Transcript of Episode #98 Featuring Dr. Robin Berzin! THE ULTIMATE HEALTH GUIDE! Anything and everything you need and want to know about functional medicine and taking control of your health!!

Today's episode is sponsored by the Apollo Neuro. Apollo Neuro is the leading doctor-recommended wearable technology. Apollo's award-winning SmartVibes AI works effortlessly behind the scenes, automatically integrating into your life to deliver gentle, personalized vibrations that activate your vagus nerve, helping you fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and wake up balanced, focused, and ready each day. Not only that, but the Apollo Neuro is the first and only wearable that improves your HRV. Apollo is effortless. Simply wear it throughout the day and night and let it do the work for you. It's safe for anyone and everyone with no side effects and is the only wearable that can be worn anywhere on your body. Optimal health requires both the mind and body to be in line, and Apollo is the key to establishing that connection. Check the description below to save $90 with my special discount. Take control over your health today with Apollo Neuro. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the Dylan Jameli podcast. So I have a great story about my guest today and how I met... Well, didn't meet you, but knew of you immediately, which I told you.

So- You found me.

I did find you. And my wife pointed out, she said, Who is that? We need to interview her. I'll tell you what happened. I told you, I'm a partner with Dr. Dave Raven, and you were on that AI panel. I'm moderating, just handling it. And you did tremendous. I sent her a video home. I took a video because I was doing it for Dave to post. She said, Who is that about you? I said, I don't know why I'm not 100% sure. I figured it out. Okay, and so we found you. Then two weeks later, I get this email of one of your representatives asking if I wanted to interview you. I said, yeah.

The universe. Yeah, exactly. It found us.

It did. I was thrilled when I saw it, and I was like, yes, sweet. I don't even have to try to reach out here because I was going to ask Dave for help, but I don't like to ask for help from anybody.

We're going to have to talk about that.

Yeah, I know it. But anyway, to introduce her, to give her a little bit of her accolades before we really get into it here. She's a Columbia-trained, board-certified internal medicine physician, but well known as being the founder and CEO of Parsley Health, which we're going to get into pretty good here, because now that I've learned more about it, I really want to stress everything that's done here because it's solving so many problems. She's a pioneer in functional and personalized medicine. She's done a ton. She's going to continue to do a ton. She's going to make a huge impact, and I'm here to help her make the biggest impact possible. So my friends, welcome Dr. Robin Burson.

Hi. So good to be here.

Thank you for coming in on short notice, especially, to come and see me. I appreciate it, and I am thoroughly looking forward to this interview. Me too. All right, let's do it. So all right, functional medicine. We talk about this, we hear the term. I know what it is quite well, very important in my life. What is it and what does it mean to you and why are you involved in it?

When I was in my medical training, I looked around the hospital and I saw that our healthcare system was really good at keeping us alive, but not good at helping us thrive. I saw that all those people were in the hospital, largely, not entirely, but largely because of the ways in which we're eating, we're moving, we're living, our environment. I saw that our healthcare system was like, drowning under this tsunami of cost and overwhelm, and we can't even get to people. Meanwhile, everyone's insurance premiums are going through the roof. Meanwhile, everyone's trying to be healthy, but our healthcare system isn't helping them do that. I was fortunate enough to learn early in my career about functional medicine, and it just hit for me. It was like, Okay, this is it. Functional medicine is really just about getting to the root cause of disease instead of treating the symptom. You're not lying awake at night because you have an ambient deficiency. That is not why you can't sleep, okay? There are many reasons you may not be able to sleep, okay? You're looking at screens, you have anxiety, you have high blood sugar, you're inflamed, your circadian rhythm's off, there's a hormonal imbalance.

We can figure out why. I'm being a little flipped because, of course, we want to use medications when we need them to achieve goals, but we can't only use medications to achieve goals. When it comes to things like we were just talking about, heart health, blood sugar, depression, infertility, hormone issues. When before we started, you were talking about testosterone and the reasons people have low testosterone in the first place. Functional medicine just digs in, and I call it the medicine of why. We figure out why you have these issues, and then we treat them with the best possible tools. Sometimes that tool is a drug, and sometimes it's a food, and sometimes it's nervous system resilience and stress management like Apollo. We can get into all the ways we do that. But that more holistic approach, it works so much better, and the results are incredible. Once I saw that, I was like, This is what I have to do.

That's what I love about it, is the actual digging into problem. I can't tell you how many times that I had questioned when I was far younger, why is it every time that we go to the doctor that all that ever happens is I get a moxacelen or now Z-Pack, like when I was in my teenage years. Why is it no matter what I have, this is what I'm getting, and why does it never work? You don't understand, you don't know, and most people just do what they're told, and they think doctors are the end all, be all that you go to and know everything and anything. It's like when you get older when you thought your parents knew everything, and you realize that's not the case. I find that now it's becoming more and more prevalent that people like yourself are changing from regular practice or coming out on their own, et cetera. I think the important thing now is to educate them on why this is necessary and how to add life to your years, not yours to your life type of thing. Is that your goal and what you just do?

Absolutely. What I love about functional medicine, it's both about optimizing your health so that you can live longer and live better, and about treating the conditions you have right now. We talk a lot about longevity right now. It's like a big buzzword, but partially, my practice has been around for almost 10 years or 10 year anniversary is coming up. I've been doing Functional Medicine for a decade. Before we called it longevity, we called it health optimization, so different words, same thing. We've been doing this for a long time. But what I love about Functional Medicine is that we're not just doing peptides GLP-1s and looking at how are you going to live 30, 40, 50 years from now. We're actually addressing the health issues that you have right now. 60 plus % of adults in America are dealing with something. They have high cholesterol, they have depression, they have hormone imbalances, they have PCOS, infertility, PMS, autoimmune, gut issues, can't get pregnant, whatever it is. People are living with stuff. Functional medicine addresses what's going on right now. We diagnose, we treat, and we optimize. What I love to do is I get to do all three.

If I'm working with a woman in her 50s and I'm working on hormone replacement therapy and weight gain, and yes, we're adding to GLP-1, and yes, we're addressing depression and anxiety through meditation, through psychedelic work, through supplements, and then sometimes through medication. I'm also looking at her calcium score and saying, What are we going to do to make sure you don't develop heart disease in 10, 20 years? I get to look into the future, I also get to help her feel better right now. I think that those two things together are what make this medicine awesome.

Yeah, I totally, totally agree. Let me ask you this. I always looked at everything through a That was an improper prism, so to speak. I had the one side was the fitness and the nutrition, which is what I've dedicated, I don't know, 20 some odd years to. But I never, until I met Dave and started working together with him, I never really looked at the mind side. I know I had a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress, and it would accumulate, but I never pieced together the importance of the balance in both and how it takes both to really be fully healthy because you and I can fix everybody's diet, their hormones, everything. But if this is really off, we're really not getting anywhere, are we?

