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Reclaim Your Energy: The Power of Natural Rhythms! | John Douillard DSH #767
00:36:02
Unlock the secrets to reclaiming your energy by harnessing the power of natural rhythms! 🌿 Dive into a fascinating conversation with Dr. John Douillard on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly. Tune in now to explore how aligning with your Circadian
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- [00:02]
Announcer
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Host
How does the circadian rhythm stuff work? Because a lot of people use alarm clocks to wake up.
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Dr. John Duyard
When I would go and do consultations and I, this guy, he said, I woke up every morning with a headache and I treated him and nothing happened. I couldn't treat him again, nothing happened. And I said, when do you go to bed? He goes, like 2 or 3 in the morning. And I said, oh my God. And get in bed around 8 o'clock, take out a boring book. As soon as your eyes get tired, go to sleep. As soon as your eyes open in the morning, get out of bed. And he did that. He called me back like two weeks later and he said, you know what? That's the first, first time in years I woke up without a headache.
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Host
All right, guys, got Dr. John Duyard here today. Thanks for coming on, man.
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Dr. John Duyard
Good to be here.
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Host
Sean, creator of LifeSpa.com yeah, been around a while, right?
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Dr. John Duyard
I've been a while around a while for sure, yeah.
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Host
So what exactly was the, the purpose of creating Life Spa?
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Dr. John Duyard
You know, back in 1981, I, I went to a lecture on meditation and the guy was talking about yoga, breathing and ayurvedic medicine, which is like the traditional system of medicine from India. And afterwards I was super into it and I asked the guy, I said, hey look, I'm training for an Ironman triathlon. I wonder if it's good to do all this exercise based on your system. And he said, what's an Ironman? I said, well, you know, it's a two and a half mile swim, 112 mile bike, a 26 mile run. And he looked at me and said, why do you do that? And I was like, I didn't really even have any answer. I never even thought of it. And he said, do you meditate? And I said, yeah, I get really deep sleep when I meditate. And he looked at me again like I was sort of an idiot and said, meditation is different than sleep. Sleep is completely, you know, you're knocked out. Meditation is being restful and alert at the same time. He goes, you're exhausted. So I started meditating more and going to meditation retreats and I went to a two Week meditation retreat. After that retreat, this is the two weeks I came back and I was like shot out of a cat. I started competing at a really high level. I was in my internship at that time and I started, you know, I had this level of capacity and multitasking I never experienced. I had like a three month window of being in the zone.
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Host
Wow.
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Dr. John Duyard
And I was so passionate and fascinated by that drug that I was on. And I kind of needed to figure out what that drug was. So in 1986 I had a chance to go to India, study this ayurvedic medicine. Stayed there for a year and a half. Closed my phone, my practice in front of a phone in New Delhi. I never went back to that practice. I met Deepak chopra there in 1986 after my training, came back and co directed his center and started doing research on nose breathing versus mouth breathing and ancient medical wisdom and modern science. And I just love the idea that you have these practices that are thousands of years old that are still in practice today and then there's actually an amazing amount of modern science to back them up. And science alone, you can just prove whatever. You can prove whatever it wants. You know, coffee can be good or can be bad. Soy can be good, it can be bad depending who's, you know, publishing or paying for the studies.
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Host
Right.
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Dr. John Duyard
But when you have the ancient wisdom and the science together, that's kind of what I do is I write about those things and I feel like that's the way we should be looking at, you know, not just throw away all that time tested wisdom, but actually bring it up. Find the science to prove it Takes, take the good, leave the bad.
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Host
Yeah, I love that. It's hard to trust certain studies, man. You see these headlines and they, they instill fear and emotion in you.
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Dr. John Duyard
Oh, totally. I mean, you can just find whatever you want. I mean I live on PubMed, so I can, I. You know, you can just, you really can just find whatever you want without having something that's time tested. It's like, I don't know, it's really nice to have that traditional wisdom that's kind of setting the tone for what you're going to take on, you know, medically.
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Host
Yeah, absolutely. You found some interesting stuff out about nose breathing. So 91% of athletes tested do not have a fully functional diaphragm.
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Dr. John Duyard
That's right, yeah. None of us do.
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Host
So that affects their breathing capacity and so much more.
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Dr. John Duyard
You know, every stress that we experience in our life, we breathe a little bit differently. That new stress Version of breathing becomes normal to you in short order. Another stress comes along. We breathe a little bit differently. Another one, another one, another. We breathe, and next thing you know, we're breathing completely different than how we started as young children.
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Host
Wow.
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Dr. John Duyard
And we start breathing in a shallow way, breathing into the upper chest fight or flight receptors. And not only that, is the diaphragm can't function any longer. And the diaphragm isn't just a breathing muscle. It pumps your entire lymphatic system. You know, the extra weight around your belly and hips is lymph congestion. The diaphragm pumps the cerebral spinal fluid in and out of your brain. And we dump three pounds of plaque and trash out of our head every year while we sleep at night.
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Host
Wow.
