Today I'm talking with the legendary Bruce Barry about how to increase your healthspan and age well. If you want to learn the secrets of feeling your best at every stage of life, you'll be inspired by this 72 year old water sports athlete and local legend.

Professionally Bruce has a degree in Food Technology and is a 50 year veteran of the food industry with leadership positions in food safety, product development, and labeling where he also performed a leadership role in industry trade associations and academics. During his career, Bruce has authored multiple food safety studies and publications, has interfaced with regulatory agencies, and has been a frequent speaker at industry events.

Personally, Bruce is a 72-year-old endurance athlete with decades of experience in surfing, sailing, windsurfing, and standup paddle where he is a frequent podium winner for both age group and open events. His professional and personal interests have given him a unique ability to blend science with the art of performance related living and he writes, speaks, and teaches on holistic and ancestral health with the goal of improving the understanding of the difference between lifespan and healthspan.

Connect with Bruce:

You can contact Bruce by email at: bbarry6186@aol.com

Products Mentioned:

Primal Kitchen

Cronometer (this is Jeannie’s affiliate link)

Also mentioned:

Darin Olien, Fatal Conveniences

Vitamin D – If you’d like a recommendation for a high quality Vit. D3 supplement, DM me and I can send you one. Dosage should be determined depending on your levels, so I recommend asking your doctor to test your Vit. D level.

References:

Adipose Tissue as a Site of Toxin Accumulation 

Is early-onset cancer an emerging global epidemic? Current evidence and future implications

Disclaimer:

This podcast and website represents the opinions of Jeannie Oliver and her guests to the show and website. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and because you are unique, please consult your healthcare professional with any medical questions.

This website or podcast should not be used in any legal capacity whatsoever, including but not limited to establishing “standard of care” in a legal sense or as a basis for expert witness testimony.  No guarantee is given regarding the accuracy of any statements or opinions made on the podcast or website.

In no way does listening, reading, emailing or interacting on social media with our content establish a doctor-patient relationship.

Privacy is of utmost importance to us. All people, places, and scenarios mentioned in the podcast have been changed to protect patient/client confidentiality.

Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are our own and do not represent that of our employers. While we make every effort to ensure that the information we are sharing is accurate, we welcome any comments, suggestions, or correction of errors.

Interested in working with Jeannie? Schedule a 30-minute Coffee Talk here.

Connect with me on Instagram @joliverwellness and check out the options for my more affordable self-study programs here: https://www.joliverwellness.com/diy-programs

Music credit: Funk’d Up by Reaktor Productions

A Podcast Launch Bestie production

Okay, so welcome back to the Nutrition Edit everyone.

I am super excited about my guest here with me today.

We have Bruce Berry, the legendary Bruce Berry with us.

Bruce is actually a legend here in the water sports community in the Pacific

Northwest and further afield as well.

so Bruce, welcome.

I'm so happy to have you with us.

Oh, it's just great.

It's, it's exciting to be here.

And Jeannie, I've, I've been all over your website.

Uh, I've, I've gone through your blog, I've gone through the other podcasts,

and you've just got awesome stuff and being invited on to contribute

is, is really exciting for me.

And hopefully I'll be able to add something of value because you sure

have a lot of value in there for folks.

Oh, that means a lot to me.

I appreciate that, Bruce.

Thank you.

And I really appreciate your time and I know that this is gonna

be so inspirational and exciting and educational for people too.

I'd love to start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and

your background and how you came to be this amazing sort of water sports icon.

Yeah, well, like you, I, I grew up in Southern

California, and I am not a big guy.

I'm 142 pounds right now, five seven.

And, I think I was a tri for my parents because they put me in

school when I was four years old.

So not only was I the littlest guy in there, but I was the youngest guy.

And so I went through, all of my school stuff into college, you know,

kind of being the, the wimpy kid, you know, and a add into my small stature.

Uh, but I'm also, I was also really nearsighted with 2,400 vision.

So, you know, the, the last guy chosen for the sports team and you

know, the guy that, the bigger kids always picked on and, but we lived

by the beach and the first time I got a surfboard in my hand, it clicked.

Uh, so I started surfing when I was 10.

And, uh, by the time I was a junior in high school, things began to change

because I began to physically fill out.

I still wasn't very big, but I certainly wasn't a wimpy kid.

I was a short,

Yeah.

wimpy kid.

In fact, in, in college they used to call me the missing link.

Uh, I mean, I was surfing five days a week and, I weigh 142 now.

I weighed 160 back then.

It was all upper body, solid muscle.

Yeah, it was, it was, it was pretty interesting.

So, yes, I mean, I, grew up in southern California.

Went to college in San Luis Obispo, which is Central California.

Continued to surf in much rougher, much colder water.

Very sharky water.

a little sharky.

Yeah.

Um, met my wife to be at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where I was going to school and.

Uh, next month though will be our 50th wedding anniversary.

Awesome.

Um, yeah.

Thank you.

And, and so, you know, we had three daughters and my oldest is

43 and my twin daughters are 41.

So I, I know that most of your clientele is, is female.

so with me being the solitary male in a house full of four females, and,

I can imagine.

trust me, they, they all, they all cycled at the same time.

so, you know, I, I'm completely housebroken.

I love it.

you know, finally even, I was trained of the unforgivable

sin of leaving the toilet lit up.

I just got to the point where I'd sit down and life was good.

So, continue to surf.

Uh, we started, uh, sailing and I, we raced sailboats up and down the

coast and, I'm not really good with math, but I've got a scientific mind

and, and so if I could memorize stuff,

as opposed to physics or something like that, I found I was Okay.

So biology, microbiology, human biology, all of that stuff really resonated

with me and I became, a microbiologist.

and so I've got, you know, at this point, again, 50 years

experience in the food industry.

I did, product development and food safety for every company that I worked for.

when we talk about, you know, food and food labeling and, and how all

that works, I mean, I was, I was the guy that did all this stuff.

and I keep trying to retire and, you know, I'll, I'll say, this is, this is my date.

And then a week before I walk in and say, Hey, you know what, if we cut

this out, what if we cut that out?

So, you know, I, I still kind of work.

I do about an hour a day, largely remote.

but I get called on nearly a daily basis and I'm on site, you know,

a couple of half days a month.

Of course, those are all days where nothing's going on weather-wise, because

I still surf whenever the coast calls and wind surf whenever there's wind here.

and paddle pretty much stand up, paddle, every day.

I've had a couple of off days this year.

I've, I've been off the water three days so

Wow.

I haven't been on the water three days yet this year.

I am an unabashedly fair weather paddler, unlike my husband who

will be out there in 20 degrees,

no matter what and, and.

Christian, your husband, he's just an animal on the water.

and it was, it was fun.

And I, I've had, I've been racing standup now for about 10 years.

And, and so for a lot of the top guys it's, it's been fun as, they've started

because I've, I've always had a little bit more experience with them and, I can

tell the guys that are gonna be really fast, and they're getting closer to

me and closer to me and closer to me.

And, and finally there's the day that they beat me in a race.

Then there's this big fist bump and stuff.

cause you know, sometime around my late fifties, I kind of got to the point

where, you know, to me, you know, if I can help other people achieve their

goals, That's really the key to life.

And so when I see these guys and if I can give 'em a couple of hints and

help 'em develop paddling and they get better to me, you know what?

That's just great.

The other thing is, is, uh, again, from a a size standpoint, if you see standing

next to, your husband Christian, it looks like a dwarf standing next to a giant.

Right?

So, yeah.

I mean I, I'm 72 and I'm still out there and I'm still pretty fast.

But the real issue for me racing isn't, you'd think the age, it's my size.

So the same thing's going on with me racing, standup as it would be if I were

to, to play basketball against Christian.

I might be like an an okay guard outside, but if I go in and try to shoot.

I'm not gonna be able to shoot because I'm gonna have this guy up here that's just

stuffing it right back down my throat.

Yeah.

But I would argue too, that you're probably a better surfer than he is

because your center, gravity's different.

Being able to pop up on the board faster is

different, whereas he just has a whole different, and he's so,

upper body dominant, I would say.

So the lower body stuff isn't as easy for him.

So, you know, if he's having to navigate waves in the same way that

you are with that quad strength and all those things, it's, I don't, I think

that you would have him well beat.

So you're 72 now, Ruth, and you said you started sub racing 10, just 10 years ago.

So you started when you were in your early sixties.

Right, right.

That's fantastic.

