greater your survivability against nearly all cause mortality. Any chronic illness, it's also your body armor. The case for muscle, I'll tell you one more thing. It is more detrimental to lose skeletal muscle than it is to gain body fat as we age.

If we believe that is true, and if that is supported by data, which it is, then why are we so hyper-focused on obesity? It's the wrong question. Hence, this is why we are where we are. I have to ask, with the wave of Ozempic and people losing weight rapidly and losing muscle, is that something you're concerned about?

I will tell you this. I have my background is in nutritional sciences. So I studied nutritional sciences as an undergraduate and then I went back and I did a fellowship. Part of that fellowship was geriatrics and obesity medicine. So I ran a weight management clinic. And I will tell you up until about five years ago, and again these GLP-1s, these GIP-1 agonists have been around for a long time to treat diabetes. Nothing has been as effective.

And I know that there's a lot of controversy because in the health space and in the natural wellness space, there's a huge dichotomy. It's either medications are all good or medications are all bad. But I would say hormone replacement therapy is good. That's also under the umbrella. Certain antibiotics, I'm not going to treat a sepsis with oil of oregano. I mean, you can try, but you're definitely going to lose your license. So the question is, the question becomes, how can we think we have a real problem?

We have a real problem with body weight management. And Betsy struggled for 30 years. If I had had the opportunity to give her some kind of GLP or GIP agonist, I would have. It would have released her from the food noise. It would have released her from this food addiction, from this constant thought of food, this inability to regulate her appetite.

Does it cause significant muscle mass? There's no mechanism of action that is any different than regular weight loss. It's just that we have not been able to restrict the way that these medications allow us to restrict.

And what I also believe that we're going to begin to see is in the data that it actually helps augment the health of skeletal muscle over time. There are papers and data that it helps with cardiovascular disease, low levels of inflammation, even can help with fertility. I think that we have to be very careful about how we think about medications and the dogma because Ozempic, Wonderno, these medications, and they're here to stay.

And we will get multiple generations. When used responsibly, I think there is a real opportunity for health and wellness when they're used responsibly. Now your question on skeletal muscle mass loss. When we lose weight, when we lose weight rapidly, we lose skeletal muscle. We also lose connective tissue. We can lose bone. We can lose size of our organ system, liver.

But when, and I see this in my clinic, so I still have a, you're my patient. Yes, I am. She said that was okay to tell you guys. So when we utilize the tools that we have, like resistance training, like increased dietary protein, we see a muscle sparing effect. And also when we use less aggressive doses. So right now in traditional medicine, it's very algorithmic. You'll start at, you know, you'll say 1.5 milligrams. This is your dose or 2.5.

But when you use things from compounding pharmacies, you're able to decrease the dose, have it be very individualized. I think there are real benefits from this medication. So whether you agree with me or not, I would think, how do we think about these things from a very broad perspective?

What would you have Betsy, Betty, what would you have her do to maintain muscle or even like help keep it while losing weight? First, non-negotiable, she has to do resistance training. You know, there's a lot of conversation about being sedentary. And if you look into the data, they will say the healthy sedentary person.

There is no such thing. We know that if an individual does not train, even if they are normal weight, we see this in 18-year-old college-aged males and women, they will become insulin resistant just by physical inactivity. We are designed to move. We are not designed to be domesticated at all.

And I will tell you that when you take care of the health of skeletal muscle, if she had been doing resistance training, not this cardio food guide pyramid, you know, there's this kind of fat phobic model of body composition, which is the following. It is based on symptomology. It's very reactive about obesity. It's all about carbohydrates. It's all about cardio. And we all know those people that are very consistent physically.

And, you know, it's like, hey, Bob, nice to see you on the treadmill again. And, you know, Bob's up there doing his five mile an hour incline walk every day. But we're not seeing changes in body composition. You're not seeing changes in blood lipids or these other various aspects that we have control over. So.

Betsy should have been doing resistance training. She should have increased her dietary protein. She was at the RDA, which is about 0.8 grams per kg, which I would consider a low protein diet. That's the minimum to prevent deficiency, which by the way was based on 18 year old males. That is not going to support any woman in here who's aging, God willing. It's just not going to. I would have absolutely improved her dietary protein intake and her non-exercise activity.