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Dr. John Duyard
But if we're not breathing properly, that trash builds up. And it's linked, according to the studies now linked to anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, inflammation, and even autoimmune concerns. And breathing techniques can actually have been shown to reverse heartburn, GERD reflux, high blood pressure. And I was in a restaurant about a week or so ago, we went early, and there's some old folks coming in and out, and they're walking with their mouth wide open, struggling just to get in and out. And I was like, God, if they only knew. Someone told them that they did, like, five minutes of breathing practices to get their diaphragm stronger. This wouldn't happen if someone told them that just five minutes a day would actually reverse their heartburn, their gerd, their reflex, their cognitive decline, actually prevent them from accelerated DNA damage. It happens as we age, and we don't really ever really talk about breathing because we just kind of do it normally. But very few of us really understand what functional breathing is really about.
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Host
So just five minutes?
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah.
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Host
What's the technique?
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Dr. John Duyard
Well, I mean, you can. You can even do it when you wake up in bed. You can just lie in bed, you know, when you wake up, roll over on your back, lie there and breathe in through your nose, but try not to move your chest or your shoulders. And just breathe into the lower rib cage.
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Host
Okay.
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Dr. John Duyard
And try to fill the lower rib cage up like a balloon, pushing the air out to the sides and even into your back. So try that. Breathe in and just breathe into the rib cage on the sides.
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Host
Interesting.
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Dr. John Duyard
You push it in, and then when you breathe out, squeeze the rib cage on the sides and then engage your abdominal muscles. And when you engage your abdominal muscles on the exhale, you create an abdominal diaphragmatic cardiac massage. And that flips the brain. And we published studies on this into an alpha state. We did this with athletes. We had one group of athletes breathing through their mouth, one breath of athletes breathing through their nose. And the ones that did it through their nose, their brain went into a meditative alpha state during vigorous exercise. So imagine like running as fast as you could, but your brain's responding to that like a meditation versus the mouth. Breathers were in a fight or flight panic state. Their brain was in a beta state, super stressed out. So that was like when I. When I. When we did that research and we finally published those studies, I was like, we did it. We. You know, I figured out what it was that got me into that zone, into that drug space where I just felt so different for, for like three months, I was in this space.
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Host
Yeah.
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Dr. John Duyard
And. And it has a lot to do with how we breathe because that sets up how you respond to stress in your life. And I think about it as the eye of the storm. If you can create a calm neurologically by how you breathe, then you can. The bigger the calm, the more powerful the winds, right?
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Host
Yeah, so.
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Dr. John Duyard
So most folks are living out there in the winds of the storm, dodging refrigerators. And it's dangerous out there. It breaks you down. But if you can actually establish that calm, inhale from that place, there's really no limit to your potential. And that runner's high, the zone. But even taking that into your regular life, I mean, if you can run as fast as you can with your brain in a meditative state, why can't you take that off the mat and bring it into your life so you're calm, you know, taking your kids to soccer practice or whatever, you know, I.
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Host
Could see that because as a basketball player and a distance runner, people that were breathing through their nose always looked calm. And people through their mouth looked like they're panicked.
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, like when I was at the nets, I taught them how to nose breathe. That's actually how I got the job, was that my book, Body Mind Sport came out. I did some in services with them and end up got hired full time. And, you know, not only were they doing it on the court when they could, but, you know, actually breathing through the nose, creating that abdominal, diaphragmatic, cardiac massage. Flip the brain into an alpha state. When you're shooting foul shots in front of 30,000 people, it's the difference versus when you're shooting in your backyard, no problem. Right. But when there's 30,000 people screaming at you, if you can create a neurological comma Vagal response, man. You're not, you know, you're, you're in your backyard.
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Host
Wow, that's awesome. Because I'll make 10 free throws in a row before the game and during the game I'll shoot like 60% from free throw line.
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Dr. John Duyard
Exactly. And we're all like that, whether you're on the basketball court or in your job or whatever, you know.
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Host
Yeah, that makes sense. Wow. Dangers of a gluten free diet. So that's like a hot diet trend, right? Not eating gluten.
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Dr. John Duyard
You know, I think of wheat as a canary in the coal mine. You know, folks, folks, stop eating wheat. There was a couple of studies that have been done where they took people who ate wheat and then people who didn't eat wheat. They didn't have celiac, but they didn't eat wheat. And they met and they found that the people who ate the wheat had four times less mercury in their blood than people who were gluten free. And significantly more good bugs, less bad bugs, and significantly more killer T cells than the people who are gluten free.
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Host
Wow.
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Dr. John Duyard
And there are so many other studies showing that the wheat actually, and the harder to digest proteins like the lectins and the nightshades and the phytic acid, everybody says, don't eat, don't eat, don't eat. When you bubble wrap the diet, you actually create a long term down the road problem. Those harder to digest foods create a hormetic effect. You know, it doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. There was a crazy study with kids, Amish kids who have the lowest rates of asthma on the planet. And their genetic cousins, the Hutterites, when they came to America from Switzerland, they became modern farmers. And those kids, same genetics, same valley they came from, have the highest rates of asthma on the planet.
