#1 Holistic Doctor: ''If You Want to Avoid Cancer - Start Doing THIS Today''

Dr. Darshan Shah 0:00 There's 150,000-plus toxins in our environment that have never been here before. They do cause biological problems. They do cause hormone dysregulation, plaque in our arteries. These are all things that could eventually pile up and lead to chronic disease.

Jay Shetty 0:17 Dr. Darshan Shah is a health and wellness specialist. He's a board-certified surgeon, published author, entrepreneur and- Spent 25 years as a naval doctor ... with a deep knowledge in the areas of heart, cancer, trauma, and surgery. What are the signs that we have too many toxins in our body?

Dr. Darshan Shah 0:34 So usually, you're just not feeling good. Brain fog, allergy symptoms, your skin has eczema, fatigue, not sleeping well.

Jay Shetty 0:42 How do I avoid getting cancer?

Dr. Darshan Shah 0:44 And I always say cancer's biggest enemy is being diagnosed at stage one. Poor metabolic health, inflammation, exposure to toxins. Once you start doing something about those root causes, your personal cancer risk starts to go down.

Jay Shetty 0:57 Why are you seeing healthy people having heart attacks?

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:01 50% of people find out they have heart disease at their first heart attack. Somewhere between 30 to 50% of that first heart attack is fatal. There are people in their 40s getting heart attacks, and women are particularly susceptible.

Jay Shetty 1:13 If someone has toxins in their body, is it reversible, or are

Jay Shetty 1:18 they stuck?

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:18 Your liver can detoxify you from almost anything. The problem is-

Jay Shetty 1:25 The number one health and wellness podcast.

Speaker 1:27 Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty.

Jay Shetty 1:31 [laughs] Today, everything from what we eat to what we put on our skin to the air we breathe is full of toxins. What is going on?

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:42 The media will have you convinced that everything is full of toxins. The reality is that is not true, but we do live in a world that's very different than our world was 60, 70 years ago. We have many manmade chemicals that are now going into our environment, right? And we're seeing evidence that this is causing people to get sicker quicker, right? And so we need to be able to mitigate against these until the laws catch up and we stop dumping this stuff into our environment, right? So even though

Dr. Darshan Shah 2:14 you're hearing a lot about toxins being everywhere, the reality of the situation is it's not too late to modify your habits and your environment so you're not as exposed as you would normally be without some knowledge.

Jay Shetty 2:27 What are toxins? Because I feel these words get thrown around.

Dr. Darshan Shah 2:31 Right. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 2:32 What actually is a toxin?

Dr. Darshan Shah 2:33 Okay, so a toxin, my personal definition of a toxin is something that humans have made that they've put into the environment through chemistry, through just manufacturing processes, and these are now entering our bloodstream and our biology. Now, thank God, we are able to detoxify ourselves from a lot of these toxins that are put out there. There could be toxins such as pesticides in our food, for example. Microplastics could be considered a toxin. There are toxins in plastics like BPA. There are forever toxins that are put out there in our clothing. So these are all things that are chemicals that were never in our environment before we started making them as humans, okay? And so when we look at the breadth of toxins, there's 150,000-plus toxins in our environment that have never been here before, and the reason we use the word toxin

Dr. Darshan Shah 3:24 or toxic is because they do cause biological problems. They do cause hormone dysregulation, for example. They cause plaque in our arteries. These are all things that could eventually pile up and lead to chronic disease, and that's why we want to avoid them as much as possible.

Jay Shetty 3:38 What are the three most common ways we're exposed to toxins that are having that level of negative impact?

Dr. Darshan Shah 3:45 I'm gonna give you four, actually, okay? I'm sorry. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 3:47 Give me four.

Dr. Darshan Shah 3:48 Air, water, food, and skin, and so we can talk about each and every one of those, all four of those, and what are some simple tactics that we can use to just reduce our exposure in those environments. And I think it's really important to know, like, our body, our biology is so good at detoxifying us. It's just when the level of exposure exceeds our ability to detoxify that we start getting into trouble.

Jay Shetty 4:11 Yeah, let's talk about each of those because-

Dr. Darshan Shah 4:13 Okay

Jay Shetty 4:13 ... you know, when I'm having this conversation with you, I'm thinking about the fact that these are things we do every day. Like, everything you just said, this isn't something that you do once in a while. So even if-

Dr. Darshan Shah 4:24 Yeah, you breathe air all day long. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 4:25 Totally. So even if there's still time to shift it, the problem is these are things we do daily, and therefore, if you do something daily, you can also go down- downward spiraling as quick. So let's start which- whichever one-

Dr. Darshan Shah 4:39 Right

Jay Shetty 4:39 ... you wanna start with.

Dr. Darshan Shah 4:40 Right. You can go downward spiraling if you don't perform certain actions to mitigate the exposure, or you can do an upward spiral if you perform some of these actions. So you can actually end up healthier in the future because you take little actions every day that stack up over time. I think you've had James Clear on, right?

Jay Shetty 4:56 Yes.

Dr. Darshan Shah 4:57 Awesome. I love-

Jay Shetty 4:57 Oh, no, I haven't had James on. No, no, no, I haven't.

Dr. Darshan Shah 4:59 Oh, you gotta have him on.

Jay Shetty 5:00 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 5:00 He wrote Atomic Habits. A 1% change every day adds up to a 3,700% change year over year. It's massive, so just make tiny little adjustments in your life every day, and this will add up over the course of the year. You don't have to do it all in one day, right? So let's talk about air, for example, okay? Obviously, we're all breathing all day long, right? But where do you spend the most time in your day? Probably in your work environment. For you, it might be this podcast studio, and your bedroom at night where you sleep, right? Most of us spend six to eight hours in our bedroom at night. And the problem with air is when it gets localized into one area and doesn't have a way to escape into the environment, there's no way for it to clean itself, okay? So-The best thing you can do in both of these environments is try to open a window. All right? The outside air is generally cleaner than the inside air, and you can check this on your phone app. It's on every weather app now, the air quality index, okay? And so it's kind of hidden sometimes. You can, you can find it on your app, and if the air quality index outside is green, you're probably safe to open your [laughs] windows, right? And how often do we open windows anymore in our life, right? We assume that we need to live in this air-conditioned environment. The reality is the air outside is actually k- making us healthier, and it allows the toxins that are accumulating to go outside and get, get back out into the environment and get recycled. So number one thing, open the windows. Number two, if you're in a home or an office environment where there's air filters for a central air conditioning system, make sure those are changed regularly. That's something that everyone should be doing. I remember when I first heard about this, I was like, "When was the [laughs] last time I changed my air filters? It's been, like, two years." And I called the people over to change it, and they look at the filter, it's like bunch of dust and stuff in the filter. And a lot of people forget to do that. A lot of employers forget to do that at work, too. So ask your HR department, like, "Are we changing these regularly?" Most employers do have contracts with HVAC people that'll change those regularly. And that's it. That's the Pareto Principle. The Pareto Principle states the 20% of actions that you can do to achieve 80% of the result is where you should focus your energy. Opening windows, changing air filters, and lastly, if you're in an environment where you can't really open a window, for example, or the air quality index is not good, maybe you live in a city that's heavily polluted, there are fantastic portable air filters you can get that you can put in individual rooms for room size. Some of these are $200, $300, and they can filter your air for you all day. And there you go. You've cleared the air. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 7:35 Solved it. Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 7:36 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 7:36 And it's so simple.

Dr. Darshan Shah 7:37 Right.

Jay Shetty 7:37 Everything you just said, you could do it right now today.

Dr. Darshan Shah 7:41 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 7:41 And the first couple of things you even said wouldn't cost us anything. It's not gonna be a habit that you have to develop. It's immediately changeable. I checked on my weather app right now. It's 27, which says good.

Dr. Darshan Shah 7:53 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 7:53 It says air quality index is 27, which is similar to yesterday at about this time.

Dr. Darshan Shah 7:57 Right.

Jay Shetty 7:58 So what-

Dr. Darshan Shah 7:59 Let's open some windows. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 8:00 Yeah, should we open some windows? Yeah. I'm gonna actually test that.

Dr. Darshan Shah 8:02 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 8:03 I'm gonna open the windows in this room when we leave-

Dr. Darshan Shah 8:06 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 8:06 ... because right now it's closed for sound, and I'm gonna see how the air quality changes.

Dr. Darshan Shah 8:10 It... Well, it's not measuring it directly on your phone.

Jay Shetty 8:13 Right.

Dr. Darshan Shah 8:13 It's telling you what the weather department is telling you.

Jay Shetty 8:15 Got it.

Dr. Darshan Shah 8:15 Now, there are devices you can buy, they're also pretty inexpensive, $40, $50, that'll tell you the particulate count of the air

Dr. Darshan Shah 8:22 quality index of the actual room that you're in. You don't need to do that, but if you're one of these curious people, I bought one and I used it for a little while. And, uh, you'll be surprised how opening the windows, all of a sudden it goes from red to green.

Jay Shetty 8:35 How is the air quality cleaner outside than inside? Because I think most of us would assume that pollution's outside, inside's cleaner.

Dr. Darshan Shah 8:42 Yeah, that's, that's the assumption that most people make. But in reality, when air gets trapped in r- small rooms, the filtration is not good. That trapping of the air,

Dr. Darshan Shah 8:51 and the dust, and the toxins in the environment just all end up staying in this little trapped, confined area. And that's why air filtration devices work really well, 'cause it's constantly t- putting that air through a filter.

Jay Shetty 9:04 What was the second one?

