May 27, 2020 • 36 mins
Dr. Marvin Singh was a Board Certified Gastroenterologist—and just a few years ago, he was overweight, unhealthy, and unhappy. But then he enrolled in the Integrative Medicine Fellowship through the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, founded by Dr. Andrew Weil. It was there that Dr. Singh learned how to reinvent his practice—and his life. He lost 45 pounds and created a new clinic focused on personalized, precision medicine. In his conversation with Bobbi, he talks about the changes he made that transformed his health, along with how anyone can harness the power of individualized medicine.
(Please note this episode was recorded before the pandemic)
For more on Dr. Singh, visit www.drmarvinsingh.com and www.precisioneclinic.com. His book is Integrative Gastroenterology 2nd Edition and you can listen to him on his podcast Precisione: The Healthcast wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Beyond the Beauty is a production of I Heart Radio.
I'm your host, Bobby Brown. I think it's so amazing
that a doctor, respected doctor who has, you know, quite
a history of working in some of the best hospital
has gone to the best schools, decided that what he
(00:24):
was doing his profession was not helping people and not
working for him. So I love the story that Dr
Marvin Singh decided that he needed to do things differently,
that he just said, this is not working. He first
personally decided he wanted to change his lifestyle, his habits,
and how he treated people, and he lost forty five
pounds by doing the things that he's teaching people to do.
(00:48):
And what I love about him most is when I
got him on the phone, we discussed everything that was
going on with me, and he just has a way
of simply explaining how and why that you can prove
some of your symptoms. And I think that that approach
to wellness is something that more people need to hear.
He's also an author, a podcast host, and one of
(01:10):
the few boards certified integrative gastro entrologists in America. Here's
our conversation. So I'm so happy to talk to and
I'm really so happy to meet you. Marvin. Likewise, yeah,
I mean I should call you Dr saying a lot
of people don't really know this about me, but I'm
kind of weird. I do things like not the way
(01:33):
everyone else does. And how I met you, I'll tell
you where I was. I was actually on a little
boat in sag Harbor with my son, my twenty one
year old, driving and my husband co captain ing, and
I had a podcasts on because you know, it was bumpy,
and I just that's what I do. And I was
listening to you being interviewed on Broken Brain, the podcast,
(01:55):
and then I guess I commented to you, guys. I
don't even know how I actually talk to you. I
think I saw the comment and I just said thanks
or something like that back, and then we started talking.
Tell us your story because you're a board certified gastro intrologist,
that's right. I was very traditionally conservatively trained doctor, you know,
(02:16):
University of Michigan for my residency, Scripts clinic for my
g I training, and my first job was assistant professor
at Johns Hopkins, so you know, it's a big university,
academic institution. Everything kind of by the books or writing
the books, as they would say. After that, I kind
of felt a little lost in how I practice medicine.
(02:37):
You know, we do a really good job at taking
care of people when they're sick, when they're in the hospital,
when they're bleeding, or when they have cancer. You know,
we were able to have a lot of technology that
we can diagnose things and treat things, but that was
just a really small subset of the people that we
actually take care of on an ongoing basis. And these
(02:58):
are the people that you know, up coming to the
office with the same complaints over and over again and
just kind of getting shuffle from doctor to doctor to doctor.
And I think about things and reflect a lot, a
lot of self reflection, and I was almost questioning my
ability as a physician. I was thinking, maybe maybe it's me.
I'm doing something wrong. Maybe I shouldn't be a doctor. Actually,
(03:21):
I remember vividly telling my wife maybe we should just
open a bagel shop or something like that. Maybe we
should just make more people. Yeah, right, So, you know,
and my wife had always been more of the open
minded type of person compared to me, more conservative, and
so she said, why don't you look into integrative medicine.
(03:42):
Maybe that's kind of the answer you're looking for. And
I kind of dismissed it immediately said I don't know
that this is too much. I don't think this is
what's going to be the solution. And she was a
little um uh insistent on it and bought me this
book called Integrative Gas from Trology because that's my fear
old him, guess from trologists. And so I looked at it,
(04:03):
flipped through it, and I found it really super interesting.
It's that Andrew Wild series book. And Jerry Mullen was
the editor of the book. And I said, you know,
Jerry is one of my friends from Johns Hopkins because
we were there together. I emailed him and then we
talked and he said I told him about the situation,
kind of what I was feeling and thinking, and he said,
(04:24):
you know, you really should look into the Integrated Medicine
Fellowship at the University of Arizona. So I looked into it,
and I decided, you know what, let's just let's go
for it. You just you know, take the take the plunge.
It was kind of a risk quit your job, no no, no,
I I while working full time, I basically put myself
through school again. It's a two year fellowship training program.
(04:44):
So you work all day and come home and go
upstairs and read until like midnight, you know, and so
it's done all digital. A lot of it is digital.
You have to go to Arizona about three times in
the course of the fellowship for a week to meet
all the faculty in Iraq with dr while and things
like that. When I went from my first week, it
was like total breath of fresh air blown into me.
(05:06):
Like I was learning about nutrition, I was doing tai
chi at sunrise and the Arizona desert, and you know,
it was just things that I would never have imagined
ever doing in my life. And when I came home,
I was like just totally rejuvenated. It was excited. I
started integrating some of these concepts of nutrition and lifestyle
(05:26):
into my own practice, into our home, and very quickly,
within like three months, I started just dropping the weight.
I wasn't even really planning to lose weight. It wasn't
like my intention, But that's just kind of what happened.
Did you always have a weight problem or was it
a slow build? Yeah? I mean, you know, as a doctor,
you think you're kind of eating healthy things are okay.
(05:47):
But I think in my fellowship, I started to realize
that I had a problem because I was over two
hundred pounds and my liver ensigns were elevated and I
had fatty liver. But I thought I was doing every thing. Okay.
You know, I have a sandwich and bag of chips
and a Coke zero for lunch. That's healthy, right, Like,
who told you that was okay? We don't know. I
mean that that's what we think is okay. Oh where
(06:09):
I'm not drinking coke. I'm drinking Coke zero. I'm having
a sandwich, not a slice of pizza. You know, that's
kind of that's how we think. You think that's you know,
that's good. That's how a lot of people think. And
it's really eye opening when you actually understand what real
nutrition is. They don't really teach us too much about
this kind of stuff in school or residency or fellowship.
(06:29):
So take me through like a normal day, like what
you eat when I'm at home these days that usually
I'm doing intermittent fasting, So in the morning, I'm really
not eating anything. I might have a black coffee or
green tea or something like that and then lunchtime, I
have a huge salad. So what you don't eat from
how many hours? Usually about sixteen hours, so by sometimes
(06:51):
even less than that. My window is even tighter because
it depends on the schedule at work, whether I have
time to eat at ten or eleven o'clock or I
just wait till lunchtime and you're not starving. No, it
takes a little bit of some getting used to. Actually,
the other day, I did a twenty four hour fast
just to kind of, you know, rejuvenate myself, and I
(07:12):
wasn't hungry at all until I ate. It was just
this is weird. I mean, your body just kind of
adapts to that. Just like you think you're never going
to be able to eat asparagus because it's just not
something you grew up eating. But once you start eating asparagus,
you find that that's the only thing you can think about.
You crave it. So you your first meal is usually
around noon, usually around new maybe a little bit before that,
(07:33):
depending on the schedule. Okay, and what what's your salad
to bring it from home? To get bring it from home? Yeah,
my wife is very kind and makes my lunch for
me every day, so tell me what what she puts
in your salad. She'll vary it sometimes, but there will
be some romaine with maybe some mixed greens in there's well, carrots, cucumbers,
(07:54):
bell peppers, onions. Will put some flax or hemp seeds
in there, and usually her nut of choices, pecans because
she loves pecans. Sometimes you put wal nuts because I
like walnuts a little bit better. And then the dressing
is like a olive oil and balsamic mix. So just
very simple. So no protein for lunch. Not usually. Sometimes
(08:18):
she might have a hard boiled egg in there. Even
that salad with an egg might be like too much
for me. See, I'm such a crunch person, like like
I just found some gluten free gg crackers. I'm so happy.