Not at all. This beautiful, my book called State Change is all about how we heal the mind through the body and how much so much of our mental health actually in the physical health and how people get stuck. I liken it to if you're dealing with depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, insomnia, all of these things that so many people are experiencing day in and day out, and you're not addressing inflammation, blood sugar, nutrient deficiencies, lack of exercise, sleep. If you're not addressing some of these physical things, it's like trying to climb Everest but not getting to base camp. You're just going to get stuck. And yet when we address mental health, we ignore the physical and act like your brain has got a concrete wall between your head and your body or something. That's not what's happening. It's all deeply connected. Then when your nervous system is on fire, it's like we're all running from a lion all day long with the lion as our email and our text messages, you get stuck in fight or flight. This is what Dave Rabin and Apollo really work on. You get stuck in this. Stress should go up and it come down, go up and come down, like that sine wave from physics from high school.

We get stuck up here where it's always on. Then the body can never begin to heal itself, because when we're in sympathetic fight or flight, we can't heal because that's our run and go mode. What we have to do is to get into parasympathetic, which is your rest, digest, relax, and heal side of your nervous system. When we can get there, the body can actually start to heal itself. It's just that in our daily lives, we're not giving it a chance. That's also why I love functional medicine is because we don't look at just physical. We look at mind, body, spirit in every single patient. If I have a mom, and she's not sleeping, and she's anxious and stressed, I know that anything I try to do for her gut health is game over. It's not going to work. I have to address these other things first.

Yeah, 100 %. I haven't taken it serious enough. I'm like that super type A that's seven days a week. And so I have this ongoing constant. I operate with a sense of urgency at all times, and it's not good. It's good to accomplish stuff, but then it becomes a problem. So I have destressed wearing the Apollo and through prayer. And I swear to I know this is going to sound immature and crazy, and I don't care because it works, but I bought myself a gaming PC and put it in my office. And when I need a break, I switch the screen, and I'm very controlled. See, I'm a very controlled person, but I start to play that thing 30 minutes, and I come right back down, and totally stress goes away. So I found something that made me feel like a kid again for a few minutes that took away from it. I don't obsess like a gamer, but I find that if you can find something that can just slow you down a little bit. And that's why I love the Apollo because it does that. See, I didn't understand vagus nerve stimulation and that role that it plays and everything.

But like you said, why do you think that people get stuck in that fight or flight constantly? What is the main cause? Is it trauma? Is it workaholic? What is it?

I think you just said it. For so many people, it's our patterns. We learn to tie our shoes and brush our teeth, but we don't learn constructive, healthy ways of managing our stress and our emotions in our nervous system. We teach people that when you feel stressed, work, or do drugs, or drink alcohol, or zone out in media or TV, or scroll on your Instagram. We have all of these, frankly, unhealthy ways of managing our stress, and we don't actually teach people the healthy ways. But exercise goes head to head with almost all antidepressants. In fact, it does better.

I agree.

95% of people respond to exercise when it comes to mental health. Only, the studies vary, but somewhere between 30% and 60% is some of the common medications. It's not to knock the medications. Those can be powerful, too. But exercise works for pretty much everybody, and it works just as well. If you look at the data, we should be prescribing exercise as our top mental health tool, but it's just not what happens in the medical community. I think when we teach people these skills and give them tools, whether we both love Dave and the Apollo, it's a device that helps, through these vibratory patterns, stimulate your vagus nerve. And your vagus nerve, everyone, is you actually have two of them, one on each side of your brainstem, and they come down in your body and they innervate everything that happens for you automatically. You're your heartbeat, your breathing, your digestion. I always want to remind people because I find we're often at war with our bodies. This human body is the most sophisticated, beautiful, incredible machine that has ever been created. It is so cool. So much is happening for you at every second of your life that you don't have to think about or direct or ask for.

It's just automatically happening. The vagus nerve is a big piece of that. If we can take care of this thing, this only vehicle that we are given for life, then everything else unlocks. For my patients and what I see, it's teaching people tools that are healthy and constructive to manage stress and to get out of fight or flight. When people realize they can do that instead of, say, drinking or some of these less helpful things, people start to feel a lot better.

Yeah. I've been learning about so many people that are providing health by just fixing what you're talking about, fixing the state of mind, getting people rewiring, basically, their brain. I've talked to multiple people about that and the significant impact that it has on everyday life. I need that done half the time, too.

That's what I'm working on. I mean, meditation has been shown on functional MRI studies to truly remap the brain. It fills in the ruts in the road of the brain so that your thoughts, instead of going in that same unhelpful pattern, can go into new directions. I meditate for 15 minutes every single morning. If I don't, things are off the rails that day. If I do, it completely sets me on a new trajectory. Usually, I have a kid or two kids sitting on me. It's 6: 30 in the morning, but I'm religious about it. My meditation practice, my prayer practice, my yoga, my exercise, these are all ways in which I am neuromodulating myself so that I can do all the things I want to do. They are as important as my gluten-free, dairy-free, high-fiber, high-protein, high-healthy fat diet.

Absolutely. I just had this conversation before you came here, and I said, You know who I have the most conversation with every day is in prayer. That's where I have the the most conversation with anybody. I thought about it, and I was like, Okay, I do one, two, three, four, and I started going online. And that's when I'm at my most peace, when I'm actually not thinking about work most of the time, and it the notifications are for the phone away. It's the only time I'm really at strong peace. And I don't think people take that silence or that understanding of the most important is to just slow down and rationalize a little bit and relax.

I have a sign in my office and it says slow down five miles an hour. Because as you're talking, I'm like, I think you and I are built from the same materials. And slowing down fixes a lot of things.

It's not easy.

It's really hard. Yeah, I know it. And it's not reinforced around us, right? We're just constantly told to go, go, go, go. And then the message is to fuel to go, go, go, go. And that's why we have a food system that is fueling us to go, but it's making us sick.

Somebody was just asking me because I said, Oh, my birthday is coming up at the end of the month. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? What's my barber? What are you going to do? What are you going to do? I said, You know what? All I want is just a day off to not have to do shit. Just a day to just do nothing. And I would be the happiest guy on the planet. Are you going to do it? Probably not.

Oh, God. You have to do it now. How old are you turning?

44. Oh, my gosh.

I'm 44.

Really? Yeah. Well, see, there you go.

All right.

I know. I think for me, I'll still work out, but I think other than that, I left my day blank. I can't not on my workout days, I'm going to do it. I do it on Christmas. I do it unless it falls on a non-workout day. But I think other than that, no. The older you get, sometimes you get so fed up where you're just like, Okay, I'm doing this. Four or five years ago, I would have lied to your face and told you I'm going to do it and then not do it.

Not do it. All right. Well, holding you accountable people. If you have one day off.