I think a lot of people, and that's something that I'd love for you to speak

into a little bit, and you mentioned this before we started recording too,

that it's never too late to get started.

So, you know, having done all these other sports and been, you

know, successful with surfing and everything, I mean, what possessed

you at 62 to be like, well, why not?

Why not race standup paddleboards?

Yeah, well, what happened is, I, I surfed in southern California, for

the first 10 years of my surfing career.

And then, you know, then we moved north, then we moved to the Bay Area.

I didn't surf as much then, but I raced sailboats and then we moved up here, to

the Seattle area and I raced sailboats and even further from the coast.

And then I started windsurfing.

So I've, I've wind surfed for over 30 years.

Cool.

and I, I got to the point where, you know, I'd be down in the

Columbia River Gorge and, wind surfing in this, this really heavy, big air, and it's

pretty much like, surfing on steroids.

so, you know, you, you can only do that so long, before you begin racking up

injuries and sometimes pretty big ones.

so at, at this point, I mean, it's gonna sound crazy to say this,

but I, I've literally strained or broken every part of my body

Wow.

I just got to the point where my wife said, are you ever going to learn?

And that was about the time that the standup paddling came about.

And I thought, well, okay, so here we go.

So this is, a little bit, uh, less intense.

this is another way to do it.

I was running a lot, and any runner knows that you, you can run and you can do

3, 4, 5, 6 miles a day for a long time, but eventually it catches up to you.

Yeah.

and the standup, I actually found was a, a better full body workout.

and it wasn't just the aerobic, it's everything.

Yeah.

Core

asymmetric.

Yeah.

isometric everything you get going, you know,

seems to work with standup.

And, you know, for me, I don't do, anything half speed.

Typically my, my daily, my daily thing.

I live on Lake Sam Amish.

I've got fixed buoys, and so I, I kind of, I'm racing myself every day.

and I go out and, uh, if I'm not windsurfing or surfing, uh, I'll go out

and I'll, I'll do like a quarter mile warmup and a quarter mile cool down.

But then I'll go flat out for a little bit over two miles.

And, you know, my, my race pace, my, my cadence is about 72 strokes a minute.

So when, when, when you think about how that works.

Yeah.

I'm taking more than stroke a second.

So, yeah, I just, I just found it to be this, this just great

workout plus, you know, it gets you outside and it's a break in the day

and it's a break in the routine.

And, you know, most of the time, uh, I paddle here on Lake Sam Amish, where

I live, but I'll, I'll go other places and I race up and down the coast.

I mean, I've raced in the big ones in California and the big ones in Hood

River and the big ones in Oregon.

so that's just, it's just a kick.

And the, the community is awesome as well.

Yes.

That is so true.

There's something about standup paddle, and I don't know if it's just the sup

or if, because I feel like all the.

Wing foiling community here too is really wonderful.

But all the water sports people in this area, I am always impressed and blown

away by how down to earth and welcoming and kind, and they all have integrity.

I mean it's, and they're just fun, cool people.

And there's none of that sort of douche baggery, if you will, that

you see in other sports communities.

at least in my experience.

I mean, I grew up snowboarding and there's just a lot of nonsense and ego and I don't

see that in the water sports community

it really isn't now.

Then you go and, and hit the coast and the douche bag on steroids.

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, it doesn't really much matter, you know, where you go and

you'd think that, you know, going out to Westport on the coast here, people

would be a little bit more mellow.

No, uh, it's, it's not, they're, they're kind of used to me at this point.

I've been going out there for 25 or 30 years.

But, there's still moments and, you know, I'm just, just to the point where

I, I just come in thinking, guys, you know, I just really don't need this.

What's wrong with you?

Right.

And, and realize it isn't, it isn't gonna change

yeah.

That's too bad.

But at least we have our amazing group

here within this To lean into.

so you said that you're getting out paddling every day.

Do you do other training outside of your actual sports?

Like, are you in the gym lifting or, on the bike?

Like, tell me a little bit more about that.

Have you ever sort of deviated from that thing, or, or, you know, of.

Just being in the water all the time.

Do you augment it?

What does your actual training schedule look like?

And has it shifted over the years?

Yeah, it, it has, one of my injuries about 10 years

ago, I rearranged my left knee

Rearranged.

That's a nice way of putting it.

I, I could have had surgery for it.

and they said, yeah, you know, you'll be off the water for six months

and it, it'll probably be better.

It'll probably be okay.

Well, I'm not gonna wait six months for a probable.

Uh, so I, I really can't run much anymore.

You know, I, I can do a day where I can do three miles, but I, I can't go

out and do five or six and I can't do three miles, a day or three in a row.

cause my knee just doesn't line up, right.

I mean, all you have to do is look at it and it's obviously at an off angle.

So when I surf again, that's, that's a little bit different.

that's a little bit more upper body and a different musculature than, than standup.

And in fact, when you look at, at pro surfers, if you don't think about it,

you, you expect to see these guys that are just, you know, massively built, you

know, kinda like the rock or whatever, but they're, they're not, I mean, you,

you look at, at Kelly Slater who's, you know, the greatest of all time, right?

Surfing and, and Kelly looks like a swimmer.

it's not that he, he isn't muscular.

It, it's just that he doesn't have high definition all over where you

look at, at a lot of really good standup paddlers and they're ripped.

Okay?

So I, I've got that going on and, and that kind of does different

muscles than paddling and then the wind surfing and wind foiling.

Definitely does different muscles, and when I surf and or wind foil,

I'm usually out for, you know, two or three hours at a time.

I don't do any more than that because what I've found is that if I go too

long in any given day, then I really do need to take a bit of a break

and I don't like to take breaks.

So I kind limit it to about two hours now,

just just the two, two to

three hours.

That's,

the two.

I'm being kinda sarcastic thinking of my like 30 to 60 minutes

that I'm putting in a few days a week.

yeah.

And, and then, you know, when I'm, when I paddle, so, you know,

I, I paddle for about 30 minutes with my warmup and cool downs.

but then every other day I'll come in and I'll do, uh, curls

and, and they're not heavy.

It's, it's 20 pounds, but I'll do 10 sets of 40, which is, you know, 400 curls.

And then I'll do two four minute plank sets.

I do a minute and a half of regular plank and then a minute of, of forearm plank,

and then another minute and a half of regular, and then I give it a little bit

of a break, and then five minutes later I come back and, and do it all over again.

And, and what I've found is, is that as I've gotten, as I continue

to get stronger, I, I used to have to give it like an hour or an hour

and a half after I paddled, before I went in and, and did those things.

Now I, I come in, take my wet, soaking wet bandana off and

just go and lay right into it.

Uh, and it just, just doesn't matter.

So, uh, the reason I don't do really heavy stuff is because I've been

broken a lot and, and when I do the heavy stuff, It flares everything up.

Just like I can't run heavily

anymore.

I can't, I can't lift heavily.

I mean, literally, for me, something as, as crazy as, as opening a

twist top jar will literally throw a tendon in my right elbow off.

And it, it takes me, you know, a bit of time to recover from that.

So when we talk about aging and, and think about aging, I mean, what, what happens

is, you know, people get these injuries and, and I've, I've had 'em all, you,

you, you get 'em and then you think, oh man, that, that just, that really bites.

I need to back off.

And you back off.

And

then your muscle atrophies and

Yes.

And

you

used to

do and then you, you back off again.

So it's this, this wicked, wicked cycle you get into, I mean, I, I literally

about 15 years ago, uh, thought that I was gonna have to, to stop.

Windsurfing and probably stopped surfing because I was in, in chronic pain.

And if you take, you know, pain at a level of 10 being maximum, I was at a,

a four to five every day, in my back and my shoulders, unless I tweaked it,

which would put me into a higher level.

I found a chiropractor who did something called biomechanics, and the first

thing he wanted to do was take X-rays.

Mm.

And this is, is going to sound impossible, but I guarantee you it's

true because it showed up on the x-rays.

if you take a line between my shoulders, a straight line across my spine

was pushed one inch to the right.

Wow,

that's, that's,

so significant.

Yeah.

it's no

wonder my right shoulder didn't, didn't work really well.

it's gonna happen.

I mean, stuff happens as you age, right?

And so you've, gotta find a way to not, not work through the pain,

but try to identify the root cause of the pain,

and try and find a way to solve it.

Drugs are not the answer.

Um, you know, PT is quite often the answer.

Uh, I mean, you may need to take drugs for a limited period

of time because something, you know, can't happen otherwise.

