Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to the Connecting Minds podcast. My name is Christian Jordonov. Thank you so much for joining me today. On this episode, I have a conversation with Dr. Mark Sherwood, really awesome guy. He's a former Oklahoma state and regional bodybuilding champion, an ex -professional baseball player, and a 24 -year retired veteran of the Tulsa Police Department in Oklahoma.
Speaker: where he logged a decade of courageous service on the department SWAT team. He's now a naturopathic physician and with his wife Michelle L. Neil Sherwood, they have a successful medical practice, the functional medical institute,
Speaker: They also have a television and radio program and they have tons of resources including the Amazon Bestseller, The Quest for Wellness and a couple of other books, nutrition plans, fitness instructional videos, and helpful mental and emotional steps to provide relief from stress and to help people form better habits so that they can live well. They also have a couple of documentary films
Speaker: very prolific, very busy folks. They've helped thousands of people around the world. And obviously, Mark is a wealth of knowledge on all things natural and functional medicine. But the topic of today's episode is the obesity pandemic, which is destroying the lives of countless millions of people around the world.
Speaker: So we discuss how we came to the state of affairs as it now is, what led us here, and some practical steps that we can take to reverse the process if we are affected. Talk about not just reducing calories and moving more, which is the often given prescription. It's all about calories in, calories out. We are lazy. We don't.
Speaker: moving off, we eat too much, but it's a little bit more complex than that as Marc kind of explains. We talk about what insulin resistance is, how a diet high in carbohydrates can predispose us to weight gain. He also gives us a kind of overview of their seven pillar process
Speaker: And we talk about those pillars to their motivation, nutrition, sleep, movement, stress management, supplementation. And we also talk about some peptides that he is using with great success with his patients.
Speaker: So a lot of really valuable information. I'm going to have links to all of Mark's books and their website and make sure you check out the links in the show notes and the website to Mark and Michelle's resources, their website, their books, their films. There's just a ton of really valuable information on how to change and improve our habits to live a better life.
Speaker: I love Mark's energy. I love how passionate he is about what he's doing, about helping people improve the quality of their lives and their health. And I love how just inspiring it is just to listen to him.
Speaker: cannot help but to feel inspired to make better choices in your life, be that with regards to movement, stress reduction, improving sleep, nutrition. He's so capable of motivating people. This is why I'm really excited to share this episode with you, and I'm so honored to have him on the podcast. So without further ado, let's get right into it. Here is Dr. Marc Sherwood.
Speaker: Connecting Minds is a space dedicated to honoring the amazing authors, researchers, clinicians, artists, and entrepreneurs who are contributing to our collective evolution or simply making the world a better place. These thought -provoking conversations are intended to expand our horizons, so come with an open mind and let us grow together. Here is your host, Christian Yordanov.
Speaker: Mark, thank you so much for joining us again. Christian, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you. It's good to see you. Yeah, so we had some technical difficulties last time, and I'm grateful that you made the time for us to redo our conversation. We'll be discussing mainly the obesity pandemic, as you call it. But before we get into the subject matter, can you give folks a little bit of your story? It's a pretty exciting one, so I think that will be quite interesting for people.
Speaker: So just a bit about myself. Just people want to know who's talking on the other end, of course. My life has been one I struggled with a little bit of weight as a young man. I struggle with eating, body image. Believe it or not, I'm a
Speaker: You know, I'm a pretty strong guy now and I have a good physique. But when I look in the mirror, I still see sometimes that little short fat boy, you know, and it's a hard thing to overcome. So I get that. But, you know, throughout my life, I've been a good athlete, played a little professional baseball, of course, and then got into bodybuilding, was successful in that. And then I was in law enforcement for over two decades and 10 years on the SWAT team.
Speaker: I've been all around this world and pretty much spoken every continent except Antarctica. And now I'm a naturopathic physician. My mission is really to serve and protect people from themselves. Now we have, you know, my wife and I have a large reach with social media. We're produced a couple of movies. We've written three books. Just really enjoy helping people. And it is, it's an honor to be here with you today, for sure.
Speaker: Thank you. You kind of glossed over a few things that are pretty big. So you were on the SWAT team, but you were also a professional baseball player. Can you just give us a little bit of the background there?
Speaker: Yeah, it's in your ride. I kind of moved through quick but stuff because you know, it's hard when you're telling your own bio, you know, but man, I've been really blessed. My baseball career was something that I grew up loving that game that sport and, you know, like a lot of little boys around the globe.
Speaker: You know, I had a dream of playing professional baseball as a life career. And I was fortunate enough to do that one year in America and then one year in Australia, believe it or not. So lived over there all by myself for a year. That was before cell phones and computers. So that was amazing. But while there.
Speaker: If you knew, I was actually the rookie of the year back then. So that was a neat time. And I learned to lift weights over there. I learned to exercise because I had nothing else to do during the day but go to the games at night. So that was a great learning experience, not just the experience of playing professional baseball and being on the field with some people that are amazing athletes and amazing human beings.
Speaker: But also just growing up a lot living on another continent with not the social connection we have today. So that was a kind of the welcome to the world story for Mark. Yeah, so you got into bodybuilding when you got back to the States.
Speaker: I did, it was interesting because, you know, again, I was a good athlete with hand -eye coordination and, you know, physicality, but physique -wise, it wasn't the best. And while I was in Australia, I went from more or less a, well, in baseball talk, a singles and doubles hitter to a home run hitter. And it happened over the course of a year as I
Speaker: I started lifting weights and I got stronger and I got faster and I got more powerful. And when I came back to the United States after that, people that had seen me before I left, because I'd been gone quite a while, they couldn't believe it. And they said, hey, you probably ought to do a bodybuilding show. And I'm like, no way, I'm not going to put on trunks and get out there nearly naked and do that. But they talked me into it and I ended up doing
Speaker: I think I competed probably a dozen or 15 times close to that over the course of the next 12, 15 years and actually won a lot of regional competitions and actually qualify for the national level in some places. That's awesome, man. It takes a lot of dedication because I know those guys, not just training hard, but the dieting, it's so tough. I can only imagine.