I want to get into more of the Parsley side because I asked you, is it similar to Function Health? And you just gave me a full-blown education on it because I think Function is very popular, and people know that the marketing is good on it. But you do something similar but very different, which I really appreciate as you explained it. I wasn't necessarily going to go deep into Parsley, but I want to now because of learning more about it. It's more intricate, it's more personalized. So just talk about That's what you filled me in on earlier.

Totally. Like many of the lab testing companies out there, we have a full comprehensive blood work panel, longevity labs that you can get with us nationally. You get them through Quest, and you You can do those labs with us, and we'll give you a whole breakdown of what your labs mean, what your results mean. We look at hormones, we look at heavy metals, we look at heart health, blood sugar, all the things. You can do that with us. Like you mentioned, function. There's lots of other companies out there. Also, I'm on Whoop, the wearable company's medical advisory board. They have comprehensive labs as well, which is awesome. I'm all for it, by the way. I think that our data should be in our hands, and getting your lab test and knowing what they mean is a great starting point. Whether you get them through Parsley, which we offer, or whether you get them through one of these other companies, great. It's a great place to start in your health. But what happens over and over again, and what I see with all these lab tests, is that people get the results and they get the AI report, and they look at it, and they I understand some things.

Okay, I understand. They're like, What do I do with this information? I don't know. Then they throw it into ChatGPT or Claude or whoever your favorite AI platform is, and they get some more information. Maybe the vitamin D is low, and maybe the AI gives them seven ways to fix their vitamin D, and they're like, I don't know what to do. What do I do next? How do I make decisions around this? God forbid, it's not vitamin D. It's heart health or it's autoimmune. It's fertility or hormones. It's like, What do I do with this information? Then what happens is they go to their primary care doctor or their regular who is wonderful and well-meaning, but who's like, Why did you order these tests? I don't have time to review these tests. I'm not trained to connect the dots across all these different tests because in my conventional medical training, which you introduced me at amazing places like Columbia and Mount San Jose, I wasn't trained there to think about the body as ecosystem, to connect the dots between your lab results and your nutrition and your mental health and your physical health. Regular doctors, people are coming to us all the time at Parsley and being like, Yeah, they either didn't have time for me or maybe they blew me off or maybe they just didn't answer my questions or they didn't give me a plan.

When I'm seeing over and over again, as people have results, they have data, but they're not taking action. What Parsley We offer, in addition to those lab tests, is actual medical care with board-certified functional medicine doctors. We do it online nationwide. So 50 state, you can just Zoom with us over from your house, your car, your work, or whatever. Our doctors will... We have a visit you can buy where you will just go over your lab results so they could come from any of the companies. Any other company, it doesn't have to be us. We not only tell you what your labs mean, which is a great starting point, but we also do a little bit of our own health assessment, and we look at what you're eating and how you're moving. We look at your symptom severity. We look at your symptoms across your whole body. Our doctors put the pieces together and give you an action plan. Because if you get all this data, but you don't do anything with it, you're not getting healthy You're getting healthier because you have data. You're getting healthier because you do something. We have this visit, we call it BYO Labs, where you can do a 30-minute doctor visit with us, and we'll give you this plan and tell you what everything means, and answer your questions and hear you.

Because The AI isn't hearing you or listening to you or in conversation with you or understanding that because your house is under construction, you don't have a kitchen, you can't eat this way, or because you're working too hard, you need help navigating the healthcare system. We do that. Then we also have our annual program for clinical care. Lots of people come to us, not just for labs. We do the labs, but they come to us to work with our docs on fertility and menopause and heart health and low testosterone and depression and weight and inflammation and autoimmune. We do a lot of gut health, a lot of autoimmune, a lot of hormones, a lot of weight and metabolism. I like to make fun of some of these really fancy pants doctors who we all know and love. Some of them have big podcasts, let's just say, and they have fancy pants medical practices where they see 50 patients a year for 250 grand a month. Yeah, I know it. If you're like, Well, I could never have that, my answer to you is, Yes, you can. It's called Parsley Health. One of the doctors who used to work for me at Parsley went to work in one of these $250,000-a-year clinics.

I saw him a couple of years ago and I said, Hey, it's great to see you. What's it like over there? Are they doing anything different than we're doing at Parsley? And he said, No. Everyone, everyone should have a functional medicine doctor. Everyone should have a doctor who understands nutrition and sleep and fitness and supplements and advanced testing. And who will talk to you, and hear you, and give you guidance so that you actually take the actions that get you healthier. That's what we do. We do it all online. Yes, it's the labs, but it's also the actual care. The care is what is missing. And that, to me, is the gap to close, and that's what we're here for.

Yeah, and that's just it. It starts with the data. You got to have the data. Yes. Interpretation of the data can be tricky, and you can get so many different pieces of information. And you and I both know these ranges go all over the place anymore, too. And you got to be careful on those because they change with what they say is healthy, which I don't even know what that means anymore, to be honest with you. I think the gaps that are like this should be more like this. I mean, personally.

Yeah. Well, because we're functional medicine, we tell you not just what's in range, but we tell you what's optimal.

Right.

And we do explain to you in the lab product what that means. And this is good. This is great. This is out of range. Yeah, that's great. But then here's the thing about the out of range. People bring us these tests from all over the place, and people have out of range tests, but then they just don't know what to do about it. It's great to get a pat on your back if you're optimal. I've got the optimal magnesium level. My Abobe is optimal. Do that Saturday Night Fever walk. Leverland is looking at me. But then what about when things are not optimal. Why is my HCRP high? Why am I inflamed? Well, now we got an investigation because there's a lot of reasons your HSCRP and inflammation could be high. We now need to take the next step. To take the next step. You need a doctor to help you navigate because what is right for you may not be what the AI spit out as an answer.

That's just it. What you just said, a lot of people don't even know what that is, nor understand what it means. Then they look it up and they don't realize the correlation that has on every damn thing that could be wrong. Because if you're inflamed, that potentially could cause anything. It's more than likely the culprit of whatever problem you have.

Exactly. It could be indicative of something deeper. It could be a heart health issue. It It could be an immune system issue. It could be an injury. It could be because you had a cold and flu when you got these lab tests. There's all sorts of stuff going on. I see patients on Thursday mornings, and I'm always amazed that somebody will have been seeing me for six months and will have totally fixed their GI issue. They'll come in with gas, bloating, all these things. They turned out to have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. We treated it. It's better. That's the number one cause of most of GI I distressed today, but it goes underdiagnosed. We do a breath test to diagnose it. We treat it. It's six months later, and I'm like, How are you doing? They're like, I cannot lose these 10 pounds. I'm like, Remember when you came here and you were bloated and couldn't poop and have reflux and all these things? It's like, our memories of even how we feel felt six months ago, it's gone. It's like, Oh, yeah, I don't care about any of that. That's great. But now I'm on to this thing, right?