So you don't need like a piece of toast, a
piece of bread rice quene wa. The romaine is the crunch,
I guess, okay, And then when do you eat again?
(08:38):
Dinner at home? So you eat nothing snacks, salad, and
then you eat dinner. And what's your dinner Dinner depends
on I guess what the kids are feeling. But often
that may be the time when we have meat. If
we have meat, and there'll be a bunch of vegetables
there as well. And then after dinner you're done, done,
No no fruit, no dessert. I might I mean I
might have some berry with some cinnamon sprinkle on top.
(09:02):
That's kind of like my my specialty dessert. And once
in a while I'll have an organic piece of dark
chocolate if I feel like it. That's just the like
it's so clean, but it's so kind of like you're
missing all this good stuff. Well, there's plenty of good
stuff there, yeah, But I mean like like, if you
went to France, would you eat the French bread? Probably
(09:22):
you would, Okay, And you are now in New York
and you did admit that you had Chinese food? Was
it worth it? Today it's not worth it, But last
night it was worth it. I'm a huge believer in
flexibility and adaptability. Otherwise you're just it's hard to function.
You sees people at you know, parties and things like
(09:43):
that where they like, no, I can't eat that, I
can't eat that. I I strongly believe that part of
being alive and healthy and well isn't enjoying life as well.
So it's more important what you do most of the
time than what you do once in a while. So
like my aim is saying is that you should eat
cake on your birthday. It's good to eat cake on
(10:04):
your birthday. You should celebrate your birthday. Just don't eat
cake every day. That's when you have a problem and
you don't think you'll ever incorporate breakfast I do. I mean,
actually today I had steel cut oatmeal with berries on top,
mainly because the lady in the hotel told me that
you could not just sit and drink coffee because some
people say don't eat oatmeal. Like, I feel like there's
(10:26):
experts out there that are constantly telling you what not
to do. You can't have oatmeal, you can't have eggs.
You should have egg whites. No, you should only eat eggs.
I think it's so complicated out there. Yeah, you don't
you know why there's only one expert on this planet
that exists. It's you. Yeah, everybody is totally different. I
mean there was even a study earlier this year that
(10:48):
they looked at thirty some odd people I think thirty
four thirty two people and they followed them for seventeen
days and they checked their microbiome every day, and what
they determine was that within each individual you could predict
what changes in the microbiome might occur based on what
foods they were going to eat, but that was not
(11:09):
generalizable across the entire group of people. So if I
ate broccoli, I might have five different changes in my
microbiome that might produce five chemical changes in my body.
And you might have five different changes in your microbiome
that might produce five different chemical changes in your body
for eating the same broccoli. And I might be good
(11:30):
and you might be bad. We're only ten to similar
in our gut microbiome. So explain to me this whole
gut microbiome has exploded over the past couple of years.
Like I, you know, five years ago, we didn't know
what it was. Yeah, we took you know, acidophilis because
we we heard we should. So how do you know
that your gut is healthy? And there's all these now
(11:52):
doctors that are coming out with these cleanses that you've
got to remove all the bad things and then replace,
Like what do you think about all that? I think
the one thing that we all agree on is you've
got to remove the bad things and put in the
good things. It's what exactly is the good thing for
your body that is dependent on you individually. The bad
(12:12):
things that we all universally agree on are like, you know,
the vegetable oils, the fried foods, the saturated fat, the
hydrogenated fat, all those kind of things, you know, process
packaged food. We all agree that those are not good.
And then what kind of diet pattern do you follow
to optimize your gut health. That's the tricky part because
a lot of this health and wellness stuff has been
(12:36):
highly marketed for certain belief systems, and so you find
certain pockets of people, you know, following one direction or another,
and there's a lot of marketing behind that, and people
are generally lost because they don't really know what's best
for them. They see, oh, this guy, you know, he
wrote a good book and he sells these products, So
(12:57):
I'm going to try that just because I like what
he has to say. Maybe that's what I have to do.
And they follow based on that, They're not really following
necessarily based on them or listening to what their body
is saying. And everybody is so different, But how do
you find out what your body needs? That's what I
love helping people figure out So I started as clinic
called Precision Clinic, and we do really in depth analysis
(13:20):
of people's bodies, their microbiome, food sensitivity testing, chemical sensitivities,
the whole body imaging, brain imaging, heart imaging, all these
kind of things, and I put it all together. If
I was gonna do you, we we would go through
all the testing and then on a day like a Saturday,
when I'm not working, you know, seeing patients in the office,
(13:42):
I'll literally block off six to eight hours and I'll
be sitting there looking at Bobby's results and analyzing everything
and creating like an executive summary. Then I sit down
and I say, based on your genes, and based on
what your microbiome is saying, and based on your leaky
gut analysis and all this, I think this is how
you should eat. I think these are the things you
(14:04):
should avoid. This is a way to clean up your environment,
and this is how you should exercise. And we kind
of go through all this step by step, and then
I kind of guide them through the process. Is very
overwhelming to get all this information as well, so it's
important to have somebody to kind of guide them through it.
But for most people, if they're not in San Diego.
They don't have access to you, they don't have the
(14:25):
money to pay for it because insurance I'm sure doesn't
cover most of those things. How does a normal person
become healthier versions of themselves? I think if you were
to say, you're like stuck on an island, but you
have all the food and all the resources, but you
have no doctors and no tests. Even some of the
tests are actually becoming much more affordable because as there
(14:47):
as the technology advances and they're able to do things quicker,
then the cost goes down. If you look at sequencing
the whole genome on the Clinton administration had Craig Venture
do that for the first time, I think it was
like a hundred million dollars, And now you can get
a whole genome sequencing done for like three thousand dollars.
So you say, three thousand dollars a lot of money,
(15:09):
but it's not a hundred million dollars, And in the
coming years that maybe three hundred dollars. So I don't know,
you know, and what what kind of information does that
give you? So it'll show you, you know, what what
diseases you may have, risk for how your body may
process certain things like caffeine and if you have a
risk for high hypertension or heart attack based on that
(15:30):
and salt and take and kind of helps you understand
your risk so that you can understand how to live
for the future. So if it tells you you can't
drink coffee and you love coffee, uh huh, you have
to quit. It tells you there's this particular gene we're
talking about regarding coffee. I actually have that gene. Unfortunately,
probably my worst gene. Drink coffee. I drink coffee, but
(15:52):
you're allowed two hundred milligrams of caffeine, so that's like
two cups of coffee, which is not bad. I mean
usually have one or two cups. Yeah, And actually I
always did notice, never knew why if I ever pushed
to have a third cup of coffee, just historically over
the last many years, I would get a headache or
I'd start feel jittery. And when I did the gene
(16:13):
test on myself, I figured, well, that's probably why, because
I don't metabolize the caffeine that well, and so that
jitteriness is just my body saying enough. But I think
you know someone like me who's very in touch with
what happens when I eat certain foods, and and because
my body is not as clean as yours, but it's
cleaner than most people. When I do something that's not
(16:34):
on my okay list, I don't feel good, I think
because either I'm more sensitive or I just noticed. So
I have a double expresso every morning, I'm fine. If
I ever have a cup of coffee in the afternoon,
I instantly yawn and feel tired, and I don't feel well.
