003: Reviving Ancestral Nutrition with Matt Cook
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Speaker 1
[00.00.00]
You're listening to Real Food Mental Health with Cody Cox. Today's episode was a bit fun for me, but it was also a bit of a paradigm shift because I'm normally a proponent of a low carb, high fat diet. Today's guest talks about eating carbs, especially eating sugar to fuel the brain. And so it was a very interesting interview to hear his perspective on this. One thing to keep in mind, though, is you listen to this is nutrition is a very bio individual approach. So make sure you're not going and you're just taking pure glucose to fuel the brain because that might not be the right thing for you. It really just depends on what your body needs. So make sure you talk to an appropriate health care provider if you're unsure about it. Welcome to the Real Food Mental Health podcast, where we explore the powerful connection between mental and physical health. My name is Cody Cox, a holistic nutritional psychotherapist, and I'm here to guide you on a journey to true wellness mind, body, and spirit. If you're tired of quick fixes and want real solutions that address the root cause, you're in the right place. Let's get started on your path to lasting wellness. Today's guest is Matt Cook, who has coached over 80,000 men and runs the largest online university for alternative health and sex for men. Get member access. Com. He helps men have the relationship and healthy life of their dreams by using alternative methods. And I have no doubt that you'll find this very eye opening and quite opposite of what every other so-called expert is saying. Welcome to the show, Matt. Cody,
Speaker 2
[00.01.46]
it's really great to be here. Thank you. Tell us
Speaker 1
[00.01.48]
about this online university that you have.
Speaker 2
[00.01.53]
I'm very fortunate because I have really the largest alternative health online university in the world. Get member access. Com and I've run it for about 15 years. I've coached over 80,000 men. And we have people that will experiment with things. I call the mats guinea pigs. And I really believe a lot of life is about experimenting with health and diet because, you know, you've wisdom of the body, right, Cody? We have kind of an intuitive wisdom. Sometimes when we're doing something, it's good for us. It's not good for us. So I encourage people to experiment and figure things out rather than just doing something because someone tells them to do it. I mean, obviously there's there's harmful things that you shouldn't try out, but a lot of things are work for you. Don't work for me, work for someone else. So I always encourage people to try it. We run all these different experiments. On nutrition. And so that's part of what, uh, what we do at, uh, get member access, all kinds of experiments.
Speaker 1
[00.02.53]
Yeah, I love that. And I heard on one podcast, I guess it's been several years now, but they said n equals one. So if you're familiar with statistics, n represents the number of participants in your study and what they say when they, when they're saying n equals one is essentially that that one is you. You are doing experiments on yourself because nobody can really experience what you're experiencing, even the researcher. Right? It has to be you. It has to be your
Speaker 2
[00.03.25]
perspective. Right.
Speaker 1
[00.03.27]
And that's that's far more valuable than any research you could read from somebody else. Yeah.
Speaker 2
[00.03.32]
So and a good way of determining health for a man is going to be sexual health. That's a very good indicator. Um, erections are uh, sort of a dipstick of male health. You know, you can check the oil, they check how that goes. That's a good indicator. Women. Um, it's a little bit more difficult for women, but, uh, having a healthy libido, having a diet where you crave things that are good for you rather than things that are bad for you. Those are kind of indications of health, a little more complicated. But I try to help people with all the different aspects of it. And, uh, food is very interesting. I'm doing an experiment now that has been super interesting, and I learned about it from a psychologist named David Phillips, who goes into prisons and works with people that have mental health issues. And he's been giving them this idea. And it's a crazy idea, Cody. It's a crazy idea. But I looked into the science and it's really very interesting. It's about, uh, glucose. So you know how we can basically function for energy on either carbohydrates or fat, right? That's it. I mean, that's where you get our calories from. You can't get them anywhere else. And so it's very trendy now for a lot of people to do, uh, low carbohydrate diets that are high in fat. And then there's still some people that believe in the high carbohydrate, low fat diet. Right. But this is essentially a remediation, a treatment where I'm taking about 300g of glucose or dextrose, same thing, glucose or dextrose every day, staged out over like four different doses. So that's a lot of sugar, right? 70g of glucose. I put it in a coffee or I put it in a hot drink, or I put it in coconut water and I'm drinking that. And, uh, Doctor Stevens showed some citations and it looks very compelling because people that have depression, anxiety, bipolar, a lot of times, Doctor Stevens found that the, uh, their brain is sort of throttling. It's sort of like you have like half of your brain cells aren't quite working. And he said the reason for that is certain traumas and stresses result in a condition called hyper glycolysis, which is a dangerous condition for the brain. And in order to contain that, the brain stops burning as much sugar basically throttles down. It's almost like you're you're driving your car and you're lifting your foot off the gas pedal. That's what your brain is doing. And he found that when you fix this problem by giving yourself lots of glucose over a period of maybe six months, that fixes itself, your brain goes, aha, I'm okay with all this glucose. I can function at full throttle again. And he found that it was a game changer for bipolar depression, anxiety, and also for many and many other conditions, including headaches. And I've suffered for headaches for for 25 years. So I've been doing it for headaches and I've been getting great results from it actually for several months into it now. Never had results this good. And you can say, well that's crazy Matt taking all that sugar since you get diabetes or whatever. Well, you don't really get diabetes from sugar. Um, it's probably not going to make you diabetic. I certainly have to watch my other foods so I don't gain fat. But that's an example of a very, very successful experiment. Some people will have different results. Some people have had better results. I've had some really good results. I've had people that have had issues with it. But who would ever think that something like that would even work? And yet there seems to be some science behind it.