That's how we as human beings work. It's hard for us then to expect us to take all of this data, even with the AI, and the AI is amazing. I mean, I use it every day. But to then self-navigate and connect the dots across My health history, my family history, the condition I had five years ago that could actually be informing why I feel the way I do. You know why people have sebo? Because they took all these antibiotics for sinus infections and ear infections and that destroyed their microbiome. But They're not connecting the dots between the bloating I have now and the crazy amount of antibiotics I took for sinus infections five years ago. That's where the guidance can help you to that next step and to actually feel better.

We live in a more is always better type of society. You could rob Peter to pay Paul and think you're fixing one thing and causing a whole another issue somewhere else. I see it all the time. I've done it a million times myself. When I was telling you about the LP Little A, you know how many things I threw at that thing under the and created liver problems, kidney problems. I was taking everything that I thought could fix it. My wife would look at me and she'd go, Are you really taking that much stuff? I mean, the pile was like this. Yeah, but it does this, but it does this, but it doesn't. I even know better. But you can't help it. That's why it's important to have somebody that's taking care of you or watching over you, even if you know or think you know.

Oh, yeah. Everybody comes to us with a supplement graveyard. I'm sure. It's like, I took it a little bit for a little while, and then I took this other thing for a little bit for a little while, and I'm always like, Yeah, that's not how supplements work. No. You got to take them consistently, start one thing at a time. Then I took all these things, and something was making me sick, and I didn't know what it was, so I stopped all of them.

I'm like, Okay, cool.

We're starting over. Clean this late.

Oh, my gosh. And that's the thing, too. Some things that work necessarily aren't going to work for everybody because it can... What I was telling you, what I'm going through now with the Jardiance, I think those are just magnificent drugs. What I was telling you before is it's gotten to the point now where the past two or three weeks, my heart is jumping out of my chest constantly because I can't keep electrolytes. I can't keep potassium. When your electrolytes are off, you get irregular heartbeat. I know the pattern because I carried low potassium before I even took it. It's gotten to the point now where I had to just stop. In three days, now that it's out of my system, I feel like, Okay, I can breathe again. I'm back to normal. Yeah.

So many of medications that are targeting one thing, they have full body effects. The doctor that prescribed the one thing for the heart doesn't really care about the skin or the hair loss or the bloating or the other or whatever else that happens. I was making fun of her this week, my best friend from childhood. She's complaining to me about her bloating and her weight gain and her hormones being off, and we're in her mid-forties now. I've been telling for 10 years to try stopping gluten. She was having all this hair loss, and so her doctor put her on midoxidil, and she's doing PRP in her scalp. But the midoxidil made her whole body puffy, and she's a jewelry designer, and so now she can't wear her rings. I'm just like, Okay, finally. I don't know what I said, 10 years of banging my head against the wall. She was like, I went gluten free this week, and it's funny. All my bloating went away. I don't feel so foggy. I had a really stressful week, and I was a lot calmer. I'm just like, I want one of those slow motion videos of me just banging my head into a wall.

Just like, oh. But I'm like, Cool. Well, let's stick with this for a few months. Then maybe let's taper off the Minoxidil because actually some of your global low-grade hair loss might just be from chronic inflammation from eating a food that's inflaming your gut and therefore inflaming your whole body. Then we don't need this drug that makes you puffy and that makes you can't wear your rings. It's like getting to the root cause. That is what I did not learn, even in my incredible medical training. It's what I learned in functional medicine. When we take a beat to try to get to that root cause and let the body heal, sometimes we don't need all these medications. Sometimes we don't need all these supplements. We can get ourselves into a state where the body is actually regulating on its own.

Absolutely. It goes with every single condition and everything. I learned about this not in this field, but training bodybuilders like I was getting into before, and everybody wanted to be on testosterone replacement therapy. I was learning about it in my later 20s, early 30s. I was coaching steroid users and seeing what they were doing to themselves and eradicating things. But then there were people that were following their suit. Well, they're taking TRT, so we're going to take it. It's like, well, yeah, but if we fix your SHPG, it's high. If we get that in range, your testosterone is going to boost right back up. Probably if not taking anything else because it's bounding up your testosterone. Sometimes it's easy. It's a simple fix, but you wouldn't know if you don't talk to the people.

I see so many men are living sedentary lifestyles. They've got metabolic syndrome, high blood sugar. They're inflamed. Claimed their whole system is out of whack. Their digestion is completely off. They're not exercising. They're not doing anything. Then if you are like that, your testosterone is going to be low. Absolutely. Then they're going online, and these places will just give people testosterone nowadays. Terrible. What happens is then they don't realize that it's going to kill their fertility. I'm like, all for TRT and HRT, and we prescribe a lot of hormone replacement therapy, especially for women at Parsley. We see men, too, but we see a lot of women who are going through menopause and perimenopause and prescribing hormones. I'm a huge fan of testosterone, and including testosterone when appropriate for women and in moderation for women. But I can't tell you how many people could have had their own testosterone levels just rebound if they just address some of these root causes. By addressing those root causes, they not only get higher testosterone, they get better everything. Their energy, their clarity, their focus at work, their digestion, their weight. I'm all for using medications, whether it's a GLP-1 or hormone replacement.

But what I'm seeing is everybody skipping the step. They're going straight to the medication without addressing the underlying core health issues, no drug will ever outrun an underlying health issue. It will never outrun it. I always talk about If you're eating sugar and ultra-processed foods and you add metformin or you add GLP-1s, it's like there's a fire burning in your basement and you're stuffing a towel in your kitchen door and just hoping it doesn't burn down your house. Eventually, the underlying illness the underlying disease process will outrun the drug's ability to keep up with it. Glp-1s are the same thing. They're very powerful tools. They're awesome. I use them in practice, but they're not a miracle drug. They can only do so much, and they do not make up for eating an ultra-processed food, high sugar diet, and a sedentary lifestyle. They just don't. I think a lot of people are confusing them and thinking, Well, I can just take this, and then I can keep doing what I'm doing. The reality is you can't. Your body will get sick.

There's no goal a ticket to just eat it.

There's no golden ticket. Yeah.

I mean, you can think that, and you may look it for a little while, but then when we look internally, it's like when you're a kid and it's like, Oh, Joe can eat Burger King every day and never gain a pound. Yeah, well, let's check Joe's cholesterol in his 20s and 30s and see what's going on there. Yeah.

And how does he feel?