So I don't need the test. I just don't drink
that cup of coffee exactly. So that was actually going
to be my point where we were talking about being
(16:56):
on the island with all the resources and food but
no doctor or tests. Really, the best doctor that you
have access to is your body. Your body will do
the best job that it can under your circumstances and
in your environment if you help it as best as
you can by listening to what it needs. And a
(17:18):
lot of the times we are not tuned into our bodies,
were listening to somebody else what somebody else's experiences with
regards to their body. But that's how we as humans
are kind of programmed to think that, oh, well, this
guy did this, So I'm gonna do this and I'm
gonna get healthy too. So there's a lot of stuff
that you can figure out that you couldn't figure out
(17:38):
from a test. Even Also so actually, in my in
my consultations, the first visit is actually a test, I
tell everybody because we sit and talk for ninety minutes
and there's no test on the planet that can really
replace the conversation. And so just talking to somebody and
learning about their life and their background, how they grew up,
(17:59):
what stressors are, there's no test that can that can
tell you that information. And so that's actually the first
part of the puzzle. What's kind of your like health
coach on top of being a doctor exactly? So is
(18:22):
your is your practice now mostly gastro? Is it weight loss?
Like where are you? And your everywhere? Everywhere? Okay, I'm
gonna drive your wife crazy, you know, it's like I
don't know where I am some days they're not. So
I have a regular gastro practice where I do colin
ospy's and endospi is just like anyone else. And this
precision Clinic is a second practice that I started. So
(18:45):
the diagnosis like leaky gut cebo all of those other ones,
Are they real? And why do people get cebo? Yeah?
I think they're all real. I think they're all manifestations
of a similar spec from a problem, and that problem
is called dysbiosis or an imbalance in the gut microbiome.
(19:07):
And why there's an imbalance in the gut microbiome could
be due to a number of factors. Some of the
common things alcohol, smoking, other toxins, diet choices, stress, not
sleeping enough or well enough, um, not exercising, you know,
all of these kind of things that sound really basic
(19:28):
when you say them, but it's not a basic process
that happens inside the body. It's actually very complicated and
simple at the same time. That's actually the more and
more I start reading and learning about things over the
last several years, the more fascinated I become with the
human body. I mean, if you look at all the
(19:50):
studies on how to improve your DNA health, how to
improve your gut health, how to improve your motochondrial health,
all these are like the big buzzwords out there, and
you look at what all the common factors are with
regards to how to optimize each of these areas. It's
the same kind of stuff. There's nothing special. You can
read a book on motochondrial health and they might tell
(20:11):
you to take a couple of different maybe supplements, but
the general basic principles are the same as for gut
health and for DNA health. And what we're doing is
basically scientifically proving now that all of these various different
kinds of lifestyle elements help optimize these different parts of
your body. And so where one program will say, okay,
(20:33):
you should eat broccoli, you should have onions, it's got
good prebiotics. But then if you have SEBO, they tell
you to follow a fod map diet. Yeah, so it's
it's complicated for most of us out there. Yeah, that's
why listening to your body and seeing what symptoms you
have when you eat particular kinds of foods is important.
Just because you may have se bo or bloating now
(20:55):
and it might be a good idea to avoid the
fod map foods now doesn't necessarily mean that that's how
it would have to be forever. Because from what I understood,
if you follow a fod MAP diet, it takes away
the symptoms, but it doesn't get rid of the CBO.
So people probably don't know what CEBO is. So CEBO,
as s I b O stands for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
(21:17):
So we have trillions and trillions of bacteria in our
gut microbiome, and majority of them live in the colon,
but they do live in all parts of our gi tract.
And when there's an overgrowth or an imbalance of these
bacteria in our small intestine, which is about twenty ft long,
then we start feeling symptoms bloating, sometimes people have diarrhea
(21:40):
or constipation or a mix of both. That's a largely
a result of fermentation that these bacteria do have the
food that you're eating. And so foods that are highly
fermentable are some of these fod MAP foods that we're
talking about. A lot of these are very healthy, like
cabbage and Brussels sprouts and cauliflower and avocado, yeah, even
avocat and so these are all health foods we talk about.
(22:03):
So people will go and you know, I'm gonna eat
all these foods you're telling me that they're good to eat.
I'm gonna eat plant based, But I can't eat any
of these plant based foods because I have these symptoms,
avoiding the foods that you know cause your problem, and
then addressing the actual cause of the sebow, and then
trying to slowly, sequentially reintroduce some of these foods may
(22:23):
be able to kind of help bring balance back. And
and that's kind of what I work. And it's a process.
It's not something that you can take one magic pill
and overnight you know you're miraculously cure not come on,
maybe just come up with some kind of magic pill
and be so much easier. It's because the body is
simple and complicated. There's a lot of things going on
(22:43):
at the same time. So you know, your sebow could
be caused by not sleeping well, alcohol and and alcohol
and being stressed. A lot of those three things go together.
I sleep well and the other things I can promise.
You can say, well, I stopped eating fod maps, So
why why do I still have symptoms? Was because that's
(23:05):
just part of the process. That's not the entire process.
And that's actually the hard part because it involves behavior change.
But I think that I am so much better than
I was before. And I don't know if it's anything
I did except a mindset I said to myself, just
eat the best possible food you could eat, listen to yourself,
and don't feel bad about you know what you're eating.
(23:28):
You know, I think that has helped me a lot.
Like I I feel a lot better than I did
when I you know, I was crying to you on
the phone because I literally I just said, you know
what enough. I just if my stomach hearts, it's because
I'm making myself crazy, and I don't know, I think
I've willed myself into feeling better. Yeah, I I strongly
believe that too. I mean, sometimes if you just put
(23:49):
yourself in the right mindset, take some deep breath, do
that for seven eight breath, and Dr Wild teaches you
just kind of rebalance yourself because your body listens to
all of these method sages. It's very very cool and
fascinating at the same time. So Dr While is a
mentor definitely. Yeah. I met him once years ago. You know,
(24:10):
tell me, tell me what he means to you, and
tell me what he's like. It's a really gentle guy,
very very soft spoken, very smart, intelligent. It's almost just
listening to him walk you through a meditation practice is surreal.
It's very peaceful. He's actually the one on the the
Fellowship the first week, the one that actually teaches you
(24:31):
through the for seven eight breath. But his his eating,
he eats like he eats normal. He doesn't do intermittent fasting.
I don't know about intermittent fast he's I don't know
whether he eats meat or not. Actually he eats regular meals.
I mean, I've been to his restaurants. Fantastic. Yeah, do
you have one in San Diego? We have to. We
don't have any in New York yet. But when you
(24:52):
sit down at these restaurants, they're called Drew Food Kitchen.
They have one in Chicago where my sister lives. The
flax crackers, you know, are the best things. I don't
know why he doesn't just put those in a box
to sell them. They're so good. And because he doesn't,
they don't serve bread at the restaurant. Yeah, but they
do serve alcoholohol to get a cocktail. Because he does
(25:13):
teach I don't know. I don't won't say moderation because
he's not saying, you know, go eat French fries. But
you know, maybe if you bake sweet potato fries. But
he teaches you like a better version of regular food exactly.
So if you take a high quality ingredient versus a
low quality ingredient of the same food, it's it's different.
You get a different nutrient profile, it tastes better, it's
(25:36):
healthier for you. Even something as simple as an apple,
you ever compared just a regular apple and an organic
apple or broccoli, even just looking at it, smelling it
as you cut it, it's a different food. So sometimes
when I'm at a restaurant, I usually order off the restaurant.
I eat out a lot, which probably is, you know,
not the best thing, and I usually order off the menu.
(25:58):
I just said, give me a piece of old fish,
nothing on its steam, vegetables. But sometimes when everyone's looking
at the menu, I kind of play a game with myself.
I'm like, Okay, if it wasn't fattening, I wouldn't get
a headache or a stomachache, I wouldn't feel gross. What
would I eat? And you know, the truth is I
would probably get a cheeseburger and fries or you know,
or I would get you know, I don't like French toast,
but I would get something where I usually make my
(26:21):
choices on what I'm what's not going to make me
feel bad. You know, I've turned it into you know,
what I believe in. But I realized there are some
people that could eat things and not get affected by them.
