December 26, 2024 • 63 mins
Imagine waking up each day feeling truly aligned—mind, body, and soul.
In this conversation with Dr. Monisha Bhanote, discover how the integration of science and ancient wisdom can redefine well-being.
From her insights on the gut microbiome and cellular health to practical tips for living intentionally, this is a guide to embracing the foundations of vitality.
Plus, hear her transformative journey from conventional medicine to integrative healing and how small, sustainable choices can pave the way for longevity and joy.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the Plant Powered Athlete podcast. I'm your
(00:03):
joint host Joe Gagnon. Today I have a fabulous guest with me,
Dr. Monisha Binoot and it's going to be a fun dialogue because she's been on a
journey that many of us would envy. You know, a level of insight that she's
gained. She wrote a book called The Anatomy of Well-Being which
I probably would like to understand even better myself because I've been on this
(00:25):
sort of, we'll call it my own inspired journey of health and wellness making
what I think are better choices but sometimes we're not exactly sure.
So I think we're going to get into some of the detail of that. She runs retreats,
she runs a practice, she's really sponsoring
the idea that through the mind-body harmony
we can just live a better life and we always say you know the mind and the
(00:48):
body are the same. We cause some separation
only because sometimes we feel different about it but anyway
Monisha, welcome to the podcast. What a pleasure to meet you and by the way I
love your headband. Thank you. Thanks Joe for having me on the
Plant Powered Athlete podcast. I'm looking forward to our conversation and
(01:08):
sharing with your community kind of what I've been doing the last
30 or so years what I know and yeah let's get into it.
Yeah you know to me the especially I always think about myself as a
typical person you know where I am today I'm
not sure I ever imagined that I would have been you know if you'd
written it down there's some point in our lives where you
(01:31):
had written it down you'd say that's not going to be me you know.
So if you were to think back and it'd be fun to hear your journey because the
journey is a lot what people are going to think about how did we get there
because it's easy at the end but there's a lot there. How did this
happen you know becoming you know a doctor and then
thinking about medicine differently but also a lifestyle.
(01:52):
Was it obvious to you when you were growing up or were there things that
happened tell us your sort of story. Yeah yeah absolutely so you know I don't
have like one of those stories where it's like oh a friend or family member
got sick and I was like oh now I need to be a doctor and save them.
That wasn't really my story. My story was I'm a first generation immigrant
(02:13):
and you know coming to America my family was like you know to have a
better lifestyle so with that say hello to the construction here.
So with that the idea was you know I'd become a
professional so a doctor a lawyer or engineer and
(02:37):
my father is an engineer and I'm like that's boring you know I don't want to
do that. You never do what your parents are and
so the idea was pre-med pre-law and so I went to undergrad I was pre-med
pre-law and I'm like oh it's law you have to read so much.
I'm like I can't do that and I love I'm a very visual person so I love
(03:01):
pictures and I'm like oh this pre-med thing there's there's a lot of pictures
there this I can do and so I went down the path
pre-med you know an undergrad and I was always you know
stronger in science just naturally so it came quite easy to me
and then I went to medical school and I trained to be
(03:23):
a conventional medical doctor because that's all I really knew there's
there's no other doctors in my family I'm the only one the first
the last probably the only one for now and so I trained to be an
internist internal medicine because that's all we really knew we knew
about our gps and our regular doctors that would take care of us
(03:46):
and I quickly realized well within the first year of residency that
whoa this is not and this was you know decades ago now this is not a path that
is going to be fulfilling for me both as a physician
and as a patient because what was actually happening was
I was and this is a time before we had EMRs or electronic medical records this
(04:10):
is you know we used to write in the patient's chart so month
after month week after week I would see my own patient notes like the
patient was coming back again and again in the emergency room in
the hospital and I'm like wait a minute what's going on in the
clinic and they're not getting better and I'm like but looking at I'm like oh
(04:31):
well they're getting the right protocol they're getting this you know
we have all and then I'm like wait a minute something's wrong here and I'm
like let me figure out what's actually going on in the body on this cellular
level and so I moved from doing
internal medicine to something called pathology and most
(04:51):
people don't even know what pathology is so pathology is really the
examination of all tissues in the body and how disease
evolves so anything that comes out of the human body
whether that is a blood test whether that is a
biopsy say you go in for colonoscopy and they take a little biopsy sample
(05:12):
or you go in for your mammogram and they take a breast sample
all of that tissue body fluids all of that go to a
pathologist who is the one person who looks at it
under the microscope and goes ah it's this let me give you an answer
so I did that for a very very long time in fact I'm
I have three medical board certifications just in pathology I have
(05:35):
anatomic pathology clinical pathology and then cytopathology where where it's
I'm able to diagnose diseases including cancer with just a
few cells like little needle aspirations we used to do
whether we're putting them in your thyroid cells or we're putting them in
you know maybe a lymph node or something like that and we take them out and we're
(05:56):
able to diagnose disease so I did that for quite a bit of time
and in that time part of our
management of patients in a hospital is to have something we call tumor boards
okay and tumor boards are you know where the clinicians the surgeon the
(06:18):
oncologists the radiologists the pathologists all come together to talk
about a single patient and their case and what needs to happen next based off
of the answer the pathologist has given them
so we're kind of more of a doctor's doctor like I've got answers
I'm going to give you the answers and then based off of these protocols that
(06:39):
there's guidelines like NCCN guidelines and all this kind of stuff this is what
happens okay so I did that for a number of years
and I still do that but I'm a very curious person and I'm
like okay so I've given them the answer they've gone to the right person to have
the surgery they they've had their treatment from the
oncologist but why am I seeing why am I seeing their tissue back on my desk
(07:02):
again meaning why do they have another thing going on in their body or in their
human cells why do they have a recurrence of their cancer why do they
have a whole new cancer why do they have some other disease it
doesn't even need to be cancer like maybe it's like a side effect of one of
the medications they took like why do they now have gastritis or reactive
gastropathy as we call it so that kind of led me down this path
(07:28):
of okay there's still something missing here I have not solved the world's
problems yet I need to dive a little bit deeper
and that's where I really started looking at other factors like
lifestyle so things like mind body and how it connects so I am a certified
yoga and meditation teacher so and then I trained at the Andrew
Weill Center for Integrative Medicine so really taking this holistic approach of
(07:52):
mind body soul spirit all of this and how
integrative to me is really it's complementary we take the the best of
the best that we can get from conventional and we take the best that
we can get from these other whole body systems whether that's
Ayurveda or traditional Chinese medicine or botanicals
herbs and really take this integrative approach at looking at the individual
(08:15):
and then additionally of course I train in culinary medicine because that
simply wasn't enough I'm like I love food food is medicine and how can we do
that right so all of this kind of puts me at where
my journey is now and how I view the human body on this
cellular level and how I live my lifestyle based off of this and all my
(08:37):
knowledge yeah wow and a question I wanted to get
a little deeper but were you plant-based throughout that
journey or did that happen somewhere along the way
that's a great question no I was not plant-based because you know I'm eating
in the hospital and the hospitals are some of the worst places to eat
especially the doctor's lounge you know we got
(09:00):
like bagels and pastry for for breakfast we've got these
big pots of soup that probably every hospital is feeding us across the world
we have like you know turkey and ham sandwiches and
you know you're on call and all you want to do is just have some some fuel
which I did not realize until after medical school
(09:22):
and a few years in that that food that I was eating was basically
creating disease in my body even though I was looking at disease under the
microscope yeah I didn't connect it until
probably I would say definitely not through med school I would say
maybe in the first couple years of working so definitely about
(09:45):
you know a couple decades ago but I did not make the change right away
because I'm like okay let's see if there's some science behind it let's see
what this is really doing let you know because if this is the norm
and all we know of what the norm is is like it's being
fed and we're getting it in a hospital it must be good for us
you know that's the norm we don't we don't really think about it but then
(10:09):
when I'm seeing my colleagues developing diseases like
you know high cholesterol or high blood pressure or even like you know
cancers and stuff like that I'm like what what's going on here
and really then that's where that approach came so I have been
(10:29):
plant-based for I would say fully plant-based for over a decade now
so since 2014 but I didn't do it overnight and I think that's the
important thing for people to realize is it was a transition
um in my household we were mostly vegetarian so I grew up eating a lot of
(10:51):
vegetarian food it was only outside of the house like
at say school or work or you know going out to dinner
with friends where I would not eat vegetarian um and then
um I think it was in I would I would say
(11:11):
probably early 2000s like maybe 2007 2008 where I really started
looking at it and going oh I need to learn how to eat more plants even
though I eat them at home um but I'm not at home anymore now
right so I'm living all over the world and I'm like I need I need to learn how
(11:32):
to do this for myself so I've taken a number of cooking classes
I've learned from some of the best chefs and I'm like there's really something to
it because when you are able to work more
efficiently when your mind is clearer when your body moves with ease
you have more energy that connects directly to your food
(11:55):
and so I think that was a big part of it and um
but like I said I didn't go overnight I even remember before I went
fully fully vegan my last meal was the biggest
macaroni and cheese that I could find because I'm like okay I'm giving up the
cheese because cheese was a regular thing in
in my diet you know um and now I can't even like think about
(12:20):
eating that like you know all these different things I remember when I
sat for my board exam and we finished a two
two-day pathology board exam in Tampa we had to use to go in person for these
exams two days of pure torture for our medical
boards and I remember after that exam we all went to a steak house and we
ordered the biggest steak and the biggest bottle of wine and stuff I'm
(12:43):
like I can't even imagine myself as an individual doing that knowing what I
know now yeah maybe this is one of those
questions of somewhat curiosity you know we
I think our system is resilient enough that it sort of hides the impact of what
we do to it right so we can sit on the couch and feel
(13:06):
comfortable sitting on the couch even if that's not helping us we can
eat foods that are not helping our health but we don't feel it immediately
and we can not have movement or good mindset or bad sleep whatever all these
things there isn't this sort of direct causal
feeling there's causality but not the feeling of that
(13:27):
and so and then there's a point where if we look
and fast forward you know to health in most Americans we'll just
talk about health isn't great and you'd sort of say well is that just
a natural path that we have to not be healthy when
we turn 50 60 70 you know that we need more pills to resolve
(13:49):
something why and have we just duped all of ourselves
to say you know we don't know what's happening
or is there some other part of this that you've thought about because
it is something we can intervene right throughout we can change something and
not end up in that circumstance years later because no one wants to
(14:12):
feel that way what do you think yeah no no finish
I was just saying have you thought about that because
catching people earlier is what we have to sort of do
right yes absolutely 100 prevention is a key and I think when I'm working with my
patients and stuff and they're like well why didn't anybody tell me about
(14:32):
yes that's always a like why didn't I know
about this you know like whether they have a cancer diagnosis or they have high
cholesterol they're like oh I didn't know that you know my
friday night pizza habits and my ice cream was influencing
anything you know and I think it is partly cultural you know
(14:53):
that we live in a country where you know
there's a pill for every ill right so you think all right I get sick
I go take the pill I'm better but that's not actually what happens
in the body on that cellular level and it's kind of interesting because I've
been traveling quite a bit and the one thing I notice is here in the
U.S. the number of wheelchairs lined up at
(15:18):
airports you know anywhere from five to seven
wheelchairs just to get on a plane now in other countries and and you know I
traveled to five countries far east middle east and all
that recently I did not find one wheelchair you have all the older
individuals walking around whereas here um you know we have a problem one of the
(15:41):
problems we have is obesity we are an overfed malnourished
country meaning we're eating food but we're not
actually eating food because we're eating ultra processed food that our