Surgeries are, are always risky.

I mean, I've, I have had, you know, two, they were Unavoidable,

I've got a bionic groin.

I've got 18 square inches of mesh in my groin.

when you fall out of the sky wrong on a sail board for from 15 or 20 feet up,

uh, and land on one foot, unbalanced it, it tends to put a strain on

places that like don't

Unnatural.

Yikes.

My gosh.

Well, that brings me a question because I've dealt with chronic pain before.

you know, I kind of beat on my body growing up.

I grew up.

Riding horses, doing hunter jumpers.

I've been thrown off horses.

I've, you know, fallen off, over jumps, whatever it landed on my head, landed

on my neck, um, broke a million things, snowboarding again, landing on my neck,

breaking collarbones, all kinds of things.

and at the time I think I was, I kept going because I was young and stupid.

I think that when we get older and we are a little wiser or we are

more cautious, and like you say, you know, you don't wanna lose that

time, but I think that you're right.

Like so many people just give up or because they've lost ground,

they get to discouraged and then they don't start up again.

What, what are the things that have kept you feeling excited?

And I don't necessarily like to use the word motivated because I think that

motivation ebbs and flows for all of us.

Even those of us who are like, you can extremely consistent

with your daily activity.

But I would say, you know, driven to keep going.

or that keep you, yeah.

Let's just say motivated to, to do the thing even if it's not the thing you love

the most or you have to dial it back.

share a little bit about that.

it's going to be a personal journey for everyone.

granted, I mean, right, right now, I, I don't work full time.

I don't have kids at home.

in theory I've got all the time in the world to, to rest and, and

recuperate, and that's one of the reasons why I can push pretty hard.

Every day.

But again, one of, one of the keys is, is that you've gotta get to the root cause.

And you know, with my back and shoulder problems, I knew

that something was messed up.

Uh, and I'd been to doctors and I didn't like what they

had to say, and I kept looking.

And, you know, finally, just by chance, I heard a presentation from this

chiropractor who was a triathlete, and he'd done a little bit of surfing.

and he talked about, you know, how he would do x-rays and stuff and, and

actually, you know, really try to dial into what was going on wrong with people.

And, you know, I, I had two discs that were only half the size of

what they were supposed to be.

And, and basically what he did is he, he, he put me on a series

of torture devices and racks

my God.

I can picture them now.

I know exactly which ones you're talking

and, and he, he stretched me out.

Because what happened is I got the injuries and then I pushed through

the pain and the injuries healed with really tighten, uh, ligament.

And so as ligament healed it, pulled everything out of alignment.

Right.

the more I pushed, the worse it got.

And so what he did is he stretched everything to get it back into alignment.

I mean, literally, as the discs in my back began to be relieved from the compression

they were under, I'd get my wife's car every, every couple of weeks and I'd have

to adjust the rear view mirror up because I was getting just a little bit taller.

That's incredible.

I gained half an inch.

Nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I, I thought it was just age,

That's

incredible.

the root cause thing is really what it comes down to, right?

I mean, I, for years with all of my injuries that I'd had gone

to, chiropractors, had body work, body, rolfing, you name it, but

the structural issues weren't necessarily being addressed.

So if you have those structural issues, it doesn't matter how many times you

get cracked or massaged, everything's gonna get pulled back out of alignment.

Exactly.

and you know, so I was going to this, the chiropractor for about three

years, and at, at that point, I.

I was really pretty much out of pain on a normal day-to-day standpoint.

my wife had been doing yoga for years, you know, three or four days

a week and, you know, extensively.

And she'd been trying to get me to do it for years and I kept going, nah.

Uh, and she said, well, you know, Kelly Slater does it and Jerry Lopez

does it, and all these, she's just throw out all these pro surfers

that we're, we're doing yoga.

And I go, Nat, well, so about five years ago for my birthday, she got

me a, a one month pass and she said, I don't care if you go or not, but

if, if you know me, you're probably too young to remember this, but

remember on the, uh, the old nickels, they, they had the buffalo on 'em.

They, yeah, well, I'm so tight with a nickel, I can squeeze,

the shit out of the buffalo.

So there was, there was no way.

I was gonna let that pass go to

waste.

And,

She was a smart woman.

She knew that,

well, she she did.

So, you know, I've been doing it for about two weeks and, and then I went

surfing and everybody has a good day or a great day once in a while.

A a day that's just really different.

And, and so I, I went and I, I blew up and I'm going, oh my gosh, what just happened?

and then I went back again and, and I kept doing the yoga.

And then I, I went back again and, you know, two weeks later

I surfed again, the same thing.

It's like I'm, I'm surfing 20 years younger.

And, and the way I would describe it is that all of a sudden, Rather than

my body being on a two foot spring that was completely compressed.

My body was on a six foot spring.

That was going fully up and fully down.

Well, again, it's, it's this whole idea of the way the tendons and ligaments

and bone and musculature all work.

And what happened is this, this fairly gentle yoga, on top of the work that,

that the chiropractor had done and actually relieved all of the, built

up stresses throughout my whole, system of tendons and ligaments and,

and the way all that stuff works.

Which gets into another interesting part on aging that we'll cover.

I.

A little bit.

So to make a really short story, long as I just did, you, you've

gotta find the root cause and, you know, find a good physical therapist.

if you're in pain or if, if you've got limited mobility,

find something you can do.

maybe it's walking.

Walking is absolutely awesome.

We were built to walk.

Yes.

I push that all the time.

Yeah.

maybe you can't do that, because it, it's too much

pain on your lower extremities.

Uh, you can possibly get into a pool and do pool based exercise and

it's still doing the same thing.

It's, it's still working the muscle.

And, and that's the really key thing because what we find as we get into

aging is that within the muscle, there's something called mitochondria.

And, and each one of our cells, Has mitochondria, forgiven,

really healthy person for a muscle cell, a single muscle cell.

You might to have, you might have one to 2000 of these little

mitochondria buddies in there.

A heart maybe three to 4,000.

The brain has upwards of 5,000.

And we used to think that the mitochondria did nothing more than just create energy.

You know, they convert the glucose to energy.

and off we go.

Now what we know is that mitochondria are, hugely responsible for immune function.

And so, if you have mitochondrial dysfunction or if you have a

lack of mitochondria, you've got bad immune function

Bad function overall, I would

argue,

overall to the extent where a really good thing to remember is that

muscle is the currency of longevity.

Yes.

Amen.

So, find a way to work through the pain, not work through it,

that, I can deal with it, but find a way to get to the root cause, uh, and then

find a way to be able to get moving again.

you've done such a good job in your blogs and stuff on nutrition.

we typically don't eat right.

Uh, we certainly eat differently now than we did even when I was a kid growing

up because of the way that that foods

are

available and, and, hey, I, I understand it.

I mean, I, I was the guy, I mean, I did the labeling, I developed the

Yeah.

So you've seen this trajectory

over the years

of how things have

I've seen it.

I, I I followed the science.

I work for a meat snack company.

I specifically made meat snacks, that kept this, fat, bad carb good concept in mind.

And that is absolutely catastrophic science for our

society.

you've seen the graphs, I've seen the graphs, I've, I've got presentations full

of the graphs that show that in 1976, all of a sudden something absolutely grotesque

began to happen to US health span,

Yeah,

and now it's worldwide.

It's not just us.

We've imported this disaster everywhere.

yeah.

It's true.

And really quick, I wanna put a pin in that and let's,

I love the word health span.

Tell us what you.

Mean by health span, because I think that people think of, you

know, lifespan or longevity.

But when we talk about health span, we're actually talking about aging well, right?

Like enjoying each state of your life, feeling good and vibrant and being

able to move in each stage of life.

Is that how you see that term?

E exactly.

Perfectly stated.

When, when we look at the data, uh, and it used to be us now, it's now it's

worldwide, lifespan, you know, roughly in the US it's, it's, it was 78 years now.

Now it's 76, uh, biggest drop in a century in the last two years.

And it's not just covid, it's a combination of many things.

We'll talk about some of that later.

but basically if, if you take that 78 lifespan, Health span is a difference

between great robust health, I'm feeling good and a downward spiral.

And generally, you know, we're, we're thinking statistically it

looks like that spiral is about 10 years before end of life.

Hmm.

Yeah, that makes for a not fun.

10 years,

last

not so fun.

10 years.

So, yeah.