Speaker 1
[00.07.02]
Yeah, that's really interesting. So. So if you don't get diabetes from sugar, what would you say you get it from?
Speaker 2
[00.07.08]
Right now, as we're, uh, talking, there's a lot of discussion, finally, about something that my students have known for many, many years, which is that seed oils and and even fish oils can be very, very toxic. And they, uh, our body prefers to burn saturated fats. So when we consume things with soy or corn oil and so forth, these get stored in our fat cells instead of being used. Then when we're sleeping, because we're fasting during sleep or when we're exercising heavily, we run out of sugar. We run out of the stored sugar glycogen. Now we're running on on fat. Our body dumps that seed oil fat into our bloodstream. And that seed oil fat is very, very destructive. It destroys the sensitive cells in the man's testes. It destroys the sensitive late excels there. It destroys the beta cells in the pancreas, the thymus cells. That's why you see the thymus, which is an organ for for building our immune system. It shrinks. So I think it's from seed oils, actually. And if you avoid seed oils, it takes a long time to get rid of them in your body. But your body eventually gets rid of them. And then it would be very hard to get diabetes. At that point, I
Speaker 1
[00.08.17]
was taught in my nutrition training that carbohydrates do have some effect on your blood sugar. I mean, as it kind of depends on how we are, we're combining our foods, the order of the foods that we're eating. So, for instance, if you were to eat fiber, fat, and protein before your carbs, generally your body's going to respond a little bit better. And they've done tests on these based off of people who wear continuous glucose monitors. Yes. Uh, whereas people who are wearing that continuous glucose monitor or CGM, if they're just eating carbs without the fiber, fat and protein fruit, they've got that glucose spike.
Speaker 2
[00.08.57]
That's right. And then it
Speaker 1
[00.08.58]
drops. And if that becomes a habit that might contribute to inflammation or other problems, so how would that tie in to seed oil consumption,
Speaker 2
[00.09.09]
would you say. Yeah, I wore I were I where I was looking around for my when I always wear one it lasts for about two weeks. I don't have a current one, but I'm wearing a CGM because that's how you get to see your especially at night. What I've found is that, um, a lot of people have lost the ability of storing sugar. The way you store sugar is in your liver and your muscles in the form of glycogen. Right. And if you're a young person, you might have 8 or 10 hours of glycogen stored. So that means if you don't eat, you can still function burning sugar in a healthy way for 8 or 10 hours. But a lot of us, especially with seed oils, polyunsaturated fats, fatty acids, poofs, we've been we've got a fatty liver and our liver can't store much sugar, so we're constantly burning fat. Between meals. You know, we have literally 15 or 20 minutes of sugar stored. And so we're continuing burning fat. And if you look at any person with type two diabetes, they are always burning fat. They're not able to burn sugar. And one of the problems with fat burning is these very unstable, uh, polyunsaturated fats, the seed oils that normally in the old days, you know, you'd have some nuts once in a while, but you wouldn't have massive amounts of these seed oils that you do today. You would have had fat from butter, fat from a cow or beef fat, tallow or whatnot, but you wouldn't be able to get large amounts of fat. So now, because of industrialization, we have very large amounts of fat. Our bodies have a fatty liver, we can't store the sugar. So we're continually dumping that into our into our bloodstream. And I think that's it's been we're doing more and more studies on this, finding the issues with it. The problem is that we have an enormous industry that's dedicated to the seed oils, started in the 19th century because the they made cotton and they said, what do we do with all these seeds? And they said, why don't we sell them to what they call housewives, who can use it instead of butter because it's cheaper, and they basically use marketing to transform our food and our whole diet. And then in the in the 1950s, they did this study in Minnesota in a mental hospital, where they claimed to show that consuming high amounts of seed oils lowered cholesterol and led to a longer life. However, The New York Times publishes several years ago. They look back at the data and there's either the researcher was lying or they made great, grievous mistakes. Because it turns out that when you consume a lot of soil, corn oil and all this, you don't live as long and you're more likely to get heart attacks and more likely to get a fatty liver and have health problems. And yet they're still talking about this to this day. Polyunsaturated fats don't eat a lot of saturated fat. You know, they're still talking about that and giving people this advice, which I think is exactly the wrong thing.
Speaker 1
[00.11.54]
It is. I totally agree with you. I mean, these plant oils tend to be chemically unstable, which means they oxidize very quickly. So generally, I usually tell people if you are going to change anything about your nutrition, change your fats
Speaker 2
[00.12.10]
first way. Good. That's so good.
Speaker 1
[00.12.12]
Because these these plant oils, vegetable oils, seed oils, whatever you want to call them, they're probably rancid by the time you even buy them at the store. So this is before you've even opened the bottle, because they're not refrigerated, they're not fresh, and they're highly processed. Yeah. So you're way better off going for that saturated fat, which is more chemically stable and frankly, a better fuel for the body in the brain.