body does not know what to do with and therefore we are malnourished from
that and we are creating disease from that
(16:02):
and um and that's really one of the biggest factors for
the chronic diseases that we are seeing in younger and younger generations
because you know now one in four millennials has a chronic disease
um now we're seeing cancers in 18 19 20 year olds things that were diseases of
(16:23):
older age is now a disease of every age in our
country yeah yeah it's crazy you know it's so
interesting because you sort of wonder like I
don't feel like I would be considered a privileged person for some reason
genetically you know probably as regular as
everyone else yet in the past 20 years I think I had a
(16:46):
cold twice maybe if I can even I'm making that
up because I don't remember and you sort of think that that's
really on the outliers right I mean that is
not normal tell you like well why like is that something that could actually
happen you know that you could not be sick
(17:09):
and you know for whatever other the macro things that I could be sick I don't
have any of those either and so you'd have to sort of try and
say is there something that happened right what caused that
and I think that's what the opportunity is so when
you know you wrote on your website you know biohack your gut mind and soul you
(17:29):
know I just posted recently my biohack you know was how I eat
how I think how I sleep how I exercise how I interact with my community there
are all these things that are all in our hands
I don't need any kind of economic advantage
you know maybe the knowledge but that is
easy enough with today's technology to find out right
(17:53):
um so let's just jump into this because I think biohacking most people think is
I'm going to be like Dr. Sinclair and I'm going to take a
pill and I'm going to you know take rapamycin
I'm going to change my aging and my telomeres let me talk about like
living is biohacking either to the good or the bad right
yeah I actually it's kind of it's funny I joke Ayurveda which is an ancient
(18:18):
like 5 000 year old whole body system I feel is the original biohack because
they were looking at that body on that um that mind body spirit connection and
looking at what is in balance and out of balance and
how um you know food will influence this so you know I I am in the the biohacking
(18:39):
world in the biohacking community and there you know there's a lot of talk
about taking you know metformin and rampamycin and all
these different things to um improve and increase longevity but
a lot of those things aren't going to work if you're not
doing the basics and we're we're basically skipping steps right so if
(19:00):
you're if you're climbing a mountain and you're
trying to get to the top of the mountain you still need that foundation and this
is why people fall off the top of the mountain because it goes straight up to
the top maybe they have the helicopter or the pill drop them at the top
but they fall back down right so um I think it always comes back to the
(19:20):
basics you are what you eat you are how you move you know your your
body is meant to move um you recover with having quality
restorative sleep not that you're just lying on a bed and sleeping like we
really want to get into this restorative place
so our cells can kind of clear out all the gunk that we've developed
throughout the day um and then how we nurture our
(19:43):
relationships I mean these are just a few of these
things that are so basic that everyone's kind of like
skipping around in a way it's like it's right there in front of you and I
almost want to use my cell it's right here in front of you and
everyone's kind of hopping around it instead of going all right let me focus
on what I call hashtag cell care like let's take care of these guys and it
(20:07):
does not cost that much money to do it it's what
it is it's time and we have the time we have 24
hours in a day so if you're not spending you know four hours of it on
social media and instead that four hours devoting to
you know eating properly moving your body and all these kinds of things
this is going to be much better off yeah we have all heard in the past years
(20:34):
now that you know the gut microbiome some language
people may be familiar may not be familiar that you know we should be
doing things to help you know our digestive system because
it is a different system right we have all these different systems
but it seems to be one of the places we're falling apart and it has this very
(20:56):
big significant impact tell us your perspective on you know
how we should think about this because that's where food goes right and
ends up in our gut and then something's happening good or bad
where are we yeah so so let's think about what happens when we eat food
right so digestion actually starts much earlier on
(21:17):
like because it starts when you're like smelling food because that's when
your body is starting to produce the enzymes that will break down the food
so you put your first bite in your mouth whatever it is it's going to go down
from you know broken down in your mouth with
the help of salivary glands which are these little glands that sit on the
side mouth they give you little enzymes to break down the food it goes down
(21:40):
through the esophagus which is the next area of your GI tract
which has something called peristalsis movement and it allows the food to go
down into your stomach where your stomach then further
digests it with its enzymes and ingredients and stuff
from your stomach it passes on to like i wish i had a little image here
(22:00):
it passes from your stomach into your duodenum okay so your duodenum is broken
into three parts the first second and third part of your duodenum
the duodenum is part part of your GI tract but that
duodenum also communicates with your pancreas
your pancreas is sending enzymes into your duodenum your
gallbladder and liver are sending enzymes like
(22:22):
bile and stuff like that to break down the food and now
from the duodenum it passes into the much longer smaller intestine
and then as it goes down and progresses even further it goes into the large bowel
or the colon before the parts that you don't need are
eliminated now all through that process you know if we think about whatever one
(22:42):
food you ate as that food is getting broken down
the nutrient or lack of nutrients is taken from the food and it is
turned into you know at the the base level you know we
can talk about the macro level of you know proteins carbs and fats
but then at the base level we're talking about the vitamins and minerals the
(23:06):
amino acids all this different stuff we're getting out of it
which then travels to our bloodstream and then reformulates
in this chemical reaction into things we need to make
neurotransmitters hormones all this kind of stuff
and as you can tell i'm kind of a science geek
but it it's important to understand that every bite
(23:30):
will influence how you feel how you think how you move how you sleep how you
live your daily life right so um so that that's kind of the
basis of it and i would love people to kind of think of the gut microbiome as
like i call them our bffs because we actually have
more gut microbiota than we have human cells like
(23:53):
you know just percentage wise so you really want to make
friends with these guys and you want to have like the cool fun guys that are
going to help you do all the things you want to do
and not the bad guys that are going to create inflammation wreak havoc and have
parties in your body because those parties they might be
localized to the gut to begin with but they like going through that bloodstream
and traveling to other organs and causing disease
(24:15):
so i would love for you to think of the gut as
really a key tool in helping you both prevent or create disease hey it's
nathan crane founder of plant powered athlete and i want to thank you for
tuning in to the plant powered athlete podcast
and as a special thank you i want to give you a 10 discount code
on our plant powered protein scientifically formulated super clean
(24:40):
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so the 10 discount code you can use the word podcast at checkout and you can
(25:04):
get plant powered protein at our website at plant powered athlete
com thanks again for tuning in we have been told to our lives that our brain is
this really important organ but the gut is a peer to the brain
right in terms of what some people consider the gut the third brain right
(25:26):
so um but here's the thing the gut closely communicates to the brain
so um for example when um we have nowadays a lot of people a lot
of young people even experiencing anxiety it's like they don't even like
anxiety has kind of come out of nowhere and um and young people i'm like what do
(25:49):
you mean the seven-year-old's anxious well like does do they even know what
that means right um but when we think about it the
neurotransmitter serotonin a majority of that is made in your gi tract
so now you can imagine if all you've been eating is
frozen pizzas and goldfish and like i don't even know you know what kids are
(26:12):
drinking these days if it's it's unhealthy like
whatever purple blue drinks like whatever's not real food
that they've created a microbiome that is not healthy
and so therefore they're not able to create the correct
neurotransmitters to even feel good to regulate their emotions to know like
what's going on yeah so which fascinating of course right
(26:37):
because the activities that we take the food that we eat the way that we
live has an impact i sort of wonder if we don't
realize that it does because we don't always do things to
our advantage in that way so you know one of the the words you
use frequently is this idea of being intentional
(27:00):
so let's like pull that apart a little bit because it sounds you know
both specific in a to simisense to people or abstract
you know what do we want to be intentional about how should we be
thinking like where where do we need to start down this path
yeah so to start down this path is i really want to see people get off of
autopilot right and um you know when you wake up like take a moment
(27:27):
to pause and be like hey how am i feeling today what am i
you know what's what am i doing what do i need
today because we get on this autopilot of oh let me wake up let me
go to the gym let me rush to here let me rush to work let me do
this and then at the end of the day you're frankly exhausted and you don't
have any idea what's happened right so this is really about slowing down
(27:50):
right intentionality is about slowing down
becoming more mindful and present in what you are doing with your actions
because um often we're not present when we're
doing things like the number of people i've talked to i'm like
when we sit down and discuss mindful eating and i'm like hey what did you
eat last night for dinner and they're like you know i don't really remember i
(28:12):
remember eating but i don't even remember what i had
um you know so we have our our clients our patients do food journals
and correlate those food journals to how their day was and correlate it to how
their mood was throughout the day and then that helps us connect the
dots because most people can't remember what they ate
last week let alone yesterday but when we kind of start making ourselves
(28:36):
accountable for these things um we can connect the dots and be like
oh you know what that's not making me feel good so i'm not one to be like oh
cut this out like you got to cut it out because it's bad
i think it takes people their own self-discovery
to go you know what that wasn't making me feel good and that's what sticks
it's like when you tell somebody to tell a kid don't do that like
(28:58):
don't touch that what do they do they could touch that right so we don't do
that if we're trying to help people heal with health issues right
we want them to be able to explore and really experiment you know it's a
our life is a lab right we're experimenting with our life and that
comes back to biohacking right so biohacking is really experimenting
with what works for you as an individual but also gaining the
(29:22):
knowledge and being like okay i tried this it didn't work i mean i'll
give you an example i tried you know very popular biohack um uh
which you know a lot of people are doing is intermittent fasting and i
regularly intermittent fast already like you know i'm usually
uh a 16 eight intermittent faster but i'm like oh let me see if i can turn
(29:43):
this up a notch let me try this fasting mimicking where i'm really
bringing it down to like 500 calories and see if i can
get myself into further autophagy and see if that
really does something for me it took my system out of whack my body did not like
that in fact it took me months to recover from that and i'm
(30:04):
like so that that's where it's like really pain but the thing is i have the
the experience expertise to be like okay i i know how i have to recalibrate i
know what went wrong i know why this didn't work
um and that doesn't mean it won't work for somebody else but for
you know i i think it works great for people who do have like say maybe
(30:25):
50 75 pounds to lose that that's not why i was doing it i was looking at it from
this perspective of oh can i clean out any
more gunk from my cells but when you don't have that much to
clean out what happens it's not the best thing right
so so i think it's it's really taking these tools and going
and instead of just jumping from one fad to another fad and
(30:49):
and this kind of slowing down because at the end of the day i have so many
clients who have tried so many things and they're trying to do so many things
and they don't know what's working or what's not so then they're afraid to
stop doing any of the things but it gets very exhausting
like health should not be exhausting health should feel
super easy super intentional super like okay this is just my lifestyle now
(31:15):
yeah so when you have these conversations whether it's in a retreat
or with a patient or just someone you randomly meet
and they say you know tell me like what i should do and you're like okay i'll
give you some kind of ideas do you follow along with telling them
like how do we measure progress how do we measure
(31:37):
success whether we we want to use those words or not
they're going to be how people think and so
in the abstract of i'm 45 years old and i'm not really worried about how
many fell i'm 70 because it's so abstract at this point
um how do we get people to see progress along the way because you've told them
(32:00):
they'd really be like fast forward to 70 and they had this like
they could you know run around the block and play their pickle ball and they can
do all the things they want to do and hang out with their friends etc
most people would sign up for that but it's a long way off and like yeah it's
fine so what do you do to think through with