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Host
Wow.
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Dr. John Duyard
So they were like, how could this be? They measured the dust in the barns where the Amish kids were running barefoot in the barns. They had cows as pets. And it was the dust that created an irritant on the respiratory tract that gave an immune response to asthma. And they didn't get asthma.
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Host
Wow.
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Dr. John Duyard
Harder to digest foods. If we bubble wrap our diet, we're going to become, you know, so you put somebody on welfare, they're like, well, it's much easier just to be on the dole. Right, Right. So. So exactly the reason you and I have gut immunity, which is 70% of our immune response, is because of those harder to digest foods. So instead of just taking the food out of the diet, which of course, if you feel Bad eating it, don't eat it. But that hasn't fixed the problem. The idea is to actually find out what the underlying imbalance is in your digestive system and fix that. Of course eat whole foods, non processed foods because the pesticides on the foods kill the enzymes that make the kill the bugs rather that make the enzymes to help us digest the wheat hard to digest food. So we're sort of screwed by all the pesticides. But that doesn't mean we can't reboot digestive strength and be able to have a wider birth of foods we can eat. And the studies show now that by eating a bubble wrap diet we are having more and more microbial lacking microbial diversity. They did another study out of Stanford and they took mummies that are 1,000 years old. They measured their poop and the bugs in their poop and they compare that to human, non modern humans. And the lack of bugs in our feces was so much different than the thousand year old poop that they're actually calling that an extinction event. So our lack of diversity in our bugs because we're eating processed food, bubble wrapping our diet, the same food again and again and again, it's really a big deal. And that stems from not having digestive strength. If I can't eat something, I can't eat phytic acids, lectins, beans, nuts, seeds, grains, legumes, nuts, dyshas, goitrogens, then I'm just going to stop eating them. Well that's where all the diversity comes from. That's where the hermesis irritation creates an immune response. If you don't have that, we are seeing the studies come in saying hey you know what, this is becoming a bigger problem now.
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Host
Yeah, that is fascinating. I'm more impressed with how that poop lasted a thousand years.
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Dr. John Duyard
I'm more impressed how they figured out how to get the poop. And a study actually just came out from the New England Journal of Medicine just this week, a similar study basically saying the same thing.
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Host
Wow.
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Dr. John Duyard
How they figured out and how that poop was maintained, I don't know.
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Host
So there was a lot more parasites in them basically.
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Dr. John Duyard
I don't know if it was parasites, but just more diversity, you know, different kinds of bugs and that that makes us stronger.
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Host
70% of American diets processed foods now.
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Dr. John Duyard
It's crazy.
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Host
It's really high. Yeah, yeah, that's too high.
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Dr. John Duyard
That way too high. In the last, in the last 30 years the diversity of the diet like ethnic foods and all that has reduced by 50%. So we're eating 50% less diverse foods than we used to, which is like. And even the organic spinach we get from grocery store now in a plastic container comes off a conveyor belt that's grown in the same dirt again and again and again. That's not diversity. It's good, it's organic, but it's not microbial diversity.
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Host
Fruit and veggies don't taste the same. When I was a kid, I remember, like, really bold flavors.
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah.
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Host
You know?
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah.
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Host
The soil epidemic seems really problematic.
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Dr. John Duyard
There's no. I mean, the minerals are just devoid in the soils because we keep using it again and again and again. And then the farmers will put minerals back in there and. And oftentimes overshoot the Runway and actually create mineral toxicity. So.
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Host
Whoa.
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Dr. John Duyard
It's sort of a random. I mean, it's like you get too much or you get none. It's such a. It's a crazy world.
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Host
Yeah. So we got to start our own farms at home then.
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, exactly.
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Host
That's the only way to know the source and everything. Because the pesticides is another problem too.
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah.
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Host
I mean, it's in water now.
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah. Yeah. It's everywhere. And like I said, those pesticides, they compromise our ability to digest those, which is why we want to bubble wrap our diet. But that's not the solution.
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Host
Yeah. Now, nuts are kind of controversial. I hear so many opinions on that. What's your take on nuts and seeds again?
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Dr. John Duyard
They're a hard to digest protein. You need a good, strong stomach acid to do it. And if you're stressed out eating a bunch of junk. Junk. Your digestive strength's gonna weaken. You're not gonna break down those nuts. And here's a quote from the studies. If you don't break the proteins and the fats down completely, they'll go incompletely into your intestinal tract. They'll be too big to get into your blood. They get uptaken into the collecting ducts of your lymphatic system, and that'll create extra weight around your bellies, rashes out your skin associated lymph in your. In your skin. It'll congest your respiratory lymph. And your brain lymph, as we mentioned, dumps three pounds of plaque. It'll start breaking. It'll actually start accumulating in your brain chemistry and creating more severe problems.
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Host
Wow.
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah. So that's why we have to have good digestion.
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Host
Is it true only 10% of the cells in the human body are human?