Speaker 2
[00.12.36]
Yeah, it is. Now, a lot of people are very much afraid of carbohydrates today. And there's the what I call the keto bros. There's a lot of people that are really pushing keto. It is true that when you go on keto, it's easy to lose weight. Initially everybody does, but what they don't realize is that it's usually water weight, because when you go keto, you know you're losing all the water that's attached to the carbohydrates that are stored in your body. So you lose this woosh! You lose some fat, but some weight. Rather, you don't really lose much fat. And then it's a slog. Like any other diet you end up, you're really going to have to cut calories in order to, to lose, to lose fat. And then a lot of people lose muscle mass. That's a problem. You know, as we get older, when we lose weight, we're more likely to lose what's called lean mass muscles, organ mass, you know, because that is turned into sugar in our bodies by cortisol. And we literally, you know, are eating our own organs sort of slowly but surely. So you've really got to be careful before you go on a diet that cuts calories because you don't want to lose lean mass. You know, you're already losing it slowly with age. We don't want to accelerate it in. So many diets actually cause people to lose lean mass, and they're worse off than they were before they started the diet. Mhm.
Speaker 1
[00.13.47]
Yeah. And I think nowadays too you mentioned fatty liver. I heard a statistic that 25% of all adolescents in America have a fatty
Speaker 2
[00.13.58]
liver. That's incredible.
Speaker 1
[00.13.59]
Which is that's a huge problem. And that's not even that doesn't even count the the disk like Mia. That doesn't count the mental illness. That doesn't count all the other stuff that they also have.
Speaker 2
[00.14.11]
Right? Right. Well, what I found when I wore the continuous glucose monitor and many other people have done the same thing as my guinea pigs, is that it's not really a high blood sugar. That is the issue so much as low blood sugar. We go through these hypoglycemic episodes at night when we have a fatty liver, because at night we're not presumably eating unless you're sleepwalking to the refrigerator, you're fasting when you when you're sleeping. And that's when we run out of that glycogen. We run out of sugar, and our body starts dumping fatty acids in the bloodstream. But usually it gets pretty low before that happens. And it's like a stress reaction right around 50 or 55 on a on a CGM. And that can cause you don't realize it, but it can cause anxiety and depression. And that effect of that low blood sugar episode, that effect last several days. It kind of takes a lot out of us, and people don't even realize they're doing it because it's happening when they're asleep. But it has a great effect when they're waking up. And I think this this is leading to a lot of the mental Illness problems that we have today that are so much worse in the past because of that fatty liver.
Speaker 1
[00.15.13]
Mhm. Yeah. And when a person has low blood sugar I actually I speculated on this several years ago before I got my clinical nutrition training as a therapist. I noticed that mental health really is about energy.
Speaker 2
[00.15.28]
Yes. And I kind of got I got some continuing education as a therapist in nutrition for mental health specifically. It was pretty light stuff. But even at that point, I wasn't taught about blood sugar, and I was speculating. And I noticed when people have low blood sugar or when they have low energy, they are more likely to be depressed. They're more likely to be
Speaker 1
[00.15.48]
irritable, anxious, all kinds of things.
Speaker 2
[00.15.51]
Yeah, yeah. Well, one thing that I found is super essential, which is never emphasized enough, is that potassium in our diet, dietary potassium really helps us manage our blood sugar to a great extent, even more than insulin does. So when I'm eating the sugar, I am also eating drinking coconut water, which is high in potassium, or milk, which is high in potassium. And I think that a lot of us have a diet when we talk about processed foods. And that's being bad. A lot of it is because we don't get enough potassium, and potassium is super helpful for maintaining our normal blood sugar, as it turns out. And yet most people get not nearly enough potassium in their diets.
Speaker 1
[00.16.31]
Yeah, I mean, just minerals in general. So if we're just focusing on macronutrients, which is kind of the conventional nutrition perspective, we're going to eat stuff that probably doesn't have a lot of micronutrients. And so that's when that's when we're talking about the vitamins and minerals. And I think those are essential for mental and physical health. And and many of us are deficient in those micronutrients.
Speaker 2
[00.16.58]
Yeah I think you're right. So one of them for example, is selenium. Um, and the other would be copper and zinc. But I found as interesting as selenium, copper and zinc are present in things like oysters, which people generally don't eat very much of crab, lobster, because the seafood kind of concentrates that, you know, especially crab that has blue kind of blood in its fluids, that's because of the copper. And if we don't consume seafood, we're not going to get much copper. We're not going to get much selenium, we're not going to get much zinc. It's very hard to get those in our diet. Um, and so I do actually recommend people do supplement with selenium and and I found recently I've done an experiment with zinc and copper. I hadn't really found any good effects from zinc for a long time, but when my own health started to really improve, I did find some zinc and copper seems to be very, very helpful. So I started to use that and looking at a analysis of diet, I don't see how you would get enough zinc and copper in a normal diet. I just think everyone's deficient in it really. That's the problem. And you know, they add iron to things. Cody, you know how they add iron, they call it, um, uh, like enriched or fortified with iron. It's iron filings. Reduced iron is iron filings. They have it in every baked good. You can't even get flour that doesn't have it very easily. And all that iron is really bad for us. And it displaces copper. And a lot of people are high in iron and low and copper, and it's hard to fix that. But I find a little bit of copper in the form of copper glistening or better yet, eating some oysters. Uh, smoked oysters are fine. Canned oysters are fine. They don't have to be raw once a week. Can can help adjust that and increase your copper and selenium and zinc to a great degree.
Speaker 1
[00.18.43]
I think it depends on to like where you're getting those nutrients from it. It's very important to pair the right nutrients with each other so that they can, yeah, increase bioavailability, increase absorption. Uh, because like you said, I mean, when they fortify these cereals, the breads, whatever it is, your body's not really absorbing it. And we hear all the time about people being iron deficient, but it might actually be the opposite. Maybe they're not testing it, right. Maybe.