Speaker: It was challenging. But, you know, one thing I've kind of learned in life, if you want to do what you've never done and become what you've never been, you've got to do other people won't do. And so commitment is something that's in my blood. The best competition is with yourself. And that sport is a great example of that because, you know, yeah, you get on the stage with other athletes and there's a sort of a
Speaker: A subjective judge there judges viewing you making a score on that but but ultimately you if you do your best you got nothing to be ashamed of if you don't do your best you got everything to be ashamed of and so that sport i mean it's like.
Speaker: I don't compete anymore, Christian, but I do still work out like that. I live like that, I eat like that, and if I needed to walk on a stage, perhaps in six months, I could, and I would plan on winning. I don't have a second thought about that. We need to have mindsets like that, but that is mine, and that was mine at the time, and that's why
Speaker: You know, there was some, you know, some would say success. I call it just blessings because of my attitude and work ethic and just, you know, God gifted abilities, I would think. That's a great attitude, Mark. So what made you then later on leave the SWAT team of all things and become a naturopathic doctor? Man, that is, that's a super awesome question because that's a troubling story for me. You know, my last 10 years,
Speaker: When I was employed by a large metropolitan police department, I was put in charge of some of the training and the hiring of some of the men and women that we were bringing in and getting them ready to go to go out on the streets and do their job.
Speaker: And then I was tasked with developing a wellness program for that particular department. And at that time, I watched men and women—and I'd been on, you know, a decade and a half—I'd watched men and women come on, and they were in the best mental, physical, emotional shape that you can imagine. You know, they were looking good, feeling good, we're good, we're—and then I watched a transition occur, Christian, of these men and women.
Speaker: through the time that I had known them 20 years, and they'd retire and they would die. That broke my heart because I thought to myself, that's not right, man. They work so hard for this thing that we all want to have this thing called retirement. They had a good pension system, a retirement as we would call that, and they lost it.
Speaker: And they would retire, and once they lost their identity of that, they would die. And that bothered me a lot, because I developed some really, when you're in that line of work, and you see people dying in front of you, you know, and you're in that, it's tough, man, and you have to sort of, there's a camaraderie there that only a few people understand, you know, and I say this for effect, but not to shock anybody, when you've looked a person in the eye,
Speaker: that's across from you and you watch them with a group of people around you on the SWAT team, put a gun in their mouth and pull the trigger. And you see this thing called pink mist go in the air. You know, that, that changes the individual person and it changes everybody around you. And it's, it's, you start looking at life and death differently. And when that changes you like that, you start valuing life probably a little bit more.
Speaker: And when you see that life taken away, which I did, and it bothered me so much, I wanted to do something about it. So I started studying, I started searching, and I want to know why. Why is it that life takes such its toll on law enforcement personnel? Why is it that they die before they're supposed to, at least in my view and observation?
Speaker: And why did they get so out of shape? They were getting bigger, fatter, high blood pressure, depressed. Why was that? Was it the job? Was it diet? Was it exercise? Or was it other things? And I wanted to find the answer. And so that led me on the quest to become a naturopathic physician. And so as I stated earlier, my job when I was in law enforcement was to protect and serve.
Speaker: And that mission has not changed. It's just expanded now around the globe where I want to help people, man. I want to help them have the best life and not have anything less than they're supposed to have in life. And so long answer to a short question, but I am passionate about it and I think people understand why now.
Speaker: Moving on to, I guess, the big subject that it's a big subject because last time around you called the obesity crisis a pandemic. Can you tell us why, how, what happened that we have become so obese as a society?
Speaker: Well, I think we have to understand why I said what I said and I'll repeat it again. Obesity is without a doubt the fastest growing non -communicable disease on the planet. And it's not okay because we know there's many, many comorbidities that come from that because excess adipose tissue creates
Speaker: inflammation signaling through what's called the adipokines. And we've all heard of the cytokine storm of, you know, speaking of this current timeframe, COVID, everybody understands that. Excess adipose tissue is also not just inflammatory, but it's from a kinetic standpoint, it creates pressure on our joints, knees, et cetera. So we end up getting joint pain and joint degeneration.
Speaker: Further, adipose tissue holds toxins because most toxins that we face in our world, we live in a toxic world, they are called lipophilic substances, meaning they love fat and they get stuck there. So it's like this whole milieu of potential problems. It all began
Speaker: when we specifically in American, yes, I'm an American, yes, I'm in the US right now as I speak to you, but when the American system started employing their control over what people ate and developed the food pyramid that was suggesting 6 to 11 servings of breads and grains,
Speaker: And fats became bad, sugars became, we don't talk about those. And now breads and grains became the norm. Processed food became something that was funded and subsidized by our own government. And all of that went out and it became what is known now as the standard American Western diet. And it was exported around the world after it was absolutely mastered in the US. And the US at that time, when that food pyramid was installed,
Speaker: There was one state, and in the US we have 50 states, there was one state that had an obesity rate over 10%. Just one at the time. In 11 years, it took just that long for every state with the exception of one to go beyond 10%. And that was back in the late 80s.
Speaker: It is predicted right now that by 2050, 100 % of the U .S. population will be obese based upon BMI. Right now, there are several states, including my own, which is Oklahoma, that have an obesity rate greater than 50%.
Speaker: That is not okay, and that has been exported around the world, and it is killing more people than we want to deem appropriate. Frankly, I don't think it's okay for us to gloss over that thing that is crushing people for the sake of convenience
Speaker: Yeah, I realize there's a subsidization going on about it. I realize there's big money involved. But if we don't stop it, we're all going to just crush our health. And you can work all your life, Christian, and you can make all kinds of money. But if you don't have your health, what do you have?
Speaker: you just wasted all that time and so we need to tackle this thing called obesity head on and it's got to start with individual people like you and me. We got to say not in my home, not in my life and we must understand that many people may not support that and it's okay but leaders don't wait on someone to follow them. Leaders lead
Speaker: With the intent that people will follow and if they don't they still need and that's what we need right now in the world to address this cuz it is a major major problem. Totally agree.