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah. I mean, most of it's microbes. Yeah.
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Host
That is Crazy.
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Dr. John Duyard
We are. We, we. We are. We evolved to create a home that moves around and spreads the bugs around with our poop. We eat, we poop and we keep moving and we keep spreading the bugs around so the bugs survive. We're here for. I mean, really, when you think about it logically, we're here for them.
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Host
So we're 90% bugs.
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah.
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Host
That is crazy.
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah.
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Host
Holy crap.
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah. And they. And there's even studies that show that when you can take a toddler and look at the bugs in their gut and actually predict if it's going to become a doctor, a lawyer, or an artist. Yeah. From the bugs, Psychobiotics. Yeah. You can totally tell by their microbiome, their core microbiome, where their tendencies, likes, dislikes, propensities are going to be really crazy. Yeah.
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Host
I wonder if there's one for entrepreneurship because it seems like a lot of people say they're born with it.
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Dr. John Duyard
We should check your bugs.
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Host
Yeah, I'd be interested. That's crazy. So you're really born with a set path in life then?
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, there's a core level and then there's stuff we add on, but yeah, for sure.
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Host
Dang. Is there any, like, influence on that? Can you change the bugs?
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Dr. John Duyard
You can totally change the bugs. I mean, you can't change the core level, but you can a lot of times. What happens, you take some antibiotics. Right. You kill off a lot of the bugs.
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Host
Yeah.
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Dr. John Duyard
In short order, they all come back. There's no vacancy. Ever. But what comes back can be bugs that don't do anything, anything good or bad. They just take up all the real estate. And then. So there are ways to kind of get rid of some of those opportunistic bugs that don't do anything and repopulate with colonizing probiotics, ones that have been proven to stick to your gut lining and become permanent. Versus most of the probiotics on the market are transient. They work, but you got to keep taking them to keep the benefit.
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Host
Yeah.
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Dr. John Duyard
And that's. I'm not a big fan of those because I gotta sell a pill and a powder to somebody forever. Best way is to reset a microbiome and then start eating diverse foods in season. Because the bugs in the soil change from one season to the next to the next. The bugs in our gut, according to the Hadza tribes, Tanzania tribes, and the hunter gatherer tribes, their bugs change from one season to the next to the next. So we should be eating in a more seasonal way to inoculate the bugs. You know, the gut with the right bugs for the right season to sort of decongest you in the spring from allergies, get rid of heat in the summer, and boost your immunity in the winter. That's how it works.
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Host
Yeah.
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Dr. John Duyard
We eat, like, the same food processed every day. It's a bad look.
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Host
Yeah. I got off probiotics, actually. I used to take those. I'm on fermented veggies now. Yeah, I like those.
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Dr. John Duyard
Doing something like that or doing something that's going to make a permanent change is what you want to do.
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Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not a fan of antibiotics also.
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you got to do it. You got to do it, you know, because they do save lives, but. But you got to do something after to kind of help repair and reboot.
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Host
Yeah. So what should you do after? If you take that for a week?
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Dr. John Duyard
Soluble fiber, like a slippery elm licorice marshmallow flax chia. The soluble fiber, make a tea out of it and drink it throughout the day and just coat your whole gut, like the Pepto Bismol commercial, with soluble fiber. That's a prebiotic, and it's a healing agent for the lining. And that soluble fiber attaches to the bile, so. So in your liver, there's bile like a pac man gobbling up toxins. Eat some fatty food. The bile grabs the fat in your intestinal tract. The fiber takes all that fat and toxins to the toilet. If you don't have enough fiber in your diet, all those toxins get reabsorbed back to your liver, 93% of it. So we end up just kind of. Kind of rewashing the same dirty dishes again and again and again. So you take. You do that to kind of create a fertilizer for healing the environment. And then you take, like, the fermented vegetables or some type of, you know, colonizing probiotic and maybe some saccharomyces and things like that to knock off some of the yeast and some of the opportunistic bad bacteria. But there's definitely ways to reboot that. I treat that in my practice all the time, you know, sibo and, you know, chronic, you know, issues with digestion as sort of an ayurvedic medicine. That's like the king pin. You have to evaluate the digestion and the lymph first. And if you fix those things, the lymph's like the drains in your body taking the trash out.
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Host
Yeah.
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Dr. John Duyard
Digestion is like, you know, the faucets bringing this stuff in. If those two things are Broken, you're gonna pay a price.
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Host
What's the ayurvedic approach with vaccines? Is that something you guys get?
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Dr. John Duyard
They didn't have vaccines 2,000 years ago. I mean, they had really interesting ways of doing it. They would. They would take, you know, 24 karat gold and. And then heat it up and then put it in water and create this, like these gold tonics. I've never seen any studies to show that that actually works, but they didn't have vaccines back then, you know, And I think in my personal opinion on vaccines is that we give these little kids at 4 months old way too much too soon. Like in Europe, they wait a year before they start giving vaccines. You know, when you're. When a baby's being nursed, you have a lot of immunity there.
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Host
Yeah.