So your age cohort, which is another really interesting thing.

there was a study that came out just last year and it was

called the birth Cohort Effect.

what the study found, and it was a mata analysis, tens of thousands of people.

And what it found is that cancer rates are statistically exploding with every

10 year difference in birth cohort.

An example, 30 to 40 year olds have statistically much higher rates of

cancer than 40 to 50 year olds had when they were 10 years younger.

And it's it's exponential

and it's worse in the US but it's, it's a first world problem.

you know, so what causes that?

Well, I mean, what, what causes it is, is we begin to, think about how different,

our lives are and our environment is.

Then it was, 30 years ago when we were younger or our parents'

age, or our grandparents' age.

And, you know, at, at this point, I almost want to, to back up not

30, 40, 50, 60 years old, but, but maybe go back about 2 billion years.

Yeah, which is a ways, but I think it's a good thing to do

because I think that we need to kind of look at the drastic difference between

how our ancient ancestors would've, the environment, the terrain, so to speak,

that they would have lived in what our bodies would've evolved to deal with,

or the environment we would've been.

Surviving in versus now with all the modern, conveniences.

I love that Darren Lene calls 'em fatal conveniences.

Um, but aspects of our modern world that make life easier, they're

actually making us sicker and they're shortening our lifespans.

And I love that you sent me an actual, timeline too, where you have mapped

this all out, like basically like the history of Man on Earth and, and

you know, how things have changed.

so yeah, give us a little, you know, kind of encapsulated view of that.

'cause I think it's really important for people to understand.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So if we, if we go back to the very beginnings of life, I mean, obviously

we don't, we don't know exactly.

We, we can't label a culprit, but it was a single celled organism that's called

Luca last, universal common ancestor,

Luca.

Okay.

So Luca was either r n a or d n a based.

It, you know, nobody knows for sure.

Uh, d n A is is what we think of as contending the genetic code.

R n a is sort of the messenger boy, and a really good way to think of d n a and r n

a is that d n a is like read only memory.

R n A is random access memory.

They're held on chromosomes.

Chromosomes are like our hard drives and it's held within each cell.

Well, the interesting thing is, is when you look at, at each cell and when you,

when you think about life, you know, there's, there's really four definitions

of, of life, of a living organism.

One, it's got a uniform in tech body.

Every single cell organism does two.

It receives inputs and has metabolic processes that react to them.

Three, based on those metabolic processes and the inputs it receives,

it has outputs, it sends out signals, and four, it self replicates.

So the difference between a bacteria and a virus is that a virus isn't

alive because can't self-replicate.

It's gotta invade one of our cells and use our cells as, as a pirate.

So the reality, when you think about, you know what, we really are.

Is again, each one of our cells is alive in sentient.

We've got 30 trillion of them that's 30 with 12 zeros behind it to make that work.

There's another 70 trillion microbial cells within us.

We have more bacterial d n a in us than our own human.

D n a.

A really cute way to look at it that's not necessarily untrue is that we

are nothing more than a nice walking habitat for a big pile of bacteria.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like those jellyfish that you see, they're not

one jellyfish.

They're actually a colony of

different

Yeah.

So for, for me to just talk, or for me to stretch out my arm an exclamation,

I've literally gotta activate somewhere in the area of a hundred trillion

sentient organisms to do that.

The mind boggles.

We think we control it all.

We don't,

we Humans are arrogant, aren't we?

yeah, we are.

70% of our metabolism is done, autonomously.

the reason it's done autonomously is because our cells don't trust us.

They don't believe we'll do it.

Right.

And a really good trick to prove that to yourself is hold your breath

and let me know how long that takes.

Because at some point your cell is gonna take over and say, Hey, stupid.

Knock, knock.

Big breath.

Okay, so, um, The other, the other thing about our, our cells and, life

and aging and everything else is, is that again, this, this goes back,

billions of years from a life standpoint, from the standpoint of, of homo

sapiens, it's, it's one to 2 million depending upon how you look at it.

Uh, so our cells have this, tremendous buildup of information on how to live.

And when we think about aging, you know, there's a big difference

between how we age and why we age.

Mm.

is

really simple.

We age because life past procreation a benefit to nature.

Our cells literally are programmed to take us out because it is nature's

first order of conservation to remove a population that can no longer

propagate because gene pool propagation.

Is the reason for all life.

Mm-hmm.

It's that brutally simple.

Yep.

So we're, we're programmed to self-destruct.

Yep.

we self-destructed at, at a different rate now than all

other land-based mammals because of something called the grandmother effect.

What happens is that grandmothers help their daughters have more progeny.

And so if you think back about 50,000 years ago when this this first began

to be noticed, what happens with, with natural selection as you have, you

know, this, this nice older lady and her daughter has more kids and then

they have more kids and her older lady, genes get passed on to the daughters.

Then they get passed on to the sons and then they have more people

that get older and they pass it on.

So, so we developed, uh, disability to live longer, about 50,000 years ago.

And we know this because there's a thing called Paleo pathology.

Uh, and the interesting thing is, is that, you know, again, with this, this

whole concept of getting older and how everything works is that during the

Paleolithic period, stone Age, which ended about 10 to 12,000 years ago, and this

is the whole again, the whole concept of, of paleo eating and, and paleo, this

paleo that, uh, those people were bigger.

Hmm.

They were bigger than what came after in the Neolithic.

Uh, in fact, on average in the Fertile Crescent in the Pacific, in the, um, in

the ancient near East, uh, where most of these bones are found, it was only in

the last 40 or 50 years when the average height regained that of the paleo years.

Hmm.

Yeah, they, yeah.

Well, Everything was different about 'em, and they were hunter gatherers, you

know, for them to be in a group of over a hundred, a 125 people was rare because

that type of, of living couldn't support

Right.

So they, they ate on the fly, they ate berries, nuts.

There really wasn't a whole lot of farming going on.

The farming started with the neolithic period about 10,000 years ago, and

what happened is, again, with the study of bones, what we found is that

the cause of death began to change.

So in the stone age, the typical cause of death was occupational.

It was childbirth injury from accident or warfare.

In the neolithic period, birth still was high, but it was disease.

What happened is as we began farming and living in clustered

communities, The disease started.

That's literally the price of civilization.

Wow.

And that's the beginning of, of this change of,

of how we got to where we are now.

Because what's, what's happened is we've gone from a point where had an okay food

source, but we had to work to get it to the point now where we don't have to work,

we don't have to move to do anything.

We can spend our whole lives doing what you and I are doing right now.

We don't have to leave these screens.

It is a totally, completely alien environment that our

bodies were not designed for.

a really interesting thing, and I was, looking it up, the other day is

in rural Africa, the average woman still has to walk four miles a day.

They walk two miles to get their water.

They walk two miles back.

When they walk back, they're carrying 40 pounds of water.

Um,

I mean, we can't even fathom that

and everything we've done, and this goes back five minutes to,

you know, when you began this kind of monologue, everything we've done to make

life easier has made it more disruptive to our genes because none of this

is the way we were designed to live.

Screens not so bueno

Light at night, not so bueno.

Other than firelight, right.

other than file, well, yeah.

That's not

really, you know.

orange hue, it says all blue lights shining in her eyes.

You've got good information on your blog, a about, circadian rhythms.

Okay?

And we're completely disrupting our ci circadian rhythms with all of this blue

light at night.

in fact, uh, a guy in 2017 got a Nobel Prize for discovering that almost every

single one of our cells is governed by its own unique circadian rhythm.

Isn't that so fascinating?

So, you know, getting back to this idea of, bright blue light

during the day, which, makes us secrete serotonin, which is our daily upper,

and this, this amber firelight at night, which does melatonin, which is our downer.

That's the way we're supposed to live.

And oh, by the way, when you look at what melatonin really

does, it's not just for sleep.

It's massively impacting the immune function.

Yeah.

Brain detoxification and Yeah.

So much.

So we, we've got that going on.

We've, we've got the fact that we're not moving.

We've got the fact that our food supply is corrupted.

We've got the fact that we've screwed up our circadian rhythms.

You've also got good information on detox.

there was a landmark study done a couple of years ago where they tested 400 people

for chemical toxins and found the average person had around a hundred different

manmade toxins stored in their fat.

Yeah.

Have you ever seen those shows like Dr.

Pimple Popper, you know what I'm talking about, where they remove some

like giant like cyst or something

from these people's?

And I always, Bruce am like so desperate for them to find some sort of toxicology

lab where they could go in and test what's in that cyst, in that fat, because we

do sequester toxins in our fat cells.