you know your clients or patients about success
(32:22):
and progress how do you keep them on track
yeah absolutely so we we generally start with what are you doing in 24 hours of
your day i think that is a very important thing and a big
eye opener for people to be like what do i do and and i'm talking like in
detail like what time are you waking up are you
(32:43):
having breakfast what are you having for breakfast
when are you going to work like what is your full cycle like what is your
lifestyle yeah right and then taking a look at
what is it that they want to do with their life and it's and it's
really hard for an individual like one of the last questions i will ask
(33:04):
in um in our first initial consultation appointment is what gives you meaning
and purpose in life and it's a very difficult question
sometimes for some people when they're like
wait a minute nobody's ever asked me that like what does that even mean like
yeah what gives me meaning and purpose in life right
and it's like why do you wake up every day and and we need that and we need to
(33:25):
be um reevaluating that and making sure
that we are on that path that aligns with that right because
you know i have people who are like oh i just want to see my daughter get
married or i want to see my grandkids graduate from high school or i want to
do this right and then we take that back and go all
right if that's what you want this is how we got to get there based off of
(33:46):
where you are right so there's always going to be motivators
and i think it's a matter of tuning into what is your motivator you
know for me i want to travel to all the countries in the world
like i you know and i don't want to be doing it lined up in a wheelchair
at an airport because it's not easy that way
you know so just thinking about it from the perspective of
(34:10):
what is it you want out of this life and it's going to be different to
everybody and then how do you get there yeah i like that you uh touched on this
travel idea a lot of people who venture to be
either all plant-based or more plant-based
do pretty good job at home because you can control it you can
(34:32):
go to your natural grocer or make good choices
get out on a trip or a weekend vacation or anything else
and all of a sudden it's a lot of noise and it's hard to be able to make those
choices since you have traveled a lot and you
have lived this lifestyle what advice do you have for how to
travel be plant-based eat better you know keep it going yeah so first
(34:57):
thing be prepared right so um you know we're talking to plant
powered athletes here so you're not going to show up for your
next race or your next game without practicing right you're just not going
to do it you know um that that's why we prepare for things so
same thing when it comes to our nutrition we want to be
prepared so i'll give you a few of the hacks that i do but so thinking about it
(35:21):
from a pre-travel perspective um i always research where i'm going so
i know if there's restaurants going to be there that i can eat at or not
you know and depending on what country i'm in and if there's not restaurants
i usually pack some food um and one of the things i might do is i might pack
(35:41):
a plant powered smoothie right so the protein power like make a smoothie and
the best thing is you freeze it okay so now you're freezing your
smoothie by the time you get there you stick it in the refrigerator and you can
have three days four days of smoothies this works especially well when
like going to conferences and stuff like that and you're like you're just not
going to be able to be fueled and you need to have it
stick it in your suitcase it's frozen it'll be fine yeah um
(36:05):
that's one thing i do another thing i do is
most places you will be able to get some kind of salad
um and so i make sure i like double down on my dark leafy greens and getting a
lot of salads so much so that i travel with something called
a mezzaluna which probably looks like a weapon but it's not
it's like a a chopping device that you can chop up
(36:29):
the greens and make them like much smaller so you can actually eat those
eight cups of dark leafy greens right so that's just one thing i do
people will be like i'm sitting in a conference and i pull it out and they're
watching me prepare this but i'm trained in culinary medicine so
that that's one of the tricks i've picked up um
another thing is um i'm a big fan of carrying around nuts and seeds
(36:53):
especially you know like chia seeds are easy to carry around you can stop at
starbucks get a get a cup of plant-based milk pour your
chia seeds in there shake it up and by the time you're
getting on board the flight you've now got chia seed pudding
you know um so really like keeping that simple um
these are kind of some like pre pre things i do recommend you know besides
(37:17):
preparing and looking ahead at restaurants i will sometimes even call
restaurants because um like often with doctor events it's
like we don't really have the choice like this is a restaurant they picked and
we have to be there i will call ahead and um i usually end up
talking to the chef and be like hey what can you make for me you know and
(37:38):
almost always my dish ends up being better than
everybody else's dish then everybody's like how did you get that right
so um i i think just asking for what you need because you know it's going to feel
your body better is this key and then of course
traveling to places like you know i hold a plant-based
(37:59):
retreat where you can actually experience the food and even if you aren't
plant-based just to experience the food and go oh i
can live off of this this is like a new way of living my
body feels better i think that's the biggest thing is people don't realize
how good their body can feel on plants because there's many people who have
(38:21):
tried plant-based diets and or vegan diets and been like it made
me worse and then i look at what they've done i'm like that's not a plant-based
like i don't even know what that is you know that's not
plant-based or they've tried it and their cholesterol levels have jumped or
something has jumped and it's like because you're not really eating
plant-based you're eating you know um plant-based chicken nuggets and
(38:43):
plant-based burgers and not real food um so i i think it's a matter of really
understanding like what is food what kind of food and also getting that um
what i call like biodiversity because we tend to eat the same stuff
every day like if you came to my house you would see that i have like
three to five different smoothies on rotation for the week you know it's not
(39:05):
like just one every single day the same thing um
probably throughout the day i've got like because i drink i drink out of
these small little cups um three to five different ones that i
might be having because i'm looking at getting the multiple factors of
different nutrients and which is the colors of the rainbow too.
Yeah and i think you've read a lot about the
(39:25):
the uniqueness of individuals and of our bodies
and so there's this sort of foundation of how
plants and the right nutrient profile can help us generally how
specific do you get marisha is it something that
this i'm different than you or are we more similar than different
(39:46):
and so on with all your patients etc. We get very specific because with my
patients we do in-depth blood work so um that blood work
is really you know the key for oh this person is missing antioxidants
or this person is missing these specific b vitamins so we want to
increase this nutrition and then we want to support it this way
(40:09):
or this person might be eating the best diet
meaning they're eating a really good you know plant-based diet
but their body isn't able to break down the nutrients so if it can't break down
the nutrients it's creating inflammation or their body is not able to absorb the
nutrients because there's some um parasite there or some kind of gut
imbalance so we're really looking at kind of the
(40:31):
nitty-gritty i would say with testing and going all right right now
this is what's going to be good for you let's get your body stronger and then
you know start incorporating some of the things like maybe you want to eat this
and your body's like you're missing it um i think that
is very important that's where personalized medicine comes in
(40:52):
you know of course we try to this is not a
podcast about selling plant-powered athlete protein
nonetheless this you know we've seen fads in food you know over the past 30
years right we said no fats no sugars know this know that have
this and one of the sort of places we find
(41:15):
ourselves today is that people are saying we should have more protein
now of course if you're plant-based everyone says oh you can't get enough
protein which we know is not true i mean nathan i think at
his peak crossfit stuff was doing over 200 grams of protein a day as a vegan so
you know we can get to it but it does seem that if we increase the
(41:37):
clean amount of protein it changes our appetite it changes how
we feel about ourselves um gives us a different kind of energy
in a different platform why is that happening like tell me a
little bit you know because you really studied this cellular level of stuff like
why is protein having such a significant impact in the positivity
(41:58):
and how we're reacting to it as bodies and systems and humans
yeah so there is a variety of different proteins right so whether you're doing
animal proteins or plant proteins proteins basically
contain the building blocks of life which are amino acids
which means that they are going to help make cells they're going to help make
you know our dna and all this kind of stuff
(42:20):
the reason i prefer plant protein is because it comes with a few other things
that you can't get from animal-based proteins
which is fiber yeah number one okay um good which our gut microbiome loves
and two it is going to be phytonutrients and that is often what i see in
(42:41):
individuals um that are eating a more um animal
predominant diet is that their blood tests will clearly show me that they
have no fiber in their body it will clear clearly show me
that um they are lacking in phytonutrients
and antioxidants which are critical for protecting our cells
(43:03):
right so just even if we break both of those down for a second um
so fiber the three things that do not have fiber are going to be
meat dairy and sugar what is the majority of people eating
meat dairy and sugar now if we do not have fiber our gut microbiome doesn't
(43:24):
have anything to feed itself off of right so what happens in that state is
that we can create a microbiome dysbiosis or imbalance in a in a high
animal protein diet okay um specifically if you're eating more
red and processed meats but even just you know
grass-fed beef all this trends that we have you're still going to create an
(43:47):
imbalance because what happens is with excessive
meat consumption you're creating a compound biochemical
compound called tmao okay so with this tmao it leads to
inflammation in the body and it leads to cardiovascular disease
now when you talk to the people who have had high blood pressure high
(44:08):
cholesterol or even a heart attack and you ask them
about their diet and what they're eating well they're eating steaks and they're
eating burgers and they're you know they're eating all this stuff
um the other thing is that high animal protein diets also create
a acid load so we're getting more acid in our body because we're getting
(44:30):
more um instead of being alkaline our body is
more acidic okay and this potentially leads to
you know things like calcium depletion um higher risk of
osteoporosis um you know i have these women who are like oh you know
when they started the fad of like grilled chicken everywhere
you know the grilled chicken on my salad grilled chicken in my wrap grilled
(44:54):
chicken everywhere or i'm just eating grilled chicken and broccoli
you know because they're they're trying to like you know
they think they're taking care of their body but
when you're grilling meats you're actually
creating heterocyclic amines which are cancer causing compounds
in the body which doesn't happen when you grill
(45:15):
like peppers or zucchini or something else on the grill
it's just inherent in animal proteins right
so at the end of the day we end up creating this inflammatory cascade which
is the precursor to how the rest of our body functions
because of our body is so inflamed and that's just
one factor that's a food factor then we put in the mental health aspect of it
(45:39):
and the stress that we are experiencing now we're creating inflammation on this
whole other level so we're basically people walking around
so inflamed even if you can be a skinny inflamed person like
you know um and how does it show up it shows up in you know from symptoms like
digestive things to headaches to sleep issues
(46:02):
and then the most important thing is mood like i don't know if you've ever like
walked around like well you're in new york right you
i lived in new york so there's a mood happening in new york okay
but there's so much anger and aggression that comes with with this and you know
when i was traveling abroad i'm like why are all these people so happy like
the store owners are happy the uber drivers are happy like
(46:25):
everybody's happy i encountered one unhappy person in an entire month
on the trip and i was like what is their secret because they're all happy
and it's really the simplicity because they're eating real food
they're not eating ultra processed food they're moving their body every day
there it's not like they're just sitting and being sedentary they're like
(46:46):
actually walking and moving their body and they're having good relationships you
know so it's it's it's very interesting to me like all
these simple things we just avoid doing and
when we're thinking about it from this longevity perspective we work in america
we work work work work work we hit retirement and instead of
(47:06):
enjoying retirement we end up in hospitals uh doctors
appointments every third day or like monday wednesday friday we're at the
doctors and we're not enjoying life anymore
yeah right so i think that's where people should think about it is
you're working but what are you working for because
what i see is people spend all this time working you hit 65
(47:27):
you go for retirement but you're literally at doctor's appointments
when that is totally avoidable yeah this probably um certainly not a
scientific question but has some science base to the answer
if we were to ask old people who got cancer or some other disease
(47:49):
intestinal bowel syndrome crones go through any of these sort of
like if you say to people like why do you think you got that
do we think the answer is it's just like
you know not winning the lottery or winning the lottery i mean it's like
completely random do people associate anything that they've ever