Speaker 2
[00.19.16]
I don't see that people are too often iron deficient. Yeah. Uh, we found that, uh, a lot of times the the body buries the iron, you know, there's a, uh, those spots people get that older people get called age spots, the sort of dark spots people have them on their hands and their face that's actually caused by iron. It's, um, iron is, um, is sort of stored separately in our body because it's extremely toxic. We need some. But your body has to be careful. It's like a tiger by the tail. And those age spots are a mixture of the seed oils and iron called liposuction. And they're actually very harmful on their in your whole body. If you see them on your, your on your, on your skin, they're actually inside your, your body in a three dimensionally. They're all over. And so iron is responsible for that. And you really don't want those aged spots. So it's a sign of iron toxicity. So if you've got age spots you've got a toxic iron situation. Even if they say you have low and iron you don't.
Speaker 1
[00.20.09]
Yeah. And I just I've just heard a lot of cases in which doctors have. Prescribed iron supplements. Oh yeah. People. Yeah. And it's like, I'm not so sure that's really
Speaker 2
[00.20.19]
the. Why don't they give them liver. Have them take liver if they're low. Because this is I know people don't like liver, but it's a natural naturally high in iron. And it's a good form of iron that we can, we can absorb with, with copper and, and selenium and other other nutrient, especially if it's calves liver.
Speaker 1
[00.20.34]
Yeah. And nutrients tend to be more bioavailable from animal products to I mean at least from what I understand. And you can get iron from plant products, particularly dark leafy greens, but they need to be cooked. Yeah. And people eat them raw all the time. And so it's like you're not really absorbing those nutrients. Anyway. What
Speaker 2
[00.20.52]
I really like about raw vegetables. Yeah, I don't like you're absolutely right. I don't like raw vegetables because the plants, uh, have a cell wall around each cell that's made of cellulose, which you can't really digest. And so unless you cook it to death, it's not really digestible. But what happens is, if you eat a lot of raw vegetables, they spend a lot of time in your gut. A lot of us have a slow gut, and we get a lot of fermentation, which results in these endotoxins, which our body has to deal with. And if I was to say the one problem that we all have as we get older that's responsible for virtually all chronic disease, it's going to be the microbial endotoxins that are responsible for just about every problem that we get as we get older and very, very much tied to depression, anxiety and bipolar and other mental illness very, very much so. It's the bacterial endotoxins from the digestion. Um, have you ever heard of low dose naltrexone? Cody I have not told me about that. So naltrexone is used as a reversal agent as sort of a related drug called naloxone, and it's actually given away free for people that overdose on fentanyl or whatever. Uh. The authorities are trying to get more people to have it around as as a way to save someone's life who overdoses. But there's a cousin called naltrexone, which is been used by addicts. And in a very tiny doses, it's been found to help the, uh, what we call the endogenous opioid system in our body. We have a sort of a receptors for opioids, natural opioids, for example. Um, you know, the people know of that we normally get when we run or whatever that, uh, you know, the so, uh, uh, low dose naltrexone helps seal the gut. It helps close up the gut that's been leaking. That gets leaky as we get older. And for a lot of people, it helps a whole bunch of conditions. I had cracked heels for 25 years. I started taking this. It fix my gut. My heel, cracked heels went away. Nothing I ever put on them ever worked. I had terrible seasonal allergies that my whole life completely gone when I started on low dose naltrexone because they were actually coming from the gut even though I was sneezing, and I always assumed it was pollen in the air, it was really from the gut, all that leaky gut. Everybody has a leaky gut to some degree. So I've been a big fan of low dose naltrexone in recent years, and I had all sorts of people that have told me how it's cleared up their eczema or cleared up other conditions they had. And, uh, chronic pain is very useful for that. And also a lot of mood disorders as well. I'm a big fan of it, and it's been pioneered by a lot of health people who take normal naltrexone. It's taken in 50 or 100mg a day. This is more like a half milligram to four milligrams a day. So it's a very small amount, but it has a very strong effect over a period of several months.
Speaker 1
[00.23.42]
So you mentioned a little bit of personal experience. And I'm curious with your online university, Alpha Lion, you what what led you to start that? Would you mind sharing?
Speaker 2
[00.23.56]
Sure. Of course. Yeah. I've been at health researcher for about 25 years and like everyone who becomes a health research, probably I did it to solve my own problems. Um, I was born with a very debilitating autoimmune disorder, and I probably wouldn't have been alive past 50 years old had I not run into the discoveries of a of a of a Soviet era. Professor Constantine Bhutto and I started at portico method and realized I could get rid of my life threatening problems. Within a few days, I did something you're not supposed to do. Okay? Never do this. I throw away all my medications, eight medications, and never took them again. You're never supposed to do that. Um, yeah, I could have died from it, but I felt confident what I was doing, and that led me to become full time. And. And I started with my own problems, and then I started working with people. Originally, it was a lot of men around Ed and issues like that. Then I found that a lot of men with Ed also had health issues. For example, they were taking, well, SSRIs, which are pretty common, like Prozac, pretty common for people with anxiety and depression. And those SSRI caused sexual side effects. And I found that a lot of drugs did that, like statins that are commonly prescribed to men, cause sexual side effects and a lot of other drugs. So we started getting into helping men with these other health issues, which I had always been studying, and we ended up, uh, creating an online university for, you know, any kind of health issue. And the whole idea is to eat better, use certain supplements, some medications, if you need to, so that your doctor can take you off of your medications because you no longer need them. It's to avoid going what I call down the medical rat hole. Basically, because so many people I see, they just go further and further down there. They're not looking at alternatives, they're not looking at options. And unfortunately, it's um, you know, it hurts a lot of people. I mean, I'm a great fan of doctors. My father was a doctor. My father in law was a doctor. I love doctors, but, uh, I work with a lot of doctors because they know that the medical field, especially now, is doesn't have a lot of the answers. And if you just listen to that, a lot of times your health declines. So you want to you want some options to support support health and not require those kinds of interventions. That's how I started.