Speaker: What's your stance on, I know there's a few people out there that are just saying it's see -so, calories in, calories out. We are, as a society, we're obese because we eat too much and we don't move enough. Is it as simple as that or is it more complex in your view? It is not as simple as that and much more complex. We have these
Speaker: These jeans and and keep in mind and this will blow everybody's mind are human jeans have changed two percent ten thousand years that's it.
Speaker: Now, we have human genetics, but all of us have about 100 times more bacterial DNA than we do human DNA. So that would give you the indication that we're more bacteria than we are human. We live with bacteria, we live with parasites, we live with viruses. No discussion for another day, but you get the point. We live in a symbiotic relationship with these things, and so our genes and our bacteria, and bacteria have genetic codes with them too,
Speaker: But they all deal with how we process food availability, how we break down individual foods, etc. And it's not about calories. As a matter of fact, I would submit that that whole calorie in, calorie out thing out is absolutely erroneous from start to finish because you could eat an apple, I could eat an apple, and because of the variances of just one thing or bacteria,
Speaker: I might break down that app a little bit faster than you or vice versa, yielding more potential energy created from that or less energy created from that comparatively. Now with that said, the majority, and we do genetics in our practice with people around the world and actually just taught a class recently with 58 practitioners worldwide on four continents, which is pretty cool about genetics.
Speaker: And we have these genes, and I'll just give a couple of genes for people to really, you know, look them up for yourself. One is PPARG. One is TCF7L2.
Speaker: SLC2A2 and FTO. Again, PPARG, TCF7L2, SLC2A2, and FTO. All of these relate to our ability to sort of store fat or not, right, in a general sense, and even feel full or not in a general sense. With that said,
Speaker: The majority, and this is, again, it's not a leap. This is the way it is. The majority of the world's population had the tendency to actually store fat in a time of feasting. And guess what? We are not fasting now at all. So longevity of the human
Speaker: being is tied to our ability to survive this feasting famine rotation. When food is scarce, we need to put on a little bit of fat so we can walk and find our next meal. We're designed to be active and when food's prevalent, we're designed to eat. And so because food is so prevalent now in the standard American Western diet, eating habits, fast, quick, convenient, comfort food,
Speaker: we eat a lot we put in a lot of calories but it has no nutrition so we keep eating and eating and eating and the body is queuing those genes to put on fat because it thinks it's in a feasting mode but fast never comes and so hence we're chronically building and never tearing down and that is leading to this troubling troubling trend across our world.
Speaker: You know, you're going to make me check those four genes. I have a genetic report with those four genes there. You're going to make me check them after this call. But there's a Dr. Richard Maurer in Maine. He wrote the book, The Blood Code.
Speaker: He's awesome like you. He's got a great attitude of framing that we have these genes, but we have to understand that we are good at storing. It's an amazing survival mechanism that allowed us, our whole lineage, to be alive now, right? So it's a good thing. But we're just, like you said, we're not utilizing
Speaker: them or we're over utilizing them and we don't have these periods of famine where the body upregulates other enzymes, autophagy, this kind of stuff. So with that said, so we have an abundance of food and it seems a lot of it is, like you say, junk, little nutritional value, high carb. So this is something I wanted to weave into the conversation
Speaker: of the whole aspect of blood sugar, dysregulation, insulin resistance. Can you give folks a primer? Why are too many carbs at one time bad? What is insulin resistance and how does that affect fat storage, please?
Speaker: So I'm gonna give everyone a little bit of a lesson in physiology using a story that they'll understand. So we all take in foods, and then foods contain what is called macronutrients, which are fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. All foods, for the most part, have some of all those. There's, of course, some exceptions. Now within that, those fats, carbs, and proteins, within that food supply, there are things that we have to have. These are essential vitamins, minerals, fatty acids,
Speaker: Um, uh, et cetera. So we have to have these things in there as far as, you know, an amino acids, of course, that we have to have to run our systems.
Speaker: Now, our systems are mainly designed to run on a good balance of all those things with the nutrients coming in to drive what's called the Krebs cycle or the citric acid cycle inside of our mitochondria. And everyone's heard of the energy we create in the body. It's called ATP or adenosine triphosphate.
Speaker: And if we have a system that's smooth like that, all is well. But what happens is when we put the bounty or the most of our food supply coming from carbohydrates, those things in our gut get converted to blood sugar very, very rapidly. The majority of them do. Now, the speed at which they get converted to blood sugar, that's kind of scaled on what's called the glycemic index.
Speaker: For example, sugars, breads, grains, processed carbs have a very high glycemic index, meaning they produce a lot of blood sugar very, very quickly. That's why you can eat some sugar and you feel it immediately. Okay. There's other things in the carbohydrate family, such as plants, like maybe a spinach or spinach leaf or spinach salad.
Speaker: those take a longer time to break down. Kind of makes sense because they're more robust. They're going to be more resistant to gut and bacterial and enzymatic breakdown. So they have an ability to create blood sugar too. It's just very, very slow and very, very low. So we take in these high glycemic rapid converting to glucose carbohydrates. That glucose gets
Speaker: developed and sensed and put in the bloodstream. And that glucose in the bloodstream signals an organ called the pancreas to create a hormone called insulin. Now the hormone insulin is very, very important. It will save your butt because if glucose comes up too high and insulin is going to come up there, insulin is going to sort of escort or signal the glucose to get stored into either your liver or your muscle cells, for example.
Speaker: for later use, right? We all know about that. Now, having said that, what if blood sugar keeps coming in and coming in and coming in so fast and insulin's kicking out or the pancreas is kicking out a lot of insulin very, very rapidly?
Speaker: Once insulin lowers blood sugar and pulls it out of the bloodstream or escorts it out, however you want to verbiage that, insulin is going to hang around. It's not going to come down very quickly because its job is to save our butts from too much blood sugar. So when blood sugar drops, we have what's called a hypo
Speaker: glycemic moment where what do we want to do? We want to have more blood sugar. So this persistent elevation of insulin actually signals us to want to have more blood sugar in. So we have this draw, this drive, if you will, to drive in more, consume more of these rapidly converting to sugar high glycemic processed carbohydrates.