done that this is why it's happening or do we all just say
(48:12):
nope that was the card i was dealt by a higher power and i just had to live with
that what do you think is the mind many people say that it's
just that's it was my family it was my
genetics it was you know like because it's very hard for us to take
responsibility for our lives and our actions right
and that's where you know when i work with my patients i go i go back to like
(48:36):
childhood i'm like okay how was your life up to the age of
age of five in grade school how was life all right now we're in high school how
how was life what were you doing were you enjoying it were you not
all the way depending on how old they are we go all the way back and we go
all the way to the present because usually there is some factor
in there that started triggering this disease um you know whether it was
(49:02):
the stress of a divorce or the you know late nights of uh staying up for school
or something that we didn't have the tools to
manage that then created disease in our life so
what we really should be doing is teaching children the tools to take care
of their body and that means how do you make a meal
(49:25):
because kids i actually i have adults right now who
don't even know how to make a salad and i'm like what do you mean well i was a
latchkey kid i got frozen dinners right so we have done a real disservice in
society to not teach people these basic things
because we live a life of convenience yeah we can just call uber eats we just
have something delivered but that's not going to be the food
(49:47):
that heals you i mean i live in a neighborhood full of doctors and it's
like and i'm just at the beginning of the neighborhood and i always laugh
because i see the uber eats guy dropping off um fast food to these
doctor's houses and i'm going oh my goodness okay let me
keep talking about this yeah and i i says the leading question but
(50:08):
it's never too late right to change right yeah
absolutely not it is never too late i mean i i have patients as young as like
10 years old to you know in their 80s and at the end of the day all we really
want is to feel good right and imagine if that was possible i
(50:30):
think people give up on the fact that they can feel good
and when you wake up and and this this is a funny part because you know
in our intakes we i always go back to all right this is where you were six
months ago do we have any of these complaints now
they're like oh i didn't even know i had them like
totally forget about them like when we don't have pain when we don't have
(50:53):
headaches when we don't have you know they forget that they even existed
right but of course i've documented i'm like oh great we've solved the problem
right but but you did the work to get there and
it was worth it yeah i do think that the other part right
is that we sometimes can well we'll see some people will say well
(51:13):
that's not me you know i can't do that uh you know i'm not
michael jordan you know i'm not a runway model you know
all this stuff and we sort of you know abdicate and we give up on you
know the possibilities because maybe we don't have enough good
examples of the people who we would consider
(51:34):
just regular people you know and and so what do you think either what
certainly with your practice you touch a certain number of people but
more broadly how do we create enough role models
so that people can because we're good at copying like humans are really good at
copying you know we're good and bad so we should just copy good how do we do
(52:00):
more of that how do we get more of the message out
more of the message out there i think you know
it's really important to surround yourself with the people who are
uplifting you rather than people who are bringing you down like
you know there'll always be those people who are like oh let's go drinking on
friday night and let's go you know out to whatever restaurant and
(52:23):
eat the cheesecake or whatever i don't even know
what the latest is right there will always be those people but
i think it comes down to going back to what do you want from
this life because we do have a short life and going all right
i'm gonna find those people i'm gonna surround myself with those people
and the end and i almost like even if you weren't a sports person i know a
(52:45):
lot of people probably listening to this are sports people so it's really easy to
go to what did i like doing when i was younger i liked this sport
i liked it because it it had community it had these people right
um maybe you were in band or something like think about what it is
and usually it was like the people and like showing up for that so now i'm
really asking you to show up for yourself right and show up in that right
(53:09):
community find that that community i think it's
very very critical um the other thing is and i
and i talk a lot about this in my book is mindset
right so most people don't realize that you can develop
a growth mindset you are not stuck the way you are
and it can be very powerful when you tap into that and you know there's tools
(53:31):
like you know mindfulness and meditation and breathing and all that
that allows you to kind of quiet out the noise
so you can tap into who you are and we do a lot of that in my retreats because
it really comes down to like how can you show up and be the
best version because then the day like i said we just want to be healthy
and happy yeah all of us i you know you see young kids are
(53:56):
in was remember the story of where artists
were explorers were adventurers that's how we're born
there is no influence other than nature that is affecting that
and then over time we pulled that out of us you know whether it was
for a long time we had to dress the same to the way that we were talked to
(54:19):
to that you know we were conforming and when i went through my journey you
know and i went through sort of that and people wanted to make you a certain way
and i realized now i'm most curious like i
desperately want to know i want to try think
be and it's sort of exciting to think that you can have that throughout your
(54:40):
life but in that right the opportunity to change your mindset through sort of
just trying to say i wonder you know like i always tell
people you know i run pretty much every day my favorite days
are the worst weather because i said what is it like to
experience that wouldn't that be cool to have that experience like this is
(55:01):
interesting or to try some new foods wouldn't it be fun
to see what that's like you know change it up into
not the no leading but the yes and the curiosity because that's easy you
know and you may you know if you run even for an hour
and you're soaking wet you're going to be back in your warm house
(55:24):
you're gonna be fine you know it's not the top of mount everest
and i think it's missing you know i think the curiosity as we get older
is lost and you know that it is sort of what makes our system work to the
best degree possible which then allows us to explore
a plant-based diet because why wouldn't we want to try it it'd be interesting to
(55:47):
do that or why wouldn't we want to go on a retreat or hang out with
people like that because you know what maybe i can learn something um so
you know i think that that's part of this journey and why we want to have
these conversations you know as you think about
the practicality i was asked this the other day i was doing a talk not too
(56:08):
dissimilar some of the ones you do and someone said well what is the one change
i could make tomorrow that would make an impact and i know one
is not it but if we were trying to put people on a
path of saying okay yes it tomorrow is soon enough today it's
great yesterday doesn't matter you know what advice do you have for our
(56:28):
listeners to start to put themselves on this path
yeah um you know i always say if you can pick one thing and do it one
percent better today and then add the next day and then you're two percent
better in the next day imagine a year from now where you're going to be right
right um you know i find that the the biggest
(56:49):
impact i see in patients just from a health perspective and because just
seeing so much testing on them is really when
we become mindful of what we're putting in our mouth
yeah right and it doesn't mean you're like
eliminating things altogether it's just like like
(57:10):
as one patient she's like yeah um yeah i didn't realize how many potato chips
i was eating and now i know that if i'm going to eat
some potato chips i'm going to have a huge salad before that
and and she's just feeling so much better right so just really going all
right instead of focusing on i gotta take this out i gotta take this
(57:30):
out focus on what you need to add in okay because all the bad stuff then
gets crowded out so if you need to add something whether
that's you know a salad or a smoothie or um you know or if you need to add
movement just focus on something small one meal at a time
yeah um you know one 10 minute walk at a time
(57:52):
one let me go to bed by nine o'clock at you know so one
small thing because what happens is all of this gets compounded and there's a
ripple effect because then you wake up and you're like
oh well now i'm feeling better i don't want to go
you know drink this i'm gonna drink this because i'm gonna feel better
right so it kind of almost awakens the body
(58:14):
like your body starts to feel awake instead of like i said that autopilot
where you're just kind of like a zombie walking around not knowing what's going
on but you awaken the body you awaken the
cells and the cells love you for it so instead
of speaking out in angry terms and giving you symptoms they're like
it's good let's like support this person so um
(58:34):
i think that's that's basically it just pick one
small thing and just try it but don't give up don't give up okay like
people give up so quickly um find a support network to help you do it
it's kind of like the same thing like when i think about like
training i'm a former tennis player and um
(58:55):
you know if i don't go to practice i'm definitely not hitting those balls
you know and if i'm showing up for a game that's not going to be a very fun
game because i'm just going to get slammed so this is why we practice and
think of you know these things that you're doing
more of a practice i call them rituals actually like make
yourself a new ritual you know whether it's a a ritual to have a cup
(59:19):
of herbal tea at night so you can sleep instead of the
glass of wine which we know will disrupt your sleep you know pick something
you become intentional and more self-aware about it
yeah i love that and i said this to someone the other day and they found
this pretty much new thinking which is not pretty
basic but we are what we do and they're like oh wow i never thought
(59:40):
of it that way and so you know look we don't judge
anyone because everyone has free will free choice we're just trying to
communicate there's alternatives that may be beneficial to you
we believe it deeply because we've learned it but
if you describe yourself in this category of you are what you do
(01:00:00):
in the predominance of what you did was social media and netflix and you went to
a party and someone said okay i'd love you to introduce yourself
as who you are and you said well i'm a really good social media person
i'm a good flipper of right to left and i'm really good at netflix
i've got good dexterity would you feel good about introducing yourself that way
(01:00:23):
that's the question we should ask ourselves is should we
describe ourselves that way the best potato chip eater in the world
if we're good with that you know then you just live with whatever that is i
think most of us know that that's not what we want to be
and it's not to say we shouldn't watch netflix can of a potato chip
and we know that's oh i do both i will admit it i do both
(01:00:46):
it's fine it's just not the predominance and so yeah
no it's what we're doing um you know i would say 90 percent of the time and
it's it's the same thing like when i tell patients i'm like health
does not happen in the doctor's office because we're seeing you for like a few
hours you know 95 percent of health is happening outside of the doctor's office
(01:01:08):
it's it's happening in your daily lifestyle and that's why i spend so much
time going over what is your daily lifestyle
let's see where we can make one small change here there's time here you know
like and and that's where people are like oh i
never thought of that it's always i never thought of that i know
well now that you know let's do it let's do that well
(01:01:29):
this has been an amazing discussion you're uh inspiring and energizing and
i know our listeners would love uh to know more so how do they find out about
you where's your book available what are the content retreats tell us a
little bit about that to finish up absolutely so um my website is
drbenote.com so everything you will find on there so
(01:01:53):
um my patient clinic is on there my retreats our next retreat is happening
at an amazing plant-based resort um march 27th 2025 um so if you're
looking for um some great experience where you
don't have to worry about what you're eating you're just going to enjoy it and
um really tap into um you know it's a longevity retreat but
(01:02:17):
it's an ayurvedic inspired one where we're tapping into who we are as people
and taking the eastern meets west um so i invite you to take a look at that
on the website um on social media on instagram facebook pinterest and
youtube i'm dr benote so that is also the same and then um you
(01:02:38):
can get my book at all retail book sellers
sellers um amazon barnes and noble um it's called the anatomy of well-being
intentional practices to uh let's see um embrace your body's unique design and
revitalize your health so um definitely check it out it's not a
kindle book i know people love kindling it
it's it's literally a um guidebook or framework or let's call it a blueprint
(01:03:00):
for the way the human body works and how to optimize it with
intentional practices so a super um like kind of like you're going to highlight
it i guarantee you're going to highlight it
that's what most people have done well thank you so much
we want you to keep doing what you're doing because it matters to all of us
we'll talk to you again soon thank you so much
Welcome to the Plant Powered Athlete podcast. I'm your
(00:03):
joint host Joe Gagnon. Today I have a fabulous guest with me,
Dr. Monisha Binoot and it's going to be a fun dialogue because she's been on a
journey that many of us would envy. You know, a level of insight that she's
gained. She wrote a book called The Anatomy of Well-Being which
I probably would like to understand even better myself because I've been on this
(00:25):
sort of, we'll call it my own inspired journey of health and wellness making
what I think are better choices but sometimes we're not exactly sure.