And so always curious like what would they find, what would be there?

But you're right, and, and because you're in food science, and you know, I've harped

on this a lot, but I think it's always, it always bears repeating because, well,

organic food is certainly not perfect.

I do believe that minimizing our exposure to all of these man-made

chemicals as much as we can is a crucial piece to, preserving that health span.

And even just enjoying where we're at right now in whatever stage of life that

is just taking good care of our bodies.

so as someone with a food science, Mind and background, what are the biggest,

most detrimental shifts that you've seen as far as what's being used in

the food supply now that wasn't maybe, you know, even 20, 30 years ago?

I mean, I talk a lot about, with my clients, especially in my, you know,

detox programs and things about obesogens and endocrine disrupting chemicals.

you know, there's a lot of lawsuits out there now against Monsanto over

glyphosate or Roundup, which, you know, the World Health Organization

has declared a probable carcinogen.

I mean, there's so many of these things.

So from your perspective, what do you think the biggest, most

detrimental shifts have been there?

Yeah, that's a tough one.

Especially, I mean, even something as simple as, as drinking water,

we don't, we really don't know what, what's in our water anymore.

And, you know, the whole idea of is it fluoridated?

You know, do we have that in there?

And if it is, what does that cause?

we all kind of have a basic understanding now that excess sugar is bad.

and that's, that's pretty common knowledge.

there's becoming greater knowledge about the fact that, fat isn't really bad.

You know, fat's not this evil thing.

We thought it was for a long time.

I'll be honest, until 10 years ago, I wouldn't do butter.

I'd be really careful about any saturated fat because I thought

that saturated fat was the devil.

Oh, and doctors will still tell you that if you have high

cholesterol or you have anything, you know, heart disease related or concerns,

that's the first thing that they tell you.

Avoid the

Yeah.

fats.

So, the problem with, with the fat is this sleeper

idea of, essential fatty acids.

Okay?

So there are essential omega six fatty acids and there are

essential omega three fatty acids.

They do two different things.

The omega six essentials, foster inflammation, supposed to,

Yep.

the omega threes are anti-inflammatory.

They're supposed to be.

The problem is, is is that with, again, this disastrous, you know,

fat, bad carb, good thing, and let's eat heart healthy oils.

What happened is we went from, a, an ancestral ratio of kind of like

one part, omega three to maybe.

Four parts.

Omega four, which, which kind of kept inflammation, you know, pro-inflammatory

stuff, anti-inflammatory stuff, imbalance to the standard American

diet, which is upwards of one to 21 part omega, three to 20 parts, omega six.

That causes masses massive, massive inflammation.

And the problem is, is that you don't know it.

you have no idea.

everybody's got bank accounts.

Everybody knows what it's like to draw down on their accounts.

And you know, you, you look it up online, you think, oh, well I've

got this, that, or the other.

I'm cool that the problem with, this, inflammation from the omega sixes

is you have no idea what's going on.

You have no idea what's happening to you with it.

And what most people are doing is they're massively drawing

down again, immune function.

on this overconsumption of omega sixes with her immune function

already wiped out by dysfunction.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, and it, it's just again, this, this spiral that goes on and on.

also, you know, one other thing going on with, with diet,

and that is micronutrients.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, what's a micronutrient?

Well, we know that that vitamins are micronutrients and we need to take them.

And, uh, some of us are aware that, you know, there's, there's all

of these, um, minerals, you know, potassium, oh, the bad sodium, the bad

chloride, uh, calcium, uh, magnesium.

You know, what most people don't realize is, is that other than sodium

and chloride, most of us are grossly deficient in all of these minerals and.

Again, you, you don't run right?

a really curious thing is, is that with sodium and potassium, it's

not so much too much sodium, it's the absolute lack of potassium.

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

One of the, you know, the nutrition labeling was, was a good thing.

And I was, I was involved, uh, from the get go in that I was involved in, working

with them on stuff that made sense and stuff that, that didn't make sense.

And with the updated nutrition labeling of about two or three years ago, uh,

you'll see that vitamin D and potassium all of a sudden went on the label.

And you'll notice that it's 0, 0 0 0 0 0 0.

Well, if, if these are essential nutrients and it's always zero, how do you get 'em?

so that, the problem with sodium and potassium again, is, is that

the balance is, is all whacked out.

Sodium's.

Not necessarily bad.

In fact, sodium's necessary.

Guess what?

Can cause high blood pressure?

Low sodium.

Shocker.

But you told

me that it was bad for me.

it's the opposite.

It's bad if you don't get potassium.

Oh, well I got plenty of potassium.

I eat a banana.

Yeah.

How many do you eat?

I had a banana a day.

One 10th of the r d A is in that single banana.

It's a fraction of what you need.

I wanna back up just a little bit, Bruce.

Hold, hold that thought.

Where you're at.

Let's, let's put a pin in that, 'cause I wanna come back to that, but, but I

wanna go back 'cause you had mentioned that shift in 1976, and what I think you

were getting at is, is that shift where, There was some bad science done that

shifted kind of this focus onto fats as being the bad guy, the, the enemy when it

came to cardiovascular health, et cetera.

When that happened, we started to again, like you said, move away from these

natural, like ancestral sources of fat, you know, cooking with tallow, which is

beef fat or maybe, you know, rendered duck fat or bacon fat, pork fat, whatever.

full fat cream, milk, yogurt, things like that.

And instead we shifted to the canola oils.

These heavily processed what we call industrialized quote

unquote vegetable oils.

Right?

Which are those ultra high Omega six.

And I bring this up because people should know, you know, one of the reasons that.

We see dramatic shifts in our health when we start cooking at home, if we're

using the right fats to cook with at home instead of eating out all the time.

Is that in a restaurant setting or any kind of commercial setting?

They're typically using, you know, vast quantities of these industrialized

oils, vegetable oils, seed oils that are highly inflammatory.

Is that, is that correct?

And that's what's kind of throwing this ratio off of our omegas.

Yeah.

And, read your food labels.

Okay.

and what you'll find is, is that on just about any processed foods,

sometimes if, if you get something that's, that's organic, like we use,

the organic avocado Mayo which is okay.

forget the guy's name, but he is, he's, you know,

famous and, yeah.

Primal Kitchen.

He's, he's famous and

holistic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There you go.

and what you'll see is, is that it's all these, as you said, industrial seed oils.

Those are all omega six, Canola's got a little bit of omega three, but most of

them have zero omega three, all omega six.

And so where do the omega threes come from?

Well, they come from cold water, fish, actually, you know, little

bit of, you know, flax seed, a couple of seeds here and there.

It's actually a little bit hard to find these days, so I recommend

supplementing with omega threes

just to make

sure you're, just, to make sure you're getting 'em.

There's also, and this one takes a lot of work and Jeannie, that's, it's something

you probably do for your clients.

There's also a calculator called the Chronometer,

and

what we use.

All my clients get access to Chron meter.

Mm-hmm.

Or Chrome.

Ex.

Excellent.

Yeah.

And it is, it's

absolutely, it's stunning when, when you do that, my wife Pat

and I, I mean, we pretty good.

I'll do all the inputs and stuff and I'll, I'll look at it, uh, before I,

I add the supplements and I mean, this is, this is crazy, but, I only get

about 30% of the r d a for potassium, uh, a little bit of from my banana.

I get it in my coffee and I get it in my merlott wine.

And other than that, and you know, if you're, if you're active, I mean, if you

sweat a lot and, and I do, you're just blowing those electrolytes out and, and

that r d a, that doesn't mean squat.

That's probably, you know, a.

50% or more, less than what you really need.

exactly.

right now I take, about twice the r d A of magnesium,

And, and I have to, because unless I supplement with magnesium and

potassium and a little bit of sodium, I get massive cramping at night.

Yeah, I think most of us don't get enough magnesium, and

that is especially true for women.

And I think that that is one of the problems with a lot of these, you

know, chemicals that we're spraying crops with and things, and we're not

doing regenerative farming, which means we're not resting soils in

between crops or rotating crops the way that indigenous people typically do.

So we're depleting our soils of all of these incredible minerals and

micronutrients that are so crucial.

For our optimal health.

Right?

And then if you include other chemicals that are disrupting, you

know, enzymatic processes and things, it makes the problem even worse.