Dr. Darshan Shah 9:05 Water, right? We all drink a lot of water. We should be drinking a lot of water. We should be staying hydrated. If you're not drinking a lot of water and you're drinking a lot of, like, sugary beverages, sodas, for example, what I would say is try to drink a lot more water. It's great for your detoxification systems. But the water that comes from your tap in most municipalities has a lot of chemicals in it, okay? And so there are ways that you can filter that water out of your tap. So what I tell all my patients to do is look at where you get most of your water from. That particular sink, if you can get a reverse osmosis filtration system, which again, is about $200 or $300, and put it under your sink, you can install it yourself or you can have a plumber do it for about $100, that will completely remove all of the heavy metals, the toxins, fluoride, et cetera, in the water so that whatever water you're drinking there is completely filtered. Now, if you can't get a reverse osmosis system, there are, of course, those pitchers that you can buy that have a filter in them, the carbon filters. And so that's another way that you can remove these toxins from the water. But in general, you wanna be drinking filtered water as much as possible out of glass bottles. So all the plastic bottles we're drinking out of, there's a ton of microplastics, especially if they're out in the heat, that accumulate in that plastic bottle. Try not to drink out of plastic water bottles if at all possible. Get yourself a big glass water bottle. Fill it from a reverse osmosis or filtered system every day. And once

Dr. Darshan Shah 10:38 again, where do you spend the most time? At home. Where do you get most of your drinking water from at home? Probably your kitchen sink. You only need that one spot. And at work, try to get your employer, once again, to get a reverse osmosis or some sort of filtration system in that work sink as well.

Jay Shetty 10:52 It's shocking to me the situation we have with plastic water bottles.

Dr. Darshan Shah 10:56 It's shocking.

Jay Shetty 10:57 Because I feel like 99% of us are drinking water from a plastic water bottle.

Dr. Darshan Shah 11:04 Yeah, it's unfortunate.

Jay Shetty 11:04 It's what's sold in every single store, every single brand. Whether you're at the airport, whether you're at the grocery store, wherever you are, you barely will see a glass water bottle. It's just not that common-

Dr. Darshan Shah 11:16 Right

Jay Shetty 11:16 ... until, uh, Ashton Hall did his Saratoga... Did you see that, with his-

Dr. Darshan Shah 11:20 No

Jay Shetty 11:20 ... morning routine?

Dr. Darshan Shah 11:21 No.

Jay Shetty 11:21 Oh, okay, okay. There was a, there was a, a f- I think he's a former NFL athlete who recently did his morning routine, and he had the Saratoga water bottle.

Dr. Darshan Shah 11:30 Mm-hmm.

Jay Shetty 11:30 It's these blue water bottles.

Dr. Darshan Shah 11:31 Yes, yes.

Jay Shetty 11:32 And he, he uses that, and it's like, it's gone crazy because-

Dr. Darshan Shah 11:36 Oh, wow. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 11:36 ... his video went so viral. But, but it's interesting to me that plastic water bottles have just been the norm for so long.

Dr. Darshan Shah 11:43 They have been, yeah.

Jay Shetty 11:43 For someone who's sitting there going, "Jay, I've been drinking out of a plastic water bottle for 10 years. I'm fine. What does a microplastic even do? What is drinking... What is the big deal, Dr. Shah, from drinking from a plastic water bottle?" What would you say?

Dr. Darshan Shah 11:57 I think microplastics, we don't really know yet what they're doing, butThere's indicators in science that there is harm being done. So for example, one of the indicators is they did a research study where they look at the blood vessels of people that have suffered strokes and heart attacks, and you can actually see microplastics in the wall of the blood vessel. And as we know, you know, that cholesterol can accumulate there, that blood vessel can get blocked, that can lead to a heart attack, it can lead to stroke. This is also happening in what's called the microvasculature, the tiny blood vessels that we can't even see with the naked eye. Those are more easily blocked, so we know every organ in our body needs blood to survive and to thrive, and you're blocking those micro vessels with microplastics, this can be a huge problem. There's a lot of studies also done where we're f- finding microplastics accumulating in our testes and ovaries, also in our brain. They've done studies of this, and it can't be good. This is something that is blocking hormonal signals, is blocking neuronal signals, and we really gotta mitigate our exposure. Plastic, you know, wasn't in our environment to the degree it is now 100 years ago, and we're just running this mass experiment across all of Western civi- all across the whole world, actually, on what are the effects of microplastics gonna be. And what we don't wanna do is, you know, for example, when you reach 100 years old, and now all of a sudden a research study

Dr. Darshan Shah 13:21 comes out that says microplastic accumulation leads to Alzheimer's disease, leads to cardiovascular disease. We don't wanna end up there, right? So I don't wanna say it's easy, but it's easier than you think it is to avoid microplastics.

Jay Shetty 13:34 Well, I think you've raised a really important point there because I think the challenge with us as humans is we wait-

Dr. Darshan Shah 13:41 Yeah

Jay Shetty 13:41 ... for some conclusive evidence-

Dr. Darshan Shah 13:43 Right

Jay Shetty 13:44 ... to make small changes that would only benefit us. So as you said, there are already studies and research being done that point towards there being issues here. Why take a risk? Like, it's not worth it.

Dr. Darshan Shah 13:56 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 13:56 Right? It's not worth it. What are some of the ways in which microplastics are hiding in our everyday life beyond water bottles?

Dr. Darshan Shah 14:04 For example, a lot of clothing have microplastics in them, and also forever chemicals. And so look at the tag of your clothing and see what it's made of. If you're buying, you know, wool or if you're bu- buying 100% cotton, chances are it's probably safe. However, a lot of these synthetic blends can be a problem, so you really wanna do some research there on your clothing. Even everything in our kitchen is made out of plastics now, cutting boards, the Tupperware that we store our food in, right? And here's the worst situation with plastics. When you heat up plastics in a microwave, for example, the plastics and the chemicals leach into your food at a very, very high degree. So never warm up anything in the microwave in something plastic. If you have a cutting board, for example, that's made out of plastic, look at what's happening to the cutting board. You'll see little pieces of plastic after you've cut your vegetables. Throw that away and get yourself a wooden cutting board, right? Look at what you're stirring your food in when you're cooking. A lot of those utensils that people use, they're putting a plastic utensil inside of their food, heating it up, and basically it's melting into the food. Don't do that. Get a wooden spoon, a metal, something with metal. All of these small, minute changes, it might seem overwhelming once again, like, "Oh, I gotta go through my whole kitchen and change everything out?" No, you don't have to do it all today, but over the next six months, a year, as you're, you know, losing Tupperware [laughs] or getting rid of it,

Dr. Darshan Shah 15:31 buy ceramic storage containers instead, you know? As you're replacing things, get rid of the plastic and go more towards something that's more sustainable. Not only is it good for your biology, it's also great for the environment, right? [laughs]

Jay Shetty 15:44 Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 15:44 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 15:45 I actually, I actually am gonna say Dr. Shah's being nice. I'm not giving you six months.

Dr. Darshan Shah 15:49 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 15:49 I'm not giving you three months. Today, go into your kitchen and remove everything that is plastic that connects with your food, whether it's the Tupperware, whether it's the spoon, whether it's the chopping board. Get rid of the plastic from your kitchen. It's just not worth it.

Dr. Darshan Shah 16:05 Right.

Jay Shetty 16:05 Right? It's not worth it.

Dr. Darshan Shah 16:06 It's not worth it for your health, absolutely. And, you know, I know there's a lot of controversy or, and talk about plastic straws, for example, plastic utensils. All of this stuff, like when it comes in contact with heat, it becomes particularly dangerous, and so the less you can use some of these things, the better.

Jay Shetty 16:23 How did companies get away with it for so long?

Dr. Darshan Shah 16:25 You know, unfortunately, the way our laws are structured is until something is proven unsafe, you can put it out into the environment, and that's the problem. It's the exact opposite of pharmaceuticals. You have to do massive studies to make sure something is safe before

Dr. Darshan Shah 16:40 you can put it out into the public, right? Unfortunately, with every other chemical, until it's proven unsafe, you can't do anything about it. Even the EPA is hamstrung.

Dr. Darshan Shah 16:50 They have to do a study to prove something is unsafe before they say, "Hey, let's, let's [laughs] hold off on this getting out in the environment," you know? So it's just this train that left the station a few decades ago, and it's n- can't be stopped now.

Jay Shetty 17:04 Before we started, we were talking about something else. You were talking about coffee cups.

Dr. Darshan Shah 17:08 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 17:08 Talk to me about that.

Dr. Darshan Shah 17:09 Yeah. So I've, we have a mutual friend who came on my podcast, and, uh, we measured some testing on him, and we saw high levels of forever chemicals and plastics in his testing. And, and I started to ask him like, "Well, where is this coming from?" He's like, "I'm pretty good about plastics. I don't drink out of plastic water bottles." And, but then I saw him grab a cup of coffee and take one of those paper cups and fill it with coffee. Well, those paper cups are actually lined with a plastic liner. You put hot coffee in there, guess what's happening. It's melting. If you use those, uh, K-Cups, the, the ones that come in plastic, those are heat going right through a plastic cup. You won't even believe this. A lot of tea bags are made out of plastic.

Jay Shetty 17:51 I don't... Tea bags are made-

Dr. Darshan Shah 17:53 Tea bags are made out of plastic. Yeah. Believe it or not. It doesn't look like plastic. It looks like cloth, but it-

Jay Shetty 17:57 Yeah

Dr. Darshan Shah 17:57 ... it's actually plastic. So you have to be really careful about these things and start asking questions and have alternatives for yourself. So I went from, I had a Keurig machine at home, believe it or not, and I wouldUse 50 of these plastic containers of coffee every month, and I just switched out to using a French press, and now I never see plastic little containers. Same thing with tea bags. Now we use a special metal container

Dr. Darshan Shah 18:24 that we put tea in, and we do it this way. It actually feels nicer. You feel more in, in connection with your coffee and your tea because there's not this kind of plastic barrier between you and your tea and coffee, and for your long-term health, that's probably the right thing to do. When your immune system is too busy, it doesn't have the time or the ability to attend to all of its different roles, right? So cancer cells get missed, and you develop cancer. Amyloid accumulates in your brain, you develop Alzheimer's disease. These things happen because our immune system just literally doesn't have the capacity to do all the different jobs we're asking it to do. I talk to so many people that say, "My mother got Alzheimer's, so I know I'm destined to get Alzheimer's." And I tell them, "There's a gene test for Alzheimer's called APOE. Even if that comes up positive, that you have a higher risk of Alzheimer's, we know we have the technology now to reverse that trend and prevent Alzheimer's in you from ever occurring, and in fact, we can keep you mentally sharp for the rest of your life if you just put into place simple lifestyle interventions." We've been convinced through marketing that we need to do more and more and more and more, and the reality is you need less. You just have to know where to cut back. Let your body keep you healthy. Your biology is an incredible system. It's made... It's, like I s- keep saying, it's evolved over millennia to keep you healthy. Give it a chance to do it.