So I think we're going to get into some of the detail of that. She runs retreats,
she runs a practice, she's really sponsoring
the idea that through the mind-body harmony
we can just live a better life and we always say you know the mind and the
(00:48):
body are the same. We cause some separation
only because sometimes we feel different about it but anyway
Monisha, welcome to the podcast. What a pleasure to meet you and by the way I
love your headband. Thank you. Thanks Joe for having me on the
Plant Powered Athlete podcast. I'm looking forward to our conversation and
(01:08):
sharing with your community kind of what I've been doing the last
30 or so years what I know and yeah let's get into it.
Yeah you know to me the especially I always think about myself as a
typical person you know where I am today I'm
not sure I ever imagined that I would have been you know if you'd
written it down there's some point in our lives where you
(01:31):
had written it down you'd say that's not going to be me you know.
So if you were to think back and it'd be fun to hear your journey because the
journey is a lot what people are going to think about how did we get there
because it's easy at the end but there's a lot there. How did this
happen you know becoming you know a doctor and then
thinking about medicine differently but also a lifestyle.
(01:52):
Was it obvious to you when you were growing up or were there things that
happened tell us your sort of story. Yeah yeah absolutely so you know I don't
have like one of those stories where it's like oh a friend or family member
got sick and I was like oh now I need to be a doctor and save them.
That wasn't really my story. My story was I'm a first generation immigrant
(02:13):
and you know coming to America my family was like you know to have a
better lifestyle so with that say hello to the construction here.
So with that the idea was you know I'd become a
professional so a doctor a lawyer or engineer and
(02:37):
my father is an engineer and I'm like that's boring you know I don't want to
do that. You never do what your parents are and
so the idea was pre-med pre-law and so I went to undergrad I was pre-med
pre-law and I'm like oh it's law you have to read so much.
I'm like I can't do that and I love I'm a very visual person so I love
(03:01):
pictures and I'm like oh this pre-med thing there's there's a lot of pictures
there this I can do and so I went down the path
pre-med you know an undergrad and I was always you know
stronger in science just naturally so it came quite easy to me
and then I went to medical school and I trained to be
(03:23):
a conventional medical doctor because that's all I really knew there's
there's no other doctors in my family I'm the only one the first
the last probably the only one for now and so I trained to be an
internist internal medicine because that's all we really knew we knew
about our gps and our regular doctors that would take care of us
(03:46):
and I quickly realized well within the first year of residency that
whoa this is not and this was you know decades ago now this is not a path that
is going to be fulfilling for me both as a physician
and as a patient because what was actually happening was
I was and this is a time before we had EMRs or electronic medical records this
(04:10):
is you know we used to write in the patient's chart so month
after month week after week I would see my own patient notes like the
patient was coming back again and again in the emergency room in
the hospital and I'm like wait a minute what's going on in the
clinic and they're not getting better and I'm like but looking at I'm like oh
(04:31):
well they're getting the right protocol they're getting this you know
we have all and then I'm like wait a minute something's wrong here and I'm
like let me figure out what's actually going on in the body on this cellular
level and so I moved from doing
internal medicine to something called pathology and most
(04:51):
people don't even know what pathology is so pathology is really the
examination of all tissues in the body and how disease
evolves so anything that comes out of the human body
whether that is a blood test whether that is a
biopsy say you go in for colonoscopy and they take a little biopsy sample
(05:12):
or you go in for your mammogram and they take a breast sample
all of that tissue body fluids all of that go to a
pathologist who is the one person who looks at it
under the microscope and goes ah it's this let me give you an answer
so I did that for a very very long time in fact I'm
I have three medical board certifications just in pathology I have
(05:35):
anatomic pathology clinical pathology and then cytopathology where where it's
I'm able to diagnose diseases including cancer with just a
few cells like little needle aspirations we used to do
whether we're putting them in your thyroid cells or we're putting them in
you know maybe a lymph node or something like that and we take them out and we're
(05:56):
able to diagnose disease so I did that for quite a bit of time
and in that time part of our
management of patients in a hospital is to have something we call tumor boards
okay and tumor boards are you know where the clinicians the surgeon the
(06:18):
oncologists the radiologists the pathologists all come together to talk
about a single patient and their case and what needs to happen next based off
of the answer the pathologist has given them
so we're kind of more of a doctor's doctor like I've got answers
I'm going to give you the answers and then based off of these protocols that
(06:39):
there's guidelines like NCCN guidelines and all this kind of stuff this is what
happens okay so I did that for a number of years
and I still do that but I'm a very curious person and I'm
like okay so I've given them the answer they've gone to the right person to have
the surgery they they've had their treatment from the
oncologist but why am I seeing why am I seeing their tissue back on my desk
(07:02):
again meaning why do they have another thing going on in their body or in their
human cells why do they have a recurrence of their cancer why do they
have a whole new cancer why do they have some other disease it
doesn't even need to be cancer like maybe it's like a side effect of one of
the medications they took like why do they now have gastritis or reactive
gastropathy as we call it so that kind of led me down this path
(07:28):
of okay there's still something missing here I have not solved the world's
problems yet I need to dive a little bit deeper
and that's where I really started looking at other factors like
lifestyle so things like mind body and how it connects so I am a certified
yoga and meditation teacher so and then I trained at the Andrew
Weill Center for Integrative Medicine so really taking this holistic approach of
(07:52):
mind body soul spirit all of this and how
integrative to me is really it's complementary we take the the best of
the best that we can get from conventional and we take the best that
we can get from these other whole body systems whether that's
Ayurveda or traditional Chinese medicine or botanicals
herbs and really take this integrative approach at looking at the individual
(08:15):
and then additionally of course I train in culinary medicine because that
simply wasn't enough I'm like I love food food is medicine and how can we do
that right so all of this kind of puts me at where
my journey is now and how I view the human body on this
cellular level and how I live my lifestyle based off of this and all my
(08:37):
knowledge yeah wow and a question I wanted to get
a little deeper but were you plant-based throughout that
journey or did that happen somewhere along the way
that's a great question no I was not plant-based because you know I'm eating
in the hospital and the hospitals are some of the worst places to eat
especially the doctor's lounge you know we got
(09:00):
like bagels and pastry for for breakfast we've got these
big pots of soup that probably every hospital is feeding us across the world
we have like you know turkey and ham sandwiches and
you know you're on call and all you want to do is just have some some fuel
which I did not realize until after medical school
(09:22):
and a few years in that that food that I was eating was basically
creating disease in my body even though I was looking at disease under the
microscope yeah I didn't connect it until
probably I would say definitely not through med school I would say
maybe in the first couple years of working so definitely about
(09:45):
you know a couple decades ago but I did not make the change right away
because I'm like okay let's see if there's some science behind it let's see
what this is really doing let you know because if this is the norm
and all we know of what the norm is is like it's being
fed and we're getting it in a hospital it must be good for us
you know that's the norm we don't we don't really think about it but then
(10:09):
when I'm seeing my colleagues developing diseases like
you know high cholesterol or high blood pressure or even like you know
cancers and stuff like that I'm like what what's going on here
and really then that's where that approach came so I have been
(10:29):
plant-based for I would say fully plant-based for over a decade now
so since 2014 but I didn't do it overnight and I think that's the
important thing for people to realize is it was a transition
um in my household we were mostly vegetarian so I grew up eating a lot of
(10:51):
vegetarian food it was only outside of the house like
at say school or work or you know going out to dinner
with friends where I would not eat vegetarian um and then
um I think it was in I would I would say
(11:11):
probably early 2000s like maybe 2007 2008 where I really started
looking at it and going oh I need to learn how to eat more plants even
though I eat them at home um but I'm not at home anymore now
right so I'm living all over the world and I'm like I need I need to learn how
(11:32):
to do this for myself so I've taken a number of cooking classes
I've learned from some of the best chefs and I'm like there's really something to
it because when you are able to work more
efficiently when your mind is clearer when your body moves with ease
you have more energy that connects directly to your food
(11:55):
and so I think that was a big part of it and um
but like I said I didn't go overnight I even remember before I went
fully fully vegan my last meal was the biggest
macaroni and cheese that I could find because I'm like okay I'm giving up the
cheese because cheese was a regular thing in
in my diet you know um and now I can't even like think about
(12:20):
eating that like you know all these different things I remember when I
sat for my board exam and we finished a two
two-day pathology board exam in Tampa we had to use to go in person for these
exams two days of pure torture for our medical
boards and I remember after that exam we all went to a steak house and we
ordered the biggest steak and the biggest bottle of wine and stuff I'm
(12:43):
like I can't even imagine myself as an individual doing that knowing what I
know now yeah maybe this is one of those
questions of somewhat curiosity you know we
I think our system is resilient enough that it sort of hides the impact of what
we do to it right so we can sit on the couch and feel
(13:06):
comfortable sitting on the couch even if that's not helping us we can
eat foods that are not helping our health but we don't feel it immediately
and we can not have movement or good mindset or bad sleep whatever all these
things there isn't this sort of direct causal
feeling there's causality but not the feeling of that
(13:27):
and so and then there's a point where if we look
and fast forward you know to health in most Americans we'll just
talk about health isn't great and you'd sort of say well is that just
a natural path that we have to not be healthy when
we turn 50 60 70 you know that we need more pills to resolve
(13:49):
something why and have we just duped all of ourselves
to say you know we don't know what's happening
or is there some other part of this that you've thought about because
it is something we can intervene right throughout we can change something and
not end up in that circumstance years later because no one wants to
(14:12):
feel that way what do you think yeah no no finish
I was just saying have you thought about that because
catching people earlier is what we have to sort of do
right yes absolutely 100 prevention is a key and I think when I'm working with my
patients and stuff and they're like well why didn't anybody tell me about
(14:32):
yes that's always a like why didn't I know
about this you know like whether they have a cancer diagnosis or they have high
cholesterol they're like oh I didn't know that you know my
friday night pizza habits and my ice cream was influencing
anything you know and I think it is partly cultural you know
(14:53):
that we live in a country where you know
there's a pill for every ill right so you think all right I get sick
I go take the pill I'm better but that's not actually what happens
in the body on that cellular level and it's kind of interesting because I've
been traveling quite a bit and the one thing I notice is here in the
U.S. the number of wheelchairs lined up at
(15:18):
airports you know anywhere from five to seven
wheelchairs just to get on a plane now in other countries and and you know I
traveled to five countries far east middle east and all
that recently I did not find one wheelchair you have all the older
individuals walking around whereas here um you know we have a problem one of the
(15:41):
problems we have is obesity we are an overfed malnourished
country meaning we're eating food but we're not
actually eating food because we're eating ultra processed food that our
body does not know what to do with and therefore we are malnourished from
that and we are creating disease from that
(16:02):
and um and that's really one of the biggest factors for
the chronic diseases that we are seeing in younger and younger generations
because you know now one in four millennials has a chronic disease
um now we're seeing cancers in 18 19 20 year olds things that were diseases of
(16:23):
older age is now a disease of every age in our
country yeah yeah it's crazy you know it's so
interesting because you sort of wonder like I
don't feel like I would be considered a privileged person for some reason
genetically you know probably as regular as
everyone else yet in the past 20 years I think I had a
(16:46):
cold twice maybe if I can even I'm making that
up because I don't remember and you sort of think that that's