And so I think that it can help to supplement, even if we are eating plenty

of fresh, real foods, because you know, unless you're growing your own crops

or your own vegetables and things in your yard with really rich soil and

you're resting that soil and you know, rotating it or buying your food from a

farm that does that, I mean, how many of those even exist in this country?

We're just simply not getting the level of those micronutrients in our foods

that should be naturally occurring.

Would you agree with that?

Absolutely correct.

we're so as a society focused on, on body image, and for women it's so much, so

much more difficult because again, from an ancestral standpoint, for a woman, I mean,

your cells know that the guy is gonna go out and he is going, gonna go out on this

bison hunt, but then, you know what, oh, hey, we, we found some barley beer or

something, and we're about a week late.

You know that you're stuck by yourself and, and so your cells.

Look at starvation as being your primary threat, and you are

absolutely programmed to protect your progeny and your childbearing

organs, which is why, you know, women tend to be a little bit fatter.

I never understood why my wife was so cold.

She's got a jacket on when I'm running around without a shirt on.

Well, what it is, is, is literally women are wired differently with

the blood vessels, more internal to, again, protect the childbearing organs.

Right.

And, and so you get this, this situation where, you're

just, you know, kind of built to lock on and store calories.

Mm-hmm.

you know, I'm, I'm, I'm looking this up and I thought,

well, the National Bariatric Society, that would be, A good place to

look and see what they have to say.

And according to the National Bariatric Society, and I don't know

who you can get that's more credible than that, regarding weight loss.

They said one of the primary reasons for overeating and binge

eating is a lack of micronutrients.

Your body is starving for nutrition and all of these hunger pangs you have are

to try to into you what you're missing.

And not the empty

I, and I tell people, that's one of the things I say over and

over, probably more than anything else.

Overeating is not your issue.

You're not eating enough of the right foods.

Yes,

enough of the right foods that are stimulating

that leptin, which tells your brain like, I'm full and satiated.

that's stimulated by, by real food that's nutrient dense.

All of this empty calorie food is stimulating or ghrelin if we wanna,

you know, call it the hunger hormone, just for ease of explanation, you

know, that's saying, no, I'm not getting what I really need here.

Keep eating, keep feeding me.

Give me something I really need.

And you know, I always use the, the donut and chicken breast comparison because

the calories are roughly the same as a, you know, standard glazed donut and a

what, four to six ounce chicken breast,

Yeah.

roughly what?

Two 50 calories.

But the actual makeup of those foods is so drastically different.

And the chemical reactions, everything that happens in your body when you ingest

those foods is drastically different.

I know plenty of people who could easily down four or five donuts.

You couldn't eat four or five chicken breasts.

Most people could not.

Right.

I certainly couldn't, eating more than like one and a half would

be a serious challenge for me.

But you could have several donuts before your brain would actually be like, whoa.

You'd probably feel sick before you actually felt full and satiated.

Well, you've outlined the addictive process and, and again,

that that is literally by cellular design, uh, because the body expects

to go through periods of starvation.

it says, this is gonna keep me from starving, there it is.

I'm gonna lock onto it.

Yeah.

Our cells are hardwired for survival, not aesthetics,

according to our modern standards.

that's, that's absolutely correct.

Yeah.

We, we have to keep thinking back to the fact that we're literally, paleo.

We're, we're cave people that are living in an alien environment.

Yeah.

but as you explained in your timeline, like our, you know, quote,

modern society, like how many decades are we even really talking about that?

It's, it's a tiny blip on the map when we're talking about the time

of just humans being alive, right.

In the, the grand scheme of things.

This is all very new to us.

we're just not adapted for it.

Yeah, I mean we, we think of, of history and pre-history

and, and the advent of writing to be this, this big dividing line.

And it was so far back when, when we look at percentage wise, uh, what

it is from the standpoint of just homo sapiens, not genus homo, but

just homo sapiens, it's less than 2%

of our

time that we've been able to write.

Wow.

Less than 2%.

That's

staggering to think about.

So, so that's how new all of this is.

Which is incredible.

I mean, I think it really puts things into perspective when we can kind of

go, oh wait, and I, you know, I always try and think along those lines too,

that, you know, do I think everyone has to eat really strictly paleo

and never touch a grain or a legume?

No.

But I think that most of the time, in most ways, if we can kind of think

back and go, wait a minute, let's just simplify this all and get back to.

I think fasting, I think is a, is a good example of this.

You know, everyone's into the intermittent fasting right now,

and essentially all they're doing is skipping breakfast every day.

Well, that's probably not how it would've gone with our paleolithic ancestors.

It would've probably been much more truly intermittent.

Meaning, kind of more random.

You know, we would've had feast times when food was more available and

then we would've had times of, yes, probably famine or just having, you

know, less, or eating less frequently.

There would be times when we'd eat more regularly and it would be a

little bit more mixed up and random.

It wouldn't just be like, well, I'm just not gonna eat breakfast every single day.

Especially for women.

Like, it's very different.

so I always tell people, you know, kind of, and I try to think for myself,

well, how would that have actually looked in that time, that environment?

Like how would we have, have done this?

There may have been times where like, Hey, dinner's not available,

or maybe lunch wasn't at some point, or maybe for breakfast wasn't, maybe

they didn't even have a three meal a day kinda standard like we do now.

I think it's kind of comical when people get really dogmatic about these, you

know, protocols and trends and fads.

which is a theme that I come back to often, especially in this podcast, is

like, try to be a critical thinker.

and think of yourself, in this context that you and I are talking about, who

you are as a homo sapien and what your body is actually, how it's designed,

how it's supposed to interact with its environment, acknowledging the

differences of our current environment, and then how can we actually best care

for ourselves or behave, eat, move, et cetera, in the ways that our body

is actually designed to do versus.

what sort of the standards are for, for life right now.

so what would you say to that, Bruce?

As far as like, how can we use nutrition and movement specifically

to sort of counteract all of these contradictions that we have in

our, modern lifestyle and culture?

Yeah.

So, when we think about energy storage, we store energy as

carbohydrate it's called glycogen.

Glucose is turned into glycogen, and we store it as fat.

and they really have two different functions in the body.

they both are used to keep the body going, et cetera, et cetera.

But, but the carbohydrate storage is really best for, for peak.

So if you're gonna sprint, that's when you wanna be able to pull

out the carbohydrate storage.

If you're going from marathon, that's when you wanna be able to use the fat storage.

a typical person can store maybe 1500 calories of glycogen.

and you know, when I, when I paddle, I'm, I'm burning, you know, 10 to 15

calories a minute, so I can go maybe, maybe a hundred, you know, hour and a

half or so before I've literally burned all the sugar storage outta my body.

Uh, I probably, well, I know I can't grow that far.

And that's one of the problems with getting a little bit older is, is

nothing works quite the same way it used to, but I'm, I'm 15 to 17% body fat.

And when I calculate that out, so from a glycogen storage, I've got

maybe a thousand to 1500 calories.

If, if I convert my 15% body fat into the number of days, I can go based on fat.

I can go for a month.

Hmm.

And if you look at me, you think that guy's

got no fat on him whatsoever.

so the problem we've got is that with our eating patterns, if we eat and

two hours later we eat and two hours later we eat, well, first of all, the

body thinks that's really good, okay?

Because starvation is right around the corner and I'm gonna load up.

But when you continue to do it day after day, week after week, month after

month, what happens is the body says, well, something new going on here.

And, and I think this is going to be really, really serious.

So what it does is it turns off the fat burning switch and, and so you have to

eat every 12 hours and you're, you're kind of beginning to balloon a little

bit because you're, converting it to fat, but your body won't let you use it.

So one of the key ways to get back into it is this idea of, of intermittent fasting

and, and sort of the diet that you're on.

I mean, we, we don't really do paleo.

We do kind of Mediterranean,

uh, frankly, we're, we're pretty careful about it, but, but not

crazy about it.

But from the standpoint of managing fat burning, we do intermittent fasting.

We do it, you know, kind of twice a week maybe.

Uh, I've got something going on this morning, so, yeah,

I'm, I'm just gonna wait.

You know, I finished dinner at six or seven o'clock at night, and.

I'm gonna wait till noon to eat.

It's, it's not a hard and fast thing.

And, and the reality is, is if if I go 18 hours, I'm not hungry.

and what that means is I've still got the ability to turn

that switch on to burn fat,

Yeah.

That metabolic flexibility.

metabolic flexibility.

Yeah.

And, and so many of us have, have lost it.

And, and again, the way you lose lose it is by feeding, feeding,

feeding, feeding, feeding.