Right, exactly. Probably not great. No, 100% not. And that's the other thing. It's the glorification of some of these drugs by celebrities or people on influencers or whatever that make it appear to be something that it's not and never, ever, ever explain to you what goes along with it. You notice you never see like, steroid users. You never see the downside. You think they're going to go on and tell you every single thing that they've got going on. It's a problem. And these people that take the GLPs Do you think they're going to get on and tell you the side effects and the stuff that's going on, or they want to look great? Nobody ever talks about any of that. And it's just not the reality. Do you find that GLPs right now are the most maybe abused drugs that are out right now, or the ones that maybe are even the most polarizing? Because there are a ton of benefits there if used properly and everything. But I think that we're creating more negative perspective on them by the way they're being used.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think there's... I don't know if I would use the word abused, but I think they're the most DIY drug out there that is being DIY dangerously. Right. And you can go online, you can go to Eli Lilly's website, and you can get your own GLP-1. It's easy. I do think that these are powerful tools, and I'm glad we have them. I have a mom in her early 40s who just all of a sudden gained 60 pounds. We address thyroid, we addressed diet, we addressed gut health, we addressed inflammation, alcohol stress. Nothing was touching it. She just went into a perimenopausal set point shift where her weight went through the roof. I'm so grateful to the GLP-1 because it's the only thing that's actually helped us allow her to get back to herself. Then the goal is to get her off of it and allow her to reachieve her new set point along with this import on estrogen and progesterone. They do have incredible uses. Then for folks who do have diabetes or are morbidly obese and stuck, I've seen incredible results. I've seen incredible results for folks who really have some level of really deep-seated emotional eating that nothing has touched.

But at the same time, there's a lot of people just using them, not understanding the side effects, not changing their underlying diet, not doing anything to ensure they're getting adequate protein, not doing anything to build lean muscle mass, and who are relying on the drug to make up for all ills. Also not having anyone... It does increase your skin cancer risk. They're not seeing a doctor. There's no one looking global globally at, Well, what else is this doing to you? Because just as you said earlier, every single drug, as great as the Jardiance may be for one thing, it hits all parts of your body, and it's like a seesaw. It's great for one thing, but then it is sometimes not so great for something else. That's where I think people are. It's like cowboy medicine, like Frontier Town, like DIY-ing their GLP-1s, and that can get tricky.

Yeah, it's dangerous. It really is. I've seen it so many different things. It's troubling, and I wish more people would come to places like you have. I want to shift here. I want your thoughts on the the flipping upside down of the food guide period. I've started to talk about this with some people, but I'm a heavy nutrition guy, so I really like to hear differing opinions on this because I know how I feel about it. I know I battled an eating disorder even as a nutritionist, and I felt fell into this living low fat category for so long, and I know I wrecked myself. I don't need anybody else to ever tell me because I already know. I finally was able to get out of my own way like a year and a half ago. My diet now more so correlates with the way this flipped. But there are a lot of people that still say, Oh, you can't eat this way. You can't eat these fats. You can't do this. It's going to cause X, Y, and Z with cholesterol and everything else. I want your thoughts on the the flipping of it, and isn't that wild that we did that?

But then do you find it to be pretty accurate the way it's laid out now?

Yeah. I mean, the way that it is now is how we've been guiding nutrition at Parsley Health for a decade. What we see in clinical practice, we have treated Over 50,000 patients.

So you would know.

We would know. What we see is that when you get rid of refined sugars and flowers, when you get rid of ultra-processed foods, and I think that's the biggest thing. Everyone's talking about the protein and we can get into the protein. But when you take those two things out of your diet, your body starts to heal itself. When you eat wholefoods and vegetables and nuts and seeds and whole grains, and you get closer to 30 to 50 grams of fiber a day, as opposed to the measly 15 grams that the average American gets barely. That's not good. What do you fix with that? You fix your heart health, you fix your hormones, you fix your blood sugar, you fix your digestion. When we eat healthy fats and When we eat those fats, even if they're saturated fats from butter or dairy products or meat, when we eat those fats, not alone, not with a burger bun and fries and sugar-filled ketchup, but when we eat them alongside Brussell Sprouts in a salad and nuts and seeds and whole grains, our body metabolizes those fats beautifully. When we get adequate protein, we can actually build lean muscle mass.

When we don't get enough protein, and the former food pyramid or food guideline recommended daily protein was too low. When we get too little protein, we can't build lean muscle mass. We have a population that if you look at full body DEXA, body composition is, maybe we're getting a lot of calories, but we're undernourished from the standpoint of we have low muscle mass and we have high fat mass, which is a recipe for poor health regardless of what your weight is. Getting adequate protein. Now, as As a woman, I'm 44, and I got diagnosed with osteopenia this past year on DEXA scan, so I'm losing my bones already, which has lit a fire under me. I'm lifting, and I'm lifting heavy in part to to lose bone loss, in part to build up my lean muscle mass before I go into menopause, because I'm actually not in perimenopause or menopause yet. As I do these things, I know that I have to eat adequate protein. Otherwise, I'm not going to be able to really build any lean muscle mass. For me, my targets are around, I'm not targeting one gram per pound of body weight because that's just a freaking lot.

I'm targeting around 0. 7 grams per pound of body weight. What I see for myself and what I see for a lot of my patients is that that's really enough for most people to build lean muscle. Now, if you're trying to be a bodybuilder and pack it on at the gym and add pounds and pounds of pounds of lean muscle, yeah, you may need to eat more protein than that. Oh, yeah. But I think that, and you would know, so you can be the expert on that for me. But the reality is you do have to pay attention to it. You do have to get adequate protein, but you don't have to drown yourself in protein shakes to get to a body that can put on lean muscle mass.

Well, I don't think a lot of people realize just how difficult it is to... I'm not talking about gaining weight. I'm talking about adding sheer lean muscle mass. I mean, real lean, because this gets lost in the shuffle, and I battled this for years. To get like 2 or 3 pounds of muscle that you keep all year long and keep it is very, very difficult. It takes a lot of muscle manipulation in how you lift. It takes a very strong diet. You got to mix up how you're lifting the types of lifts. You can't let your body get stagnant and desensitized to what you're doing. This is a tricky process, especially as we get older. Yeah, prioritizing protein is very important. For me, I have to eat a lot more because of output. I'm burning like 4,000 calories a day with all the cardio and everything. I do a pound and 1. 5 to a pound. But it's easy for me in the way that I structure my diet because I'll have a 12-ounce piece of salmon and boom, I got 70 or 80 grams of protein. But that's not for everybody. I'm able to do that because I'm so hungry from the output.

Not everybody's doing that. I think structurally and then the concept of how do we actually put this on and keep it on. It's tricky when you get older. Creatine is important. Things that, but not over supplementing, not relying on protein shakes, which are not the answer.

Yeah. I mean, listen, they can help. When you got it, you got to eat real food, right? Yes, first. Balancing that with getting good quality animal protein. I struggle because I'm sensitive to dairy. The whey protein is actually a very good protein. Whey protein is a very good protein source. But for a lot of people, whey is tricky, and dairy is tricky because it causes, for me, it's acne and eczema. For a lot of people, it's asthma, chronic sinus infections, GI issues. I can't tell you how many people in the performance world who are living on whey, whey bars, whey protein shakes, and they don't realize that they're being super inflamed from dairy. If you're somebody out there who's eating a lot of whey and are experiencing a lot of these allergy, chronic nasal congestion, snoring, breakouts, digesting of issues, it might be that dairy is not for you. Then you have to find, well, how else am I going to get the protein in? The other thing I see is that, okay, I don't eat the dairy. I do eat meat, I do eat fish, but I need something else to get to my protein target.