How is it affecting them. Maybe they don't get indigestion,
maybe they don't our burn, maybe they don't gain weight,
but maybe the lipopolysacharade in their body start shooting through
(26:45):
the roof and the CRP starts going up and and
they don't really know that in the background, they're brewing
this inflammatory storm inside of their body and one day
it will show up in one form or another of
a disease or something. Yeah, this is chronic disease or
chronic inflammation. We talk about all the time. It's another buzzword. Yes,
(27:07):
there's so many buzzwords. So I think your job is
to try to figure out how to help people and
de buzz and navigate navigate through life basically, because no
matter what, no matter how good you are or how
perfect you think you are, there is always, I guarantee
it going to be a time when then there's a
(27:27):
problem and you're gonna get derailed, whether it's you're in
a car accident, somebody you know bumped into you from behind,
or whether you tripped and broke your ankle, or god forbid,
if loved one passes away. We're not invincible. We're humans.
Life is going to happen no matter what. That's something
that we have no control over. You can listen to
(27:48):
the cues that your body tells you. Then you can
kind of navigate through this time period and in these
tough times pass and then you can regroup after that.
And so what advice would you have for the people
(28:10):
that are listening and who knows where they are and
you know where they're working, and they don't they don't
know what to do? Like where do people start? By
reflecting on what's going on in your life and just
ask yourself a simple question to say, I have you
know all these issues and problems to deal with right now?
Say I fast forward one year into the future and
(28:33):
all those problems are gone. Just I feel like a
million bucks. I look like a million bucks. I'm on
top of the world. Then sit down with a piece
of paper and a pen and write down for yourself
the story how did you get from point A to
point B? They're in is probably the outline to your
(28:53):
lifestyle plan. It's really good, simple advice. Yeah, so I'm
going to ask you a speed round. Okay, besides this week,
what's the last time you do railed? And what did
you eat? Probably my son's birthday party last month? There
was nothing meal y, so I ate a slice of
pizza And how did you feel? I was fine, it
(29:15):
was good. I don't yeah, I mean, I mean, I
think it's part of American culture. You know, I don't
know how you could live in this country and not
eat pizza in some form or another. Very rarely do
I eat pizza, Very rarely do I have like, you know,
greasy cheeseburger or French fries or something I don't. I
don't touch that anymore. If I feel like having something bubbly,
(29:36):
I'll have like San Pellegrino. That's my new obsession. I guess.
Do you have a cocktail of choice? What I like
to do if I'm going to have a cocktail is
may get some vodka and put with San Pellegrino. I
don't drink like the soda water or anything like that.
And uh, you know, I've been known to have a
glass of Scotch once in a while, not a glass,
(29:58):
but you know what did lass. Yeah, not a whole glass, well,
you say, to glass of scotch. Yeah, yeah, as long
as you know you're not abusing it or you have
a problem, or you're drinking a bottle or half a
bottle all the time your body. I think it's actually
good to kind of stress the body with a little
bit of these things once in a while as well. Interestingly,
I do have a gene that says that I have
(30:22):
a I think sixty or sixty six reduced risk of
heart disease. If I drink two drinks a day. Wow,
you're so lucky you have. That's a good gene. Yeah,
that's a really good And I don't even drink to
drinks any ever, and maybe be better for your house.
So if I have a drink once in a while,
(30:42):
I don't feel so bad about it anymore. And what
do you do to fall asleep at night? Usually I
fall asleep pretty easily. I don't have a hard time
falling asleep. What will knock me out in like a
second is I'll just lie down and I'll do a
deep breathing exercises. Sometimes I may it on headphones and
listen to like a guided meditation. But I don't do
(31:05):
that really much anymore. In the earlier days, when I
was first learning about these kind of things and seeing
how it affects me, I would do that. But these
days I just if I say, Okay, I'm gonna do
for seven eight breath for example, I don't even think
I make it to eight breaths. I'm done. I'm already asleep.
What's your morning routine? What time do you get up?
(31:25):
It depends on if I'm doing a podcast or not. Actually,
as I started my own podcast, so a lot of
people are on the East Coast, and so I'm up
at like five five thirty to to do an interview,
but otherwise around six six thirty. And what do you
do since you don't eat to work out? You know,
I'm not a morning workout person. I just I've never
(31:48):
my whole life been able to say I'm gonna wake
up and I'm gonna work out first thing in the morning.
I know people wake up, they go to their spin
class at four or five o'clock in the morning. I
just can't do that. I'd rather sleep an extra hour.
But I will do that in the evening when I
come back from work, and I don't do it at night.
I have to do it first thing, not not at five,
but seven o'clock. Is everybody has theories on when's the
(32:08):
best time to exercise, but I tell people the best
time to exercise is when you exercise exactly. So what's
your coffee recipe? What's your tea? My coffee is usually
just black. Once in a while, I might put a
little splash of half and half in it. But I'll
tell you what my coffee routine used to be. I
used to put to splendors and generous amount of half
(32:30):
and half in the coffee, literally a diabetes bomb, you know.
And I thought, you know, this was like five years
or more ago, that splendid is better than sugar, because
that's what everybody says. So I'm going to do that.
During this whole process of kind of revamping my own life,
I said, you know, I'm gonna do this, and I'm
(32:51):
gonna do this slowly. So I went from too splendors
to one splendor, and then from one splendid to no splendor.
And then I went from a modern amount of half
and half to a splash. And you know, if I
want to put a little splash in it as a
treat once in a while, do that. But I'm fine
drinking black coffee now. And I actually grew a taste
(33:12):
for espresso. I drink espresso and I do a cap
full of half and half, like I try the coconut milk,
and I just don't love it, not the sweet you know,
touch a half and half and it's organic. So what
is your last workout? We have a peloton actually at home. Oh, good,
me too. I'll have to ratio. Yeah, I don't do
it very I still can't figure out how to work
(33:33):
out with people together. I know you can have friends
and stuff like that, but I don't. You can't. Actually
you can coordinate because my kids do it. I haven't
figured that out either, But you have kids, they'll help
you figure out. And what's the last book you read? Well?
I reread for the second time Dale Bredicon's book The
End of Alzheimer's. A large portion of our risk for
(33:55):
Alzheimer's comes from lifestyle issues, and so we can prevent
and in a lot of cases reverse some of the
early inflammation and issues that are underlying Alzheimer's. And so
it's a very awesome, fascinating book. So I read it
twice if I read a book twice, and that means
(34:16):
it's really good. There's only a few books that I've
actually had to read two or three times. Even. Do
you read books that aren't medical books or self help
books or wellness books, I mean actually novels, fiction fiction. Um,
it's been a little while since I since I had
a book like that, But I read all kinds of topics,
(34:36):
and I think that's kind of what helped me develop
as a person and as a healer. I read books
on child psychiatry. I'll read books on quantum theory, which
is those are like the kind of the craziest ones,
like why are you reading about quantum theory? I don't
even understand necessarily half of it, But it's really funny
(34:57):
because a lot of the stuff all ties intogether. There.
When you take some of those principles and you kind
of boiled them down, and you read a book on
transcendental meditation, and then you go read a book on mindfulness,
and then you read a book on got health, you
kind of get this whole feeling of this theme. And
over the last several years, I've probably done over a
(35:18):
hundred books or so from wide variety of people I read,
you know, Yoga Nanda's book, you know Dave Asprey's books,
all of Mark Hyman's books. All these things kind of
fascinating to me, and they all kind of help weave
the picture of what the human life is about. And
when's your book coming out? I have a book, The
Textbook of Integrative gast Frontrology, that actually just came out
(35:38):
with the second edition. So that book that my wife
made me read, forced me to read, that really brought
me into this field. It's funny how that's actually the
book that I ended up becoming an editor for in
the end. So that same book now I READID with
some of my colleagues and we we produced that just
a couple of weeks ago. And I and you send
(36:00):
it to me, and I'm going to dive into it.