Speaker: Over time, as this interaction between insulin and blood glucose happens, eventually the cells that are taking in this glucose for storage, liver and muscle are going to go, time out a minute. Christian, I am full. My tanks are full. I can't take it anymore. You put enough petrol or enough gasoline in me and I don't have any more room. What do you expect me to do with this?
Speaker: So they began to become resistant to the signal of insulin.
Speaker: But the problem is we still got glucose. Too much of that in the blood will kill you. So with glucose in the blood like that, something else has to happen. We got to store it somewhere. So we're going to convert this glucose to what's called triglycerides, which is fats. And we're going to cram those triglycerides in every place we can find. So our fat cells begin to take it up, and even our organs begin to take it up. And we can develop things like
Speaker: fatty liver disease. It will also cram fat into your pancreas, fatty pancreas disease. We can get fatty muscles. Hence, we've all heard of that in a cow. We eat the muscle that has a lot of fat in it. It's marbled. It's where the flavor is. That's where the toxins are, right? That's a fat cow.
Speaker: And so we got to think like this. So now we're creating a bunch of triglycerides. They're being stored everywhere. Insulin is still elevated. Insulin then becomes a fat storing hormone. So persistent insulin elevation is going to create the scenario with constant carbohydrates coming in from processed food of consistent fat gain both on the body in belly fat and in the organs. Eventually,
Speaker: enough fat in the pancreas will shut down the pancreas ability to create insulin and then you create a situation where we end up having to take insulin to facilitate blood sugar. And this is interesting because all of that I just said is just physiology to pathology and everyone would agree
Speaker: But here's the good news, it absolutely can be stopped and reversed at any phase of that. The pancreas can get rid of that fat, believe it or not, insulin secretion can return, the liver can get rid of the fat, and we can lose fat as well. And this whole thing about this metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, Christian, that needs to go away. That is not, if somebody's listening now that they have those going on,
Speaker: Folks, it's not a death sentence. You just need someone to help you understand that and really listen to this recording again and again until you get it and then make changes. And one thing to do to make changes is, yeah, you change your diet, but you start fasting. I know you touched on that earlier. Yeah. It's amazing how so many people are put on insulin, but then they're not even told to lower their carbs first. Shouldn't that be like one of the first interventions?
Speaker: Yeah, the treatment of type two diabetes, not type one by insulin is in my assessment, one of the most absurd, um,
Speaker: foolish things we could do. Because what I just say, persistent insulin in the system is going to cause a lot more weight gain. Fat storage. So we're going to get more fat storage and get this more fat storage back to our conversation, more inflammation, more joint pain, more toxic storage.
Speaker: And what are we doing by giving them insulin? We are shortening their lifespan and increase in their six span. They're not going to get better because we got this persistent low grade inflammation roaming around and that's tied to every single disease process that we know. And just a quick aside, it's insulin. I heard it's pretty expensive to be on insulin in the States, isn't it?
Speaker: Yeah, you know, it's funny. It was pretty expensive. And now some of our administration is trying to make it cheaper. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, there's something about the foolishness that's contagious as well. It seems like that that's probably another pandemic that's developing stupidity. And we're not using our brains anymore. We're not even using anything. We're driven by money, by profit. And that's not okay. To make insulin cheaper, I mean, think of the irony of that.
Speaker: making it more available to everyone. We're going to create a problem that's worse over time. Yeah, I'm all about a type 1 diabetic getting it because it can save their life and retain life. It's like subsidizing carbs. It's a similar terrible strategy.
Speaker: Well, in America, we do subsidize wheat, corn, soy, dairy, and sugar. Those five things that we give money to, we don't subsidize the organic farmer who's out here busting his butt to try to create life and sell his wares on the corner. And we're not going to have him doing that because he can become a carrier of coronavirus, for God's sake. I mean, it's an odd situation how in the world right now, we're not
Speaker: We're not communicating health, which is our major defense mechanism that's kept us alive all of these years. Instead, we're so focused on symptoms and, and pharmaceuticals. And it's the wrong, it's the wrong process, Christian. It's the wrong mentality. It's the wrong focus.
Speaker: Yeah. And just funny, you should say that we're subsidizing, you know, wheat, corn, soy. Those are also in the States, more than 90 % of those crops are GMO and heavily sprayed with glyphosate, pesticides, et cetera. So talking about fat storage and toxins, where do those toxins that we eat get sequestered right onto our body?
Speaker: Yes. And it's interesting you mentioned the, and I want people to understand this, why are they so difficult to give up? This is fascinating. So the genetically modified wheat, for example, the seed, the kernel, it is, there's three proteins there. There's wheat, gliadin, and gluten, right? And so this genetically modified thing, this
Speaker: thing that we've never faced before in our human existence. It's brand new. Remember, human genes have changed 2 % in 10 ,000 years, so this is a brand new thing that we're facing and taking in all the time. When we digest that sort of genetically modified product, the gluten and the gliadin
Speaker: get converted to what's called gluteomorphins, gliadomorphins. Now these are called, and it also will do that with dairy through what's called caseomorphins. These are called in total exorphins, E -X -O -R -P -H -I -N -S.
Speaker: They're chemical structures that actually bind to the own body's opioid receptors, making them provide a little bit of pain relief, comfort, calmness, and it is a wonder why people can't get off. If you look at somebody and say, hey, I need you to stop consuming bread grains,
Speaker: They're going to look at you like you're from another planet and you're an idiot because they're addicted. It's like looking at someone that's addicted to hydrocodone and saying, just stop it, Christian. Just don't take another pill or don't take another shot. I mean, it's not that easy. So we've created, uh, this drug and a bunch of drug addicts. And then further, we have now, uh, this thing called addiction spreading around the world.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. I have a section in my book on opioid peptides in autistic kids. There's a couple of dozen studies there that I cite. And yeah, a lot of children, not just autistic kids, but a lot of children, when their parents try to implement a gluten -free case, a free diet, they literally have withdrawal symptoms. They do. And you can see anger, you can see violence with that too. And so we must understand that
Speaker: That a good understanding of this as a parent as a leader We have to get past
Speaker: the idea that we can't change and we must change. It's not an option anymore because you mentioned autism. I mean, my God, I mean, that was one in 40 ,000 in the United States 40 years ago. Today, it's about one in 40 and I read some stuff recently and you could probably confirm it better than I can, but by 2050, it might be as high as one in two. It's not okay where we are. We've got to take some action. We've got to be drastic.