So you, you've gotta, you've got to break the cycle and it's not pleasant.

Yeah.

it's not hard to do.

you just have to be willing to go a little bit hungry for a while.

And again, it's, I don't recommend intermittent fasting

exactly the same thing every day.

I think that's absolutely wrong.

but if you can't get it, your fat reserves, again, you've gotta,

you've gotta find a way to break it.

No diet.

You try.

Is ever gonna work?

Yeah, you might shed a few pounds here and there, but it's gonna come right back.

Same idea as, as you know, not only waiting for a while in the

morning and, and having, you know, kinda like a, an 18 hour break,

but eating dinner and then going to bed before your stomach is emptied.

That again, that tells your body, this food needs to be stored.

Baby.

Don't, don't let any of this go, convert all this.

So, so, gosh, at least two hours after you eat, before

you go to bed, three is better.

You know, let it, let it settle.

Go to bed on an empty stinking stomach.

I, I talk often about how your body is actually doing

a lot of hard work during sleep.

I mean, you're doing detoxification, your cell renewal, muscle repair and recovery.

Like, there's so much going on and if your body's trying to digest and devoting all

these resources to digestion, you just don't get the level of, of quality sleep.

I mean, I can see it on my aura ring.

If I eat too late in the evening, I can see that I'm not getting

the same amount of deep sleep.

you know, I don't wake, wake up feeling as refreshed and rested if I do that.

And like you say, it's just the worst thing that you can do

metabolically or, for fat storage.

I, I don't know if this is true, but I've always heard that sumo wrestlers,

that that's how they get to be an enormous size is they will, you know,

eat these massive meals and then sleep.

easy to believe.

Yeah.

and you know, 10% of our daily calic burn is digestion.

Right.

Yeah.

I'm glad to hear you say that I feel gratified

because I think a lot of people are just like, oh, no, no, no.

Fasting's the way and there's so much science behind it.

And it's like, well, yes, but you know, one of the things that I like

to highlight in this show is the difference between men and women.

And as you pointed out before, we have a very different machine.

And what I see with many clients when they come in is that if they're doing

that fasting period, they're skipping breakfast, they maybe don't eat till noon.

They are so ravenously hungry.

By the time that they do eat that they are overeating in those

subsequent meals, which is another stressor on your body, right?

Then they end up eating.

Either too late or, or so much at dinner that it's just, you

know, the body has this huge uphill climb to digest all of it.

Um, and it's kind of working against them.

they're not getting the sleep, and then when they're not getting good

quality sleep, guess what the appetite and cravings are through the roof.

I mean, it just doesn't, I've found that often women do better by, yeah, you

can do a restricted feeding window, but doing it a little more randomly and maybe

stopping eating earlier in the evening, but having something at, at breakfast,

maybe within, you know, two hours or so of waking, versus just waiting till later

and later in the day to eat something.

And then they're often having, you know, coffee on the empty stomach,

which is, again, so stressful.

Um, hormonally for them.

It's not great for the blood sugar regulation.

It's all these things.

So, yeah, I think that that's a, a good.

Thing to point out.

so we were talking about mitochondrial function and mitochondria like is sort

of a new buzzword on the scene, but those of us who've worked in, health and for

you, the scientific community, we've known for a long time how, you know, the

crucial importance of these cool little, what we used to be told, or described

as in science classes, the, the power, plant or the powerhouse of the cell?

Um, yeah, the powerhouse of the cell.

And like you said, so many people, especially women, are focused on

just eating because they want to be thinner or lose weight versus eating

for optimal mitochondrial function.

and truly feeding our cells so that we're supporting our immune function.

Circle back a little bit to the, the muscle piece, because obviously

the mitochondria are in a pretty high concentration in muscle cells.

And so when we're talking about not anti-aging, when we're talking about

aging, well, when we're talking about maintaining, brain health, Physical

functionality, vibrancy of life in every stage as we get older, as you're such

a great example of how can we put our muscle to work for us versus, that kind

of mindset of eat less, exercise more.

well, how are we exercising?

How are we nourishing ourselves?

just talk a little bit about the, you know, kind of the function

of increasing muscle, maintaining muscle mass as an important factor

for caring for ourselves as we age.

Yeah.

So the, the body as, we keep talking about is, is really sneaky, okay?

it doesn't want to give up calories.

if you stop using a muscle, uh, like you put somebody in a cast and,

and they'll lose 25, 30% of that muscle size in three or four weeks.

And the reason why is the body says, well, uh, it's not getting used.

I'm gonna shut the calories off to that and save those calories.

Yeah, it's efficiency.

That's why the atrophy.

But the same thing happens when you start using it again, it grows, but if

you want it to grow and, and as muscle grows, you also get more mitochondria in

that development for muscle to grow you, you've gotta give it the right stuff, you

know, you've gotta water it correctly.

And one of the things that many people, and I'm guessing many, many women

are deficient in is protein intake.

Yep.

we tend to think, well it's, you know, I get a little bit here, a

little bit there, you know, I'm a, a vegan and, and that's good and I'm not really

wanting to go out and, and knock that.

But the, the problem is, is, that, you've gotta get an

appropriate amount of amino acids.

To grow the muscle, you've gotta get an appropriate amount of amino acids

to really keep everything together.

our fascial system, which is the sort of, you know, weird little connective

tissue that surrounds every muscle fiber and every muscle bundle.

When we're three weeks of age, our body is more fascia than anything else.

we develop underneath the fascia.

And it's this, this collagen protein that, that's made of

bone tendon, ligament fascia.

It's, it's all collagen and yeah, it's true.

You can, you can take amino acids and, and you can get enough glycine

in particular to, to rebuild all of this, to help with that.

But you've gotta get it.

Okay.

And if you're not eating appropriate protein, it's not gonna happen.

Another, problem with, with aging.

Is, statistically this is, this is correct, individually it isn't, but

figure that you lose 70% of all your life abilities by the time you're 70.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, and, and I've got, I've got graphs.

I've got graphs that show all of that.

you talk about sarcopenia, that's age related muscle loss.

it happens for connective tissue muscle.

It happens for heart muscle, it happens for collagen.

the melatonin, 70% loss by the time you're 80 or 90 stem cells, by the time

you're 80 stem cells, which are the general contractors of the body, which

rebuild everything, which is why it takes us so long to recover from an injury.

99.5% of the stem cells are gone by the time you're 80 years old.

when you look at, at every facet, it, it kind of runs that way.

Now it doesn't have.

To happen quite like that.

You can slow it down.

And one of the things that, praise God I've been able to do and

my wife has been able to do, is we've been able to slow that down.

Uh, part of it is this, this cognition that we have to move.

part of it is she's been very careful about her diet, which she feeds me.

Uh, her mom is 92 living alone, still growing strong.

we're afraid that she's gonna outlive us all.

Uh, but she was always very, very careful about her diet and, really

limited the processed foods.

And, and now she's on a protein kick.

Bruce, I, you know, I need more protein.

What do I do?

How do tell me what to take.

How do we do this?

So, you know, we're, we're kind of giving her ideas on, on how to up the protein.

Whey protein is, is great.

Whey protein has leucine in it.

Leucine is probably the most essential amino acid for, uh, for muscle building.

I take a little bit of leucine every day.

My wife takes a little bit of leucine every day.

And again, glycine for collagen and, and we take collagen supplements.

the other problem with, with protein is, and again, if, if you're working with

your, your clientele on chronometer, uh, you'll have a really good idea of

this, but it's hard to spread it out.

So what we've learned is that you're not going to assimilate much more than 30

grams of protein at any one given sitting.

Okay.

And when I look at, at my protein needs, for me to be putting on muscle,

I need about 150 grams of protein a day.

It is per pound of body weight that you're

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, well, yeah.

So, but if I can only assimilate 30 grams at any one sitting, I mean,

how am I gonna get that much protein?

Yeah.

And I've heard some argument about that too, whether we can or we can't.

It's interesting.

Um, Dr.

Gabrielle Lyon talks about that a lot.

I'm curious to learn more along those lines of, protein

utilization, assimilation.

Um, but yeah, and, and I think too, one question I ask here is, you know, what

are some really common myths about aging?

And I think that one of them is that we don't need as much

protein when in fact we need more.

yes, absolutely.

We absolutely need more protein when we age.

And again, it's, it's because, our ability.

to take all of these raw materials, you know, keeping in mind that, you know,

you, you eat the cow, right, and you, you eat it, and it gets broken down into

all these itty bitty little components.