Jay Shetty 19:46 So we did water. We did air. What's the next one?

Dr. Darshan Shah 19:50 We talked a lot about plastics, which is great.

Jay Shetty 19:52 Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 19:52 Okay, so let's talk about your food, okay? So a lot of the chemicals that come to us in our food come from how we're growing our food in farms now. We're f- spraying our foods with lots of chemicals. Glyphosate is still not illegal in the United States, so glyphosate, as everyone's heard of, is also another chemical that's found on foods. I do a lot of testing on our patients in our clinic that are suffering from multiple problems, and we can't figure out why do they have headaches and fatigue and brain fog and s- gut issues, and we find massive levels of glyphosate in their system. You don't have to do the testing to know this is a problem, okay? And so glyphosate

Dr. Darshan Shah 20:32 is sprayed on vegetables and fruits. There are certain fruits and vegetables that are very susceptible to glyphosate spraying because they have very thin skins, and so the glyphosate can actually penetrate into the skin, into the fruit. And so those are the ones, if you're not buying organic, you wanna wash them really, really well before you eat them. The Environmental Working Group is a great website, ewg.org. They have what's called the Dirty Dozen on their website, and these are 12 foods every year they test that have high levels of pesticides on them, and those are the foods you wanna either avoid-

Jay Shetty 21:07 What are they?

Dr. Darshan Shah 21:08 Sometimes it's blueberries. Sometimes it's apples. It's, like, anything with a thin shell on it, and so you wanna be really careful about those types of foods and, and having a good washing routine. And then, you know, trying to buy organic if at all possible. I think there's this misconception out there that buying organic is super expensive. Actually, if you go to farmers markets, a lot of them are willing to deal with you [laughs] and, and, you know, give you a good price on things, sometimes better than your supermarket. I've found this myself, where

Dr. Darshan Shah 21:36 I can find better pricing at the roadside stand or at a organic farm than I can at my own supermarket. And so I think if you try to get organic if you can, and if you can't, look at that list on the website, ewg.org. Try to avoid those or... and at least look up a YouTube video on how to wash your fruits and vegetables effectively.

Jay Shetty 21:55 Yeah, it's so hard because you're like, "Hey, I'm being healthy. I'm eating blueberries. I'm eating apples." And then you're stuck with this side of it, where it's like-

Dr. Darshan Shah 22:03 Yeah

Jay Shetty 22:03 ... "But wait, I thought I was making a healthy choice."

Dr. Darshan Shah 22:05 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 22:05 Like, you're not eating packaged foods.

Dr. Darshan Shah 22:06 You are.

Jay Shetty 22:06 You're eating fruits. You are.

Dr. Darshan Shah 22:07 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 22:08 But then there's something in it, so you gotta be even more careful.

Dr. Darshan Shah 22:11 I think, you know, the way to think about it is absolutely, you wanna eat blueberries-

Jay Shetty 22:15 [laughs]

Dr. Darshan Shah 22:15 ... over, you know, a-

Jay Shetty 22:17 South African

Dr. Darshan Shah 22:17 ... a Twinkie, for example, right?

Jay Shetty 22:19 [laughs]

Dr. Darshan Shah 22:19 But even those blueberries, you wanna be careful about what you're putting into your system. And you know, I think that we've gotten so used to this lifestyle of convenience, where you just go to the supermarket, you're in and out in 30 minutes. You don't even have to think about what you're getting. You just pick it up, throw it in your cart, and you zoom out of there, right? And I think we need to go back to a time period where humans lived, where we were much more mindful about what we were putting in our body. We respected food. We thought about our food before we ate it, and we enjoyed the meal. And so you cooked at home more. I think we need to go back to a lifestyle where we have more of a connection with our food, and then all of this stuff becomes more automatic.

Jay Shetty 22:59 One of the biggest things I'm constantly trying to work on is just eating slower.

Dr. Darshan Shah 23:03 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 23:03 Right?

Dr. Darshan Shah 23:03 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 23:03 I find, like, it's so easy. I was thinking about this, where it started. So when I was a kid, I ate fast in school because my mom would make me a Indian packed lunch sometimes.

Dr. Darshan Shah 23:12 We talked about this.

Jay Shetty 23:12 And I'd be embarrassed of it, so I'd eat it really fast. And then when I worked

Jay Shetty 23:16 in the corporate world, if you took a lunch break, you were just not hustling, like you weren't effective enough. So then I'd eat really, really fast. When I was a monk, we ate very, very slow, but we only ate, like, one meal a day, so it was very limited practice.

Dr. Darshan Shah 23:29 Mm.

Jay Shetty 23:29 And then when I left again, I went back to the corporate world and working world, and you're eating fast again. And I find when I'm eating slow, my digestion's better. My stress is better. Everything's better. And when I'm eating fast, it's almost like you're bloated. You got indigestion. Like, everything just from such a simple habit.

Dr. Darshan Shah 23:45 Yeah, you bring up a really good point there, Jay, because this is the balance between your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. When you eat, you're supposed to be in a state of rest and relaxation. That's the parasympathetic state. But like you said, most of us eat in the sympathetic state, where we're stressed out, just trying to get through the meal. Sometimes we're on our computer or our phone while we're eating, and we never allow our bodies to go into this parasympathetic state, and we spend 90% of our life in sympathetic

Dr. Darshan Shah 24:13 and 10% in parasympathetic, and it's the exact opposite of how our caveman ancestors used to live. They used to rest and relax all day long. They would walk around. The only stressful times they had is if they were being attacked by an animal [laughs] or another, you know? So, so we need to get back to taking time to eating our food.Just not only for our digestion, but also for our parasympathetic state to have just an opportunity to spend some time with us

Jay Shetty 24:38 Right. It's so good to, it's so good to understand that.

Dr. Darshan Shah 24:40 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 24:41 I mean, that ... I remember, yeah, that, that flip of how quickly society has changed from the way we used to live to the way we live now, and how we all don't have enough time to do the simple things that our bodies need-

Dr. Darshan Shah 24:54 Right

Jay Shetty 24:55 ... is, is huge. When you think about it like that, like the comparison-

Dr. Darshan Shah 24:58 Yeah

Jay Shetty 24:58 ... the flip, it's pretty insane.

Dr. Darshan Shah 24:59 Yeah. You know, I talk to a lot of my patients, and I'm like, "You have to give yourself some time to self-care." They're like, "I don't have any time to self-care. You want me to build in a six-hour self-care routine?" Like, no, no, no. Self-care means giving yourself 20 minutes to eat instead of five minutes to eat. That is practicing self-care. That allows you to sh- downshift from this high sympathetic state into parasympathetic, and when you're in that state, you do have time that your body is able to recover. And all your body needs ... Your body doesn't need a lot of time to recover, but it does need some time to recover, and meals is a perfect time for that.

Jay Shetty 25:34 Mm.

Dr. Darshan Shah 25:35 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 25:35 And the fourth one is skin.

Dr. Darshan Shah 25:37 Skin. Yeah, okay. So women, on average, use between 10 to 12 products on their skin every day, and men use between six to eight products on their skin every day. And most of us don't even think about it, right? We go to CVS, or we go to the supermarket, and we buy our skincare products right off the shelf. We need a lotion, we need a, you know, perfume, a hair wash. We just buy it, right? The reality is a lot of that stuff, over 90% of the stuff that we buy in our supermarkets, is filled with toxins. If you ever look at the label on it, you're like ... You can't even pronounce 90% of the words on there, right? And just because you can't pronounce them doesn't mean it's a toxin, but the minute you start looking them up, you're like, "Oh, my gosh. There's some bad stuff in here." Thank goodness there are apps and there are websites now that can help us to understand what's inside of these products because it's hard for the average Joe to really understand all these chemicals and if they're bad or good for you. And so you can scan these products, and we mentioned this on the last podcast. There's an app called Think Dirty. There's an app called Skin Deep. There's a few of them out there that people can use, and the beauty of this is you only need to do it one time, right? Like, how many times have you changed toothpaste in your life?

Jay Shetty 26:47 Rarely.

Dr. Darshan Shah 26:47 Rarely, right?

Jay Shetty 26:47 Yeah. [laughs]

Dr. Darshan Shah 26:48 Scan it once. You're like, "Oh, wait a minute. That's at the red level. [laughs] I sh- probably shouldn't be buying that. Let me see what the alternatives are. Okay, here's something that's green, and it's affordable to me, and I can switch to that." And then once you switch to it, that's it. You made that 1% change that day, and this is gonna stack up to a 3,700% change for the rest of the year for you.

Jay Shetty 27:07 Yeah. That's simple.

Dr. Darshan Shah 27:08 Year after year after year, right? Same thing with your skin products that you use, your lotion, your hair wash. Um, you also want to try to minimize the amount of perfumes that you use, your deodorants. All of it you wanna kinda look at. There are perfumes out there that are considered non-toxic, like essential oils and things like that, but still, our skin is an incredible barrier to the outside environment, right? You wanna protect it. You want to be able to give ... It only has a certain amount of also barrier capacity, right? And the more you keep putting on it, the harder it is for your skin to delineate what's a toxin and what's

Dr. Darshan Shah 27:46 not, okay? And so just using detoxified products, it will allow your skin to function better in the long run. One other quick hint I have on this-

Jay Shetty 27:55 Mm-hmm

Dr. Darshan Shah 27:55 ... I'll g- I'll give to you, just also for better haircare for people, I think we're convinced by advertisements on TV that we need to wash our hair every day, right? And the reality is the more you wash your hair, the more you're drying your skin, the more you're killing the microbiome of your hair, and your hair becomes more and more unhealthy. That's why every time you shampoo, you need a conditioner, because your shampoo is drying your scalp. In reality, especially for men, if you wash your hair once a week or once every-

Jay Shetty 28:24 You mean wash your hair with shampoo, right?

Dr. Darshan Shah 28:26 With shampoo, right.

Jay Shetty 28:27 Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 28:27 Once a week or once every other week, it's much better for your scalp, much better for your hair, less exposure to toxins. Your microbiome can flourish. When I learned this, it completely changed the quality of my scalp from, you know, having dandruff and having, uh, lots of dry scalp issues, itchiness all day long, to having a great head of hair and no scalp issues, so.