I'll have a plant-based protein powder that I make a smoothie out of. A lot of people don't realize that most of the plant-based proteins, like the pea and rice blends or the the rice protein, the pea protein, unless that protein powder has had branched chain amino acids, including mucine, added to it, it's not a complete protein. It's not even close to the usability, call it bioavailability that a way is or that an animal protein is. Be careful, everyone, because a lot of these chain smoothie places, not going to name names, that you have at the airport or you have at the mall, a lot of places have these plant protein powders. I remember recently, I talked to the CEOs of one of these big groups, and when I mentioned to them, I said, Well, is your plant-based protein powder, is it optimized with branched chain amino acid, so it's a complete protein. They had no idea what I was talking about. You're getting, quote, protein, but it's really low quality and it's not something your body can use. As people start to focus on protein, actually on my flight here to Phoenix to see you from LA, I walked Starbucks, a place I do not consume anything from, everyone.

But I noticed out of the corner of my eye, on the menu, it said protein something or other. I'm like, Oh, my God, they've already jumped on this bandwagon. I guarantee whatever that source of protein is at the Starbucks, sorry, Starbucks, and I am going to name names, nothing quality is happening from a food and beverage standpoint from that store. Whatever that protein source is, I would bet you and I can bet like a thousand bucks right now that it is not what it should be.

I've been in this- I didn't read the fine print.

I'll go back tomorrow morning and look. You bet you're at it. I'll send you on photo.

Yeah, it's not quality. I learned 2011-ish, probably the way protein powders worked and how they were really made and what you were getting from the big name companies. I won't say anything, but the biggest names and why they're so cheap and then why they're in Costco and everything. I'm not saying it's bad to go in Costco, but you have to be able to cut the cost to be put in those stores and those facilities. You have to understand what you're getting and structurally, how they make them and where they come from. Now, what I changed was that I still have It's a love way, but it's 25% of the protein intake I take from a powder, and I custom everything with beef protein, isolate, and then a little bit of bovine collagen protein, and I customize and synthesize these myself. And that's 75% of what I take. And I don't rely on protein powder. Honestly, I use it in my coffee twice a day and in my yogurt. Smart. And that's the only way I don't drink shakes at all. And when I made that switch, I did notice less bloating, less water retention. And my blood panels, actually, I wouldn't correlate at all to that, but I would say that that did have some benefit for me.

And by the way, everyone, whey is a great protein, of course. It's great, yeah. If it's high quality, if it's coming from some pasture-raised organic cows and so forth, just know where the whey is coming from, and then just know that some subset of people don't tolerate whey and are super inflamed and don't realize it. So that's really my call out on whey. It's not that whey is bad. It's that some people, like myself, If I eat that, I have acne, I have eczema, I can't do it.

That's why I split it because there is good purpose to it. But I found that for me personally, it was too much for what I wanted to take. But I'm a scoop-and-a-half-a-day You know what I mean? At the most. I think several things you said, Whole Foods first prioritize that this is a supplement, meaning you use it as a supplement for what you're missing or lacking, but don't try to overcompensate eat. I hate this term meal replacement. It's not a meal. It's not really replacing a meal. It's just supplementing some hunger or some nutrient lacking, in my view.

Make it your snack. Yes. Or make it your post-workout.

Absolutely. It's funny because we talk about the fats, and I told you, I went from my last 20 years eating 25 grams of fat a day if I was lucky, and it was strictly from peanut butter or something of that nature, almond butter, one of the nut butters. Now I do about 130 grams of fat a day, and I went from 1,500 calories to 3,000. I haven't been this lean or felt this good or skin or just focus even on non-good sleep day type of things. Diet runs everything. You can train all you want. If you have a shit diet, you can't outwork it.

A hundred %. In our in our medicine, in functional medicine, nutrition and food is the first thing on the prescription pad. Yes, of course, we prescribe drugs and medications, and we prescribe supplements in some cases, and we prescribe exercise and neuroresilience and mental health practices, but we also prescribe food first. You can address so many today's top health issues and symptoms with food. Getting people, again, off of the sugar and the ultra-processed foods, getting the fiber content up. Healthy fats, we can go down the seed oil rabbit hole if you want, But we forget when we were in that era of low fat, fat free and that messaging that cholesterol is the building block of all your hormones. Exactly. It's what makes your testosterone and estrogen and progesterone. Getting really good sources of fat and having fat in your diet is really important. Fat doesn't make you fat. Fat, for most people, doesn't really increase our cholesterol. There are some people, and we talked about this before we started, who have genetically high cholesterol, either very genetically high total cholesterol numbers across the board or genetically high lipoprotein (little a), it sounds like you have.

That one actually tends to be genetic if you have it and you're not really impacted by lifestyle or diet much at all. I do have some patients with what's called familial hypercholesterolemia, that everything's high because it's just genetic. Occasionally, those people accidentally do keto or something, and it just sends them into a terrible, terrible place. I explain to them, and sometimes they're statin resistant. They don't want to take statins, which I respect. But I explain to them, you can live on twigs and brambles in the forest forever. Don't Don't go to modern life. Don't go to a restaurant. Forage forever. That will probably bring your cholesterol down. If you are, for some reason, unwilling to do that, then I'm sorry, but you're going to be on a statin. Let's go. I've actually come around on statins, I will say. I used to be earlier in my practice and career more anti them. As I've aged and as I've matured, maybe, I I just see them as another tool. I don't see the negative metabolic impact meaningfully impacting people too much. They can really get your APOB to where we want it to be. For some people, we try everything else and just a low-dose statin because you don't need to go into high-dose statins because once you get in higher and higher doses, they effectively don't work as well.

No. I'm using them more liberally than I used to. It's really personal and patient dependent. We do everything else to mitigate any metabolic or negative effects. We take to a coach U10 and make sure that we're also balancing blood sugar in other ways. But for most people, you can accomplish so much of what you need to accomplish through food. Then occasionally, there's people where we hit the wall, the diet reaches its limit because genetically, they have a predisposition. Then we add the meds on top to get where we go.