Be a fidgeter. Move around. Do some push-ups on the way to the bathroom. Whatever it is. And I say this cautiously. I would have loved to address her hormone status in her sleep. She could have changed the trajectory of her brain. It's not the older generations that I worry about. We are becoming increasingly more sedentary.

And so I worry about my kids. I worry about our future. I worry about their future. They are indoctrinated in a way that is going to be devastating. And it starts with us. You guys are all fit. You're here. But it really starts with us. So the more that we can understand from a foundation level what we need to do as a culture to make it important to move,

understand that skeletal muscle is a foundation. I was listening to a wonderful interview with Dr. Will Cole and you asked what are the things that you must do and I would say we have to throw muscle health in there at the core foundational level because without muscle you're not gonna have energy, you're not gonna have healthy mitochondria, you're not going to have a chance. It's not if, it's a when. Illness or tragedy strike. It's not an if and that sounds morbid and I sound like a Debbie Downer. I'm not. We know it's coming and

So what are we going to do in the moment during these choices that we have opportunities for to really foreshadow and think about how we're going to age? How do our actions impact our children?

How do you, as a mother of two, how do you set a good example for your kids? Because I feel like I see your kids go to the gym with you. When I met them, they were eating eggs and telling me what protein was. How do you establish that? So first of all, let's define good example. My children are on the way over, and you might see them open the door and run in, and I apologize. I have a three- and a five-year-old. And I will tell you that it's not easy.

And kids, how many parents are in here? Like everybody, do they listen to what you say? Like not really. I mean mostly depending on how early it is in the morning. They always listen to what you do. They always see what we do. And I think that this quote obesity epidemic starts with us.

My kids are, you know, there's this whole notion that children shouldn't resist and strain. Kids shouldn't work out. Why? You know, we have no problem. Where's Jason? Letting them eat Kellogg's and do whatever it is that they're doing and play on their iPad. But my daughter, she can deadlift her body weight.

Yeah, that's insane. She's up there like mom. I want to do the push-ups. I want to do you know Pull-ups they want to be engaged and so the question is how do I do it? Well number one I said an example I bitch and complain every morning in my mind about how I'm not gonna get up and work out like I know it's coming So already tomorrow morning. I'm gonna work out with Khalil at 8:00 I've already begun bitching about it in my head and I will tell you that I

I'm aware of that, and it's just noise. It's just non-discernment. It doesn't matter because you set a standard for yourself, not a goal. We set standards for how we execute life. And when we set standards, we don't have to fall back on our goals because goals are temporary. They come, they go. I set a standard. Our standard is we wake up and we work out. That's what we do. You want to do your crafts? Cool. Let's bring them to the garage, and I'm going to be doing this, and if you want to do that, fine. And in terms of nutrition...

Watch them walk in here with sour patch kids. I'll be mortified. To be fair, my husband is on duty, so it is possible. It's fully, fully possible. But we don't really have that stuff around. But I will say I am concerned about putting any kind of body image or narrative about

Body weight, fatness, muscle, that's not the conversation, right? It really is about health and wellness. How can we build strong humans? I am not interested in raising children. I'm interested in building strong humans, humans that are courageous and capable. And so in order to do that, they have to be able to navigate the environment. They have to know that they are strong, and we put them in positions to be strong.

My daughter is in jujitsu. An arm bar is an everyday occurrence for her. She's five. I'm empowering her. And, you know, if she doesn't want to do it, whether she wants to, she doesn't, she's involved and engaged. And so I just think it's so critical about how we have these conversations.

At dinner last night, we were talking about school lunches and navigating just the food that our kids are exposed to. Not my kids, your kids. Soon to be. And you can also borrow mine anytime. In fact, I'm dropping them off. Where's Greg? Greg, massage is canceled. Dropping them off tomorrow at 10 a.m. Okay. Where's Greg? We've got to gear up. He's ready. My kids are coming over. He's ready. Get the chicken coops ready.

We were talking about school lunches. Right. Now I've actually thought a tremendous amount about this. My kids go to a small private school, which I will tell you this, side note, how we picked a school is my husband wanted to see which perimeter he could reach. And this was like the one that was most difficult. He's military, he's like crazy. So yeah.