Jay Shetty 28:49 Wow.

Dr. Darshan Shah 28:49 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 28:49 So washing your hair with water is fine.

Dr. Darshan Shah 28:51 Is fine, yeah.

Jay Shetty 28:52 But it's washing your hair with shampoo and conditioner every day or every other day, and you're saying once a week.

Dr. Darshan Shah 28:57 Once a week. Yeah.

Jay Shetty 28:59 Wow.

Dr. Darshan Shah 28:59 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 29:00 That's the lowest I've heard.

Dr. Darshan Shah 29:02 Your hair will stay cleaner, your hair will stay cleaner, and your hair will retain the natural oils that'll keep it healthy.

Jay Shetty 29:08 I've almost been trained to believe that when I use shampoo or conditioner, obviously it smells better, you feel better, but you can actually be clean without that? Like, your hair will be clean without that?

Dr. Darshan Shah 29:18 Absolutely. Absolutely. If you ... We've evolved for millennia to keep our scalp healthy, and now we've never

Dr. Darshan Shah 29:26 needed chemicals to keep our scalp healthy. How, how come all of a sudden the last 50 years we've been convinced that we need all these chemicals on our scalp to keep it healthy? It's not true.

Jay Shetty 29:34 It's crazy.

Dr. Darshan Shah 29:34 The opposite is true. [laughs]

Jay Shetty 29:35 It's crazy when you say it like that.

Dr. Darshan Shah 29:36 Right.

Jay Shetty 29:37 When you think about it like, you're like, what were we doing?

Dr. Darshan Shah 29:39 Look at pictures of people from back in the '30s and '40s and '50s when they didn't have all these products. Their hair looks incredible. Like, you rarely see male pattern balding or women with thinning hair. It's because they didn't wash their hair like this every, every day, you know, with every shower.

Jay Shetty 29:58 Wow.

Dr. Darshan Shah 29:59 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 29:59 I'm, I'm, I'm literally mind-blown right now.

Dr. Darshan Shah 30:01 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 30:01 Like, these are s- there, there's such, again, simple changes, simple steps, and we're protecting ourselves with ease, right?

Dr. Darshan Shah 30:09 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 30:09 It's, it's super easy.

Dr. Darshan Shah 30:10 Absolutely.

Jay Shetty 30:11 Anyone can do it.

Dr. Darshan Shah 30:11 Like, you know, we've been convinced through marketing that we need to do more and more and more and more, and the reality is you need less. You just have to know where to cut back, right?

Jay Shetty 30:20 Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 30:20 And, and know what's ... Let your body keep you healthy. Your, your

Dr. Darshan Shah 30:25 biology is an incredible system. Like I s- keep saying, it's evolved over millennia to keep you healthy. Give it a chance to do it.

Jay Shetty 30:31 And you have a three-ingredient skincare routine we can create ourselves, right?

Dr. Darshan Shah 30:35 I've always been talking about that with multiple dermatologists and things like that. I think the simpler, the better. But yes, we can do stuff like that.

Jay Shetty 30:41 What is it? What-

Dr. Darshan Shah 30:43 [laughs] I haven't developed it yet, so.

Jay Shetty 30:44 Oh, okay. Okay, okay, okay. Fine, fine, fine, fine.

Dr. Darshan Shah 30:46 We'll talk about it one of these days.

Jay Shetty 30:47 On... Yeah, yeah.Is our environment aging us faster than our genetics?

Dr. Darshan Shah 30:52 Yes. It's definitely more about our environment than it is our genetics. It's so funny, you know, this whole ... We, we had this human genome project that went on for about five-plus years, and an incredible project where some incredible scientists decoded our entire genome. And we thought this was gonna be the answer to disease, this was gonna be the answer to reversing chronic disease, keeping us alive longer. And what we're learning since then more and more is it's not in the DNA. It's more about how our environment turns on and turns off segments of

Dr. Darshan Shah 31:26 our DNA to either keep us healthy or develop in the opposite direction. And so we used to say even just five years ago that th- your DNA is really only 20% of the equation. Now we're saying your DNA code is actually probably 10% or less of the equation. It's which DNA segments are turned on and off that's totally your environment.

Jay Shetty 31:47 What are the signs that we have too many toxins in our body? How do we know?

Dr. Darshan Shah 31:51 It's usually you're just not feeling good, okay? And one thing I do wanna emphasize is that our body is incredibly resilient. By the time you feel something is usually later on in the process of accumulation, okay? So you don't wanna wait till you start feeling something. You wanna start making these mini changes now so you stay healthier for the long term. Some of the symptoms of toxin accumulation include brain fog, include allergy symptoms. Your skin, uh, has eczema, for

Dr. Darshan Shah 32:21 example. You can have fatigue, not sleeping well. These are all symptoms that if you go to a doctor, they're like, "Eh, I don't really know what's going on." Really, toxin accumulation needs to be the fourth leg of that stool that we always talk about of health, right? We have sleep, we have exercise, we have our nutrition. Toxins is that fourth leg that we need to start mitigating on so that we stay healthy for the long term.

Jay Shetty 32:48 If someone has toxins in their body-

Dr. Darshan Shah 32:50 Now-

Jay Shetty 32:51 ... is it reversible, or are they stuck?

Dr. Darshan Shah 32:53 No, absolutely reversible. Your body has a tremendous ability to, to detoxify. Your liver is this incredible organ. Do you know the liver is the only organ in our body that we do not have a medical device to replicate what it does?

Jay Shetty 33:06 Wow.

Dr. Darshan Shah 33:06 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 33:06 I did not know that.

Dr. Darshan Shah 33:07 We can replace your kidneys with dialysis, you know, your heart. We even have heart-lung machines, for example. But your liver has chemical processes that cannot be replaced, and that's because it's incredibly complex. It can detoxify you from almost anything. The problem is when the level of accumulation occurs faster than the rate of detoxification, and then the toxins end up in your plasma, your bloodstream, and deposit into your organs. Doesn't mean that the game is lost or it's too late. You just have to start somewhere at some time to start decreasing your exposure so your body can catch up.

Jay Shetty 33:43 Okay. And we've talked about all the strategies you can do that, right?

Dr. Darshan Shah 33:45 I think there's one more strategy-

Jay Shetty 33:47 Yeah

Dr. Darshan Shah 33:47 ... I think people need to think about. We think that we need to live in this super clean environment, and we buy eight different cleaners for all the things that we clean in our house, right? You have a spray bottle for your windows. You have a spray bottle for your cabinets. You have one for the toilets,

Dr. Darshan Shah 34:04 and then you have different products to mop your floor with, and air fresheners, for example. You don't need any of that stuff, okay? If you [laughs] ... You need very few products just diluted at different levels to clean things, and so soap is extremely effective. There's a great company, I have no financial affiliation with them, called Branch Basics, and I've gotten to know the founder. She makes one product that's non-toxic. You buy a big bottle, and it lasts you for months. [laughs] And you just dilute it to different levels for your windows, for your toilets, for your floor, and that's all you need. It's, it's actually simpler and cheaper to do it that way. You know, she's changed how we clean our house completely because now we spend less money, less time cleaning our house, and it's not using toxic chemicals.

Jay Shetty 34:52 I'm, I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking there are so many places in our home-

Dr. Darshan Shah 34:56 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 34:56 ... where we're exposed to chemicals.

Dr. Darshan Shah 34:57 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 34:58 And as you said, if we just spend this weekend just going, "I'm just gonna look through my apartment, I'm gonna look through my home, and I'm just gonna get rid of all of this stuff. I'm gonna find really easy replacements." Like you said, you only have to do it once.

Dr. Darshan Shah 35:10 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 35:11 It's not something you have to keep doing.

Dr. Darshan Shah 35:12 Absolutely. I have a list on my website, actually. Maybe we can link to it in the show notes of-

Jay Shetty 35:15 Absolutely

Dr. Darshan Shah 35:16 ... of 50 actions you can take. And if you just check off one a week, in a year, you're done.

Jay Shetty 35:22 I like that.

Dr. Darshan Shah 35:23 [laughs]

Jay Shetty 35:23 I like that. That's really strong.

Dr. Darshan Shah 35:24 There you go, right?

Jay Shetty 35:25 That's really strong.

Dr. Darshan Shah 35:26 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 35:27 Darshan, we've talked a lot about toxins. We've talked a lot about microplastics. But I think this is really important right now. I wanna talk to you about the top three causes of death in the United States.

Dr. Darshan Shah 35:37 Now.

Jay Shetty 35:37 Because I don't think we're as aware as we should be, but I think we're all experiencing, whether that be with friends or family. So could you take us through the top three?

Dr. Darshan Shah 35:46 Yeah, absolutely. I think it's an important topic for us to all talk about because, you know, I wanna, I wanna put some positivity in this conversation. We are living in an incredible time in history right now. The founder of Nvidia, the founders of Google, they are all telling us, "Look, what we're seeing is we're gonna be able to apply the power of artificial intelligence and quantum computing to the problem of disease." And there is not a zero chance that during our lifetimes

Dr. Darshan Shah 36:17 we'll be able to cure most disease using this incredible power that's coming, right? We're not there yet, but there's a lot coming, so it's a really amazing idea to think about this, right? And it might sound like science fiction to some people, but my iPhone sounded like science fiction 10 years ago, right? [laughs] So, so what I want people to know is that just stay healthy and alive long enough to experience this technological revolution. Now, that being said, if you go to the CDC's website, they publish every single year the top 10 causes of death.Number one is heart disease. In the top five are cancer and also Alzheimer's disease, and metabolic disease is also in the top 10, but metabolic disease is one of the root causes of cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and heart disease. So we can talk about all of those four because I think they're important to touch on, and the reason is people might think that it's outsourced to their doctor to prevent them from getting these diseases, from getting these chronic diseases, but really the Western medical system is not well-equipped to prevent and to turn around these chronic diseases. But we, through our habits and through our routines, we absolutely can make these diseases a possible non-entity during our lifetimes.