Speaker 1
[00.26.05]
So American medical schools don't teach nutrition at all. Or if they do, it might be like a two hour seminar. Like
Speaker 2
[00.26.13]
it's pretty minimal. And people don't realize that. I've had so many people talk to me and they're like, well, my doctor told me to eat this way. Usually it's. It's a low fat, high carb diet, which, you know, again, they're focusing on the macros and they're and they're missing those macros because they're not going for the nutrient dense foods like like you mentioned liver earlier or um, like you could eat heart, you could eat kidney, you could eat spleen, you could eat all kinds of organ meats that we don't normally eat in America. But doctors, they don't know to tell you that because they don't follow it themselves. And they weren't taught that in medical school. All they're
Speaker 1
[00.26.52]
taught is pharmacology and surgery.
Speaker 2
[00.26.55]
That's all they're taught. And I have a doctor that works for me full time, doctor R.D. McGill, who's an MD and does a lot of research and sees pay, and he completely agrees. I mean, I just got I just got this in this was like a few days ago. Uh, I'm not going to give you all the details, but he had five spinal surgery. He's a physician. He had five spinal surgeries, lots of other stuff, blah, blah, blah. He started doing some of our protocols and he says, um, your advice or transformations have so far proved better research and more successful, uh, than especially treatment by conventional medical treatments, but also alternative medical treatments. So he's used both as a physician and he, you know, feels that our research and our material has been been super helpful. I just feel sorry for people that don't realize that our medical system is very, very, very run by big pharma companies. Lifespan is declining in the United States and a lot of Western countries, and it's declining as we get over treated and poorly treated for more and more conditions. So either you look at these alternatives and options or you're going to get sucked in. It's not good.
Speaker 1
[00.28.02]
And I've noticed, too, that the medical system isn't just run by pharmaceutical companies. That is a huge part of it, but food
Speaker 2
[00.28.09]
companies as well. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1
[00.28.11]
pretty crazy. I mean, they've got I'm not going to name any specific companies here, but we've got huge corporations in America who tend to lobby to the FDA. They also hire dietitians to spread disinformation on social media. I've seen articles about that where investigative journalists have gone in and they've exposed
Speaker 2
[00.28.36]
this. I consider it an ethical issue, and there are so many consumers who are going on Instagram, TikTok or whatever it is, and they're like, oh, well, this person's a dietitian. They know what they're talking about. I'm going to continue eating this ultra processed food because they said it's okay and
Speaker 1
[00.28.55]
it's perpetuating problems, and most people don't really know that.
Speaker 2
[00.29.00]
The thing also about about medicine is they look at things as as cause and effect. For example, if you have glaucoma, they'll go, well, it's high pressure. We'll treat your pressures, but it doesn't really fix the glaucoma. And a lot of people have glaucoma who lose their eyesight, even though the pressures are kept normal with with medications. There's like there's a lot of, uh, things that aren't obvious when you improve your health. Like when I took the low dose naltrexone, I had no idea that eventually my heel, my cracked heels would be fixed. No idea. But it's so we're all, you know, connected together. I had somebody here like, we we have a diet we suggest, which is a high carb, you know, lowish fat diet. He said he did this. He said he changed his his light bulbs because those LED light bulbs that people use for saving, a lot of them put out light at a very blue frequency. It looks white to our eye, but it's actually blue. And the blue frequencies are very harmful on our eyes, actually. So on my computers, I always have them set to be very, very red. All my devices I don't want blue. Blue light can be very toxic, he said. So he's doing that. That's important to this story. He says he takes some taurine, which is an amino acid, some vitamin B3 and B2. He said. Last year my eyes changed from brown to blue gray. He said I had gotten glasses for driving, but I noticed that I can read and I don't need them anymore to driving. And I went to an optometrist. The old glasses were 2.75. The new ones are 1.5. At credit your course for improved vision. Wow. He's just changing his diet and his vision improves. Doctors. If you tell him that, they'll say, yeah, it's probably in his head. You know, they can't see that it's all connected. I've seen this so many times. Go to the doctor. Well, whatever it is, keep doing it. But I'm sure it has nothing to do with it. How can what you eat have anything to do with your eyes? That doesn't make any. It doesn't make sense to them because that's not how they're taught.