really on the outliers right I mean that is
not normal tell you like well why like is that something that could actually
happen you know that you could not be sick
(17:09):
and you know for whatever other the macro things that I could be sick I don't
have any of those either and so you'd have to sort of try and
say is there something that happened right what caused that
and I think that's what the opportunity is so when
you know you wrote on your website you know biohack your gut mind and soul you
(17:29):
know I just posted recently my biohack you know was how I eat
how I think how I sleep how I exercise how I interact with my community there
are all these things that are all in our hands
I don't need any kind of economic advantage
you know maybe the knowledge but that is
easy enough with today's technology to find out right
(17:53):
um so let's just jump into this because I think biohacking most people think is
I'm going to be like Dr. Sinclair and I'm going to take a
pill and I'm going to you know take rapamycin
I'm going to change my aging and my telomeres let me talk about like
living is biohacking either to the good or the bad right
yeah I actually it's kind of it's funny I joke Ayurveda which is an ancient
(18:18):
like 5 000 year old whole body system I feel is the original biohack because
they were looking at that body on that um that mind body spirit connection and
looking at what is in balance and out of balance and
how um you know food will influence this so you know I I am in the the biohacking
(18:39):
world in the biohacking community and there you know there's a lot of talk
about taking you know metformin and rampamycin and all
these different things to um improve and increase longevity but
a lot of those things aren't going to work if you're not
doing the basics and we're we're basically skipping steps right so if
(19:00):
you're if you're climbing a mountain and you're
trying to get to the top of the mountain you still need that foundation and this
is why people fall off the top of the mountain because it goes straight up to
the top maybe they have the helicopter or the pill drop them at the top
but they fall back down right so um I think it always comes back to the
(19:20):
basics you are what you eat you are how you move you know your your
body is meant to move um you recover with having quality
restorative sleep not that you're just lying on a bed and sleeping like we
really want to get into this restorative place
so our cells can kind of clear out all the gunk that we've developed
throughout the day um and then how we nurture our
(19:43):
relationships I mean these are just a few of these
things that are so basic that everyone's kind of like
skipping around in a way it's like it's right there in front of you and I
almost want to use my cell it's right here in front of you and
everyone's kind of hopping around it instead of going all right let me focus
on what I call hashtag cell care like let's take care of these guys and it
(20:07):
does not cost that much money to do it it's what
it is it's time and we have the time we have 24
hours in a day so if you're not spending you know four hours of it on
social media and instead that four hours devoting to
you know eating properly moving your body and all these kinds of things
this is going to be much better off yeah we have all heard in the past years
(20:34):
now that you know the gut microbiome some language
people may be familiar may not be familiar that you know we should be
doing things to help you know our digestive system because
it is a different system right we have all these different systems
but it seems to be one of the places we're falling apart and it has this very
(20:56):
big significant impact tell us your perspective on you know
how we should think about this because that's where food goes right and
ends up in our gut and then something's happening good or bad
where are we yeah so so let's think about what happens when we eat food
right so digestion actually starts much earlier on
(21:17):
like because it starts when you're like smelling food because that's when
your body is starting to produce the enzymes that will break down the food
so you put your first bite in your mouth whatever it is it's going to go down
from you know broken down in your mouth with
the help of salivary glands which are these little glands that sit on the
side mouth they give you little enzymes to break down the food it goes down
(21:40):
through the esophagus which is the next area of your GI tract
which has something called peristalsis movement and it allows the food to go
down into your stomach where your stomach then further
digests it with its enzymes and ingredients and stuff
from your stomach it passes on to like i wish i had a little image here
(22:00):
it passes from your stomach into your duodenum okay so your duodenum is broken
into three parts the first second and third part of your duodenum
the duodenum is part part of your GI tract but that
duodenum also communicates with your pancreas
your pancreas is sending enzymes into your duodenum your
gallbladder and liver are sending enzymes like
(22:22):
bile and stuff like that to break down the food and now
from the duodenum it passes into the much longer smaller intestine
and then as it goes down and progresses even further it goes into the large bowel
or the colon before the parts that you don't need are
eliminated now all through that process you know if we think about whatever one
(22:42):
food you ate as that food is getting broken down
the nutrient or lack of nutrients is taken from the food and it is
turned into you know at the the base level you know we
can talk about the macro level of you know proteins carbs and fats
but then at the base level we're talking about the vitamins and minerals the
(23:06):
amino acids all this different stuff we're getting out of it
which then travels to our bloodstream and then reformulates
in this chemical reaction into things we need to make
neurotransmitters hormones all this kind of stuff
and as you can tell i'm kind of a science geek
but it it's important to understand that every bite
(23:30):
will influence how you feel how you think how you move how you sleep how you
live your daily life right so um so that that's kind of the
basis of it and i would love people to kind of think of the gut microbiome as
like i call them our bffs because we actually have
more gut microbiota than we have human cells like
(23:53):
you know just percentage wise so you really want to make
friends with these guys and you want to have like the cool fun guys that are
going to help you do all the things you want to do
and not the bad guys that are going to create inflammation wreak havoc and have
parties in your body because those parties they might be
localized to the gut to begin with but they like going through that bloodstream
and traveling to other organs and causing disease
(24:15):
so i would love for you to think of the gut as
really a key tool in helping you both prevent or create disease hey it's
nathan crane founder of plant powered athlete and i want to thank you for
tuning in to the plant powered athlete podcast
and as a special thank you i want to give you a 10 discount code
on our plant powered protein scientifically formulated super clean
(24:40):
organic high quality plant powered protein
designed with health and performance and longevity
in mind with three super high quality adaptogens that have been shown
to help improve energy increase focus endurance
speed up recovery and help your body thrive
so the 10 discount code you can use the word podcast at checkout and you can
(25:04):
get plant powered protein at our website at plant powered athlete
com thanks again for tuning in we have been told to our lives that our brain is
this really important organ but the gut is a peer to the brain
right in terms of what some people consider the gut the third brain right
(25:26):
so um but here's the thing the gut closely communicates to the brain
so um for example when um we have nowadays a lot of people a lot
of young people even experiencing anxiety it's like they don't even like
anxiety has kind of come out of nowhere and um and young people i'm like what do
(25:49):
you mean the seven-year-old's anxious well like does do they even know what
that means right um but when we think about it the
neurotransmitter serotonin a majority of that is made in your gi tract
so now you can imagine if all you've been eating is
frozen pizzas and goldfish and like i don't even know you know what kids are
(26:12):
drinking these days if it's it's unhealthy like
whatever purple blue drinks like whatever's not real food
that they've created a microbiome that is not healthy
and so therefore they're not able to create the correct
neurotransmitters to even feel good to regulate their emotions to know like
what's going on yeah so which fascinating of course right
(26:37):
because the activities that we take the food that we eat the way that we
live has an impact i sort of wonder if we don't
realize that it does because we don't always do things to
our advantage in that way so you know one of the the words you
use frequently is this idea of being intentional
(27:00):
so let's like pull that apart a little bit because it sounds you know
both specific in a to simisense to people or abstract
you know what do we want to be intentional about how should we be
thinking like where where do we need to start down this path
yeah so to start down this path is i really want to see people get off of
autopilot right and um you know when you wake up like take a moment
(27:27):
to pause and be like hey how am i feeling today what am i
you know what's what am i doing what do i need
today because we get on this autopilot of oh let me wake up let me
go to the gym let me rush to here let me rush to work let me do
this and then at the end of the day you're frankly exhausted and you don't
have any idea what's happened right so this is really about slowing down
(27:50):
right intentionality is about slowing down
becoming more mindful and present in what you are doing with your actions
because um often we're not present when we're
doing things like the number of people i've talked to i'm like
when we sit down and discuss mindful eating and i'm like hey what did you
eat last night for dinner and they're like you know i don't really remember i
(28:12):
remember eating but i don't even remember what i had
um you know so we have our our clients our patients do food journals
and correlate those food journals to how their day was and correlate it to how
their mood was throughout the day and then that helps us connect the
dots because most people can't remember what they ate
last week let alone yesterday but when we kind of start making ourselves
(28:36):
accountable for these things um we can connect the dots and be like
oh you know what that's not making me feel good so i'm not one to be like oh
cut this out like you got to cut it out because it's bad
i think it takes people their own self-discovery
to go you know what that wasn't making me feel good and that's what sticks
it's like when you tell somebody to tell a kid don't do that like
(28:58):
don't touch that what do they do they could touch that right so we don't do
that if we're trying to help people heal with health issues right
we want them to be able to explore and really experiment you know it's a
our life is a lab right we're experimenting with our life and that
comes back to biohacking right so biohacking is really experimenting
with what works for you as an individual but also gaining the
(29:22):
knowledge and being like okay i tried this it didn't work i mean i'll
give you an example i tried you know very popular biohack um uh
which you know a lot of people are doing is intermittent fasting and i
regularly intermittent fast already like you know i'm usually
uh a 16 eight intermittent faster but i'm like oh let me see if i can turn
(29:43):
this up a notch let me try this fasting mimicking where i'm really
bringing it down to like 500 calories and see if i can
get myself into further autophagy and see if that
really does something for me it took my system out of whack my body did not like
that in fact it took me months to recover from that and i'm
(30:04):
like so that that's where it's like really pain but the thing is i have the
the experience expertise to be like okay i i know how i have to recalibrate i
know what went wrong i know why this didn't work
um and that doesn't mean it won't work for somebody else but for
you know i i think it works great for people who do have like say maybe
(30:25):
50 75 pounds to lose that that's not why i was doing it i was looking at it from
this perspective of oh can i clean out any
more gunk from my cells but when you don't have that much to
clean out what happens it's not the best thing right
so so i think it's it's really taking these tools and going
and instead of just jumping from one fad to another fad and
(30:49):
and this kind of slowing down because at the end of the day i have so many
clients who have tried so many things and they're trying to do so many things
and they don't know what's working or what's not so then they're afraid to
stop doing any of the things but it gets very exhausting
like health should not be exhausting health should feel
super easy super intentional super like okay this is just my lifestyle now
(31:15):
yeah so when you have these conversations whether it's in a retreat
or with a patient or just someone you randomly meet
and they say you know tell me like what i should do and you're like okay i'll
give you some kind of ideas do you follow along with telling them
like how do we measure progress how do we measure
(31:37):
success whether we we want to use those words or not
they're going to be how people think and so
in the abstract of i'm 45 years old and i'm not really worried about how
many fell i'm 70 because it's so abstract at this point
um how do we get people to see progress along the way because you've told them
(32:00):
they'd really be like fast forward to 70 and they had this like
they could you know run around the block and play their pickle ball and they can
do all the things they want to do and hang out with their friends etc
most people would sign up for that but it's a long way off and like yeah it's
fine so what do you do to think through with
you know your clients or patients about success
(32:22):
and progress how do you keep them on track
yeah absolutely so we we generally start with what are you doing in 24 hours of
your day i think that is a very important thing and a big