Jay Shetty 37:40 I read a incredible statistic. It said more than half of US adults don't know heart disease is the leading cause of death-

Dr. Darshan Shah 37:48 Wow

Jay Shetty 37:48 ... despite its 100-year reign. So that's been true for 100 years-

Dr. Darshan Shah 37:53 Yeah

Jay Shetty 37:53 ... but we're not aware of it. And even when you say the word heart disease, I'm like, how does someone even

Jay Shetty 37:59 get that?

Dr. Darshan Shah 37:59 I'll give you a couple more statistics. 50% of people find out they have heart disease at their first heart attack. Somewhere between 30 to 50% of that first heart attack is fatal, right? And that's when people are finding out. And I just read this morning it's happening at a younger and younger age. So we thought heart attacks is a disease of old men and women, right? Or just old men, most people thought. The reality of the situation is there are people in their 40s getting heart attacks, and women are particularly susceptible, and the reason is women don't have the same symptoms men have. Women's symptoms are more symptoms such as fatigue, brain fog, inability to get their day done. Men have severe chest pain a lot of times with heart attacks, right? And so women get diagnosed later with heart disease, and therefore they don't-- can't get treated for it. So there's lots of different types of heart disease. The one that we're mostly focused on is development of what's called plaque

Dr. Darshan Shah 38:53 in the blood vessels of your heart. Plaque is a thickening of the blood vessel wall due to many different factors that cause it to close off. Believe it or not, even though there's a lot of blood going through your heart, the blood vessels that supply your actual heart muscle to keep it alive are really kinda tiny. I used to operate on these when I was a surgeon, and you have to look under a microscope a lot of times to see these blood vessels to operate on them. And so, um, they get blocked pretty easily, and that's what we're talking about.

Jay Shetty 39:20 And how do they get blocked?

Dr. Darshan Shah 39:22 There's a combination of factors. I always say there's four factors that lead to heart disease. Most people think it's LDL cholesterol. That's not true. [laughs] The four factors that lead to heart disease are, number one, metabolic disease, and that's just a fancy way of saying that our body's unable to handle the amount of sugar that we have, so our glucose levels are high all the time, and our insulin levels get high all the time. Second factor is inflammation, and we can dive into that a little bit more. Third factor is damage to the wall of the blood vessel. That's called the endothelium. That happens when you have high blood pressure that's untreated for a long time, which over 50% of Americans have, and/or high stress levels or even overtraining. And lastly is an accumulation of cholesterol in your blood vessel wall, specifically a kind of cholesterol that's grouped under what's called ApoB, and we can talk about that and why that's important.

Jay Shetty 40:15 Yeah, let's talk about all four of those because I think, again, when you hear about that, we're starting to have healthier conversations around glucose spikes-

Dr. Darshan Shah 40:23 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 40:23 ... and sugar, but I still don't think we understand fully or maybe there's some denial that those things are connected to heart disease-

Dr. Darshan Shah 40:31 Right

Jay Shetty 40:32 ... in, in our understanding at least.

Dr. Darshan Shah 40:34 Right.

Jay Shetty 40:34 Like, I think we're still... I mean, I remember last week I was just doing a analysis of what products people eat on a day-to-day basis, and I was in-

Dr. Darshan Shah 40:43 Uh-huh

Jay Shetty 40:43 ... my hotel, and I was just looking at the snack basket in the hotel. I couldn't eat any of it because most of it wasn't plant-based.

Dr. Darshan Shah 40:49 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 40:49 But I was looking on the back of it, and there was a bag of a very famous chocolate which the packet is only this big. Like, it's tiny.

Dr. Darshan Shah 40:58 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 40:59 And it has 60% of your daily sugars. That's if you should even be eating that much sugar anyway. But it's 60% of your daily sugars in a bag that I would as a kid finish in, like, three seconds, right? And so it's worrying to think about the amount of sugar intake we're having without even knowing. I don't think we're aware of-

Dr. Darshan Shah 41:20 Absolutely

Jay Shetty 41:20 ... how much sugar's in a packet of chips, a chocolate bar, uh, the drinks that we're drinking every day.

Dr. Darshan Shah 41:26 Right.

Jay Shetty 41:26 Like, there's no understanding of it. So-

Dr. Darshan Shah 41:28 Right

Jay Shetty 41:28 ... let's go through each of those as well. Let's start-

Dr. Darshan Shah 41:30 Yeah

Jay Shetty 41:30 ... with number one.

Dr. Darshan Shah 41:31 Yeah, let's start with metabolic disease, right? So you've had Casey Means on here and a few experts on metabolic disease, and the reality of the situation, it's not just the packages of candy, right? A lot of people will say, "I'm-- I don't eat candy. I don't eat desserts. I'm fine." The reality is sugar and fructose is hidden in a lot of different foods, specifically ultra-processed foods and refined grains, okay? And so those can be particularly dangerous. So even a sandwich, for example. You're like, "Sandwich? There's not-- I'm not putting sugar in my sandwich." Well, the refined white bread combined with the condiments like the ketchup and the mustard, there's a lot of sugar in there. There's even sugars sometimes added to the meats that you're eating. And so if you wore, like, a continuous glucose monitor, a sandwich for a lot of people can cause a huge spike. There are easy ways to mitigate

Dr. Darshan Shah 42:22 this problem, and one of them is, of course, avoiding refined grains, avoiding ultra-processed food, but also starting every meal with some fiber. If you put fiber into your system first, your body's ability to absorb the sugar that follows it is much reduced. That's one thing you could do, and the second thing you can do is move around after every single meal, all right? So instead of you go to a restaurant, they give you a basket of bread or s- tortilla chips, say, "I'm not gonna have that, please. Instead I'll start with a side salad." And as soon as you're done, instead of just going straight to your car or your couch, go for a little 5, 10, 15-minute walk. Those two simple actions can completely change your body's relationship to sugar in addition to avoiding ultra-processed food, sugary drinks, et cetera.

Jay Shetty 43:10 Yeah, I love that one. That's been the big one for me, just I've been trying to structure my food eating in that way.

Dr. Darshan Shah 43:15 Yes.

Jay Shetty 43:16 And the walking part is life-changing. I've found that if I sit on the couch to watch a show straight after dinner, I'm now getting some acid reflux, I'm digesting food badly. There's, there's some sort of discomfort that I'm feeling, whereas just walking around for 10 minutes, all of a sudden I'm comfortable. And, and that's, it's such a small, simple step that people can take.

Dr. Darshan Shah 43:37 It's, it's a small, simple step and, you know, it doesn't take a lot, actually.

Jay Shetty 43:42 No.

Dr. Darshan Shah 43:42 It really doesn't. Just takes 5, 10 minutes if you can do it.

Jay Shetty 43:44 What was the second cause?

Dr. Darshan Shah 43:46 Let's talk about high blood pressure because I think that, um, this is affecting people at a much younger, younger age. I'm seeing people in my clinic in their 20s with high blood pressure. Let's define that. High blood pressure is anything over 130 over 80 in my definition, and there's huge research studies showing that for every 10 points that you have of your blood pressure being over 130 over 80, you have a 15% chance of having cardiovascular disease, an increase of 15% of having cardiovascular disease and complications from it. So it's really important to manage your blood pressure, right? The problem is most of us don't even know we have high blood pressure until it's way too late, and the reason for that is, where do you get your blood pressure measured, right? Your doctor's office.

Jay Shetty 44:29 Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 44:30 Right? If you even go to a doctor. 50% of people don't even go to see a doctor [laughs] right? So-

Jay Shetty 44:35 Is that true?

Dr. Darshan Shah 44:36 Yeah. 50% of people don't see a primary care doctor. All of their medicine is administered through urgent cares and emergency rooms.

Jay Shetty 44:43 That's crazy.

Dr. Darshan Shah 44:44 It's crazy right now. It is really crazy.

Jay Shetty 44:47 Wow.

Dr. Darshan Shah 44:47 If you talk to urgent care and ER doctors, they, they think it's 100% because [laughs] they're seeing people all the time. It's the busiest they've ever been since, you know, ERs and emergency rooms were ev- even invented. So anyhow, I think that, um, even if you get your blood pressure measured at a doctor's office, usually it's a garbage measurement, and the reason for that is you're doing one blood pressure measurement. Usually it's the last person that was just hired at the doctor's office doing your blood pressure. And also, you know, you're stressed out, you might have white coat syndrome. Usually that blood pressure's looked at as like, "Ah, we'll just check it again next year, next time you're here," and then it gets kind of ignored. The best way to do this, I would do this even if you're in your 30s, is buy a blood pressure cuff for your home. Look up a good YouTube video on how to measure your blood pressure. You wanna do it first thing in the morning, sitting in a specific way. You wanna do it three times, and you average those three readings. You wanna optimize for 120 over 70, you wanna try to be as close to that as possible. If it's anything over 130 over 80, that should ring an alarm bell in your mind. You wanna try it again next week, do the same procedure.

Dr. Darshan Shah 45:53 Try it again the following, do the same procedure. If this keeps happening for three to four weeks in a row where it's over 130 over 80, you need to go see a doctor and sh- bring them your blood pressure measurements and show them what you did. Because we have a lot of different ways to control blood pressure. It doesn't need to be just medication. There's sleep issues, like sleep apnea, that can lead to high blood pressure. There's dietary issues, like too much salt in your diet, which I'm not saying salt is bad for you. Salt is good. Some people eat a lot of ultra-processed food with a lot of additional salt and sugar that can lead to high blood pressure. Everything is very interrelated, as you can see, right? So the key is knowing. Once you know, you can mitigate for the bad effects of high blood pressure. The problem is now we diagnose blood pressure issues five to 10 years too late. Then it takes us five to 10 years of messing around trying to treat it before we finally get it right. So people are living with high blood pressure for 10, 20, 30 years. By then, a lot of damage has already been done.

Jay Shetty 46:47 Yeah, so people just need to go get checked.

Dr. Darshan Shah 46:49 Exactly.

Jay Shetty 46:49 People just need to know now and monitor regularly.

Dr. Darshan Shah 46:51 Well, don't... Not go get checked. Check it yourself. Get a blood pressure cuff. Check it yourself, because the going to get checked, a lot of times you get tricked into a false sense of comfort, thinking it's normal or my doctor said everything's fine, right?

Jay Shetty 47:04 Right.