It takes it's very very in depth. Got health expert.
I'm trying, but I'm so happy that you came here
to talk to me. I think you're fascinating and I
just think it's so cool what you have done personally
for yourself and that you're on this journey to help
all of us. Thank you, Thank you for having me. Yeah,
thanks so much for more podcasts from I heart Radio,
(36:25):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Beyond the Beauty is a production of I Heart Radio.
I'm your host, Bobby Brown. I think it's so amazing
that a doctor, respected doctor who has, you know, quite
a history of working in some of the best hospital
has gone to the best schools, decided that what he
(00:24):
was doing his profession was not helping people and not
working for him. So I love the story that Dr
Marvin Singh decided that he needed to do things differently,
that he just said, this is not working. He first
personally decided he wanted to change his lifestyle, his habits,
and how he treated people, and he lost forty five
pounds by doing the things that he's teaching people to do.
(00:48):
And what I love about him most is when I
got him on the phone, we discussed everything that was
going on with me, and he just has a way
of simply explaining how and why that you can prove
some of your symptoms. And I think that that approach
to wellness is something that more people need to hear.
He's also an author, a podcast host, and one of
(01:10):
the few boards certified integrative gastro entrologists in America. Here's
our conversation. So I'm so happy to talk to and
I'm really so happy to meet you. Marvin. Likewise, yeah,
I mean I should call you Dr saying a lot
of people don't really know this about me, but I'm
kind of weird. I do things like not the way
(01:33):
everyone else does. And how I met you, I'll tell
you where I was. I was actually on a little
boat in sag Harbor with my son, my twenty one
year old, driving and my husband co captain ing, and
I had a podcasts on because you know, it was bumpy,
and I just that's what I do. And I was
listening to you being interviewed on Broken Brain, the podcast,
(01:55):
and then I guess I commented to you, guys. I
don't even know how I actually talk to you. I
think I saw the comment and I just said thanks
or something like that back, and then we started talking.
Tell us your story because you're a board certified gastro intrologist,
that's right. I was very traditionally conservatively trained doctor, you know,
(02:16):
University of Michigan for my residency, Scripts clinic for my
g I training, and my first job was assistant professor
at Johns Hopkins, so you know, it's a big university,
academic institution. Everything kind of by the books or writing
the books, as they would say. After that, I kind
of felt a little lost in how I practice medicine.
(02:37):
You know, we do a really good job at taking
care of people when they're sick, when they're in the hospital,
when they're bleeding, or when they have cancer. You know,
we were able to have a lot of technology that
we can diagnose things and treat things, but that was
just a really small subset of the people that we
actually take care of on an ongoing basis. And these
(02:58):
are the people that you know, up coming to the
office with the same complaints over and over again and
just kind of getting shuffle from doctor to doctor to doctor.
And I think about things and reflect a lot, a
lot of self reflection, and I was almost questioning my
ability as a physician. I was thinking, maybe maybe it's me.
I'm doing something wrong. Maybe I shouldn't be a doctor. Actually,
(03:21):
I remember vividly telling my wife maybe we should just
open a bagel shop or something like that. Maybe we
should just make more people. Yeah, right, So, you know,
and my wife had always been more of the open
minded type of person compared to me, more conservative, and
so she said, why don't you look into integrative medicine.
(03:42):
Maybe that's kind of the answer you're looking for. And
I kind of dismissed it immediately said I don't know
that this is too much. I don't think this is
what's going to be the solution. And she was a
little um uh insistent on it and bought me this
book called Integrative Gas from Trology because that's my fear
old him, guess from trologists. And so I looked at it,
(04:03):
flipped through it, and I found it really super interesting.
It's that Andrew Wild series book. And Jerry Mullen was
the editor of the book. And I said, you know,
Jerry is one of my friends from Johns Hopkins because
we were there together. I emailed him and then we
talked and he said I told him about the situation,
kind of what I was feeling and thinking, and he said,
(04:24):
you know, you really should look into the Integrated Medicine
Fellowship at the University of Arizona. So I looked into it,
and I decided, you know what, let's just let's go
for it. You just you know, take the take the plunge.
It was kind of a risk quit your job, no no, no,
I I while working full time, I basically put myself
through school again. It's a two year fellowship training program.
(04:44):
So you work all day and come home and go
upstairs and read until like midnight, you know, and so
it's done all digital. A lot of it is digital.
You have to go to Arizona about three times in
the course of the fellowship for a week to meet
all the faculty in Iraq with dr while and things
like that. When I went from my first week, it
was like total breath of fresh air blown into me.
(05:06):
Like I was learning about nutrition, I was doing tai
chi at sunrise and the Arizona desert, and you know,
it was just things that I would never have imagined
ever doing in my life. And when I came home,
I was like just totally rejuvenated. It was excited. I
started integrating some of these concepts of nutrition and lifestyle
(05:26):
into my own practice, into our home, and very quickly,
within like three months, I started just dropping the weight.
I wasn't even really planning to lose weight. It wasn't
like my intention, But that's just kind of what happened.
Did you always have a weight problem or was it
a slow build? Yeah? I mean, you know, as a doctor,
you think you're kind of eating healthy things are okay.
(05:47):
But I think in my fellowship, I started to realize
that I had a problem because I was over two
hundred pounds and my liver ensigns were elevated and I
had fatty liver. But I thought I was doing every thing. Okay.
You know, I have a sandwich and bag of chips
and a Coke zero for lunch. That's healthy, right, Like,
who told you that was okay? We don't know. I
mean that that's what we think is okay. Oh where
(06:09):
I'm not drinking coke. I'm drinking Coke zero. I'm having
a sandwich, not a slice of pizza. You know, that's
kind of that's how we think. You think that's you know,
that's good. That's how a lot of people think. And
it's really eye opening when you actually understand what real
nutrition is. They don't really teach us too much about
this kind of stuff in school or residency or fellowship.
(06:29):
So take me through like a normal day, like what
you eat when I'm at home these days that usually
I'm doing intermittent fasting, So in the morning, I'm really
not eating anything. I might have a black coffee or
green tea or something like that and then lunchtime, I
have a huge salad. So what you don't eat from
how many hours? Usually about sixteen hours, so by sometimes
(06:51):
even less than that. My window is even tighter because
it depends on the schedule at work, whether I have
time to eat at ten or eleven o'clock or I
just wait till lunchtime and you're not starving. No, it
takes a little bit of some getting used to. Actually,
the other day, I did a twenty four hour fast
just to kind of, you know, rejuvenate myself, and I
(07:12):
wasn't hungry at all until I ate. It was just
this is weird. I mean, your body just kind of
adapts to that. Just like you think you're never going
to be able to eat asparagus because it's just not
something you grew up eating. But once you start eating asparagus,
you find that that's the only thing you can think about.
You crave it. So you your first meal is usually
around noon, usually around new maybe a little bit before that,
(07:33):
depending on the schedule. Okay, and what what's your salad
to bring it from home? To get bring it from home? Yeah,
my wife is very kind and makes my lunch for
me every day, so tell me what what she puts
in your salad. She'll vary it sometimes, but there will
be some romaine with maybe some mixed greens in there's well, carrots, cucumbers,
(07:54):
bell peppers, onions. Will put some flax or hemp seeds
in there, and usually her nut of choices, pecans because
she loves pecans. Sometimes you put wal nuts because I
like walnuts a little bit better. And then the dressing
is like a olive oil and balsamic mix. So just
very simple. So no protein for lunch. Not usually. Sometimes
(08:18):
she might have a hard boiled egg in there. Even
that salad with an egg might be like too much
for me. See, I'm such a crunch person, like like
I just found some gluten free gg crackers. I'm so happy.
So you don't need like a piece of toast, a
piece of bread rice quene wa. The romaine is the crunch,
I guess, okay, And then when do you eat again?