And then within each cell it, it reassembles it as needed.

You know, we talked about our 30 trillion cells.

You know what these things are little factories.

our cells do somewhere between a hundred thousand and 1 million

chemical reactions per second.

incredible.

know, we, we talked a little bit about, you know, d n a if, if you,

if you take all of our d n a, uh, and stretch it out, the d n a in, in one cell,

it's compressed by enzymatic activity.

If you stretched out the D N A in one cell, it's, it's six feet.

If you take the d n A in all of our cells, it goes around the solar system.

It's incredible.

but, you know, getting, getting back to, how

we do this, has to be moved.

If we don't move it, we lose it.

And again, for somebody who's, who's just, you know, trying to

start out, yeah, keep it easy.

walking is awesome.

You know, being in a pool and doing a little bit of

movement that way is awesome.

I've been invited to yoga classes where I went in and

watched, and it was seated yoga.

It was very specifically for folks who had limited mobility and, and

there's lots of of ways to do it.

But you know, when you move, that function alone begins to build muscle.

And as you build muscle, it's going to staff it with mitochondria.

And as it's staffed with mitochondria, all these processes

are going to begin to improve.

Right.

And one of my favorite processes there, or pieces of that is insulin sensitivity.

You know, especially because we are bombarded with so many of these, you know,

and it's funny because like were talking about the sort of, you know, generational

like cohort study and you know, I think back to growing up in the eighties and

nineties, not only were we supposed to eat low fat, high carbohydrate and everything

was, completely sugar laden, but we were supposed to eat every two hours.

So it's like all of these messages and, misinformation that have

been drilled into our brains.

And so women, especially of my generation, anywhere from, you

know, like late thirties into their fifties are steeped in this.

Nonsense.

Right.

And so a lot of people in general, especially Americans now are dealing

with insulin resistance on some level because of this sort of, you know, the

constant eating, the, high glycemic foods, processed foods, things like that.

And, when we have more muscle cells, more mitochondria firing off, we are more

insulin sensitive or more, what I like to refer to as, you know, carbohydrate

tolerant, like your body can get more into that metabolic flexibility.

We can prevent things like diabetes more readily.

you know, all of those things.

And when we're, our blood sugar isn't all over the map, up and

down, our energy is better.

We are a little more motivated and more likely to move our

bodies, but when we're sitting.

And then we're eating processed foods.

It's like this awful vicious cycle, and then it downregulates

our energy and we don't feel like doing it, and then we don't sleep

well, so we're even more tired.

So what do we do?

We stimulate with, you know, caffeine, we wind down with alcohol.

Like it's just this awful sort of downward, a spiral of

symptoms that we're creating.

And I see someone like you who's doing exactly the opposite, and it's really

exciting because I think that, going back to one of the sort of myths of aging,

we're told like, oh, you know, menopause is gonna be horrible and just wait.

And oh, you, you know, I mean, I've had young women, like in their early

thirties be like, well, I think my metabolism's just slowing down.

It's like, no, this is not, this is not what's going on.

This doesn't have to happen.

You can actually stay really active.

I mean, yeah, we have to do the work to, to get into it, but I love that

you're kind of highlighting like, Hey, it's never too late to start.

You don't have to walk out and be, you know, doing what you're doing,

training every day of the week and doing these amazing sports.

Like you can just start with doing cheer yoga or something, whatever

it is, just start moving your body.

real food.

Yeah, I mean the, the reality is, is if somebody who hasn't

walked much, they're gonna get a lot more tired from a short walk than I do

from furious paddling for two miles.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

get out there and do it,

It'll be a lot better for 'em.

right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, in the, um, just to be conscious about your time and everything here, I

know we've, we've talked for a while, but I'd love for you to share with us what

is your favorite thing, Bruce, about?

Being your age, I mean, as someone who has taken good care of their body

and you know, is still going strong, not slowing down much, if at all.

what's your favorite thing about this stage of life?

gratitude,

Hmm.

being at this stage of life with the, relationship I've had

with my wife and my children and their husbands, and our eight grandchildren.

and you know, the, the paddling and, and windsurfing communities.

And my, my work community.

I work because I love the work and I love the people.

I don't have to work.

and, you know, just knowing that you know, life is really a gift.

And if you don't look at it as a gift, you're never going to open the present.

I.

That's beautiful.

Yeah, it's a really a good thing to remember.

I love that.

I think it's really easy for us to think in that sort of someday mindset,

I'll be happy or I'll feel good about myself, or I'll enjoy life when.

especially when it comes to our physical bodies as women so often I hear, well,

I'll be able to like myself, I'll feel good about myself when I'm excise or

I can fit into such and such a pair of pants, or I look a certain way, or I,

make more money, whatever it might be.

So I think that that's a really good, IM important point and anchor for us to,

to circle back to and I love too, just hearing you talk about, like for some

people this may be crazy sciencey kind of information, but if we can start to

just really appreciate how incredible an amazing machine our body is, we

can start to sort of be in a place of sort of awe wonder and appreciation.

Even if we don't love what we look like in that.

Time and space, we can kind of go, oh, my body is only ever just trying

to keep me alive and functioning.

It's not working against me.

I just need to work for it and with it, in partnership and just be

really grateful all the things that I can do and people I can hug with

this body, whatever it might be.

And, and see movement as a, a birthright and a privilege and an, a joy to

like, just be able to do these things and get out, whether it's walking

or chair yoga or popping in a pool versus like, oh, I have to work out.

I have to exercise.

I think we see it as this weird sort of like obligation or just an

additional stressor on our lives when it's actually, no, it's a stress

relief, like your body's designed to do this, and if you just give it what

it needs, you'll start to enjoy it.

You'll feel better.

All the things.

so two more questions for you.

one personal, if you could go back and tell your younger self

something, what would that be?

And is there anything that you would do differently than you've done when

it comes to your health and fitness?

I,

not really.

10 years ago, my wife was diagnosed with, a terminal incurable, cancer,

and it, it absolutely rocked us.

I've been doing a lot of research, uh, on health from an endurance

health and sports related health.

At that point, I was getting a little bit closer to, you know, kind

of retirement from full-time work.

we got pulled into the, you know, the whole medical thing with that.

she had an unnecessary surgery.

She was recommended,

a treatment protocol that probably would've ended her life already

with what we know about it now.

and the reality is, that she's never had western medical treatment for

it.

for all intents and purposes, it no longer exists in her body.

Wow.

And so again, these, these weird things come up and to me, everything

we've talked about today, everything I think of and do when I talk to people

about health or how our bodies work, you know, kind of relates back to the

fact that we, we went through trauma.

I mean, we, we didn't know what was going on.

We didn't, we knew this thing was, was really serious, but we

were able to, slow the thing down, began to understand, uh, how the

medical community, you know, works.

And the fact that on top of the unnecessary surgery,

we literally were read.

A gross prescription based on the fact that I know now the doctor was

walking from one appointment to the other and misread the lab results.

so I mean, I, I, I'm saying this and it's, it's, you know, what I've, what

I've learned, if I could go back and, and the learning has, has been, it

isn't that I do anything differently.

it's just that I realize that you've really gotta be an

advocate for your own health.

if you think you're going to have serious news given to you by a

doctor or a practitioner, you should really have somebody there

with you because, personally as, as somebody's saying, Hey, you need

surgery for this, this has to happen.

You know, if, if I've, if I've got a double hernia, I can deal with that.

You know, it's not a big deal.

But if somebody says, yeah, you know, I looked at the CT scans and your,

your lymph nodes are lit up like a Christmas tree, and you don't have

somebody there to help you understand what that might mean or ask the doctor

more questions, you're just gonna freak.

So you should really have an advocate there with you.

By the same token, I I our medical practice, I mean, I've got, I've got

a grandson who has down syndrome, and he was born with a heart that

had two chambers and one valve.

he just went through his third open heart surgery.

He is absolutely thriving.

But let's think about the fact that he was eight weeks old at his first surgery.

With a heart that was a sizeable walnut.

They built a couple of chambers and a couple of valves.

Now some of it was mechanical and some of it's manmade and you'll probably

have to have another open heart at some time because as he grows, not

all of it, grows at the same rate.

But he had an open heart, two months ago and four days after that we had

to kind of calm him down to keep him from jumping up and down and

playing jumping jacks 'cause he healed

so quickly.

So our, our medical practice is, absolutely amazing