Speaker: We can't just say it's all genetic, you know, it's always genetic until we figure out the causal mechanisms. Yeah, it's fascinating on the genes, you know, the Human Genome Project, we thought was going to solve all the answers, solve the problems by giving us answers. It failed miserably because the majority of diseases are multi -factorial. There's some genetic involvement, but it's a genetic connection between multiple SNPs, multiple communication points that we're not going to understand.
Speaker: Typically speaking, there's only about three or four percent of all disease processes that have been tied to single mutations in genes. So it's very, very rare. So it leaves you the high 90 percent plus of all the other ones that are driven
Speaker: By it pretty much our environment which is that epigenetic effect toxins and then Probably mindset too is a lot the way we speak the way we hang who we hang out with How we move our body how we sleep these all matter Well, that's a perfect segue because I was literally my next question was How do you?
Speaker: go about getting people in the right mindset to take on the project of taking control of their weight, taking control of their insulin, all that stuff. Well, I think there's a couple of angles you have to take, and they're all important. One is education. People have to be willing to learn. And Christian, one of the things about learning that is the hardest thing to learn is that this, you have to learn to unlearn.
Speaker: learn to unlearn. People get stuck in this, it's almost like a neural rut that we get into. We can't get out. We get stuck in a way of thinking because we were told that. For example, you know, my doctor told me that cholesterol causes heart disease. Well, that's a false statement.
Speaker: But because we were told that and because it's been perpetuated in our system, we believe it. We have to learn to unlearn. So education is the first key thing. And when I'm working with somebody, I tell them, if you're ready to do this, you've got to be willing to learn. And you've got to be willing to unlearn. And you've got to commit to the learning process. So education is one. Number two, we've got to motivate them by telling them that it's not only possible
Speaker: But it's the design and the process and the destination of what we're doing to reverse. So we have to stop disease processes, stabilize it and reverse it. So that's going to motivate them that, you know what, I don't have to stay like this. And so education motivation. And then the last one is inspiration. How do you inspire human being?
Speaker: It's like we're talking here on this podcast and we're connecting minds. We have to inspire the mind, man. We have to say, friend, if you're there, I'm telling you, I know my experience. You put these principles into practice and you'll get there. Other people's stories are inspiring. I've seen people in front of me that are on multiple units of insulin every day.
Speaker: I've seen them label as type 2 diabetics for 20 years. But guess what? I've seen them now come into my office on no insulin, blood sugar perfectly, fasting insulin sitting at about a 4, insulin resistance score about a 7, and they don't have any signs or symptoms of anything. Now, is their medical chart still say they're type 2 diabetic? Yes. But I don't even let them own that anymore. You're not type 2 diabetic. That was a lie. You never were.
Speaker: It just, it just became something that you believed and it became a reality. So education, motivation, inspiration, it has to be those three things. And when it is, it's shocking what the human being can achieve and really remediate a lot of things they thought were insurmountable and become and do things they never thought they could become and do. That's awesome.
Speaker: That's really inspiring. Can you tell us, can you tell folks about your approach? I know you have the seven pillar approach. What's that about? We focus on seven things and it's just our style and everybody's got differences, of course. This is just what we believe. And it's probably in this order too. Nutrition is number one.
Speaker: Nutrition has got to be, the mindset's got to change around that. We put in things that are designed to keep us alive. It's like, it's necessary elements, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids for the system. Sleep, we have to sleep. Sleep's not a waste of time. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that come to us from all over the world and they say, sleep's a waste of time. No, it's not. Sleep is restoration, recovery, regeneration, repair.
Speaker: And then we talk about movement. You got to move more, sit less. I didn't say exercise. I don't even, that thing's got to, I exercise every day, but it's got a bad connotation to it. You know, you think you got to go to the gym. No, just find something you like to do and move your, you know what, move every day, move more, sit less. And then we got to talk about this stress management component.
Speaker: There's a lot of examples of this right now. If you stay plugged into negativity, fear -based media, it'll affect you. It'll affect your sleep, the way you eat, the way you move. So it affects all three. Realize that stress management is important, and that's four. Then we focus on genetics, too. We're going to run a panel on everybody, and we're going to teach them how to
Speaker: uh modify the genetic expression of what we can modify and how to sift through the stuff that we don't know about right now and gravitate to things that we do know about right now genetics is a relatively uh field real in relatively infancy right now and it will expand then we also number six is hormones
Speaker: We really believe in optimization of the endocrine system and I'm not just talking about sex hormones. We talked about one earlier insulin. We want to make sure that all these hormones that we deal with are functioning and communicating properly because this is a this is a great
Speaker: perfect way our body communicates. And then number seven, we use a lot of peptides. I am a big fan of peptides. Peptides are simply a small change of less than 50 amino acids that are strung together with the 20 amino acids we have available to us, and they create function. So they're not like a hormone, but they're a secondary signaling molecule.
Speaker: that we can make things happen like, for example, we can rebuild tissue, we can eliminate pain, we can fix the gut, we can relieve the body of excess fat, we can build bone, we can build muscle, we can even repair a brain, fix the mitochondria, just amazing things. So we focus on those seven pillars and
Speaker: Above that, we find that when people invest time and effort and education in those areas, man, 100 % of the time, I didn't say 99 .9, 100 % of the time, they get better, all of them. Yeah. Yeah. That's really awesome. I'm just wondering.
Speaker: We're going to have a couple of episodes where we talk about peptides before this episode comes out. So I think existing listeners will probably know a little bit about peptides. So maybe we can discuss some of your favorite ones that you utilize.
Speaker: Yeah, I love BPC -157. It's one of the ones that I pretty much think can be used all the time. There is some manufacturers that were coming out that with an oral supplement form. You can also use it subcutaneous injection. I prefer subcutaneous. It gets around the system in a more broad manner quicker. Obviously, it's very pleiotropic. In other words, it has signals on the body.