Yeah. Sometimes I would do this, Oh, I'm the exception, even though I hate that. I was doing that to myself, and I just despise it. Have you heard of the Pinoy, the one that measures your breath and shows That's one of the things. I did that at Eudemonia two years ago, and I took that, and he's like, Man, you were just burning, ripping through fat. That's when I was changing my diet a little bit, working on it. Then I was in my head and I was like, Man, I'm going to just try this out and see what happens. Because I always felt like I'm overdoing carbs. When I sit back and look at everything I was eating, it was just 100% carbs. Vegetables, 13, 14 servings a day, two or three bowls of oatmeal. I sat and I thought, Man, you're eating a shit ton of carbs, and that's all you're eating. It. Then I did that and I changed it, and it just changed my life. My HDL went up 40 points. Wow. Seriously. That's incredible. Last time I checked, it was I've always been low 40s. The problem with the statin for me was it took me down to 30 on my LDL because I was taking Ripatha, too, and I panicked.

I was like- Well, together, that's too much.

I stick with the Ripatha.

I mean, pretty much for you. For somebody else, it's not, but in your case.

With the LpA, knowing RAPatha can help a little bit with it. I know it's not going to do drastic.

Yeah. Well, there's a new drug that's in phase three final trials for LpA that I think for those folks who actually have good lipid levels otherwise, and we don't want to... I actually see statins lower LP a little a a little bit, but they just don't do very much. For those people that everything else is good, they don't want to be in a statin. They don't want to be in a lipid-lowering drug, but their LP a little a is genetically super high. I'm hopeful that this new medication works.

I've been following you for two years.

You just wake up every morning. It's the first thing you check. Some people check the price of crypto. You check the status of the space. I trash.

I get every couple of months, an hour, and just look at it. Early on, I was really inundating myself with everything that I could learn. I have a pretty good understanding of stuff now, but my problem with statins was the over describing of them. Yes. That's my major problem with it. I feel like they just want to put everybody on it, and they just want to just drain people's cholesterol levels. I don't think that's healthy.

Yeah, I totally agree. I also find it frustrating that so many people are just put on statins without any assessment, like true nutritional assessment, true lifestyle assessment. Because for most people, like you said, if you reduce or eliminate the alcohol, the triglycerides come down, if you reduce the sugar in the ultra-processed foods, the cholesterol comes in check, if you add fiber, protein, healthy fats, most people, not everybody, but most people's cholesterol numbers get in a really healthy place, and everything else in their body works better, and they feel better, and they can sleep, and they can poop, and they can have babies. It's like, why do we not do that first rather than... We're treating you as a whole person in functional medicine. We're not treating numbers. The numbers, again, back to the lab test thing, they're helpful. They're a great starting point, but they're not your endpoint.

You have a specific, I don't know, five essential supplements? I'm not talking the basics that people need to take. We need to take magnesium, we need to take certain vitamins. I'm talking stuff like creatine or something. Five supplements that you find that are proven beneficial that most people should or you could see taking that are going to have a benefit in their life?

Yeah, absolutely. Number one is vitamin D, vitamin D3K2. I know that falls into the basics category, but most people are deficient. Vitamin D is a prohormone. It is important for mental health, it's important for immune function, it's important for bone health, and if you're pregnant, it's important for your baby's future teeth. It's just something that still somehow not enough people are taking and has profound effects on overall body function and health.

One question on the vitamin K side. Sometimes it's obviously K2 or 3 or 7. Which one?

What's the difference? Vitamin D3, K2 is my preference. The reason people add the vitamin K, this gets missed a lot, is that it has to do with how the calcium that you absorb. One of the things that vitamin D does is it helps you absorb calcium from your diet. You need calcium for your bones. You need it for the functioning your cellular membranes. You need calcium for everything, everyone. But where we don't want the calcium to go is into the heart. The K2 helps with directing where the calcium goes, is how I put it. The vitamin D I take is the vitamin D3 K2 drops. I just put them right in my mouth. Every morning, all my kids, that little birds, they all open their mouths and mama goes around and sprinkles the vitamin D and everyone's out. Then my husband, then our nanny. I'm like, you know where. That's one that I absolutely recommend. Creatine's up there for cognitive function and for all of us who are trying to lift heavier. My version of lifting heavy and your version of lifting heavy are very, very different, everyone. But I'm like, whoa, 25 pounds. But I'm working on it.

But yes, creatine, I definitely think and we're learning more and more about. The other one that I see be really game-changing for people is the right B vitamins, so methylated B vitamins. Okay. Methylated cobalt and M5 MTHF, which is the methylated form of folate. A lot of the B vitamins out there and the multivitamins that have B vitamins in there, they're not the methylated forms. About Two-thirds of our population has a genetic variant. It's not a mutation, it's not a disease. It's just a variant. I have two copies. Some people have one copy. That mean you don't methylate as well. Why do we care? Well, methylation is happening a billion times a minute in our bodies, and it's for all sorts of things, including making neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. I have personally a huge mood impact when I am not taking my methylated bees. I had some depression and anxiety in my college years. Now in my later life, I have all of these tools to manage that. But one of the things that I found consistently over the years since I learned and trained in functional medicine was that the methylated bees for me are an antidepressant.

I've tested this many times, and you see it in the population, and there's great data on it. It's not just the end of one of me. But I can't tell you how many patients I see start them and just see some of the fog clear and the uplift. Methylation is also really important for detoxification. So many people are eating all this grocery store sushi or fancy pants sushi, I don't care where it comes from, and they're full of mercury as a result, and they're We're not detoxifying it well. When these heavy metals get into our bodies, where do they go live? They get to like to sit in our fat and stay. Most of our brain is made of fat. A little bit of mercury here and there, fine. But a lot of it or consistently over time, it just bioaccumulates. It bioaccumulates in the tuna, it bioaccumulates in us. When we're not good at methylating, we're not good at detoxifying. Also, when we're not good at methylating, every day your body, especially for women, but men, too, you make estrogen and you break it down. Methylation is important for that breakdown. For folks with PMS and PCOS and endometriosis and symptoms of estrogen dominance or regular periods, all these things, again, our methylated B vitamins can help our bodies break down and work through our hormones in a better way.

This is one that's in the basics category, but that methylated version I see have outsized impacts versus what people talk about, Oh, just take a B vitamin for energy. That's not what I'm talking about.

Is this a B complex then that you're talking?

A B It's complex, but just make sure that the version of it, when you look on the back and you look at the fine print, it says Methyl, M-E-T-H-Y-L, kubalaman, or when it talks about the folate, it says the number 5, the letter M-T-H-F. You can test genetically for the MTHFR gene variant to see if you have it, the kinds that make you less likely to methylate well that I have two copies of. That means I have a 66-ish % reduction in my methylation speed. Wow. I do see those really being interesting. Then something that I'm experimenting right now with and seeing is Urolithin A and improving mitochondrial function, because now that I am over 40, improving my mitochondrial function as I look to slow the clock and give myself more energy to run around after my children is very important. That's one that I'll be honest with you, I'm not ready to say it must be a staple for everyone, but It has not been kicked to the curb like NAD plus yet. I'm taking it and I'm discovering and seeing what it does as we get it out more into the population, regardless of the claims of anyone who makes it.