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Dr. John Duyard
And when these kids are so small and they're getting injected, it's a lot. Sometimes too much too soon is my opinion.
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Host
I agree. Now they're finding heavy metals in some of them too.
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Dr. John Duyard
Well, that's been taken out now. So that used to be the case, but nowadays the heavy metals have been taken out. So you're right. There was a thing, but not a thing anymore. So that's a good thing. They've made it. They made some adjustments there. Problem is, you can't sue them if anything goes wrong. That's the problem.
- [19:32]
Host
Those are tough to get out of your body because I just did a parasite cleanse. I still have decently high heavy metal count in my blood.
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Dr. John Duyard
Oh, really?
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Host
Yeah, I took my blood a couple weeks ago.
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Dr. John Duyard
Really? There's. There's absolutely ways to get that out of there. I can. I can share with you.
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Host
Okay. Yeah.
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Dr. John Duyard
Arsenic edta.
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Host
Arsenic was my highest, and that was surprising to me because I'm very.
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Dr. John Duyard
Eat a lot of rice?
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Host
Not really, but I used to eat a lot of Indian, so maybe it compiled. I'm not sure.
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, Yeah.
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Host
I love Indian rice. The basmati rice or whatever.
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, that's. That's a. That's. That rice. A lot of plant vegetables. Plants will pull certain heavy metals. That's what they do, you know, so it's not. That's something that they knew thousands of years ago. And they actually created detoxes for the body to help get the heavy metal load out of the body because they knew that there were issues with, you know, certain toxins building up in the body.
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Host
Yeah.
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Dr. John Duyard
So there. There are definitely ways to handle that.
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Host
So you got to be careful what plants you're eating. Then if they're absorbing those heavy Metals.
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Dr. John Duyard
You got to make sure you know what soil it's grown in. And if you get, if you get herbs that, that are FDA certified, what are called GMP certified, like our herbs that we have, we carry, you have to, we have to test them when we get them in the raw material. And we got to test them again after we make a formula, you know, so we have a formula called Turmeric plus, which is turmeric, 16 parts, 1 part black pepper. And the absorption, when the study show when you put those two together, the absorption goes up by 2000%.
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Host
Holy crap.
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Dr. John Duyard
Just mixing them together like a curry kind of a thing. So we got some stuff in. We tested the turmeric, we tested the black pepper, we put them together and the bugs exploded. My guy called me up and said, john, these are like probiotics. I mean, there's no bad bugs, but they're just this unbelievable. And that's sort of the cool thing about understanding how to traditionally blend herbs and foods together in old recipes and things. Because you make something, it's called nutrient synergy. You make something better by taking two things that like each other and put them together. And now you make something that's really going to inoculate your gut with a whole bunch of new bugs. Where our food is just like, you know, we don't have any tradition, time tested wisdom behind it. We just eat stuff that we think tastes good.
- [21:34]
Host
Right.
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Dr. John Duyard
But the tradition was do things that had been passed on. And the reason it was passed on and not thrown out is because it, it did something special.
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Host
Is there a way to tell if the bugs inside you are harmful versus helpful?
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Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, you can get your microbiome tested for sure.
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Host
Oh, your stool.
- [21:48]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah.
- [21:48]
Host
Okay.
- [21:48]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, stool test for sure.
- [21:50]
Host
I've never done one of those.
- [21:51]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, yeah. It's a bit of a moving target because things are always changing. But you know, if you have some bad stuff in there, ever, you kind of want to deal with that.
- [22:00]
Host
Interesting.
- [22:00]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, yeah. But in, in Ayurveda thousands of years ago, they, they talked about bugs that were invisible and they called them crime. They couldn't see them, but they knew they were there. And they, but they also said, don't kill them. They said, change the environment, make the environment in such a way that the bugs don't want to be there and let the good bugs take care of the bad bugs. You know what I mean? So as opposed to just like we just want to kill everything. Kill everything. And that creates an environment destruction. So now we have an environment that doesn't support the good bugs anymore. So we just get more and more bad. We clean them out, but then they just come right back because we've changed the environment.
- [22:32]
Host
Yeah. Has Ayurveda taken off in other countries and regions?
- [22:36]
Dr. John Duyard
You know, I've been doing it. I've been in practice for 40 years now, practicing Ayurvedic full time after coming back from India. And I would have thought that because it's such a cool system, it's all about living in harmony with nature and circadian rhythms and. Yeah, and I would have thought it would exploded by now, but. And I don't know why. Maybe it's because it lacks the science. And that's what I try to bring to the table is ancient wisdom and the science, you know, I don't know. That's a, it's a, it's a really good question. It's an, It's. The All Indian Ayurveda Congress is the largest medical organization in the world and it's been forever and nobody knows about it.
- [23:08]
Host
That's crazy. I've never heard about it actually.
- [23:10]
Dr. John Duyard
You know what I mean? Yeah.
- [23:11]
Host
That's nuts.