Speaker: You can put it in orally, though, if you have things like leaky gut, hyperpermeability, perhaps Crohn's colitis, that will also help you there.
Speaker: Love CJC 1295 with a combination of Bipimoralin. Those two things sort of hit secondarily on both molecular signaling ears of the growth hormone receptor. And so they create more efficiency in growth hormone. They're not growth hormone. I want to make sure everybody understands that, but they'll create more efficiency in your own production. So growth hormone sort of is the hormone of youth, if you will. Recover better, skin looks better, you know, et cetera. I love GHK Copper.
Speaker: That one is one that will repair DNA. It will cause hair to grow back, less thinning, skin, fine lines. That can be used, and I should say CJC 1295 is subcutaneous. GHK copper can be delivered subcutaneous in creams as a night cream on the face, and even a foam in the hair. So it's got multiple utility. You can pretty much use that one all the time.
Speaker: I like Epitalin or Epitalin or Epitalin, there's three different ways to say it. That's one that sort of maintains telomere length. Telomeres are the end caps of DNA and when they start to shorten, the DNA cannot repair itself. There's something called the Hayfleck limit. The Hayfleck limit says that this cell can only
Speaker: replicate and resolve itself or repair itself X number of times. So this tends to extend the Hayflick limit a little bit. And so you're talking about DNA repair. That's, that's fascinating. So that's more in the age management area. And there's others I use, but that's, that's for the ones that I like. I like the thymacins too, both alpha one and beta four. And I've used thymus and alpha one a lot to re -modulate the immune system as it, as it sort of re becomes more resilient and
Speaker: Again, with COVID, I have no problem. If people want to take that as a prophylactic for COVID, they're going to get success with that. That's great. Yeah. I've been reading a lot into all of those that you're talking about and that GHK sounds really, really amazing. By the way, out of curiosity, do you use a compounding pharmacy? How do you source them? Yeah, they have to be compounded in a pharmacy.
Speaker: In America, the FDA, Food and Drug Administration, they're pretty challenging to deal with, to say the least. I get it, but there's a lot of lobbyists, a lot of special interests around here that, look, even with our version of healthcare, it's sick care. Why would anybody want to teach you how to get well? You wouldn't use the system and they would go broke.
Speaker: It's not, you know, so it's not going to be accepted in the mainstream, but compounding pharmacies that have the certain sterility measures and qualifications, they can make it and it's really stable. Love those peptides. I'm a big believer in, you know, I use them myself and high effectiveness rate we have with our patient base.
Speaker: Yeah, I've been experimenting with a few over the last couple of months and I'm definitely seeing some amazing changes. And probably this kind of feeds into the hormone pillar. It probably really helped to allow the body to do whatever it needs to optimize the endocrine system. But do you use maybe like a Dutch test to get a hormonal baseline? What's your approach there?
Speaker: Yeah, so you can look at hormones from really three different angles. There's a saliva test that we can use. It's fairly accurate for testosterone and estradiol, but not so much accurate for progesterone. So people need to understand that.
Speaker: There is a serum test or blood test that people can use, and that's pretty much the most common type that people use. And of course, let's think about that. That's hormones in the serum or the blood. That's one look. That'll give you what's in the blood, but it doesn't tell you what hit the receptor. So we must understand if you have, you know, X hundreds of nanograms per milliliter of testosterone in the blood, that does not mean that that amount hit the receptor.
Speaker: And then you look at Dutch test, which stands for dried urine testing comprehensive hormone. This is looking at the metabolites. So serum, cell, action, usage, excretion. So we're talking about if you measure serum, you're talking a front end measurement. If you measure urine, you're talking an excretion measurement. So you can come at it from both ends. I find that
Speaker: both the serum and, again, the saliva, estradiol, and testosterone correlate very well with the urine. So you're going to get some very consistent readings there. I am friends and colleagues of the person who runs that lab. Mark? Yep. Mark Newman and Dr. Kerry Jones. They're really great people.
Speaker: And they do a fine job. And that test, you're also going to get some organic acids, B6, B12. You'll get 808 -TG, which is going to be a marker for DNA damage. It's a very good test. I like that test too, because you don't get just the sex hormones, but you also get the cortisol as well. And from that, you can derive a little bit of information on thyroid. I find that very beneficial.
Speaker: So all that said, that test is really really good. We do use a lot here.
Speaker: Yeah, it's an amazing test. I've been not running it a lot, but I've run a few and it's so illuminating. What would you say for a man who comes back with a very high estrogen, low testosterone, and an extremely high metabolized cortisol? What would be like your first impression?
Speaker: Well, I think there's a couple things there. If they had high -metabolized cortisol, you'd figure out, you know, what's the stressors that's creating the high amount of cortisol in the first place that had to be metabolized. That's one. You think about that, they're probably under a lot of stress. Stress is multifactorial, as we've talked before. You could, you also, if you have a lot of, and it's going to tie a lot to the second part of that question, the high amount of estradiol.
Speaker: you know, people that have normal adipose tissue as opposed to excess adipose tissue should never have excess estradiol. And when I say excess, there's a fine range there because estradiol, even though men produce less than women, it still becomes protective. It's a heart, brain, and bone. So we don't want to knock it off based upon what we've studied
Speaker: And clearly, the high weight of the studies indicate you don't want to just suppress the estrogen synthesis in men because you will drive disease faster even if you are supplementing with testosterone. Okay, so if you have high estradiol, you got to figure out first of all, why? Do they have excess adipose tissue?
Speaker: Which contains the aromatase enzyme which converts testosterone to estradiol and aromatase is driven in and up regulation by chronic insulin elevation which will also create chronic inflammation which will also create chronic stress so you got that cascade building there.
Speaker: I think if you have that, you can give them a little bit of DIM to help out with phase one estradiol clearance. And then perhaps if you want to start phase two clearance, you got to think about improving their methylation pathways, as well as give them a little bit of a sulfurophane yielding compound, which typically is primarily from a broccoli sprout powder mixture. And that will help a little bit of phase two as well. And you should see that come down to normal ranges.