What about you? I want to hear your answer to this question.

My biggest partner, my first partner I signed with when I went into biohacking was Timeline. I went to freaking Harvard and studied cellular health at night, and I took a cellular health coaching class. I'm a big believer believer in it. The more understanding of I saw how it worked and what it did and what I've seen it do for me. So I do find that is definitely a staple for me.

Yeah. I'm taking it, by the way, and I'm taking that brand. The data and the research on it is good enough for me to take it. My question about it, not that specific brand, but just Urolithin A in general, and my question on a lot of these things is something like omega-3s or magnesium glycinate or methylated Bs, we know what happens when you eat them, you absorb them into your body and they get into your cells. With some of these newer supplements where the data and underlying research behind them is really strong, but we don't fully yet know how eating them in the form of a pill, for example, fully plays out in a large population. I'm convinced enough that I am taking it, but I'm also looking to see over time, how does this play out in the data in actual humans?

I did some work with Me and I know the founders of Me Screen. We were talking about different ways to improve mitochondria health, and they firmly backed it, too. That was encouraging to me. You said NAD plus. Now, here's what I say to you. For people listening, because I've talked about this multitudes of times. Your body, if you take NAD, straight NAD, cannot absorb NAD. It does not get into the cell. It is too large. If you do not take a precursor, it will not work. You take NMN or NR, it can get into and penetrate the cell, which can then release NAD. So many people don't get that, and they don't understand. My wife takes the NMN. She loves it. I'm a little cautious now on everything I take, but I've used it. I like it. But NAD, like you said, I'm glad you said that. It does not work. It does nothing.

Yeah, I don't take it. I don't recommend the IVs. No. The other thing, and you I might be in a slightly different camps on the NMR and the precursors, nicotinibribicide. I haven't seen compelling data that taking those while you can absorb them and they can get into the cell, once it gets there, does any great shakes. That's what I'm not convinced of. Well, the C30A is a problem, too. Doing anything. Our bodies, when we make this through our natural workings and metabolism, can use it. I find the science on this particular area to be more theoretical than actually clinical. Clinical meaning we actually show that it improves health and cellular function in some way in humans when we take these supplements. That's the part that's patchy for me. I'm not a no, but I'm a not yet.

I'm just glad you brought the NAD up because people get tricked. Yeah. They do. Creatine, obvious. Now, dilucine, betaine, these are really key for muscle growth without having to use an anabolic steroid or anything like that. These actually work. They do quite well, and they are safe to use because I'm looking more on the safe side as opposed to the reckless side. But when you talked about folate, I don't think people realize how important that is. If you're low, how significant of a problem that particular vitamin can be. I'm glad you brought that up, too. I have been looking at making sure I'm more on level with that as I've understood more.

I'm going to send you my favorite one.

Okay, please. I've looked into more intricate stuff, the more problems I've had with the Jardiance. It's made me look at vitamins more than I did because I'm so focused on the obscure shit that I don't focus enough on the core stuff. And that made me take a step back and go, Okay, this is stripping me, and I know that, but maybe I've been missing something this whole time, too, that is just exacerbating a problem that I already have. I think sometimes we look so obscure, we forget the basics.

I'm all about the basics right now. I get asked about peptides all the time, and I call them not peptides, as the LP ones, but peptides in the longevity stacks. I call them not the icing on the cake, but the writing on the icing on the cake. I see too many people writing their names in icing peptides and missing the cake and the icing. The cake is the nutrition and the exercise and the sleep and the getting the environmental toxins out of your system and your life. The icing is the supplements that we're talking about, the vitamin D3s and the Omegas and the creatine 15. I'm going to say, I throw the Urolithin A in there. I'll put that in the basket for now. It's in the icing basket until it gets kicked back to writing. We'll see. Maybe it won't. Those things will not work, and they will not be enough. Some of them are straight up placebo effect, and some of them have some validity that's coming and getting better and better, and I think are interesting. I'm all for peptides as a technology, like nothing against them. I'm excited for them. But I just see too many people skipping the cake and the icing and going to the writing.

It's not benefiting their long term health, and it's not really even benefiting how they feel that much right now.

Well, let's want everything now and not understand it's a marathon, not a sprint. Things have to be taken care of first. I've been battling this for 15 years with people. I found a peptides in 2011, along with Sarm's, along with everything else, and people just don't get it. They just want, want, want, but they don't ever get what they're supposed to out of them because their bodies aren't ready. Just like what you're saying. If you get optimized first, then you take a look at that stuff.

But I digress. I'm with you. I'm with you.

I have had such a great conversation with you. I enjoyed every second of this. Thank you for all of the extensive knowledge. We knew we'd get into all kinds of things. I didn't even know where this was going to go. Nobody ever does when they come here. I just try to bring out the best in everybody and let you talk about stuff that you may not talk about. I don't want you to have to talk about the same old, same old. Of course, there are certain important things, but I want to show your versatility. I want to show that you have an extensive knowledge base and let it shine.

Thank you. Well, my goal, my purpose in this world, or let's say my professional purpose in this world is because family and being a mother and a partner and all these things are also my purpose, and being a light is also my purpose. But my professional purpose is really around transforming the health of as many people as possible. It's beautiful. And is showing and helping people understand what I know and what I've seen in practice and what I've had the privilege of seeing in a practice like Parsley, where we've been able to treat tens of thousands of patients, and so we're able to see what really works and really doesn't, beyond these tiny little practices. Just that privilege of having seen that is huge. I'm honored to be here and to get to have this conversation with you and to cover everything from peptides to prayer in one. I don't know how long we've been here, people. It could be hours, it could be days, but however long it is, it's just an honor to be here, and thank you so much.

Thank you. We'll tell everybody, and I'll link all of this in description, what are the best places to find you?

Yeah, parsleyhealth. Com and Parsley Health on all the socials. You can do a free 15-minute consult call with one of our team members to learn more about our medical care, or you can just sign on up. Up to you. Then for me, robinbersonmd. Com. I have a newsletter that's really focused on female longevity. That's my passion project, and people seem to really like that. Robinbersonmd on all the platform, platform of choice.

I love it. Yeah. Well, thank you for coming again. I am always just humbled when people come see me, and I appreciate it. I am excited about what Parsley does, and what, hopefully, is going to continue to make changes for health and everybody. So thank you for everything. Thank you.

And when you go on your Instagram, if you see me, I tagged you. I videoed myself outside dancing and saying, You need a waiting room, and I'm dancing on the street. I repost me making fun of your waiting room situation on Instagram.

I love it. I love it. All right, everybody. Well, that wraps up another one. I am certain this will be highly impactful, so enjoy it, soak it in, and listen to everything we said, and improve your health, please. That being said, stay tuned for plenty more to come. Dylan Jameli and Dr. Robin Burson signing off.