But anyway, and I thought to myself, all right, so what? It's funny, right? But I'm like, seriously, he's like, honey, I picked the best school. I was like, why? He's like, I went on that campus. They didn't let me in. They were armed guards. He's like, done. We're going there. All right. Okay. I guarantee you he's going to be the first person to chip a kid, like ever. All right. Mom jokes are done. I'm done. I'm done. You know, we were at dinner last night and we're talking about all this amazing conversation of how we can improve the wholeness of our kids' lunches. And

Again, I've thought a lot about this, and the reality is we are not going to be able to remove these things from their environment. It is not possible with the way big food industry is. So the best thing that we can do is educate them.

Because we can't run from the fact that these things are present that they are going to go to their friends houses and their friends are going to have Pop-tarts if they're even like Twinkies from 1970 that probably still exists, right like it's gonna happen But what I can do

is I can deeply educate my child to make choices. And sometimes she's not going to make the best choice, and sometimes she's going to make great choices. And I witness this in real life. She'll come home, she'll be, you know, so I do, I pack them a lunch. They have the opportunity to eat it or not. So, for example, here's what I pack for lunch. She had a bell pepper with lean beef and rice and some stuff in it.

So she came home and she's like, "Mom, I had macaroni and cheese and a bite of the beef." And like she tells me this whole thing, right? She's waiting for my reaction. You know, I just said, "Hey, do you think that was a good choice?" "Well," she's like, "No, but..." And that's okay because I know breakfast and dinner, I'm definitely not going to shame her. I definitely, we just have to talk about it. But what happens when we create an environment that will not withstand impact to the real environment?

And that's how I have to think, you know, again, we're raising humans. We have to raise these humans to be autonomous and to be able to withstand the world that they're going to be listening to. Fantastic advice. And I can't wait to implement that when I have kids one day. I think it's so out of the blue. 10 a.m. Be at your house. I think now is a great moment to open up to the audience and see what questions we have. So you spoke about the detriment of losing muscle. How about the detriment of having too much muscle, whether that's

proportionally throughout the body. How do you track that to identify that issue and then how do you address it? I do not believe that too much muscle exists within a, now we're not talking about a pharmaceutically enhanced body with tremendous amount of muscle, right? Kenny's here shaking his head. So, hey Kenny.

He's got too much muscle. So it's actually not a thing. It'd be very difficult. You know, there is, I believe that there is a threshold for our bodies for, you know, protein turnover, being able to actually build and maintain skeletal muscle. This is not an issue of too much. But I will say this.

For those of you who are really interested in the literature, people will say those that are overweight have more skeletal muscle. You've all heard that. And you've all heard it's because they carry more body weight. But I will say, in a lot of the studies, you know, it wasn't until, gosh, I don't know, maybe the early 2000s that we're able to really look at skeletal muscle under CT MRI in a meaningful way. So all the data that really exists, this large data set is mostly DEXA.

And what that means is it's not measuring skeletal muscle mass directly. When you get a DEXA, it looks at bone and then it looks at body fat and lean mass all lumped together. Lean mass includes the following, liver, all your organ systems, your connective tissue and muscle and various things, everything outside of fat and bones.

So when we think about people that have more muscle, the real question is how much healthy skeletal muscle do they have? When you get a steak, you want your-- please don't nod at your steak because I'm about to tell you this. You want your muscle to look like a filet.

And when you are inactive, when you overeat, when you are not creating flux, training your body so that you're utilizing those substrates, you will get fat deposition and fat marbling in that skeletal muscle. A DEXA will not pick that up. A DEXA will just extrapolate that number.

That was a long-winded way of answering, do I believe that there is ever such thing as too much muscle? No, we don't see that in humans because there is a threshold. Wonderful question. So this is a really important question. She asked if DEXA isn't the best option, what can we do? That's the best option. But please understand it is not measuring skeletal muscle mass directly.