- [23:12]
Dr. John Duyard
So it's only been around for thousands of years, more longer than Chinese medicine. So it's sort of amazing to me it hasn't just blown up.
- [23:18]
Host
Is it similar to Chinese medicine?
- [23:20]
Dr. John Duyard
Similar. You know, they use the elements and they understand the seasons in our relation to the seasons and how, you know, there's, there's, there's herbs that will heat you up. So if you're of a body type that throws off the covers all the time and you're eating hot spicy food all the time and hot herbs, you're going to overheat. So there's herbs that will cool you down. And summer, nature provides the antidote to the heat in the summer with its harvest, cooling fruits and vegetables. So nature had this incredible plan. Like in the winter you get nuts and seeds. Warms you up when it's cold. In the spring, you get bitter roots like the dandelions in your garden that will kind of suck up all the mucus and the potatoes. Potential allergies, you know, issues that you might have. So nature had this plan and Ayurveda is just a study of that plan, Like a really in depth study.
- [24:01]
Host
Yeah. How does the circadian rhythm stuff work? Because a lot of people use alarm clocks to wake up.
- [24:06]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah. You know, not the best thing to really be doing. You know, I had a patient of mine, I used to travel around when I was with Deepak Many years ago. And I would go and do consultations and I, this guy, he said, I woke up every morning with a headache and I treated him and nothing happened. I came back three months later, saw him again, treat him again, nothing happened. And I said, said, when do you go to bed? He goes, like 2 or 3 in the morning. I go, what time do you wake up? And he goes, maybe 11 or 12 in the day. And I said, oh my God. I said, tonight, go to bed at, get in bed around 8 o'clock, take out a boring book, not my book, take out a boring book. And when your eye and go to sleep. As soon as your eyes get tired, go to sleep, shut the lights out and go to sleep right then and there. And as soon as your eyes open in the morning, 5:05, whatever it is, just get out of bed and walk around. I don't care if you're walking around like a zombie, just get out of bed. And he did that. He called me back like two weeks later and he said, you know what, that's the first time in years I woke up without a headache.
- [25:00]
Host
Wow.
- [25:00]
Dr. John Duyard
And then he got mad at me because I didn't, I didn't actually fix him the first time because it was so simple. I was like, wow. But, but circadian rhythms are, you know, our biological clocks in our body have to be in sync with nature's circadian rhythms. And if we don't have that synchrony, we're going to pay a price. Chronic issues, DNA damage, diabetes, extra weight, poor digestion, can't sleep at night. It's amazing.
- [25:25]
Host
8Pm is early for a lot of people to go to sleep.
- [25:27]
Dr. John Duyard
Well, that was just to get him to experience that, you know, some change because he was so extremely, you know, out of whack on the other side of things. Yeah, I just wanted to see if I can get him to, get him to do it. They did another study in CU Boulder and they took a bunch of Boulder types, healthy Boulder types, and they measured their circadian rhythms. There's cortisol and, and their melatonin at night. And they were producing melatonin at 12 noon in the middle of the day, needing coffee to stay up. They took the whole group, took them into the mountains. No cell phones, no light bed, with the sun up with the sun. And in one week they had a 100% reset of all their circadian rhythms and biological clocks.
- [26:03]
Host
Wow.
- [26:03]
Dr. John Duyard
So we can do that. Like even, like I, I talk about, they did a weekend study, a follow up study, and they got 68% reduction. So we can do like a no artificial light weekend at home. You know, just kind of get in, turn the lights out. No WI fi, just shut it down for a weekend and reset those clocks.
- [26:18]
Host
Interesting. So the trick is to go to bed when the sun sets and then wake up when it rises.
- [26:21]
Dr. John Duyard
Two hours after the sun sets would be a good time to do it. And then get up before the sunrise.
- [26:25]
Host
Before the sunrise.
- [26:26]
Dr. John Duyard
You got to be there when the sun, the day starts for sure.
- [26:28]
Host
I got to look up when it rises out here.
- [26:30]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, right.
- [26:31]
Host
Probably like 7am it's early right now.
- [26:33]
Dr. John Duyard
I mean right now it's probably more like five. It's early.
- [26:36]
Host
I will say when I go outside right away I feel better when I wake up rather than when I stay in bed and go on my phone.
- [26:42]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah. That light, that morning light is exclusively infrared light and red light and that penetrates your skin. It activates an enzyme in your body that actually makes ATP, energy vitality. And the more light you get in the morning, the more melatonin you're going to produce at night to go, to get deeper sleep. So that light in the morning is what heals you and prepare, prepares you and gives you energy for the day and it actually heals your skin. So in the middle of the day when the UV radiation comes, you've got the UV that protected you from the damage. And in the afternoon when the sun sets, you get more of that red and infrared light that actually heals you from any uv, UV damage or UV radiation damage you might have gotten. Nature had a plan, you know, but we just sort of get out there in the middle of the day, lie there, try to get a tan and burn, you know.
- [27:28]
Host
Yeah.
- [27:28]
Dr. John Duyard
And nature, you know, people who are out all day long, the traditional folks, you don't have those issues.