eye opener for people to be like what do i do and and i'm talking like in
detail like what time are you waking up are you
(32:43):
having breakfast what are you having for breakfast
when are you going to work like what is your full cycle like what is your
lifestyle yeah right and then taking a look at
what is it that they want to do with their life and it's and it's
really hard for an individual like one of the last questions i will ask
(33:04):
in um in our first initial consultation appointment is what gives you meaning
and purpose in life and it's a very difficult question
sometimes for some people when they're like
wait a minute nobody's ever asked me that like what does that even mean like
yeah what gives me meaning and purpose in life right
and it's like why do you wake up every day and and we need that and we need to
(33:25):
be um reevaluating that and making sure
that we are on that path that aligns with that right because
you know i have people who are like oh i just want to see my daughter get
married or i want to see my grandkids graduate from high school or i want to
do this right and then we take that back and go all
right if that's what you want this is how we got to get there based off of
(33:46):
where you are right so there's always going to be motivators
and i think it's a matter of tuning into what is your motivator you
know for me i want to travel to all the countries in the world
like i you know and i don't want to be doing it lined up in a wheelchair
at an airport because it's not easy that way
you know so just thinking about it from the perspective of
(34:10):
what is it you want out of this life and it's going to be different to
everybody and then how do you get there yeah i like that you uh touched on this
travel idea a lot of people who venture to be
either all plant-based or more plant-based
do pretty good job at home because you can control it you can
(34:32):
go to your natural grocer or make good choices
get out on a trip or a weekend vacation or anything else
and all of a sudden it's a lot of noise and it's hard to be able to make those
choices since you have traveled a lot and you
have lived this lifestyle what advice do you have for how to
travel be plant-based eat better you know keep it going yeah so first
(34:57):
thing be prepared right so um you know we're talking to plant
powered athletes here so you're not going to show up for your
next race or your next game without practicing right you're just not going
to do it you know um that that's why we prepare for things so
same thing when it comes to our nutrition we want to be
prepared so i'll give you a few of the hacks that i do but so thinking about it
(35:21):
from a pre-travel perspective um i always research where i'm going so
i know if there's restaurants going to be there that i can eat at or not
you know and depending on what country i'm in and if there's not restaurants
i usually pack some food um and one of the things i might do is i might pack
(35:41):
a plant powered smoothie right so the protein power like make a smoothie and
the best thing is you freeze it okay so now you're freezing your
smoothie by the time you get there you stick it in the refrigerator and you can
have three days four days of smoothies this works especially well when
like going to conferences and stuff like that and you're like you're just not
going to be able to be fueled and you need to have it
stick it in your suitcase it's frozen it'll be fine yeah um
(36:05):
that's one thing i do another thing i do is
most places you will be able to get some kind of salad
um and so i make sure i like double down on my dark leafy greens and getting a
lot of salads so much so that i travel with something called
a mezzaluna which probably looks like a weapon but it's not
it's like a a chopping device that you can chop up
(36:29):
the greens and make them like much smaller so you can actually eat those
eight cups of dark leafy greens right so that's just one thing i do
people will be like i'm sitting in a conference and i pull it out and they're
watching me prepare this but i'm trained in culinary medicine so
that that's one of the tricks i've picked up um
another thing is um i'm a big fan of carrying around nuts and seeds
(36:53):
especially you know like chia seeds are easy to carry around you can stop at
starbucks get a get a cup of plant-based milk pour your
chia seeds in there shake it up and by the time you're
getting on board the flight you've now got chia seed pudding
you know um so really like keeping that simple um
these are kind of some like pre pre things i do recommend you know besides
(37:17):
preparing and looking ahead at restaurants i will sometimes even call
restaurants because um like often with doctor events it's
like we don't really have the choice like this is a restaurant they picked and
we have to be there i will call ahead and um i usually end up
talking to the chef and be like hey what can you make for me you know and
(37:38):
almost always my dish ends up being better than
everybody else's dish then everybody's like how did you get that right
so um i i think just asking for what you need because you know it's going to feel
your body better is this key and then of course
traveling to places like you know i hold a plant-based
(37:59):
retreat where you can actually experience the food and even if you aren't
plant-based just to experience the food and go oh i
can live off of this this is like a new way of living my
body feels better i think that's the biggest thing is people don't realize
how good their body can feel on plants because there's many people who have
(38:21):
tried plant-based diets and or vegan diets and been like it made
me worse and then i look at what they've done i'm like that's not a plant-based
like i don't even know what that is you know that's not
plant-based or they've tried it and their cholesterol levels have jumped or
something has jumped and it's like because you're not really eating
plant-based you're eating you know um plant-based chicken nuggets and
(38:43):
plant-based burgers and not real food um so i i think it's a matter of really
understanding like what is food what kind of food and also getting that um
what i call like biodiversity because we tend to eat the same stuff
every day like if you came to my house you would see that i have like
three to five different smoothies on rotation for the week you know it's not
(39:05):
like just one every single day the same thing um
probably throughout the day i've got like because i drink i drink out of
these small little cups um three to five different ones that i
might be having because i'm looking at getting the multiple factors of
different nutrients and which is the colors of the rainbow too.
Yeah and i think you've read a lot about the
(39:25):
the uniqueness of individuals and of our bodies
and so there's this sort of foundation of how
plants and the right nutrient profile can help us generally how
specific do you get marisha is it something that
this i'm different than you or are we more similar than different
(39:46):
and so on with all your patients etc. We get very specific because with my
patients we do in-depth blood work so um that blood work
is really you know the key for oh this person is missing antioxidants
or this person is missing these specific b vitamins so we want to
increase this nutrition and then we want to support it this way
(40:09):
or this person might be eating the best diet
meaning they're eating a really good you know plant-based diet
but their body isn't able to break down the nutrients so if it can't break down
the nutrients it's creating inflammation or their body is not able to absorb the
nutrients because there's some um parasite there or some kind of gut
imbalance so we're really looking at kind of the
(40:31):
nitty-gritty i would say with testing and going all right right now
this is what's going to be good for you let's get your body stronger and then
you know start incorporating some of the things like maybe you want to eat this
and your body's like you're missing it um i think that
is very important that's where personalized medicine comes in
(40:52):
you know of course we try to this is not a
podcast about selling plant-powered athlete protein
nonetheless this you know we've seen fads in food you know over the past 30
years right we said no fats no sugars know this know that have
this and one of the sort of places we find
(41:15):
ourselves today is that people are saying we should have more protein
now of course if you're plant-based everyone says oh you can't get enough
protein which we know is not true i mean nathan i think at
his peak crossfit stuff was doing over 200 grams of protein a day as a vegan so
you know we can get to it but it does seem that if we increase the
(41:37):
clean amount of protein it changes our appetite it changes how
we feel about ourselves um gives us a different kind of energy
in a different platform why is that happening like tell me a
little bit you know because you really studied this cellular level of stuff like
why is protein having such a significant impact in the positivity
(41:58):
and how we're reacting to it as bodies and systems and humans
yeah so there is a variety of different proteins right so whether you're doing
animal proteins or plant proteins proteins basically
contain the building blocks of life which are amino acids
which means that they are going to help make cells they're going to help make
you know our dna and all this kind of stuff
(42:20):
the reason i prefer plant protein is because it comes with a few other things
that you can't get from animal-based proteins
which is fiber yeah number one okay um good which our gut microbiome loves
and two it is going to be phytonutrients and that is often what i see in
(42:41):
individuals um that are eating a more um animal
predominant diet is that their blood tests will clearly show me that they
have no fiber in their body it will clear clearly show me
that um they are lacking in phytonutrients
and antioxidants which are critical for protecting our cells
(43:03):
right so just even if we break both of those down for a second um
so fiber the three things that do not have fiber are going to be
meat dairy and sugar what is the majority of people eating
meat dairy and sugar now if we do not have fiber our gut microbiome doesn't
(43:24):
have anything to feed itself off of right so what happens in that state is
that we can create a microbiome dysbiosis or imbalance in a in a high
animal protein diet okay um specifically if you're eating more
red and processed meats but even just you know
grass-fed beef all this trends that we have you're still going to create an
(43:47):
imbalance because what happens is with excessive
meat consumption you're creating a compound biochemical
compound called tmao okay so with this tmao it leads to
inflammation in the body and it leads to cardiovascular disease
now when you talk to the people who have had high blood pressure high
(44:08):
cholesterol or even a heart attack and you ask them
about their diet and what they're eating well they're eating steaks and they're
eating burgers and they're you know they're eating all this stuff
um the other thing is that high animal protein diets also create
a acid load so we're getting more acid in our body because we're getting
(44:30):
more um instead of being alkaline our body is
more acidic okay and this potentially leads to
you know things like calcium depletion um higher risk of
osteoporosis um you know i have these women who are like oh you know
when they started the fad of like grilled chicken everywhere
you know the grilled chicken on my salad grilled chicken in my wrap grilled
(44:54):
chicken everywhere or i'm just eating grilled chicken and broccoli
you know because they're they're trying to like you know
they think they're taking care of their body but
when you're grilling meats you're actually
creating heterocyclic amines which are cancer causing compounds
in the body which doesn't happen when you grill
(45:15):
like peppers or zucchini or something else on the grill
it's just inherent in animal proteins right
so at the end of the day we end up creating this inflammatory cascade which
is the precursor to how the rest of our body functions
because of our body is so inflamed and that's just
one factor that's a food factor then we put in the mental health aspect of it
(45:39):
and the stress that we are experiencing now we're creating inflammation on this
whole other level so we're basically people walking around
so inflamed even if you can be a skinny inflamed person like
you know um and how does it show up it shows up in you know from symptoms like
digestive things to headaches to sleep issues
(46:02):
and then the most important thing is mood like i don't know if you've ever like
walked around like well you're in new york right you
i lived in new york so there's a mood happening in new york okay
but there's so much anger and aggression that comes with with this and you know
when i was traveling abroad i'm like why are all these people so happy like
the store owners are happy the uber drivers are happy like
(46:25):
everybody's happy i encountered one unhappy person in an entire month
on the trip and i was like what is their secret because they're all happy
and it's really the simplicity because they're eating real food
they're not eating ultra processed food they're moving their body every day
there it's not like they're just sitting and being sedentary they're like
(46:46):
actually walking and moving their body and they're having good relationships you
know so it's it's it's very interesting to me like all
these simple things we just avoid doing and
when we're thinking about it from this longevity perspective we work in america
we work work work work work we hit retirement and instead of
(47:06):
enjoying retirement we end up in hospitals uh doctors
appointments every third day or like monday wednesday friday we're at the
doctors and we're not enjoying life anymore
yeah right so i think that's where people should think about it is
you're working but what are you working for because
what i see is people spend all this time working you hit 65
(47:27):
you go for retirement but you're literally at doctor's appointments
when that is totally avoidable yeah this probably um certainly not a
scientific question but has some science base to the answer
if we were to ask old people who got cancer or some other disease
(47:49):
intestinal bowel syndrome crones go through any of these sort of
like if you say to people like why do you think you got that
do we think the answer is it's just like