Speaker 1
[00.30.43]
Yeah. I mean, we're taught to specialize, which means so. So as a psychotherapist, I'm specializing in mental health. And honestly, I don't like that. Like, I really don't like the fact that we are compartmentalizing different parts of the body, because then we're ignoring anything else that might be influencing that part of the body. Yeah. And that's really the problem with the Western medical system, is we've got dieticians who are taught to focus on the wrong foods. And then by doing that, they're keeping patients from getting better. So then they have to refer to a doctor who specializes in this, who then refers to another doctor who specializes in this. It's all part of the medical system. Yeah. So in your opinion, Matt, what is the ideal diet? So you mentioned a lower fat, higher carb diet. But yeah, but if you could speak a little bit more to the details what would that
Speaker 2
[00.31.38]
be. Well think about the foods that we think of as feel good foods, you know um, which are what starch. Right. Carb foods people think of like, you know, when you feel good, you want to raid the raid. The, um. Pantry and have cookies and things that are sweet. I mean, people love sugar when they're not feeling so good. Um, well, uh, there's really two ways of getting energy for the body. There's there's, uh, carbohydrates. Sugar is a type of carbohydrate, the primary one. And then there's, there's fat. Um, fat is really designed for emergencies. We store some fat on us because our ancestors survived. When they couldn't get food, they had some fat on their bodies that could power their way through the the times of starvation or the times of famine. So fat is sort of an emergency food. The primary diet we're supposed to have is carbs. And if you look at all the healthy people in the world, and I've study specifically people that live to be 110, 115, 120. That's a big specialty of mine. I've been studying them for for decades. They all eat high carbs. All of them. All of them. And if you look at, you know, Japan, China, all sorts of places, you find they eat a lot of rice, right? The typical Chinese. And they had some real longevity. They'll eat rice and they'll have a little relish on top, like a little bit of meat or fish to give us some flavor. But it's based on carbs. The Japanese, some of the longest lived people in the world. Very healthy people. What do they have? Traditional Japanese diet is rice in the morning with, you know, cooked rice with some little thing with it, sometimes natto or fermented soybeans. And so I think the best diet is a high carb, low Lowish fat diet very low in seed oils, as low as you can get. No fish oils, no puffers, as little as you can get. Um, so I like foods that are high carb. For example, rice, I mentioned white rice. People always go, what? White rice. That's just empty calories. Yeah, but you know what happens? Brown rice has pupa in it, and the bran ferments in our gut and really raises endotoxins. A lot of people don't feel very good on brown rice. That's why they don't like it. So white rice. Uh, well cooked white potatoes. Um, masa harina, which is. Do you ever get Monster Arena? You know, it's a corn porridge, kind of like grits, but it uses the flour that's treated traditionally, the way they always treated flour and the where it comes from, the corn flour. Corn kernels are cooked in lime, uh, calcium hydroxide or calcium carbonate. That's how they would always eat corn. The Mayans, the, you know, the the old cultures that are in Central and South America, they'd always cook the corn, and it's called civilization. It makes it very healthy to eat that type of corn. When you go to the supermarket, you can find sometimes they call it masa. It's corn flour that's been cooked in lime. It's mixed families. It's used to make tortillas, but I use it to make a, uh, like a corn. Uh. Putting, you know, a porridge that's a very common. And I'll put some milk in. Um, and so my diet tends to be that I find works best for people, is high in carbs, low in fat, and also has a good amount of dairy products in it. And dairy products are vilified by a lot of people right now, but it's one of the best foods that you can get, especially like 1% milk. I drink lactose free milk, but it has a lot of calcium and has good quality protein has a lot of nutrients in it. I think, you know, milk is a fantastic food, so that that tends to be and I have some beef for lamb occasionally, but I've kind of lost a taste for it mostly. I mean, I like meat, but I actually like a little bit of cheese better. And so that tends to be my diet. I think having a good breakfast with carbs and some fat fat makes it more digestible. You don't want to just have carbs and then having a good lunch with carbs and fat. Then by the time the afternoon rolls around, probably not that hungry at dinner. Probably better not to have a big dinner. Don't you feel better when you don't have a big dinner?
Speaker 1
[00.35.39]
Yeah. I mean, I have heard that your metabolic health is stronger in the morning. And so, so a lot of people do intermittent fasting, which essentially means you're going a certain period of time where you have your eating window and another period of time where you have your fasting window. Theoretically, everybody's at least doing that eight hours a day because you're sleeping. Right. And
Speaker 2
[00.36.00]
so that's why you're sleepwalking. The refrigerator. Yes.
Speaker 1
[00.36.02]
So that's why we call breakfast. Breakfast. You are breaking your fasting window. But I have heard because your your metabolism is higher in the morning, it's better to eat more in the morning and less later in the evening. And that's why traditionally we had breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. What is supper? Essentially, it means soup. It's a light meal in the evening where lunch used to be the biggest meal of the day. Yeah, and we don't do that anymore because of the, the Industrial revolution. Everybody has jobs. Or we think we have to have jobs because we have this, this consumerist society that we live in. So we need to have money to live in this society. And so that keeps us from being home during lunch time, when we should be having the bigger meal.
Speaker 2
[00.36.51]
Yeah, I agree, I've found that I just gravitated towards that and the people, my students end up doing that too. Very few people really end up eating a big dinner anymore, and occasionally I do it for social reasons. I don't feel good the next day. And I did find when I was, when I where the continuous glucose monitor, if I had a steak and whatever at night. Sometimes that would give me an hypoglycemic episode at night, late at night, because the protein actually produces a very high insulin reaction. And if you don't have the carbs that are carrying it through, then a couple of hours later you still have a high insulin, you don't have enough carbs to cover it, and then you end up in a hypoglycemic state, triggers adrenaline and cortisol and a stress reaction. I didn't even know this. So then I started not having big pieces of steak at night because it just wasn't a good idea. I could see it. Yeah, and so many people are in a hypoglycemic state where we've got chronic stress left and right. Yeah. The number one mental disorder in the United States is anxiety. Yeah. Which to me that's kind of the same as stress. Like biologically speaking, we've got the cortisol, the adrenaline, the noradrenaline, noradrenaline running through the body. It's making people feel stressed. They can't relax. I try to get people to meditate. They can't focus. They can't sit still. It's such a huge issue. And if we can avoid that hypoglycemia.