Speaker: there in the person as an exemplar you gave me. I did a workshop last week with Dr. Brian Walsh and he was talking about can we lose weight too quickly, can we lose fat too quickly because
Speaker: from the research that he was kind of showing us in the workshop, he was saying that when you start, when you go hypocaloric and you start losing fat, obviously we already covered that the adipocytes will sequester fat, will sequester toxins there. So is there a cadence that you like to employ with your patients so they don't lose the fat too quickly and maybe potentially have all these toxins swimming around?
Speaker: and the body can't handle them quickly enough. Yeah, you nailed it. When you lose fat, and let's use the word too quickly in air quotes there, you're going to push out those toxins really quick, and if your detox system is not really adequate to handle those, it can be a problem because you get a little recirculation. Some would call it a Hertzheimer reaction, but whatever it is, it's one of those reactions that you don't feel well.
Speaker: Uh, let's remember the detox system also, uh, runs from a pool of nutrients, you know, B vitamins, um, some amino acids, et cetera, that are, that are in there that are required to make those systems. Phase one, the CYP system work well and phase two, the conjugation, uh, system and even excretion, which is typically phase three. So they've got to be primed specifically for you to lose fat. Now with that said.
Speaker: I do think that can happen too fast because when you hypocaloric restrict, you're creating stress in the system. A little micro amounts of stress are fine.
Speaker: but if you're not pulsing that sort of hypocaloric mindset, eventually the body's gonna respond in this way. So you restrict the calories, you'll lose fat because body, what the hell's going on? And it will do that. But then it's gonna go, wait a minute, wait a minute. If this is a norm, Christian, for me, and if you're gonna keep these calories down here for me, and this is what you're gonna do to me, I've gotta adjust because I don't wanna die here.
Speaker: So instead of your appetite going down, your appetite comes up because your body says, I need more calories than that or more food than that. So you get this rebound effect, if you will, and you get ravishly hungry. And that's not a good place to be because that also creates great stress, not just physically, but also emotionally.
Speaker: We tell people here, don't diet. I get those words completely out. I don't want them to use those words at all because they tend to get freaked out and think about deprivation or you can't have this ever. But we try to get people on a rhythm
Speaker: where their body is doing the job to reduce the fat at its own pace, and that's an inter -individual process. The body's not designed to gain fat abruptly, quickly, nor is it really designed, if you think about it, to lose fat abruptly, because the body likes what's called homeostasis. It loves to be stuck and like, leave me alone, let me do my damn job.
Speaker: Don't cause me too much stress because I'm trying to save your bacon, Christian. That's kind of how the body thinks, you know? And so we've got to kind of think like that. And so we must understand that normal plateauing, and I use that word intentionally, is not a bad thing. It's like the body going, wow.
Speaker: Okay, let me rest here. Are you serious this time? Okay, if you're serious, I'll let you go a little farther. And let the body with no time frame go through its own rhythm of reduction. Again, back to our principles. Stop the pathology, stabilize it, and reverse it back to normal physiology.
Speaker: Everybody has a pace. Age matters. Genetics matter. Culture matters. Who you hang out with matters. What you want to do matters. Activity, sleep, etc.
Speaker: Love it. You have a great way of explaining things, Mark. I love, on the last time we tried to record, I love how you, and you just touched on that, you try to get away from this mindset of deprivation and give like this abundance mindset. Can you tell us how you do, how do you do that? Because I know a lot of people coming to you will probably, let's say it's an understatement that they're eating a lot of crap.
Speaker: that kind of has to go in order for them to meet or achieve their new health goals. So how do you reframe this? Oh, but I can't have pizza. I can't have, you know, whatever my favorite milk chocolate. How do you reframe that into like an abundance mindset?
Speaker: So you have to sort of define again, the opposite abundance, which is imprisonment or bondage. And we understand bondage. We say, Hey, Christian, uh, do you think it'd be cool to like being handcuffs all day and be locked in an eight by eight cell all day? Would that be awesome or what? And you're going to go, well, no, I don't want that. And then I'm going to say, Christian, look, you know, you talked about pizza, you like pizza, right? Yes. Um,
Speaker: You're in bondage to pizza. What? What do you mean? If you think that you can't live without it, it controls you and it holds the key to your own prison cell. And I'm just using that as one example. And so I take that and they're tracking with me now and I'll say, all right, what if I told you you can have pizza anytime you want as much as you want?
Speaker: they're like well yeah but but I'm gonna say that's abundance there's a whole different mindset and I want to take people from bondage to abundance even using pizzas our example here and so eventually I'm going to take you and we're going to give you things to eat and teach you how
Speaker: to not live in prison because living in prison like that, that bondage is causing the individual person to suffer physically, emotionally, and even intellectually. They're suffering in life. They're sick. They're overweight. They can't get out of it. But if you can move somebody from that place to where they believe in their mindset, that they can have anything they want,
Speaker: and they just don't because of education, motivation, inspiration, you've just taken a person and this is most people in our world that are just stuck. They don't have any way out and they've been told don't do this. I'm saying, no, no, no, no. Let's focus on what you can do. I'm going to give you all these foods and I'm going to say eat as much as you want. And here's why we want to be cautious with pizza.
Speaker: But I want to give you so many foods. I don't care how much you eat, man. You have as much as you want. And I give people a large list of foods and I say, there you go. Eat as much as you want. And they're waiting for a diet. I didn't give them a diet. I gave them abundance. So I'm, I'm addressing both of those angles at the same time. And eventually they feel better and they feel better. And they come back and they say, you know what? I felt better and I had a pizza and you ain't going to believe this. I felt like crap.
Speaker: I say, great, I'm glad you felt like crap. Now what do you mean? I'm glad they felt like crap because their feedback mechanism finally worked. The body has a way of telling us when we put something in it that it didn't need to be there. It's called eggs, pain, stomach, egg, diarrhea, loose stool, bloating gas, brain fog. Those are feedback of the body. Your body's immune system is so extraordinary.
Speaker: And it will tell you what to do and what not to do. And I tell people to practice intuitive eating, you know. Once you get that normalcy back like that, man, you're free. See, I can eat anything I want.