The way in which I would love to see us using is MRI, but that's not, I mean, how often are we going to sit there? You know, you go in to watch the movie and the MRI. It's not exciting. We don't, there's not a great answer. Can you use ultrasound? Yes, you can use ultrasound in the temple, various places, but, you know, the way in which we distribute muscle is different for everybody. And I would say that

Building and maintaining as much skeletal muscle mass as you can is critical. There's this idea of lifespan. We all know what that is. There's this next level, this idea of health span. I don't believe that those are the ways that we should think of things. It's actually muscle span. Muscle span. And that's because there are discrete moments in time

where we could change the health of our skeletal muscle. Skeletal muscle is not just about the physical. It interfaces with our immune system, our survivability against cancer. All of these things depend on healthy skeletal muscle. And there are, you know, we talk about sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is this disease of aging. You've all either heard about it or seen it, right? It's a decrease in muscle mass and function. We see that with our aging parents or grandparents. It is not a disease of aging. I do not believe that is true.

I believe that there are phenotypes of sarcopenia in youth. And when we think about this conceptually as muscle span, we start our children young. We augment that tissue. We augment their joints and their muscles so they are primed. We know that those kids that are healthier when they are younger have a greater metabolic trajectory. Yes, ma'am. For anyone who's having trouble...

keeping enough protein in their body for whatever reason. Are there some proteins that are more easily absorbed? Are there other things they're needing to add in to help that absorption? So the first question I would ask is, what do you mean by protein absorption? So does that mean when you eat protein, you feel like it sits there? You know, I guess that would be the first question. And then the second question is, so we don't actually eat for protein. We eat for these individual amino acids.

There's 20 different amino acids, nine of which are essential. The body requires an individual to get it from the diet. And if someone struggles with, there's plant proteins and animal proteins, days that I feel like being violent, I usually will post something about that.

But it's really not that controversial, right? It's just hard, fast biological numbers. It is based on an amino acid profile. And so your question about digestion, I will say that as individuals age, their hydrochloric acid, their stomach acid potentially can go down. And so those individuals will do better having some kind of digestive enzyme to help with protein.

In terms of digestibility, when you have something in a whey form or a rice pea blend or some kind of powdered form that is liquid, typically is very easy to absorb and digest. But I will say it's not all about protein, right? It's about the other micronutrients that ride along with these protein sources that I think become so much more critical as we age.

I had a lot of muscle, and kids would make fun of me. Like, oh, I don't know, I just wanted to know about, did I have high testosterone as a kid, or was it my exercise genetics? What makes certain people more muscular than others? First of all, that's very fortunate, right? And you were probably very active.

There is a level of genetics, right, certainly in terms of capacity, and I think that a lot of the trainers and athletes in here would agree that there is probably some genetic potential. Typically when you're really young, your hormones are not, if you haven't hit puberty, it's not a huge hormone surge. It's pretty much more likely based on activity and genetics. But what I will say is that it seems to be more difficult to maintain skeletal muscle mass as we age. I say that cautiously.

Because I think that if we redefine our nutrition and our training, then it's much easier than we think. But we fail to recognize that dietary protein seems to decrease and we actually need more of it as we age, not less. It's the only macronutrient that we actually need more of. Because to put this in perspective, the body protein turns over around 250 grams a day.

We only eat, the average woman eats 70 grams of protein. The average male, if you're not Kenny, eats like 100 grams. And so, you know, our bodies recycle these amino acids. But, you know, when we think about the stimulus of how do we maintain muscle mass, we have to input a stimulus.

I will say I changed my mind on something. I wanted to believe this so bad for like 10 years. I wanted to believe that nutrition would trump the homeostatic mechanisms of muscle, that it was all about nutrition. Exercise is an even greater driver. But you can't have one without the other, right? You still need proper nutrition. And then I will say that when you are younger, I talk a lot about a protein threshold, this amino acid threshold.

The most important, when you think about the hierarchy, the most important thing about dietary protein is how much you're consuming in a 24-hour period. And the current recommendation is the bare minimum to prevent a deficiency will not support healthy aging. We know that. Recommendations don't seem to be updated in the last 40 years. I'm hoping that, you know, Jason will help get on the train to fix that.