Speaker 1
[00.38.06]
They're going to be so much better.
Speaker 2
[00.38.07]
And so yeah, everybody believes our blood sugar is too high and they are told us prediabetes. I've explained this. I've showed people studies that only like 2 or 3% of people that have a pre-diabetes diagnosis ever get diabetic. It's not it's not a legitimate diagnosis. It doesn't mean you're going to get diabetes at all. But the real issue, like you said, is the hypo low blood sugar episodes that you're getting the rebound effect, which we can't sense. We really can't know that. One way you could tell is if you get a an oral thermometer like this, it's a seven, eight, $8. And if you take your temperature when you're in a stress state, your temperatures are very low. If you have like if I have a meal with eggs and I don't have a lot of carbs, eggs really have a high insulin to trigger a lot of insulin, then I'm going to get a stress reaction, especially if you have coffee. And an hour or two later my temperature will be 96 95.5. And then I can tell them and otherwise I wouldn't know it. I don't feel any different, but I have a stress response and it does cause anxiety and depression. It's just not easy to see the cause and effect. But you're absolutely right. It's the low blood sugar that a lot of people don't realize that they're having these episodes that cause the most problems. You were talking about your ideal diet. You were talking about eating a high carb diet. But what I was hearing was a lot of whole foods, and I think that's where people get really mixed up. They're like, oh, well, it's okay to eat carbs. And so then they go and eat pizza, they eat ice cream, they eat candy, and they're like, it's fine. That's that's what they said is okay. But I think the key point here is we want it to be real food. Like
Speaker 1
[00.39.46]
you're fine eating carbs, but just make sure it's a good source of carbs. And have you found any value in. I guess you kind of mentioned it a little bit earlier. Um, ancestral preparations of these carbs. So like soaking, sprouting, fermenting.
Speaker 2
[00.40.02]
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. For example, uh, wheat is problematic for a lot of people. Even if you feel that it's not problematic for you, it could be because it causes the gluten, causes an inflammatory process in the gut, which we're not always aware of, which I think causes a more leaky, leaky gut. But if you look at traditional preparations of wheat, but you could do this at home, you could take flour and you could put some yeast, a very small amount of yeast in it, in water and salt, and just leave it for a couple of days. And it soaks and ferments and you don't even need to knead that. You don't need to do that kneading bread process where you see people spending 10 or 15 minutes pounding the, you know, stretch. And actually it makes a good bread and it lowers the gluten and makes it much more digestible when it's soaked for a long period of time. And the ancestral preparation was always sourdough, which is if you and I've made sourdough many times, it's very slow. It could take a day or two to make a loaf of bread. It's that soaking process that detoxifies the wheat. And it's a similar thing. We talked about mozzarella versus grits or polenta, which are the Italian or the southern US, but they're not mixed families. They're not nearly as healthy as the traditional flour this mix wise that the that they eat in Mexico and Central and South America. So I was I always look for those kinds of preparations because there's a wisdom there that we've lost when they stopped, when we when we adopted corn in the diet, in the Western diet, there was a lot they didn't realize that the next Asian. Was necessary and a lot of poor people reading a lot of corn, and they were getting a disease from it, which is caused by low niacin. And that's the reason they said, oh, that's why they've been boiling the corn kernels and lime, because they never got these diseases in Mexico. They were they were all living on corn. So you have to look at the preparation, because a lot of times there's a key to it being a good food for you.
Speaker 1
[00.41.56]
Yes. And people don't realize too you have to eat in a calm, relaxed state
Speaker 2
[00.42.03]
because digestion actually
Speaker 1
[00.42.05]
starts in the brain. Like if we are so busy in American culture, we are rushing to the next appointment, taking the kids to soccer, doing whatever it is that we're doing, and we're eating in the car. We're eating in a hurry. We're not taking the time to be mindful with our food. And if you can do that where you slow down. You mentioned sourdough being a very slow process. Part of that is to improve your digestion mentally. It's not just not even just a physical thing. You
Speaker 2
[00.42.33]
know, I always ask people this, Cody, I asked somebody, I said, are you enjoying your food now? Americans look at food as fuel. If you've ever spent time in France, which is a good, uh, you know, kind of a good contrast in France, they might spend an hour or two. Eating dinner, you know, and they're into the enjoyment of it. That's very, very important. But in the United States, food is fuel. It's like you need to take your car in to get, you know, more gasoline put in or a charge or whatever. That's how we look at food. But enjoying your food is really vital to life. I think it's really vital that you enjoy your food and, and, um, one thing I think is a good idea is if you can have a dinner with your family, that's, uh, something that's lost, but it's something that a lot of people can do. It just slows you down. It gives you a ritual. It gives you togetherness. I don't think there's any replacement for having dinner with somebody else as opposed. No, I
Speaker 1
[00.43.27]
don't think so either. Um, it brings a sense of community. Yeah. And like I said, the digestion starts in the brain. So if your brain knows that you're about to eat and that you're preparing food, it actually sends signals to the gut. Yeah. And to other organs to be prepared to start digesting food. If you are in a rush, you're feeling stressed all the time. Your brain isn't going to send those signals and you're not going to digest food very well. I mean, yeah, you still digest it, but it's not going to absorb the nutrients that you need.