(08:38):
Dinner at home? So you eat nothing snacks, salad, and
then you eat dinner. And what's your dinner Dinner depends
on I guess what the kids are feeling. But often
that may be the time when we have meat. If
we have meat, and there'll be a bunch of vegetables
there as well. And then after dinner you're done, done,
No no fruit, no dessert. I might I mean I
might have some berry with some cinnamon sprinkle on top.
(09:02):
That's kind of like my my specialty dessert. And once
in a while I'll have an organic piece of dark
chocolate if I feel like it. That's just the like
it's so clean, but it's so kind of like you're
missing all this good stuff. Well, there's plenty of good
stuff there, yeah, But I mean like like, if you
went to France, would you eat the French bread? Probably
(09:22):
you would, Okay, And you are now in New York
and you did admit that you had Chinese food? Was
it worth it? Today it's not worth it, But last
night it was worth it. I'm a huge believer in
flexibility and adaptability. Otherwise you're just it's hard to function.
You sees people at you know, parties and things like
(09:43):
that where they like, no, I can't eat that, I
can't eat that. I I strongly believe that part of
being alive and healthy and well isn't enjoying life as well.
So it's more important what you do most of the
time than what you do once in a while. So
like my aim is saying is that you should eat
cake on your birthday. It's good to eat cake on
(10:04):
your birthday. You should celebrate your birthday. Just don't eat
cake every day. That's when you have a problem and
you don't think you'll ever incorporate breakfast I do. I mean,
actually today I had steel cut oatmeal with berries on top,
mainly because the lady in the hotel told me that
you could not just sit and drink coffee because some
people say don't eat oatmeal. Like, I feel like there's
(10:26):
experts out there that are constantly telling you what not
to do. You can't have oatmeal, you can't have eggs.
You should have egg whites. No, you should only eat eggs.
I think it's so complicated out there. Yeah, you don't
you know why there's only one expert on this planet
that exists. It's you. Yeah, everybody is totally different. I
mean there was even a study earlier this year that
(10:48):
they looked at thirty some odd people I think thirty
four thirty two people and they followed them for seventeen
days and they checked their microbiome every day, and what
they determine was that within each individual you could predict
what changes in the microbiome might occur based on what
foods they were going to eat, but that was not
(11:09):
generalizable across the entire group of people. So if I
ate broccoli, I might have five different changes in my
microbiome that might produce five chemical changes in my body.
And you might have five different changes in your microbiome
that might produce five different chemical changes in your body
for eating the same broccoli. And I might be good
(11:30):
and you might be bad. We're only ten to similar
in our gut microbiome. So explain to me this whole
gut microbiome has exploded over the past couple of years.
Like I, you know, five years ago, we didn't know
what it was. Yeah, we took you know, acidophilis because
we we heard we should. So how do you know
that your gut is healthy? And there's all these now
(11:52):
doctors that are coming out with these cleanses that you've
got to remove all the bad things and then replace,
Like what do you think about all that? I think
the one thing that we all agree on is you've
got to remove the bad things and put in the
good things. It's what exactly is the good thing for
your body that is dependent on you individually. The bad
(12:12):
things that we all universally agree on are like, you know,
the vegetable oils, the fried foods, the saturated fat, the
hydrogenated fat, all those kind of things, you know, process
packaged food. We all agree that those are not good.
And then what kind of diet pattern do you follow
to optimize your gut health. That's the tricky part because
a lot of this health and wellness stuff has been
(12:36):
highly marketed for certain belief systems, and so you find
certain pockets of people, you know, following one direction or another,
and there's a lot of marketing behind that, and people
are generally lost because they don't really know what's best
for them. They see, oh, this guy, you know, he
wrote a good book and he sells these products, So
(12:57):
I'm going to try that just because I like what
he has to say. Maybe that's what I have to do.
And they follow based on that, They're not really following
necessarily based on them or listening to what their body
is saying. And everybody is so different, But how do
you find out what your body needs? That's what I
love helping people figure out So I started as clinic
called Precision Clinic, and we do really in depth analysis
(13:20):
of people's bodies, their microbiome, food sensitivity testing, chemical sensitivities,
the whole body imaging, brain imaging, heart imaging, all these
kind of things, and I put it all together. If
I was gonna do you, we we would go through
all the testing and then on a day like a Saturday,
when I'm not working, you know, seeing patients in the office,
(13:42):
I'll literally block off six to eight hours and I'll
be sitting there looking at Bobby's results and analyzing everything
and creating like an executive summary. Then I sit down
and I say, based on your genes, and based on
what your microbiome is saying, and based on your leaky
gut analysis and all this, I think this is how
you should eat. I think these are the things you
(14:04):
should avoid. This is a way to clean up your environment,
and this is how you should exercise. And we kind
of go through all this step by step, and then
I kind of guide them through the process. Is very
overwhelming to get all this information as well, so it's
important to have somebody to kind of guide them through it.
But for most people, if they're not in San Diego.
They don't have access to you, they don't have the
(14:25):
money to pay for it because insurance I'm sure doesn't
cover most of those things. How does a normal person
become healthier versions of themselves? I think if you were
to say, you're like stuck on an island, but you
have all the food and all the resources, but you
have no doctors and no tests. Even some of the
tests are actually becoming much more affordable because as there
(14:47):
as the technology advances and they're able to do things quicker,
then the cost goes down. If you look at sequencing
the whole genome on the Clinton administration had Craig Venture
do that for the first time, I think it was
like a hundred million dollars, And now you can get
a whole genome sequencing done for like three thousand dollars.
So you say, three thousand dollars a lot of money,
(15:09):
but it's not a hundred million dollars, And in the
coming years that maybe three hundred dollars. So I don't know,
you know, and what what kind of information does that
give you? So it'll show you, you know, what what
diseases you may have, risk for how your body may
process certain things like caffeine and if you have a
risk for high hypertension or heart attack based on that
(15:30):
and salt and take and kind of helps you understand
your risk so that you can understand how to live
for the future. So if it tells you you can't
drink coffee and you love coffee, uh huh, you have
to quit. It tells you there's this particular gene we're
talking about regarding coffee. I actually have that gene. Unfortunately,
probably my worst gene. Drink coffee. I drink coffee, but
(15:52):
you're allowed two hundred milligrams of caffeine, so that's like
two cups of coffee, which is not bad. I mean
usually have one or two cups. Yeah, And actually I
always did notice, never knew why if I ever pushed
to have a third cup of coffee, just historically over
the last many years, I would get a headache or
I'd start feel jittery. And when I did the gene
(16:13):
test on myself, I figured, well, that's probably why, because
I don't metabolize the caffeine that well, and so that
jitteriness is just my body saying enough. But I think
you know someone like me who's very in touch with
what happens when I eat certain foods, and and because
my body is not as clean as yours, but it's
cleaner than most people. When I do something that's not
(16:34):
on my okay list, I don't feel good, I think
because either I'm more sensitive or I just noticed. So
I have a double expresso every morning, I'm fine. If
I ever have a cup of coffee in the afternoon,
I instantly yawn and feel tired, and I don't feel well.
So I don't need the test. I just don't drink
that cup of coffee exactly. So that was actually going
to be my point where we were talking about being
(16:56):
on the island with all the resources and food but
no doctor or tests. Really, the best doctor that you
have access to is your body. Your body will do
the best job that it can under your circumstances and
in your environment if you help it as best as
you can by listening to what it needs. And a
(17:18):
lot of the times we are not tuned into our bodies,
were listening to somebody else what somebody else's experiences with
regards to their body. But that's how we as humans
are kind of programmed to think that, oh, well, this
guy did this, So I'm gonna do this and I'm
gonna get healthy too. So there's a lot of stuff
that you can figure out that you couldn't figure out
(17:38):
from a test. Even Also so actually, in my in
my consultations, the first visit is actually a test, I
tell everybody because we sit and talk for ninety minutes
and there's no test on the planet that can really
replace the conversation. And so just talking to somebody and
learning about their life and their background, how they grew up,
(17:59):
what stressors are, there's no test that can that can
tell you that information. And so that's actually the first
part of the puzzle. What's kind of your like health
coach on top of being a doctor exactly? So is
(18:22):
your is your practice now mostly gastro? Is it weight loss?