When we get this baseline of dietary protein, which is closer to one gram per pound ideal body weight, the evidence would support 0.7. So it's a little bit lower, but I would say there's no problem in one gram per pound. That's the most important. And then the next thought process is, you know, the protein quality. The higher your protein intake is, the less I care about the quality, which I really didn't want to believe that for the longest time. I had my own biases.

but I will say it also is about the micronutrients. And then when you're really getting into body composition, which is how do you lose body fat, maintain muscle, or support healthy aging, that's when we begin to have this conversation about protein distribution, which is how do we dose protein from a muscle standpoint? Because muscle is very interesting. It is exquisitely sensitive to amino acids.

it's exquisitely sensitive to one particular amino acid which is leucine and you require that at a very particular dose to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and that dose is about 30 grams. So for anyone who is eating sub threshold of a 30 gram protein dose, you know, I would say take shakes out of that, then you don't actually mount this muscle synthetic response which becomes blunted as we age.

I have a question. What does your day in the life look like, what you put in your body, how you fuel yourself on a day-to-day basis in terms of, like, maintaining muscle mass? So thanks for that question. I wake up to a lot of screaming, usually put in my face, highly caffeinate myself.

All this is true. I train at 7:00 in the morning. So I train from 7:00 to 8:00, and then I typically will have either a protein shake or some Greek yogurt, some kind of protein. I don't fast. I used to fast. I believe that we are going to begin to see some data that fasting for women in the morning actually lowers your resting metabolic rate. It hasn't been published, but I believe it will come out of Chapel Hill that we'll begin to see how do we think about and deploy fasting.

I'll have probably around 30 grams of protein. When you train, you sensitize muscle to these amino acids. So if you are exercising or doing something physical, you can get away with a little bit lower. So I choose 30 grams of protein as opposed to 50. And then I will probably have more caffeine.

True, not proud of it, but it's true. I'll also take a shot of collagen or I'll use strong coffee which has collagen in it. Collagen has a protein score of zero, friends. So don't count that towards your protein because it doesn't have those complete amino acids.

Then I don't have a big lunch. I might have another meal in the afternoon, which will be probably some kind of lean protein and some veggies, depending on how hard I train. And then dinner will be around 50 grams of protein and some veggies and probably some sweet potato. That's it. Simple. And then I use some supplements.

So for me, I use creatine. I'm on a big creatine kick. It's very hard to eat enough creatine naturally in the diet. For one pound of meat, you might get, after it's cooked, half a gram of creatine. That's crazy. And the data shows around 10 to 12 grams of creatine for brain function.

So I might have creatine, I'll have some urolithin A, I'll have a multivitamin with some kind of greens, and that's it, easy. Some fish oil. Oh, there's my husband, late, in the back. Hi, honey. I just told everyone about how you tried to breach the perimeter of the school and then fed Sour Patch Kids to our kids. Oh, food to our kids. Oh, so they're my kids, right? Back up there. There you go.

Anyway, they look strong strong and naughty I will say the one thing that I could really work on more asleep and there's interesting data that a few nights of Impaired sleep can actually suppress muscle protein synthesis but can be overcome with more high-intensity training the following day That's unusual right? So if you are going to go through periods of time where you don't sleep as much people will say I need to sleep instead of train I would say train

I know, it's the worst, right? I know. I know, it's true. I think we have time for one more question. Hi, I was curious to hear your thoughts on amino acid supplements. I have for the longest time thought no. And I would say that the way in which you would use amino acid supplements, I think we should try to get things through Whole Foods. I say that, but I also will use a protein shake.

But where amino acid supplements I think can be very valuable is if you are eating a lower protein diet or you're more plant-based. So for example, let's say you want three ounces of fish. And I told you that the minimum to really protect your muscle, to help maintain muscle mass and keep body fat at bay is 30 grams. So if you have three ounces of fish,

I don't know, three times five, it has five ounces or five grams of protein. That's 15 grams of protein. That's not enough. So I would take a branched chain amino acid supplement or an essential amino acid supplement in addition. I would not suggest using amino acids throughout the day. It's a pulsatile effect.

So that's how I would use it. I would use it with a meal. And then anecdotally, potentially, post-training to reduce soreness, there's no evidence for that. That's purely anecdotal. And then I think individual amino acids like glycine for sleep. Again, we talk about protein as if it's one thing. These are 20 different amino acids, all with unique pathways that do very unique, specific things in the body. So I just think that's important to recognize. Dr. Gabrielle, thank you so much. That was fantastic.

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