Dr. Darshan Shah 47:04 I think it's... I'm a big believer in empowering

Dr. Darshan Shah 47:07 yourself with a few numbers about your health, and one of them is definitely blood pressure. So knowing your own blood pressure and checking it yourself is a good idea in my opinion.

Jay Shetty 47:15 It's so amazing how you could just miss it just by a little bit, but like you're saying, five to 10 years-

Dr. Darshan Shah 47:20 Five to 10 years-

Jay Shetty 47:21 ... too late

Dr. Darshan Shah 47:21 ... is not a little bit, right?

Jay Shetty 47:22 Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 47:23 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 47:23 It's not, yeah. Five to 10 years.

Dr. Darshan Shah 47:24 People ignored a long time.

Jay Shetty 47:25 That's late.

Dr. Darshan Shah 47:26 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 47:27 If someone checks themselves right now and they have high blood pressure, what should they do?

Dr. Darshan Shah 47:32 First thing, don't freak out, right? I mean, it's just one measurement or three averaged into one. Check it again the following week and check it again the following week. There's a lot of things you can do to lower your blood pressure naturally. We talked about some of the dietary interventions. There's also, you know, start listening to The Daily Jay.

Jay Shetty 47:49 [laughs]

Dr. Darshan Shah 47:50 On the Calm app. It's just some breathwork, some meditation can be massively beneficial in reducing blood pressure naturally. Going for a walk after meals, sleeping better, all of these things can help.

Jay Shetty 48:02 So simple things.

Dr. Darshan Shah 48:02 Simple things, right?

Jay Shetty 48:03 It's just it always comes down to the basics.

Dr. Darshan Shah 48:05 Yes, it really does.

Jay Shetty 48:06 It always comes down to the basics, and then being really aware of these little nuances, I feel. Like the more time I've spent with you, you realize, yeah, it's about these simple things like your nutrition, your sleep, your exercise, and then at the other end it's about the microplastics, the toxins, the...

Jay Shetty 48:24 And these are the more nuanced things that require a bit more organization and orchestration.

Dr. Darshan Shah 48:29 Right.

Jay Shetty 48:29 Inflammation is one of the root causes of heart disease.

Dr. Darshan Shah 48:31 Yes, and Alzheimer's.

Jay Shetty 48:33 And Alzheimer's, yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 48:34 And, yeah, and cancer, okay? So what is inflammation? It's an overactivity of your immune system. Your immune system is what keeps us healthy. It fights off, we all know, viruses, bacteria, but it also fights off cancer cells. It also has a major role in healing us from injuries throughout our body. When your immune system is too busy, and this can happen for many different reasons, but there's one in particular, it doesn't have the time or the ability to attend to all of its different roles, right? So cancer cells get missed, and you develop cancer. Amyloid accumulates in your brain, you develop Alzheimer's disease. These things happen because our immune system just literally doesn't have the capacity to do all the different jobs we're asking it to do. So there's one place where most inflammation starts, and that's in your gut.Okay? Most of our immune system, 80, 90% of our immune cells are located in our gut, and when our gut is unhealthy, toxins are instantly absorbed through our gut into our bloodstream, and our immune system asks, is asked to fight these off. And so it's really important to maintain a healthy gut

Dr. Darshan Shah 49:42 so that our immune system is allowed some time to do its other jobs.

Jay Shetty 49:46 If you're someone who gets sick often-

Dr. Darshan Shah 49:49 Mm-hmm

Jay Shetty 49:49 ... or has a regular cough or sore throat, is that a sign that your immune system's weak?

Dr. Darshan Shah 49:54 Yeah. Absolutely, it could be, for sure.

Jay Shetty 49:57 What should you be doing?

Dr. Darshan Shah 49:58 So the first-

Jay Shetty 49:58 'Cause I feel like we just let it go. I know a lot of-

Dr. Darshan Shah 50:00 Yeah

Jay Shetty 50:00 ... people who just, every time I see them, they're like, "Oh, you know, I just got a cough," like, "Just got a sore throat. I'm just, just got sick again." Like, you know, every month you're hearing about it.

Dr. Darshan Shah 50:09 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 50:09 And you kinda just live life that way.

Dr. Darshan Shah 50:12 Yeah. It's unfortunate. We get used to it, right?

Jay Shetty 50:14 Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 50:14 And so there's a lot of ways to keep your immune system healthy. One is, is we, we keep going back to the basics, but [laughs] I will say sleep is such an-

Jay Shetty 50:24 Yeah

Dr. Darshan Shah 50:24 ... important factor-

Jay Shetty 50:24 I agree

Dr. Darshan Shah 50:24 ... in immune system health. The less you sleep, the weaker your immune system gets, and it's al- it's so predictable, you know? And so having good, deep sleep is very important. We talked about toxins. The less your immune system has to deal with toxins, the better it has the capacity to help detoxify you from viruses and fungi so you don't get sick. And then lastly I would say is keep your gut healthy. You know, make sure you're eating a lot of fiber. Make sure you're avoiding things like Advil and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs unless you absolutely need them. Don't take antibiotics unless you absolutely need them. That can kill your gut bacteria. Keep your gut as healthy as possible, lots of fiber. It's super important as well for your gut to be healthy.

Jay Shetty 51:04 What are the negative impacts of antibiotics and Advil?

Dr. Darshan Shah 51:09 They are like nuclear bombs to your gut bacteria. You take an Advil, you take any nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug or an antibiotic especially, your gut bacteria take a while to regenerate themselves. It's really a tragedy in modern medicine because, you know, when I was in medical school, I was taught there's no downsize to antibiotics. Why not just fling antibiotics at people? I think people know better now, for sure, but it's still, you know, doctors don't have time to sort through all these things, and sometimes you, just writing someone a prescription for an antibiotic gets them out your door. And people are seeking antibiotics all the time. They want something. They want a pill t- they want a quick fix, a pill to take. And I think that, um, we have to be much more mindful because the same antibiotic that's killing your sinus problem is killing your gut bacteria, right? So unless you absolutely need it, I would be very careful about taking antibiotics and nonsteroidals. I think now, you know, we've come to this age where we can buy these things over the counter in massive tubs of, like, 180 pills of Advil, right? [laughs] And the minute you have a little ache or a sore, even people going to the gym, they take a little Advil before to get a better workout. It's killer for your

Dr. Darshan Shah 52:21 gut bacteria.

Jay Shetty 52:22 Wow.

Dr. Darshan Shah 52:22 So you wanna avoid these if at all possible.

Jay Shetty 52:25 What do you do for a headache instead?

Dr. Darshan Shah 52:26 Curcumin. Yeah.

Jay Shetty 52:28 Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 52:28 There's lots of natural remedies for, you know, headaches. Um, taking a nap. Curcumin is a powerful anti-inflammatory, especially if you take it with pipavarin, which increases its absorption. Try that first. You can even try this if you're having back pain, neck pain. Look, I'm not telling people live with pain. Absolutely not. But don't also become a chronic user of Advil every single day.

Jay Shetty 52:51 Yeah, because the pain you're actually setting yourself up for is far worse.

Dr. Darshan Shah 52:55 Right.

Jay Shetty 52:55 And I think that's what we just don't see. I think we've all been trained to believe that as long as I don't feel anything, I'm good.

Dr. Darshan Shah 53:02 Yes.

Jay Shetty 53:02 Not realizing that the numbing and the suppressing of that signal, that sign, that alert that's trying to say, "Hey, take a look at your gut," or, "Take a look at..." whatever it may be.

Dr. Darshan Shah 53:13 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 53:13 It's, it's so easy to just kind of just avoid it and hide it almost.

Dr. Darshan Shah 53:17 This happens with all of disease, Jay, is that we cover up the symptoms with pharmaceuticals, and we never look at what is the root cause of why we have that in the first place, right? So if you're having pain, it's your body screaming out saying, "Hey, there's a root cause issue going on here. Help me figure this out

Dr. Darshan Shah 53:35 so that we don't have long-term issues." Instead, a pill will cover up the symptoms, and it numbs you to that signal, and that's the problem.

Jay Shetty 53:43 And what was the next one after inflammation?

Dr. Darshan Shah 53:45 Then we talked about cholesterol-

Jay Shetty 53:46 Yes

Dr. Darshan Shah 53:46 ... leading to heart disease.

Jay Shetty 53:47 Yes. Yes.

Dr. Darshan Shah 53:47 So one point I wanna make here is I think a lot of us are stuck in this mentality of LDL cholesterol leads to heart disease.

Jay Shetty 53:54 Explain that-

Dr. Darshan Shah 53:55 Yeah

Jay Shetty 53:55 ... because I don't think most people even know what LDL cholesterol is.

Dr. Darshan Shah 53:58 Yeah, so if you get a cholesterol panel and, um, your doctor tells you, "Oh, your total cholesterol is high. Your LDL is high. I think you might need a statin to mitigate the effects of this so that you don't have heart vessel blockages in the future," well, we already know that it's not just cholesterol that leads to heart disease. It's all the combination of things that we talked about. If your doctor talks to you about LDL or you h- or if you're following your LDL, really that's 1980s,

Dr. Darshan Shah 54:23 1990s medicine now. We have a new biomarker that everyone should know what this number is, especially once you hit the age of 40. It's called ApoB. ApoB is a protein wrapper around all the bad forms of cholesterol. I'm doing air quotes here for your listeners, the bad forms. LDL, VLDL, LP little A, all these forms of cholesterol that are damaging to your heart. So if you know what your ApoB level is, you wanna continually improve your diet, improve your activity, your sleep, your exercise to get that lower and lower so that you don't deposit cholesterol into your arteries.

Jay Shetty 54:57 Why are you seeing healthy people having heart attacks?

Dr. Darshan Shah 55:01 Look, a lot of us look at an outward appearance of someone, and we say, "Oh, that person must be healthy. They look thin. They look like they take care of themselves." The reality is what's going on under the hood of our health is very different than what we can see on the outside. I see a lot of athletes in our practice. You know, these are people that are trained athletes, that are the top of their profession, and when I do some simple blood tests on them, I see they have a ton of inflammation. They have metabolic disease. They have high ApoB, the cholesterol marker. Their hormone levels are off. And we have the technology now very simply to look at this-We just don't because we look in the mirror and we say, "Well, I must be healthy. I look okay."