- [27:33]
Host
It's damaging.
- [27:34]
Dr. John Duyard
Right.
- [27:34]
Host
When you're out during the peak because Brian Johnson only goes outside when the UV is under three.
- [27:38]
Dr. John Duyard
Right.
- [27:38]
Host
So that's like early morning and late at night.
- [27:40]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah.
- [27:40]
Host
And he said anything above that can cause skin damage.
- [27:43]
Dr. John Duyard
Right. But don't forget that the UVA radiation, the one that everybody tries to paint sunscreen for in 1901, won the Nobel Prize for healing skin conditions and autoimmune concerns. Really won the Nobel Prize. And you might be remember seeing pictures of, of hospitals where they would wheel people out on the, on the balconies and the old pictures. The reason they would wheel all the patients on the balconies was because of the, the Nobel Prize winning science that the UVA radiation, which we think is so bad, actually has a healing effect. Now it's a matter of dose. Right. You can't get too much of that. But it's not that there's nothing wrong with the sun, it's just that we end up getting way too much of it and we don't have the UV infrared light in the beginning or the infrared light at the end to protect ourselves. So we have to try to plug that into the equation.
- [28:29]
Host
Yeah, I think sunscreen is one of the best marketing campaigns of all time.
- [28:31]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah.
- [28:32]
Host
I mean that is a trillion dollar industry now, right? Sunscreen?
- [28:35]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah. It's amazing.
- [28:36]
Host
And now they're finding out it might.
- [28:38]
Dr. John Duyard
Actually harm you depending on what they're putting in it, you know, for, for sure, you know. But again, you know, skin cancer is a real thing as well and people are getting way too much, you know, in too high, do too much intense radiation at one time without having the natural preparation.
- [28:57]
Host
Yeah.
- [28:57]
Dr. John Duyard
And we do burn. It can be a problem.
- [28:59]
Host
What's the Ayurvedic approach of dealing with diseases like the cancer and the deadly ones?
- [29:05]
Dr. John Duyard
You know, it's in Ayurveda, the definition for cancer is that the cells lost their memory of proper function, so they started to go rogue. They were starving, they didn't have enough, they didn't have the nutrition coming in and the waste coming out. So they didn't have the nutrition to divide and become two and healthy new cells because they couldn't get the good stuff in because of poor digestion. They couldn't get the waste out because of lymphatic drainage, congestive issues. So now the cells going, well, how do I divide and become two new cells? And I go, we don't have enough nutrition. There's a big trash backlog. So the body starts actually dividing in a, in an aberrant way, one that doesn't require so much nutrition to divide in a complete way. So the cells lose their memory of proper function and they go rogue. And so the treatment would be to restore the, the nutrition in, fix that digestive piece and make sure your drainage system, your lymph, your, your skin is a detox organ, your intestinal tract, your digestion, make sure you can detoxify. Well, if you can't cut the trash out, you're going to pay a price. And the thing that goes wrong with most of us most of the time is getting rid of the trash. You know, people get swollen rings on their fingers, they, their skin breaks out, they get extra weight around their belly, their Joints begin to ache, they can't sleep at night. These are all as brain lymph congestion. Yeah, These are all trash removal systems. And once you understand why that's there and detoxify that lymph and support digestion, the body tends to heal itself. You know, get out of the way. Don't just try to kill the thing and fix the disease. We're just trying to bring the body back in balance, let, let things do what they're supposed to do.
- [30:36]
Host
Yeah. I've read some books on people actually treating cancer just through diet change.
- [30:39]
Dr. John Duyard
Oh yeah.
- [30:40]
Host
Which is crazy.
- [30:41]
Dr. John Duyard
And that's sort of doing the same thing. You're just getting the body back into that balance and, and diet with good bugs, you know, that have the holobiont is when they actually have the plant chemistry and the microbiome together. And when you put those together, you've got a whole food with intelligence. You know, there's, there's bugs on plants and herbs, if they're whole herbs, not extracts that are extra called bacterial endophytes. And those bugs support the growth, the longevity, the intelligence, the potency and the immunity of that plant. So when you strip it down, you know, spray pesticides on our food or you know, create extracts of herbs that are sterile, they're going to be more like a drug that's going to have a benefit, but it's going to have a consequence. But when you use the whole plant, the whole food, this is nutritional nutrient synergy. It's actually working with you, helping the body do its job as opposed to doing the job for the body. And at the end of the day, we all want to be able to do it ourselves, right? Yeah.
- [31:37]
Host
What do you think of America fortifying and enriching most of their grains?
- [31:41]
Dr. John Duyard
You know the crazy thing about whole wheat in America, you take the wheat and you put it into the grinder and for it to be called whole wheat, it only has to weigh 51% of what it actually started with. Wow, that's a whole grain. And then that they do is then they fortify it. I mean, need I say more? I mean that's just insane.
- [32:00]
Host
Yeah. You know, so it's not even bread at that point.