Speaker: I can. I just don't. I mean, in my position I don't, but I don't. But I can have a donut. It wouldn't kill me at all. I just don't, right? And so freedom has great liberation attached to it, you know? It's got great liberty attached to it. If we keep telling people what they can't do, or frankly going to the doctor to find out what's wrong, we're focusing on negative so much, what a waste of time.
Speaker: People are getting too much negative. They need to take the other side of it. Here's what you can do, Christian. Here's what's available to you. Get outside that prison. Get some sunshine, man. You can go back to that prison any time you want to. But you know what? The more time you spend outside the prison cell, the less time you want to go back inside. And it becomes a wonderful learning experience from an experiential position.
Speaker: Yeah, that's like last year after this COVID stuff hit, we have a wonderful pizza place around the corner and we were eating more pizza. I was very busy, so we just didn't have time to cook as much. We were eating quite a lot of pizza, so we kind of cut that down.
Speaker: the last few months and now when i have a pizza i'm like feeding like shit yeah it's good pizza don't get me wrong but i'm like i don't feel as good as energetic as after having like a chicken soup with vegetables and it's it's i love how you you say like the the long years you spend time out of the prison when you go back and
Speaker: Oh, this sucks. I'm not going to do this. I don't want to do this again. It's, it's also, it reminds me of that book. I haven't actually read it, but I should. Jocko Willing's discipline is freedom. I think that's, that's what it's called. And I concur with that thought because discipline, you know, the few people, and this is an encouragement for all the listeners. If you want to achieve the extraordinary,
Speaker: You've got to exhibit the consistency of baby habits that carry you to where you want to go. And you make these baby habits non -negotiable. You know, just absolutely, I'm not going to be on this area. You know, my wife and I, we have a non -negotiable item, which is good for every relationship. We're going to date night every Friday night. And that's, we do that. I don't care who calls me. I don't care who wants it. I don't care because the non -negotiable item I pick out, whatever they are,
Speaker: They need to provide benefit for me long -term. You don't have many of them, but if you'll have them, it's so powerful because it's a straight line. If I'm going to fly from here to you, I'm going to fly a straight line. But if I get off one degree by the time I get from here to you, I'm going to be off 500 miles.
Speaker: off course, and that's what happens, we get off course, we start bending, we start exhibiting like, I'm going to let my guard down, I want to do this just once, and it becomes twice, and it compounds the effect, and we become, I would consider just average, or just normal.
Speaker: And we want to train up people where I'm at to be extraordinary. I want people to have their best. Don't want them to have their less than that. They, people have, should have the opportunity to maximize life, live with this concept of unlimited potential and, and believe that you can achieve that. And it always required with great courage and great courage has within it discipline.
Speaker: And discipline is really driven by a heart that says, I know why I'm doing this.
Speaker: And my heart is going to drive me the right direction. I'm not going to go anywhere else because I've got my chart, my course charted here, and I'm supposed to be on that course. And that gives me the meaning of life to maximize life. So see, it comes back in full circle, but you know, I do concur that where discipline is something that people need to grab a hold of.
Speaker: Learn it and listen to this recording over and over again. Mimic the habits. If you want to be like somebody, find out what they do. And if you want to do what they do, you got to go where they've been and be willing to go right to those rough steps and learn it. Learn it.
Speaker: I love it, Mark. Thank you so much. I'm sure you've inspired a lot of people. And for those that want to kind of connect with you, where can I find you on the internet and your resources, your books? I know you have movies you've produced. Can you tell us all that good stuff?
Speaker: Yeah, they can find us, really connect with us on Sherwood .tv. That's an easy one to do. That connects with our clinic, all of our books. We've written three. The book's titles are Quest for Wellness, Fork Your Diet, and Surviving the Garden of Eaton.
Speaker: This is a pretty cool title. We have two movies, one called Fork Your Diet, the movie. It's kind of a documentary. It interviewed a bunch of doctors from around the world. And then we have a movie that recently came out called The Prayer List, which is actually the story of my wife.
Speaker: What an inspiring, wow, movie of a person who grows up and has all kinds of troubles and stuff and achieves great, great things. So that's one of those things we're really proud of. But we have newsletters, podcasts and things, but all of those are there through sherwood .tv. Love to have people connect. Yeah, that's awesome. Bonus question. How do you do this? How are you able to do all of this amazing stuff? Man.
Speaker: You know, I think I'll give you a bonus answer with that one. The idea is I have a passion to help people. Everybody has gifts in life.
Speaker: I'm walking in my guess. I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. I'm being who I'm supposed to be. I don't have to be anybody else. I just got to be me. And if I'm me and everybody's just the same like that, we end up fulfilling our purpose and the world is not supposed to be everybody copying everybody else. I'm just me. But in me, I want to maximize
Speaker: my life and become the biggest influencer i can for the purpose and the passion in which i live and i've tried for many years christian to suppress that passion keep it down or hold it back or tone it down
Speaker: But I can't. And when I just let it loose like I do, and when I get the opportunity to talk to you, I get to cut loose. There's freedom in that. So back to our freedom idea, if you want to live with purpose and passion, and that's what I do, I find great freedom in that as well. And I hope that if it inspires one person today listening to this, man, I've had a good day.
Speaker: Yeah. This is why I love this podcast and I love connecting with people like you because you cannot help but have it rub off onto others, on me. Every time I'm listening or interviewing someone or re -listening and creating the episode to publish,
Speaker: Sometimes I'm just getting goosebumps and just getting inspired. I want to work harder. I want to reach more people, help more people, write more books, create more videos. You're definitely inspiring a lot of people and you're touching a lot of lives positively. So thank you for your work.
Speaker: And thank you again for honoring me for coming on. I had some technical difficulties. You were just super awesome about it. And I think this one came out even better than the last one. So thank you so much for coming on today, Mark. Well, Christian, you're very welcome. It's my honor. And let's make a pact right now through Connecting Minds to make encouragement the next pandemic. Yeah, I like it.
Speaker: connecting minds. We hope you enjoyed this conversation and found it interesting, illuminating, or inspiring. For episode show notes, links, and further information on our guests, please visit christianjordanov .com. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with someone who might also enjoy it. Thank you for being here.