Like where are you? And your everywhere? Everywhere? Okay, I'm
gonna drive your wife crazy, you know, it's like I
don't know where I am some days they're not. So
I have a regular gastro practice where I do colin
ospy's and endospi is just like anyone else. And this
precision Clinic is a second practice that I started. So
(18:45):
the diagnosis like leaky gut cebo all of those other ones,
Are they real? And why do people get cebo? Yeah?
I think they're all real. I think they're all manifestations
of a similar spec from a problem, and that problem
is called dysbiosis or an imbalance in the gut microbiome.
(19:07):
And why there's an imbalance in the gut microbiome could
be due to a number of factors. Some of the
common things alcohol, smoking, other toxins, diet choices, stress, not
sleeping enough or well enough, um, not exercising, you know,
all of these kind of things that sound really basic
(19:28):
when you say them, but it's not a basic process
that happens inside the body. It's actually very complicated and
simple at the same time. That's actually the more and
more I start reading and learning about things over the
last several years, the more fascinated I become with the
human body. I mean, if you look at all the
(19:50):
studies on how to improve your DNA health, how to
improve your gut health, how to improve your motochondrial health,
all these are like the big buzzwords out there, and
you look at what all the common factors are with
regards to how to optimize each of these areas. It's
the same kind of stuff. There's nothing special. You can
read a book on motochondrial health and they might tell
(20:11):
you to take a couple of different maybe supplements, but
the general basic principles are the same as for gut
health and for DNA health. And what we're doing is
basically scientifically proving now that all of these various different
kinds of lifestyle elements help optimize these different parts of
your body. And so where one program will say, okay,
(20:33):
you should eat broccoli, you should have onions, it's got
good prebiotics. But then if you have SEBO, they tell
you to follow a fod map diet. Yeah, so it's
it's complicated for most of us out there. Yeah, that's
why listening to your body and seeing what symptoms you
have when you eat particular kinds of foods is important.
Just because you may have se bo or bloating now
(20:55):
and it might be a good idea to avoid the
fod map foods now doesn't necessarily mean that that's how
it would have to be forever. Because from what I understood,
if you follow a fod MAP diet, it takes away
the symptoms, but it doesn't get rid of the CBO.
So people probably don't know what CEBO is. So CEBO,
as s I b O stands for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
(21:17):
So we have trillions and trillions of bacteria in our
gut microbiome, and majority of them live in the colon,
but they do live in all parts of our gi tract.
And when there's an overgrowth or an imbalance of these
bacteria in our small intestine, which is about twenty ft long,
then we start feeling symptoms bloating, sometimes people have diarrhea
(21:40):
or constipation or a mix of both. That's a largely
a result of fermentation that these bacteria do have the
food that you're eating. And so foods that are highly
fermentable are some of these fod MAP foods that we're
talking about. A lot of these are very healthy, like
cabbage and Brussels sprouts and cauliflower and avocado, yeah, even
avocat and so these are all health foods we talk about.
(22:03):
So people will go and you know, I'm gonna eat
all these foods you're telling me that they're good to eat.
I'm gonna eat plant based, But I can't eat any
of these plant based foods because I have these symptoms,
avoiding the foods that you know cause your problem, and
then addressing the actual cause of the sebow, and then
trying to slowly, sequentially reintroduce some of these foods may
(22:23):
be able to kind of help bring balance back. And
and that's kind of what I work. And it's a process.
It's not something that you can take one magic pill
and overnight you know you're miraculously cure not come on,
maybe just come up with some kind of magic pill
and be so much easier. It's because the body is
simple and complicated. There's a lot of things going on
(22:43):
at the same time. So you know, your sebow could
be caused by not sleeping well, alcohol and and alcohol
and being stressed. A lot of those three things go together.
I sleep well and the other things I can promise.
You can say, well, I stopped eating fod maps, So
why why do I still have symptoms? Was because that's
(23:05):
just part of the process. That's not the entire process.
And that's actually the hard part because it involves behavior change.
But I think that I am so much better than
I was before. And I don't know if it's anything
I did except a mindset I said to myself, just
eat the best possible food you could eat, listen to yourself,
and don't feel bad about you know what you're eating.
(23:28):
You know, I think that has helped me a lot.
Like I I feel a lot better than I did
when I you know, I was crying to you on
the phone because I literally I just said, you know
what enough. I just if my stomach hearts, it's because
I'm making myself crazy, and I don't know, I think
I've willed myself into feeling better. Yeah, I I strongly
believe that too. I mean, sometimes if you just put
(23:49):
yourself in the right mindset, take some deep breath, do
that for seven eight breath, and Dr Wild teaches you
just kind of rebalance yourself because your body listens to
all of these method sages. It's very very cool and
fascinating at the same time. So Dr While is a
mentor definitely. Yeah. I met him once years ago. You know,
(24:10):
tell me, tell me what he means to you, and
tell me what he's like. It's a really gentle guy,
very very soft spoken, very smart, intelligent. It's almost just
listening to him walk you through a meditation practice is surreal.
It's very peaceful. He's actually the one on the the
Fellowship the first week, the one that actually teaches you
(24:31):
through the for seven eight breath. But his his eating,
he eats like he eats normal. He doesn't do intermittent fasting.
I don't know about intermittent fast he's I don't know
whether he eats meat or not. Actually he eats regular meals.
I mean, I've been to his restaurants. Fantastic. Yeah, do
you have one in San Diego? We have to. We
don't have any in New York yet. But when you
(24:52):
sit down at these restaurants, they're called Drew Food Kitchen.
They have one in Chicago where my sister lives. The
flax crackers, you know, are the best things. I don't
know why he doesn't just put those in a box
to sell them. They're so good. And because he doesn't,
they don't serve bread at the restaurant. Yeah, but they
do serve alcoholohol to get a cocktail. Because he does
(25:13):
teach I don't know. I don't won't say moderation because
he's not saying, you know, go eat French fries. But
you know, maybe if you bake sweet potato fries. But
he teaches you like a better version of regular food exactly.
So if you take a high quality ingredient versus a
low quality ingredient of the same food, it's it's different.
You get a different nutrient profile, it tastes better, it's
(25:36):
healthier for you. Even something as simple as an apple,
you ever compared just a regular apple and an organic
apple or broccoli, even just looking at it, smelling it
as you cut it, it's a different food. So sometimes
when I'm at a restaurant, I usually order off the restaurant.
I eat out a lot, which probably is, you know,
not the best thing, and I usually order off the menu.
(25:58):
I just said, give me a piece of old fish,
nothing on its steam, vegetables. But sometimes when everyone's looking
at the menu, I kind of play a game with myself.
I'm like, Okay, if it wasn't fattening, I wouldn't get
a headache or a stomachache, I wouldn't feel gross. What
would I eat? And you know, the truth is I
would probably get a cheeseburger and fries or you know,
or I would get you know, I don't like French toast,
but I would get something where I usually make my
(26:21):
choices on what I'm what's not going to make me
feel bad. You know, I've turned it into you know,
what I believe in. But I realized there are some
people that could eat things and not get affected by them.