Jay Shetty 55:44 How much of this is based on family history, and how much of it is lifestyle? Is it based on our genetics? Is it based on something that we've inherited, or is it something we're creating for ourselves?

Dr. Darshan Shah 55:55 I think family history and our genetics has a role, but it's much smaller than we think. And even if you have a family history, that is not your destiny. Your environment can turn off those genetic signals depending on the lifestyle and the environment that you live in.

Jay Shetty 56:12 I love that you have that perspective. You always say that to me as well because we talk a lot about our South Asian and Indian heritage and how some of the health markers that I have today, you'll always remind me that some of them are not my lifestyle, but based on the past. But you feel very confident that we can actually shift

Jay Shetty 56:29 that.

Dr. Darshan Shah 56:29 Yeah. You know, I, I don't worry too much with you because you live an incredibly healthy lifestyle, so you're turning off the genes that if you did not live an incredibly healthy lifestyle, they would be turned on. They would cause damage quickly. And we're monitoring you, right? We're doing some simple blood tests that everyone has access to, and they can ask their doctor for it any time to make sure that you're under close monitoring so that your genetics don't lead to an unhealthy destiny.

Jay Shetty 56:54 Yeah. I'm glad, I'm glad that you have that positive outlook because I think for a long time there was this feeling that like-

Dr. Darshan Shah 57:01 Right

Jay Shetty 57:01 ... if you have a family history of this, you're screwed.

Dr. Darshan Shah 57:03 Right.

Jay Shetty 57:03 Right? It's over for you.

Dr. Darshan Shah 57:05 Right.

Jay Shetty 57:05 And it's great for us to realize that we shouldn't live in that trap, that mindset trap, that, hey, you're, you're destined for the same.

Dr. Darshan Shah 57:12 The place I see that the most is with Alzheimer's disease, right? I talk to so many people that say, "My mother got Alzheimer's, so I know I'm destined to get Alzheimer's." And I tell them right off the bat that even if you, if, even if we did a gene test for you, there's a gene test for Alzheimer's called APOE. Even if that comes up positive that you have a higher risk of Alzheimer's, we know, we have the technology now to reverse that trend and prevent Alzheimer's in you from ever occurring. And in fact, we can keep you

Dr. Darshan Shah 57:44 mentally sharp for the rest of your life if you just put into place simple lifestyle interventions.

Jay Shetty 57:50 Can we test for Alzheimer's disease?

Dr. Darshan Shah 57:53 Yeah, so this is a great, uh, question because it's at a perfect example of this incredible age that we're living in. So through the power of computation and computers, we have found protein signals in our blood that can tell us whether or not you're headed towards Alzheimer's disease now.

Jay Shetty 58:11 Wow.

Dr. Darshan Shah 58:11 So now with a simple blood test, we can see how likely it is that you will get... And this is not genetic risk. This is actually developing Alzheimer's. Okay? So the old test for Alzheimer's was we would have to do a high radiation scan of your brain to see if you had potential Alzheimer's disease developing. Because of the radiation, because of the complexity of the scan, no one would get it until you've had a lot of the signs and symptoms of Alzheimer's. Now, we can get this blood test that highly correlates with the scan. It's called the p-tau217 blood test. It's just come out a few months ago, actually. It's very new, and I'm incredibly excited because now we can screen for Alzheimer's. We can see if our treatments are working 'cause this blood biomarker can go up or down. It's actually an, a quantitative number. It's not just a yes and no. So we can actually see what direction you're headed and if the treatments are working.

Jay Shetty 59:06 Something you mentioned, I feel like so many people, Dr. Shah, feel like this fear of Alzheimer's, especially if they have a family history.

Dr. Darshan Shah 59:14 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 59:14 And you kinda carry that fear around.

Dr. Darshan Shah 59:17 Right.

Jay Shetty 59:18 And it's a hard way to live because you're scared it's gonna happen. There's data that proves it could be there. What should you do if you are fearful that Alzheimer's runs in your family, it could happen for you? What should you be changing?

Dr. Darshan Shah 59:31 It's a lot of the basics that we talked about, but the things that are gonna make the most difference with Alzheimer's particularly is, number one, getting into a practice of giving your brain some time to relax, right?

Jay Shetty 59:43 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Darshan Shah 59:43 And you talk a lot about this. Breathwork, meditation, all of this is so important. We live in a state where our brain is hyperactive all the time, and just turning down the noise in our brain once a day is incredibly powerful. The second thing that you can do is a technique called mental reprocessing. Our brain loves to work. It loves to do something. Specifically, what it loves to do is to learn new things, think about them, and then talk about them to somebody else without, like, an electronic device in front of you [laughs] the whole time, right? So reading, thinking about it, talking about that book to somebody else, very powerful.

Jay Shetty 1:00:26 Mm.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:00:26 This is why there's this huge study done on nuns that had genetic risk for Alzheimer's but never got Alzheimer's, even into their 80s and 90s, and the reason is, what were they doing? They were constantly learning about religion through their Bible and talking about it and teaching it to people. This is what kept their brains healthy, right?

Jay Shetty 1:00:45 Wow.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:00:46 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:00:46 That's pretty fascinating.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:00:47 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:00:48 I didn't know that one.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:00:48 Uh-huh.

Jay Shetty 1:00:49 I love that one because, I mean, that's why people love podcasts, 'cause you can listen to something on a podcast. You have a podcast too. People can listen to something. They can share it with someone. Does that work as well if you're listening, or does it have to be reading?

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:01:00 No. Uh, uh, listening, learning, active learning is actually-

Jay Shetty 1:01:04 Yeah

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:01:04 ... very, works incredibly well, so doing something with your hands and learning in that fashion. Any type of learning. Learning, thinking about it, talking about it, teaching it is the cycle called mental reprocessing that works incredibly well to keep your brain healthy.

Jay Shetty 1:01:18 I love that because I find that most of us-The challenge is if you're not learning, you're just thinking, and then you're overthinking.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:01:27 You're ruminating.

Jay Shetty 1:01:28 Exactly, and you're thinking about something

Jay Shetty 1:01:30 that isn't that useful. So you're thinking about the person that cut you off in traffic, or you're thinking about the person who spoke to you badly at work, or you're thinking about your boss or whatever it may be, and none of those thoughts are learning or helping you or healing you or making you happier or making you healthier. They're just spinning around in your mind.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:01:50 Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jay Shetty 1:01:51 And as soon as you learn something, it interrupts that pattern.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:01:54 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:01:54 And now you're like, "Oh, wait a minute, I learned this really cool thing today, I'm gonna share it with three people" and all of a sudden, that's actually helping your brain.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:02:00 Keeping your brain younger and healthier. It- there's this chemical hormone in our brain called BDNF. I think you and I have talked about it before, brain-derived neurotrophic growth factor. This chemical, when it's secreted in our brain, causes our neurons to connect, and so our brain is nothing but a connection of the neurons that we're born with, right? And the more connections we have, the more mentally sharp we are. And as we age, those connections start to dissipate, unfortunately. As you sleep less, as you expose yourself to more toxins, this is a problem. The opposite of that is having good levels of BDNF. Your BDNF increases, and you've seen these studies with meditation, increases with active learning, increases with exercise, walking increases BDNF levels. Anything you can do to increase BDNF levels in your brain, you should be doing it every day.

Jay Shetty 1:02:52 Yeah. D- again, really, really accessible,

Jay Shetty 1:02:55 practical steps. That's why I love talking to you because-

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:02:57 Right

Jay Shetty 1:02:58 ... the changes are always things any of us can do. You don't have to learn a new habit. You don't need to go build a new skill. It's just finding time for these really, really simple things.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:03:07 You know, you said something powerful to me, and it resonated with me because it r- elicits an emotional reaction. It's this fear of Alzheimer's because you have a family member that has it, right? And so many people are living with this fear, and whenever I see a patient that comes in with this fear, I t- tell them all the things I talked about with you, but I also hand them a book that I think is very powerful. Dr. Dale Bredesen wrote a book called The End of Alzheimer's, and it really gets your head wrapped around the multifactorial nature of Alzheimer's and all the different things that leads to it. It is not just one gene. It's not just amyloid, for sure. We know that as a fact. And it empowers you to understand that there's a lot of things you can do to prevent Alzheimer's and even reverse it if you have signs of cognitive impairment. So I think it's really important for the mindset shift to happen just for all of us as a population, that this is not the destiny that we are going to be handed is Alzheimer's disease or being frail. That does not have to happen. We can all live vibrant, long, healthy lives. And I'm a big believer in education. There's certain books that I love. We've talked about a few of them. That's one that I think is very important if you have the fear of Alzheimer's.

Jay Shetty 1:04:17 I'm glad you talked about that. I'm glad you responded to that because I think the other fear we all have is a fear of cancer. I think I've lived... My lifetime, I think when I was young, it was one in four. Then I saw it become one in three, and now it's, like, one in two. And so when you have those odds, we're sitting in this room thinking, "Well, that means one of us..." right? When you're with your friends, everyone's sitting there going, "Well, one of us is gonna get it." And that's a really sobering, painful experience, especially because so many people right now are losing people to cancer, even people who are quite young.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:04:51 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:04:51 You know, I have friends losing people their age. I have mentors. I have uncles, aunts, whoever it may be. It feels like everyone I know at a certain point has it.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:05:00 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:05:01 What- how do I avoid getting cancer?

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:05:04 Right. Right. So I do wanna say something about those statistics, though, because I think it's important to understand the nuance behind it. Yes, there are more cancers being discovered for certain types of cancer. For example, younger and younger people are getting colon cancer, and it's, uh, perplexing everybody, you know? I, I think I know why, but, you know, it's, it's a big problem, right? Yeah, however, other cancers, because we have better screening for cancers, we're diagnosing more of them, but we're also treating more of them at, at a much earlier stage, right? I always say cancer's biggest enemy is being diagnosed as stage one, right? [laughs] But at stage one, you're talking cure. At stage three or four, you're talking five-year survival rates. But not to discount the issue that there is a higher incidence of cancer right now, and we do need to be more cognizant, and I think there's a lot of reasons for that. A lot of those reasons are at the root causes of health that we talked about, poor metabolic health, inflammation, exposure to toxins. Once you start understanding those are the root causes and you start doing something [laughs] about those root causes, your personal cancer risk starts to go down, and I think that's important.