- [32:03]
Dr. John Duyard
No, that's what, that's why in Europe people. Why do I go to Europe and feel better when I eat the wheat? Well, because this, because the whole wheat here is only, is 49 of what it once was.
- [32:12]
Host
Wow.
- [32:12]
Dr. John Duyard
And where, where did all that go? And so there they're using the whole grain, they're grinding you're getting all the nutrition, and they're making their bread every single day. You know, the, the. The. You've. I'm sure you've had many podcasts. I think I've heard a couple on seed oils.
- [32:25]
Host
Yeah.
- [32:26]
Dr. John Duyard
But what they figured out with the seed oils is they make things. They make things stay on the shelf longer. They extend shelf life, of course, not our life. And you put that oil in a loaf of bread, and now the bread never gets hard. When I was a kid, there were bakeries, and they had to make bread every day because it would get hard at the end of the day. They give it away the next day. Now you put seed oils in that stuff, and the bugs on the counter that normally eat oil won't go near it. The bugs in your gut that normally eat oil won't go near it. So where does all the oil that nobody, none of your microbiome is going to eat go? To the trash can, which is your lymph and your liver. And now you have liver congestive issues and lymphatic congestive issues. And that's usually what we're trying to do, is reboot lymph and liver function.
- [33:10]
Host
I was so disappointed. I went to Wegmans recently, and I grew up eating their bread every day as a kid, and every single bread had seed oil.
- [33:17]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah.
- [33:17]
Host
I was like, oh, my gosh, it's.
- [33:19]
Dr. John Duyard
So hard to find.
- [33:20]
Host
And I couldn't even eat Wegmans bread. I grew up eating their olive oil bread every day.
- [33:24]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, it's. It's un. Unbelievable. And that stuff was supposed to cure heart disease. Right. And that didn't work, so I just use it to make the inside of the grocery store stay on the shelf forever.
- [33:33]
Host
Yeah.
- [33:33]
Dr. John Duyard
It's crazy.
- [33:34]
Host
Plus, a lot of them have the. The enriched and fortified, which I have the MT F. R gene break or whatever, which 50 of people have. So they're actually eating stuff they're allergic to and they don't even know.
- [33:43]
Dr. John Duyard
Right. They can't break it down.
- [33:44]
Host
Yeah. It's crazy. And that's in almost every single pasta, too.
- [33:47]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah. That's why understanding how nature, like every spring, if you ate only what nature provided in the spring, there ain't a lot happening. You can't harvest any pasta or pizza in the spring. It's a pretty austere time of the year. That's why all the fasting and the religious fasting's done in the spring. So that's the time to really go into a calorie restricted time. And force ketogenic, where you're burning fat and inside the fat is all the toxins. So that's when you go do the really deep detox of your tissues. Because we are going to accumulate some heavy metals or toxins. That's what we need to do. But we don't eat season anymore. We just eat the same old food. And so that's such a simple way to start is to start we have a. We have a. I wrote my, one of my books called the three season diet, which is eating with the harvest of spring and the harvest of summer and the harvest of fall for winter eating, because there's three harvests that we actually eat from. And one of those seasons is a resting dormant season, which is winter. So we have a grocery list which is free on my website for winter. You just circle the foods on that list that you like and eat more of them. Doesn't mean you have to only eat them, but you want to get medicinal dosages of the foods in that season. Yeah, right. And then. And so you inoculate your gut with the right bugs for that right season. And then you have a list for spring, circle the foods, eat more of those. Same thing with summer. And now you're starting to get yourself locked into, you know, being connected to the rhythms of nature from a food perspective. Which is why we're here because eat foods in season.
- [35:11]
Host
I love that a lot of people with the same thing every day, chicken and rice, whatever it is.
- [35:14]
Dr. John Duyard
Exactly. We think it's good because it's healthier. But we're not inoculating the guys, we're not changing the bugs. It's the same thing. They did that, that has a tribe thing was a really funny study where they saw that the bugs in the gut change from one season to the next to the next. But the men had a stable of bugs that were really good for digesting protein, meat protein. And the women and the children and the grand folks had a stable of bugs that was really good at digesting vegetable protein and starches. And they were like, okay, how does that work? Well, the men every morning would wake up and they go out on their hunting trip and then they'd come back empty handed. And I go, we didn't have anything. And they would eat what everybody put together, but somewhere out there they were eating some meat all by themselves. Because it was only the men that had the bugs in their gut for meat. You know, it was sort of really interesting, but it was because they were the hunters and they were eating more of that meat.
- [36:05]
Host
Wow Dr. John, it's been fun. What's next for you? I know you got the new book, right?
- [36:09]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, I got my book called Eat Wheat Body Mind Sport. I'm also teaching a a breathing course with the Shift network that's coming up this July which is a seven week in depth course about breathing techniques which is going to be really cool.
- [36:21]
Host
Nice. We'll link it below. Thanks for coming on man.
- [36:23]
Dr. John Duyard
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for being here.
- [36:24]
Host
Thanks for watching guys. As always. I will see you tomorrow.
- [36:33]
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