How is it affecting them. Maybe they don't get indigestion,
maybe they don't our burn, maybe they don't gain weight,
but maybe the lipopolysacharade in their body start shooting through
(26:45):
the roof and the CRP starts going up and and
they don't really know that in the background, they're brewing
this inflammatory storm inside of their body and one day
it will show up in one form or another of
a disease or something. Yeah, this is chronic disease or
chronic inflammation. We talk about all the time. It's another buzzword. Yes,
(27:07):
there's so many buzzwords. So I think your job is
to try to figure out how to help people and
de buzz and navigate navigate through life basically, because no
matter what, no matter how good you are or how
perfect you think you are, there is always, I guarantee
it going to be a time when then there's a
(27:27):
problem and you're gonna get derailed, whether it's you're in
a car accident, somebody you know bumped into you from behind,
or whether you tripped and broke your ankle, or god forbid,
if loved one passes away. We're not invincible. We're humans.
Life is going to happen no matter what. That's something
that we have no control over. You can listen to
(27:48):
the cues that your body tells you. Then you can
kind of navigate through this time period and in these
tough times pass and then you can regroup after that.
And so what advice would you have for the people
(28:10):
that are listening and who knows where they are and
you know where they're working, and they don't they don't
know what to do? Like where do people start? By
reflecting on what's going on in your life and just
ask yourself a simple question to say, I have you
know all these issues and problems to deal with right now?
Say I fast forward one year into the future and
(28:33):
all those problems are gone. Just I feel like a
million bucks. I look like a million bucks. I'm on
top of the world. Then sit down with a piece
of paper and a pen and write down for yourself
the story how did you get from point A to
point B? They're in is probably the outline to your
(28:53):
lifestyle plan. It's really good, simple advice. Yeah, so I'm
going to ask you a speed round. Okay, besides this week,
what's the last time you do railed? And what did
you eat? Probably my son's birthday party last month? There
was nothing meal y, so I ate a slice of
pizza And how did you feel? I was fine, it
(29:15):
was good. I don't yeah, I mean, I mean, I
think it's part of American culture. You know, I don't
know how you could live in this country and not
eat pizza in some form or another. Very rarely do
I eat pizza, Very rarely do I have like, you know,
greasy cheeseburger or French fries or something I don't. I
don't touch that anymore. If I feel like having something bubbly,
(29:36):
I'll have like San Pellegrino. That's my new obsession. I guess.
Do you have a cocktail of choice? What I like
to do if I'm going to have a cocktail is
may get some vodka and put with San Pellegrino. I
don't drink like the soda water or anything like that.
And uh, you know, I've been known to have a
glass of Scotch once in a while, not a glass,
(29:58):
but you know what did lass. Yeah, not a whole glass, well,
you say, to glass of scotch. Yeah, yeah, as long
as you know you're not abusing it or you have
a problem, or you're drinking a bottle or half a
bottle all the time your body. I think it's actually
good to kind of stress the body with a little
bit of these things once in a while as well. Interestingly,
I do have a gene that says that I have
(30:22):
a I think sixty or sixty six reduced risk of
heart disease. If I drink two drinks a day. Wow,
you're so lucky you have. That's a good gene. Yeah,
that's a really good And I don't even drink to
drinks any ever, and maybe be better for your house.
So if I have a drink once in a while,
(30:42):
I don't feel so bad about it anymore. And what
do you do to fall asleep at night? Usually I
fall asleep pretty easily. I don't have a hard time
falling asleep. What will knock me out in like a
second is I'll just lie down and I'll do a
deep breathing exercises. Sometimes I may it on headphones and
listen to like a guided meditation. But I don't do
(31:05):
that really much anymore. In the earlier days, when I
was first learning about these kind of things and seeing
how it affects me, I would do that. But these
days I just if I say, Okay, I'm gonna do
for seven eight breath for example, I don't even think
I make it to eight breaths. I'm done. I'm already asleep.
What's your morning routine? What time do you get up?
(31:25):
It depends on if I'm doing a podcast or not. Actually,
as I started my own podcast, so a lot of
people are on the East Coast, and so I'm up
at like five five thirty to to do an interview,
but otherwise around six six thirty. And what do you
do since you don't eat to work out? You know,
I'm not a morning workout person. I just I've never
(31:48):
my whole life been able to say I'm gonna wake
up and I'm gonna work out first thing in the morning.
I know people wake up, they go to their spin
class at four or five o'clock in the morning. I
just can't do that. I'd rather sleep an extra hour.
But I will do that in the evening when I
come back from work, and I don't do it at night.
I have to do it first thing, not not at five,
but seven o'clock. Is everybody has theories on when's the
(32:08):
best time to exercise, but I tell people the best
time to exercise is when you exercise exactly. So what's
your coffee recipe? What's your tea? My coffee is usually
just black. Once in a while, I might put a
little splash of half and half in it. But I'll
tell you what my coffee routine used to be. I
used to put to splendors and generous amount of half
(32:30):
and half in the coffee, literally a diabetes bomb, you know.
And I thought, you know, this was like five years
or more ago, that splendid is better than sugar, because
that's what everybody says. So I'm going to do that.
During this whole process of kind of revamping my own life,
I said, you know, I'm gonna do this, and I'm
(32:51):
gonna do this slowly. So I went from too splendors
to one splendor, and then from one splendid to no splendor.
And then I went from a modern amount of half
and half to a splash. And you know, if I
want to put a little splash in it as a
treat once in a while, do that. But I'm fine
drinking black coffee now. And I actually grew a taste
(33:12):
for espresso. I drink espresso and I do a cap
full of half and half, like I try the coconut milk,
and I just don't love it, not the sweet you know,
touch a half and half and it's organic. So what
is your last workout? We have a peloton actually at home. Oh, good,
me too. I'll have to ratio. Yeah, I don't do
it very I still can't figure out how to work
(33:33):
out with people together. I know you can have friends
and stuff like that, but I don't. You can't. Actually
you can coordinate because my kids do it. I haven't
figured that out either, But you have kids, they'll help
you figure out. And what's the last book you read? Well?
I reread for the second time Dale Bredicon's book The
End of Alzheimer's. A large portion of our risk for
(33:55):
Alzheimer's comes from lifestyle issues, and so we can prevent
and in a lot of cases reverse some of the
early inflammation and issues that are underlying Alzheimer's. And so
it's a very awesome, fascinating book. So I read it
twice if I read a book twice, and that means
(34:16):
it's really good. There's only a few books that I've
actually had to read two or three times. Even. Do
you read books that aren't medical books or self help
books or wellness books, I mean actually novels, fiction fiction. Um,
it's been a little while since I since I had
a book like that, But I read all kinds of topics,
(34:36):
and I think that's kind of what helped me develop
as a person and as a healer. I read books
on child psychiatry. I'll read books on quantum theory, which
is those are like the kind of the craziest ones,
like why are you reading about quantum theory? I don't
even understand necessarily half of it, But it's really funny
(34:57):
because a lot of the stuff all ties intogether. There.
When you take some of those principles and you kind
of boiled them down, and you read a book on
transcendental meditation, and then you go read a book on mindfulness,
and then you read a book on got health, you
kind of get this whole feeling of this theme. And
over the last several years, I've probably done over a
(35:18):
hundred books or so from wide variety of people I read,
you know, Yoga Nanda's book, you know Dave Asprey's books,
all of Mark Hyman's books. All these things kind of
fascinating to me, and they all kind of help weave
the picture of what the human life is about. And
when's your book coming out? I have a book, The
Textbook of Integrative gast Frontrology, that actually just came out
(35:38):
with the second edition. So that book that my wife
made me read, forced me to read, that really brought
me into this field. It's funny how that's actually the
book that I ended up becoming an editor for in
the end. So that same book now I READID with
some of my colleagues and we we produced that just
a couple of weeks ago. And I and you send
(36:00):
it to me, and I'm going to dive into it.
It takes it's very very in depth. Got health expert.
I'm trying, but I'm so happy that you came here
to talk to me. I think you're fascinating and I
just think it's so cool what you have done personally
for yourself and that you're on this journey to help
all of us. Thank you, Thank you for having me. Yeah,
thanks so much for more podcasts from I heart Radio,
(36:25):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
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