Jay Shetty 1:06:13 Yeah, I like the way you just brought that back because it's all connected.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:06:15 It's all connected.

Jay Shetty 1:06:16 Right? It's not like, oh, if you do toxins, it will get you this, and if you do, you know, microplastics, it will get you

Jay Shetty 1:06:22 this.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:06:22 No.

Jay Shetty 1:06:22 It's, it's not like a flowchart. It's literally like, no, this is all connected-

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:06:27 Yeah

Jay Shetty 1:06:28 ... and each of it can spiral off in any way.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:06:30 Those four factors we talked about with heart disease, guess what? Those are also four factors that could potentially lead to cancer, right? Inflammation, metabolic disease, high blood pressure, poor vascular. Those are all things that lead to cancer, all things that lead to Alzheimer's. It's all connected to these root causes of health.

Jay Shetty 1:06:45 Yeah, and that actually is beneficial for us because means we don't have to think about all of these things. We just need to think about the basics and then the core principles you've spoken about today to actually help us with all of that. It's not like we have to have a different game plan for Alzheimer's and a different game plan for cancer and a different game plan for heart disease. You can have the same game plan.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:07:07 Yeah, very well said. It's the same game plan.

Jay Shetty 1:07:09 Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:07:09 It's just understanding what, what those key moves are, right? [laughs]

Jay Shetty 1:07:13 Yeah, yeah, and, and knowing how the strategy changes-

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:07:16 Yes

Jay Shetty 1:07:16 ... when there's... Like, that's how I like to think about it. If we- if we're athletes preparing for a game, you can't predict what's gonna happen in the game. You can plan for the game.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:07:26 Right.

Jay Shetty 1:07:26 And then based on your opponent's moves, you then strategically have to shift.And the quicker you spot your opponent's shift in strategy, the better you can. So the quicker we spot cancer, the quicker we see signs of heart disease, the quicker we see signs of Alzheimer’s, the quicker we can make progress.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:07:43 Right.

Jay Shetty 1:07:44 How late or early are we spotting cancer or heart disease, Alzheimer’s?

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:07:47 Unfortunately, it's still

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:07:49 too late. The way the current Western medical system is set up is we wait until things get to a danger zone before we start doing something about it, right? And the reality is, we have the technology to spot all of these things 20 to 30 years prior to getting a diagnosis. We're just not doing it, right? And so there are blood biomarkers like we talked about, uh, for metabolic health. There are scans that you can do that are extremely preventative for cancer. If everyone, you know, out there listening, if you're over the age of 40, you have not had a colonoscopy done, get it done. Like, these are things that your insurance cover. Skin cancer is another great example of this. There are apps now that you can scan moles and see if they're cancerous or not, right? Most people wait until it's just way too late to go see a doctor and ask about it. So I think there's some level of personal responsibility that we have to take here to be more proactive and understand what are some of these markers, what do they mean, and can we check them earlier? And also, we have to challenge our medical professionals that we see. Why are you not checking certain blood biomarkers? We need to check these on a regular basis. Every time you go to the doctor every year, I think it's important to ask your doctor to check for metabolic health, for inflammation, for ApoB, the heart biomarker that we talked about.

Jay Shetty 1:09:06 Let's, let's just list that for people.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:09:08 Yeah.

Jay Shetty 1:09:08 If you could give people a list of everything they should check today to ensure that they have a healthy life, what should they be checking?

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:09:18 I'll give you the list, but I also, also have this on my website. We can link to this [laughs] in the show note. There are 10 key biomarkers that I look at, and I empower my patients to follow these on their own. That's the key. No one's gonna care more about your health than you do. Everyone deals with a spreadsheet in one form or in the other. Just make one with these 10 markers on it, put the dates on the top, the 10 markers on the left [laughs] , and just start following them yourself, right? And so, uh, some of them are blood tests, some of them are simple tests to obtain at home, such as your blood pressure that we talked about. And I can list a few of these for you, and then we can give people a-

Jay Shetty 1:09:54 No, yeah

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:09:54 ... a resource, right?

Jay Shetty 1:09:55 Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:09:55 Okay. So some blood tests that everyone needs to understand are hemoglobin A1C. This is a three-month average of your blood glucose. Your doctor won't raise an alarm until it gets to 5.7 or above. That's pre-diabetes. 6.5 or above is diabetes. You wanna keep it as close to 5.2 or below. That's optimal range. If it starts ticking up to 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, now we have a problem. We need to start making changes in our diet and our movement to get it back in the right direction. Inflammation is tracked by a biomarker called hsCRP, highly sensitive C-reactive protein. This is a very simple, extremely inexpensive blood test. Your insurance covers it. You want this as close to zero as possible. If it's over one or two, there's inflammation going on, most likely in your gut. Your gut starts at your mouth. You look at your oral health as well. The next biomarker we talked about at length is ApoB. That's the one of your cardiac risk of all the bad forms of cholesterol. I also like tracking vitamin D levels. This is... Vitamin D is a hormone. We track yours. We know that, you know, we need to supplement with vitamin D sometimes. It's hard to be out in the sun 30, 40 minutes a day, right? [laughs] Then there are markers that you can do at home, blood pressure. There's a special kind of scale that I try to get everyone to buy. It's a scale that goes way beyond weight. Weight, to me, is not super useful. What is useful is the amount of skeletal muscle mass you have and how much fat mass you have. You always wanna make sure that you have enough skeletal muscle so that you can live your day-to-day life, but also your metabolism lives in your muscle. People that struggle with poor metabolic health often have a lack of good amounts of skeletal muscle. And so we can track this using what's called a bioimpedance scale. These are, like, 20 bucks. You can buy them, and you step on them with bare feet. This is electrical current that you don't even feel goes through your body, and it tells you these numbers, and you see what direction you're headed in. What's really important here is

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:12:00 men after the age of 40, women after menopause, we start decreasing our skeletal muscle mass rapidly, and you wanna start increasing your protein intake and increasing your strength workouts to track the skeletal muscle mass as well. So these are some of them, and there's a few more, uh, that are a little bit more technical but easy to follow. Once again, cheap, easy, insurance covers some of these things, and I think it's important to empower yourself with these numbers.

Jay Shetty 1:12:25 And where can people go to get them?

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:12:27 My website, drshah.com, and there's links right on there. They're free. I want everyone to have 'em. You don't have to come to me as your doctor. Bring this list to your doctor.

Jay Shetty 1:12:35 That's fantastic. Dr. Shah, you... Honestly, every time we talk, I walk away feeling lighter, I feel clear, and I feel so confident that I can actually make a change in my health. And I'm so glad that you share things in such a concise, interesting, and also optimistic lens-

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:12:53 Thank you

Jay Shetty 1:12:54 ... that people can go and live and make a change in their life. And these resources are gonna be huge for people. I think this episode is gonna be one that everyone's gonna share with a friend, a family member. Whether you're dealing with the fear, whether you're worried about a particular health challenge that you might have, or you're just trying to get the basics right and be on the lookout for toxins and microplastics, I hope this episode has served you today. Dr. Shah, is there anything that I didn't ask you about that you really wanna talk about or share with me and my audience?

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:13:22 Yeah, I think, you know, one important topic that you talk a lot about is, how does mental health tie into all of this? And I think it's so important, and I'm seeing this more and more in my own clinical practice, that if I don't address mental health, the physical health sometimes strugglesIn following

Jay Shetty 1:13:40 Mm-hmm

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:13:40 But also, the opposite is true. When I have patients that have, struggling with mental health issue, whether it be depression, anxiety, attention deficit, bipolar, if we're not looking at the biomarkers and what's going on in your biology, we're never gonna be able to make major changes up here, right? And so a lot of people are on the high doses of medications, sometimes multiple medications. And guess what? The minute we get their hormones fixed, their vitamin D fixed, they start reducing their dosage. We get people off medications a lot of times. So they're so interconnected. So my reason for bringing that up is a lot of people, they feel physically fine, but they're struggling with mental health issues.

Jay Shetty 1:14:23 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:14:23 They still need to look under the hood and see what's going on in their biology.

Jay Shetty 1:14:27 I'm so glad you raised that. I encourage my community to do the same because I think for a long time mine was the other way around, where I'd, like-

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:14:34 Mm

Jay Shetty 1:14:34 ... figured out the mind and then had to focus on the body a little bit, and you realize how interconnected they are. And I couldn't agree with you more. I think so much of what we're dealing with mentally could be solved with the right change in nutrition, sleep, diet, supplements, vitamins, e- everything that you're talking about. You can make so many shifts, or at least positive improvements.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:14:57 Yes.

Jay Shetty 1:14:57 And, and I would encourage anyone who's struggling with something mentally to also go and prioritize these things that seem very physical, but ultimately it's just health.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:15:06 Exactly.

Jay Shetty 1:15:07 Right? It's just one big thing. Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:15:08 Yeah. We're s- we're connected beings. We don't have a cardiovascular system and an, a nervous system. It's all one part of our being, and our emotional health and our physical health are so interrelated.

Jay Shetty 1:15:20 Absolutely. Everyone, subscribe to Dr. Shah's podcast, Extend, if you wanna hear more from him and the experts that he connects with. As I said, Dr. Shah's my doctor. I trust him. I work hard with him. I'm always trying to figure out new ways to be better, healthier, and happier, and I feel like you just, again, this is just another masterclass. It was-

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:15:41 Thank you

Jay Shetty 1:15:42 ... brilliant to have you back on, and this is gonna be one of those episodes I know people are gonna get so much value from.

Dr. Darshan Shah 1:15:47 I hope so. That's my purpose in life. I wanna empower each and every person, each and every one of your listeners, to have full control of their health and feel like they have the power to avoid chronic disease and turn their health around.

Jay Shetty 1:15:59 Absolutely. Thank you. If this year you're trying to live longer, live happier, live healthier, go and check out my conversation with the world's biggest longevity doctor, Peter Attia, on how to slow down aging and why your emotional health is directly impacting your physical health.

Speaker 1:16:17 Acknowledge that there is surprisingly little known about the relationship between nutrition and health, and people are gonna be shocked to hear that, 'cause I think most people think the exact opposite