Speaker 2
[00.43.58]
Yeah, yeah. Now, I do find that a lot of people are, uh, have a very poor digestion at this point and fatty liver. And one of the things is that they crave sugar a lot. You know, people how they just crave sugar, like, especially as they get older, they just they'll tell you, like, they don't enjoy eating anything with sugar. So there's a reason for that is that their body has sort of lost the ability of digesting and using a lot of different foods because of low cellular energetics and mitochondrial dysfunction. And so that's why some people starting out simple carbs are actually a better way of getting your, your gut fixed. Um, I have a feeling that this glucose. Um. Tests that I've been running is probably works for a lot of people who have very, very poor gut health. Because glucose is digested very high up in the digestive tract. It doesn't turn into endotoxins, it doesn't feed bacteria, because from the moment you have it in your stomach, it starts to enter your body. And your cells all can use can use glucose. And then eventually your health improves. Then you can have more carbs and you're not going to have the same trouble you might have had before with them.
Speaker 1
[00.45.06]
So I think we're just about out of time. But Matt, I'm going to ask you just one question. If there were one thing you could change about the way people approach health and wellness, what would it be?
Speaker 2
[00.45.20]
Look at options that are outside of the mainstream, yet that's so important. Just look at them. You don't have to do anything, but just look at them. Be open minded about it, that's all. Um, there was a very, very famous, um, Professor Gershon, sidekick of Hebrew University, a brilliant researcher. He did videos on YouTube. They took them all down because he wasn't saying nice things about certain things, but, um, and you know, what I really learned from him is he's somebody who is a professor, a medical school professor, and a teacher. And yet he encouraged his students to look at alternative health options. He says, we don't have the answers as doctors, of course, we have a few. But mostly you need to look at all the different possibilities and people that heal from serious diseases. A lot of them will try a little of this, a little that, sure, they may get a little chemo or they may get a little bit of this, but they also do other things. And I've noticed the same thing, Cody, you'll have ten things somebody does and they recover. Was it the the mushrooms that they did? Was it the, you know, the drug they were given? Was it the change in diet? I think it's all those things, and I think you can recover from almost anything, you know, kind of combining medical options with your doctors knowledge. It could set with other options. And I think it's important to be open minded to those other options. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it seems like in recent generations, we have been drawn to the dogma that has been fed to us. But that's not necessarily the right answer for everybody. No. In fact, in fact, in most cases, we do need to look at those other options because it's like we were saying earlier, doctors don't have training in nutrition, or at least they don't have adequate training in nutrition unless they sought out that training on on their own became a functional medical doctor. They started working in private practice. In that case, they might know what they're talking about, but we need to branch out and look at those other options from nutritionists, health coaches, uh, maybe checking out your online university for men there. There
Speaker 1
[00.47.29]
are so many different resources that we have now, especially with the internet, podcasts, books, YouTube videos. There's so much out there that people could really benefit from and they don't even know where
Speaker 2
[00.47.41]
to look. Yeah.
Speaker 1
[00.47.42]
So how can they find you if they
Speaker 2
[00.47.45]
want? Well, what I would suggest is I have a gift for your podcast listeners. If you go to Daily Medical Discoveries. Com and just join my list, I will send you a copy of my book, Healthy to 120, which is in its third edition. It was one of the all time All Health Best sellers on Amazon. It's completely, completely rewritten. Um, so it's daily medical discoveries. Com and and I'll send you health data in 20, uh, as a, as an electronic book. And it's a $30 book on Amazon and it's fantastic. And it has a lot of the things. There's nothing held back. There's no it's real solid. And it's a good start for a lot of people.
Speaker 1
[00.48.20]
Awesome. I really appreciate that. Thanks, Matt.
Speaker 2
[00.48.22]
Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. It's been fun. Hey, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I just have a couple things I want to share with you before we wrap up. And that is if you want to support me in this podcast, the production, interviewing more guests, putting out more episodes, go to kofi.com/codex. That's kofi.com/cody Cox. Also, I wanted to share. I am offering a 20% discount on my packages to my podcast listeners before the end of the year, so if you want to take advantage of this, go to my website at Beavercreek wellness.com and go and purchase a package using the promo code podcast 24. That's podcast two for you'll get 20% off your first payment. Now, as a hint, if you want to utilize this 20% off for the entire package, you'll want to pay for the entire package upfront. Otherwise, you do have the option of paying monthly, but you'll only get the 20% off for the first month. This deal applies to packages of nutrition as well as nutritional psychotherapy. And as a reminder, if you are not in the state of Utah, unfortunately you cannot utilize the nutritional psychotherapy package. However, if you're outside of Utah, you may be able to utilize the nutrition package. So something for everyone here. But remember, this deal expires December 31st, so make sure you jump on it soon.
Speaker 1
[00.50.00]
Real Food Mental Health is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The information presented on this podcast is not intended to replace any medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. While I am a health care provider, I am not your provider. Always seek the advice of an appropriate health care practitioner with any personal questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. Reliance on information provided by this podcast is at your own risk.