you know not winning the lottery or winning the lottery i mean it's like
completely random do people associate anything that they've ever
done that this is why it's happening or do we all just say
(48:12):
nope that was the card i was dealt by a higher power and i just had to live with
that what do you think is the mind many people say that it's
just that's it was my family it was my
genetics it was you know like because it's very hard for us to take
responsibility for our lives and our actions right
and that's where you know when i work with my patients i go i go back to like
(48:36):
childhood i'm like okay how was your life up to the age of
age of five in grade school how was life all right now we're in high school how
how was life what were you doing were you enjoying it were you not
all the way depending on how old they are we go all the way back and we go
all the way to the present because usually there is some factor
in there that started triggering this disease um you know whether it was
(49:02):
the stress of a divorce or the you know late nights of uh staying up for school
or something that we didn't have the tools to
manage that then created disease in our life so
what we really should be doing is teaching children the tools to take care
of their body and that means how do you make a meal
(49:25):
because kids i actually i have adults right now who
don't even know how to make a salad and i'm like what do you mean well i was a
latchkey kid i got frozen dinners right so we have done a real disservice in
society to not teach people these basic things
because we live a life of convenience yeah we can just call uber eats we just
have something delivered but that's not going to be the food
(49:47):
that heals you i mean i live in a neighborhood full of doctors and it's
like and i'm just at the beginning of the neighborhood and i always laugh
because i see the uber eats guy dropping off um fast food to these
doctor's houses and i'm going oh my goodness okay let me
keep talking about this yeah and i i says the leading question but
(50:08):
it's never too late right to change right yeah
absolutely not it is never too late i mean i i have patients as young as like
10 years old to you know in their 80s and at the end of the day all we really
want is to feel good right and imagine if that was possible i
(50:30):
think people give up on the fact that they can feel good
and when you wake up and and this this is a funny part because you know
in our intakes we i always go back to all right this is where you were six
months ago do we have any of these complaints now
they're like oh i didn't even know i had them like
totally forget about them like when we don't have pain when we don't have
(50:53):
headaches when we don't have you know they forget that they even existed
right but of course i've documented i'm like oh great we've solved the problem
right but but you did the work to get there and
it was worth it yeah i do think that the other part right
is that we sometimes can well we'll see some people will say well
(51:13):
that's not me you know i can't do that uh you know i'm not
michael jordan you know i'm not a runway model you know
all this stuff and we sort of you know abdicate and we give up on you
know the possibilities because maybe we don't have enough good
examples of the people who we would consider
(51:34):
just regular people you know and and so what do you think either what
certainly with your practice you touch a certain number of people but
more broadly how do we create enough role models
so that people can because we're good at copying like humans are really good at
copying you know we're good and bad so we should just copy good how do we do
(52:00):
more of that how do we get more of the message out
more of the message out there i think you know
it's really important to surround yourself with the people who are
uplifting you rather than people who are bringing you down like
you know there'll always be those people who are like oh let's go drinking on
friday night and let's go you know out to whatever restaurant and
(52:23):
eat the cheesecake or whatever i don't even know
what the latest is right there will always be those people but
i think it comes down to going back to what do you want from
this life because we do have a short life and going all right
i'm gonna find those people i'm gonna surround myself with those people
and the end and i almost like even if you weren't a sports person i know a
(52:45):
lot of people probably listening to this are sports people so it's really easy to
go to what did i like doing when i was younger i liked this sport
i liked it because it it had community it had these people right
um maybe you were in band or something like think about what it is
and usually it was like the people and like showing up for that so now i'm
really asking you to show up for yourself right and show up in that right
(53:09):
community find that that community i think it's
very very critical um the other thing is and i
and i talk a lot about this in my book is mindset
right so most people don't realize that you can develop
a growth mindset you are not stuck the way you are
and it can be very powerful when you tap into that and you know there's tools
(53:31):
like you know mindfulness and meditation and breathing and all that
that allows you to kind of quiet out the noise
so you can tap into who you are and we do a lot of that in my retreats because
it really comes down to like how can you show up and be the
best version because then the day like i said we just want to be healthy
and happy yeah all of us i you know you see young kids are
(53:56):
in was remember the story of where artists
were explorers were adventurers that's how we're born
there is no influence other than nature that is affecting that
and then over time we pulled that out of us you know whether it was
for a long time we had to dress the same to the way that we were talked to
(54:19):
to that you know we were conforming and when i went through my journey you
know and i went through sort of that and people wanted to make you a certain way
and i realized now i'm most curious like i
desperately want to know i want to try think
be and it's sort of exciting to think that you can have that throughout your
(54:40):
life but in that right the opportunity to change your mindset through sort of
just trying to say i wonder you know like i always tell
people you know i run pretty much every day my favorite days
are the worst weather because i said what is it like to
experience that wouldn't that be cool to have that experience like this is
(55:01):
interesting or to try some new foods wouldn't it be fun
to see what that's like you know change it up into
not the no leading but the yes and the curiosity because that's easy you
know and you may you know if you run even for an hour
and you're soaking wet you're going to be back in your warm house
(55:24):
you're gonna be fine you know it's not the top of mount everest
and i think it's missing you know i think the curiosity as we get older
is lost and you know that it is sort of what makes our system work to the
best degree possible which then allows us to explore
a plant-based diet because why wouldn't we want to try it it'd be interesting to
(55:47):
do that or why wouldn't we want to go on a retreat or hang out with
people like that because you know what maybe i can learn something um so
you know i think that that's part of this journey and why we want to have
these conversations you know as you think about
the practicality i was asked this the other day i was doing a talk not too
(56:08):
dissimilar some of the ones you do and someone said well what is the one change
i could make tomorrow that would make an impact and i know one
is not it but if we were trying to put people on a
path of saying okay yes it tomorrow is soon enough today it's
great yesterday doesn't matter you know what advice do you have for our
(56:28):
listeners to start to put themselves on this path
yeah um you know i always say if you can pick one thing and do it one
percent better today and then add the next day and then you're two percent
better in the next day imagine a year from now where you're going to be right
right um you know i find that the the biggest
(56:49):
impact i see in patients just from a health perspective and because just
seeing so much testing on them is really when
we become mindful of what we're putting in our mouth
yeah right and it doesn't mean you're like
eliminating things altogether it's just like like
(57:10):
as one patient she's like yeah um yeah i didn't realize how many potato chips
i was eating and now i know that if i'm going to eat
some potato chips i'm going to have a huge salad before that
and and she's just feeling so much better right so just really going all
right instead of focusing on i gotta take this out i gotta take this
(57:30):
out focus on what you need to add in okay because all the bad stuff then
gets crowded out so if you need to add something whether
that's you know a salad or a smoothie or um you know or if you need to add
movement just focus on something small one meal at a time
yeah um you know one 10 minute walk at a time
(57:52):
one let me go to bed by nine o'clock at you know so one
small thing because what happens is all of this gets compounded and there's a
ripple effect because then you wake up and you're like
oh well now i'm feeling better i don't want to go
you know drink this i'm gonna drink this because i'm gonna feel better
right so it kind of almost awakens the body
(58:14):
like your body starts to feel awake instead of like i said that autopilot
where you're just kind of like a zombie walking around not knowing what's going
on but you awaken the body you awaken the
cells and the cells love you for it so instead
of speaking out in angry terms and giving you symptoms they're like
it's good let's like support this person so um
(58:34):
i think that's that's basically it just pick one
small thing and just try it but don't give up don't give up okay like
people give up so quickly um find a support network to help you do it
it's kind of like the same thing like when i think about like
training i'm a former tennis player and um
(58:55):
you know if i don't go to practice i'm definitely not hitting those balls
you know and if i'm showing up for a game that's not going to be a very fun
game because i'm just going to get slammed so this is why we practice and
think of you know these things that you're doing
more of a practice i call them rituals actually like make
yourself a new ritual you know whether it's a a ritual to have a cup
(59:19):
of herbal tea at night so you can sleep instead of the
glass of wine which we know will disrupt your sleep you know pick something
you become intentional and more self-aware about it
yeah i love that and i said this to someone the other day and they found
this pretty much new thinking which is not pretty
basic but we are what we do and they're like oh wow i never thought
(59:40):
of it that way and so you know look we don't judge
anyone because everyone has free will free choice we're just trying to
communicate there's alternatives that may be beneficial to you
we believe it deeply because we've learned it but
if you describe yourself in this category of you are what you do
(01:00:00):
in the predominance of what you did was social media and netflix and you went to
a party and someone said okay i'd love you to introduce yourself
as who you are and you said well i'm a really good social media person
i'm a good flipper of right to left and i'm really good at netflix
i've got good dexterity would you feel good about introducing yourself that way
(01:00:23):
that's the question we should ask ourselves is should we
describe ourselves that way the best potato chip eater in the world
if we're good with that you know then you just live with whatever that is i
think most of us know that that's not what we want to be
and it's not to say we shouldn't watch netflix can of a potato chip
and we know that's oh i do both i will admit it i do both
(01:00:46):
it's fine it's just not the predominance and so yeah
no it's what we're doing um you know i would say 90 percent of the time and
it's it's the same thing like when i tell patients i'm like health
does not happen in the doctor's office because we're seeing you for like a few
hours you know 95 percent of health is happening outside of the doctor's office
(01:01:08):
it's it's happening in your daily lifestyle and that's why i spend so much
time going over what is your daily lifestyle
let's see where we can make one small change here there's time here you know
like and and that's where people are like oh i
never thought of that it's always i never thought of that i know
well now that you know let's do it let's do that well
(01:01:29):
this has been an amazing discussion you're uh inspiring and energizing and
i know our listeners would love uh to know more so how do they find out about
you where's your book available what are the content retreats tell us a
little bit about that to finish up absolutely so um my website is
drbenote.com so everything you will find on there so
(01:01:53):
um my patient clinic is on there my retreats our next retreat is happening
at an amazing plant-based resort um march 27th 2025 um so if you're
looking for um some great experience where you
don't have to worry about what you're eating you're just going to enjoy it and
um really tap into um you know it's a longevity retreat but
(01:02:17):
it's an ayurvedic inspired one where we're tapping into who we are as people
and taking the eastern meets west um so i invite you to take a look at that
on the website um on social media on instagram facebook pinterest and
youtube i'm dr benote so that is also the same and then um you
(01:02:38):
can get my book at all retail book sellers
sellers um amazon barnes and noble um it's called the anatomy of well-being
intentional practices to uh let's see um embrace your body's unique design and
revitalize your health so um definitely check it out it's not a
kindle book i know people love kindling it
it's it's literally a um guidebook or framework or let's call it a blueprint
(01:03:00):
for the way the human body works and how to optimize it with
intentional practices so a super um like kind of like you're going to highlight
it i guarantee you're going to highlight it
that's what most people have done well thank you so much
we want you to keep doing what you're doing because it matters to all of us
we'll talk to you again soon thank you so much
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