Quickly Fix Your Health In 2025 - Doctor To Billionaires, Dr. Chiti Parikh | The Ranveer Show 470

Very few podcasts that get me this excited. Dr. Chitiparek, welcome to TRS. Thank you so much for having me. I think that this marriage of the West and the East is going to be the next massive wave in the world of health care. Absolutely. The way that yoga and meditation really work is by activating this one nerve in the body called the vagus nerve. I hope that this discovery is based on scientific proof.

What's fascinating is the location of the chakras is exactly matches where this nerve goes to the major organs in the body.

What is science learning about dopamine now? So until now, we thought that mental health issues, everything was just in the brain. Recently, we figured out that more than 80% of things like serotonin, dopamine, all of these good feel-good hormones actually meet in the gut, not in the brain. So that gut feeling people get, it's actually real.

Hookup culture, one night stands. What has your experience as a doctor taught you? So the hookup culture often relates to feeling that sense of loneliness and seeking that validation externally. Loneliness is just as bad of a respected heart disease. No one talks about it. What do you have to say about marijuana generally? I actually prescribe a lot of medical marijuana in my practice, but there's a thin line to walk here. If you're using more than once and twice, it will start rewiring your brain.

The effect of foods on one's gut could be different for different people. How do you know whether or not your food is harming your gut or not?

50% of the people I see in my practice are for gut health, for IBS. People with IBS are willing to give up 10 to 20 years of their life just to feel better. What is the treatment you give them as an integrative medicine doctor?

One can develop ADHD with age? Absolutely. We're seeing an epidemic of ADHD diagnosis in older adults, even people into 50s and 60s. Is it because of short-format content? Yes. It actually doesn't just have a short-term impact. Long-term impact is that... Just mindful of it.

We're releasing this very, very special health oriented episode in the first week of the New Year. In my eyes, no one better than Dr. Chitiparek to give us some practical, physical and mental health advice. She coaches the who's who of Manhattan, billionaires, athletes, actors.

She helps them better their physical and mental health through her practice. I sincerely hope that you watch this episode with your family. There's a lot of practical science back health care advice that you'll gain from this episode. And of course, Dr. Chitti is of Indian origin. There are certain elements of yoga, meditation and Ayurveda, which are key parts of this conversation as well. But everything is science back.

So, sit down with a notebook with a pen and take down these practical hacks from one of the world's leading minds when it comes to new age science-backed healthcare. Dr. Chitiparek, with her debut on TRS.

There's very few podcasts that get me this excited. Dr. Chitipare, welcome to TRS. Thank you so much for having me. Congratulations on your pregnancy. Thank you. You're six months in. Yes. I feel very special that you're recording this podcast with us during your pregnancy. Where do we begin this very wide and important conversation? That's a question that I had before entering the studio. I think a great place to begin is your education. You're an MD.

in internal medicine. Now, in India, I don't know if people understand the term internal medicine. So how would you explain it to my Indian audiences? Yeah. So internal medicine is sort of the general practitioner. These are the doctors that become your primary care, your family doctors, and allows you to keep the options open because you know a little bit of everything. So you sort of jack of all traits. Gotcha.

What I've noticed in the world of medicine after speaking to a lot of doctors on the show is that the best doctors keep studying even after their education is complete. And I put you in that exact same category. But specifically, you're kind of tying Western science and those modalities of going about education, like deep research, studies, evidence-based science with

Eastern practices. I think that this marriage of the West and the East is going to be the next massive wave in the world of healthcare. And it's very, very important for our generation of human beings. Fair assessment of your journey. Absolutely. I think this is really the future. This is what everyone is looking for because Western medicine does

acute medicine, like if you get a heart attack stroke, yeah, you want vested medicine. It does not do a good job at really preventing disease. Eastern medicine, like Ayurveda, Chinese medicine has been around for 5,000 years, right? So they've perfected the art and the science how to prevent disease and understand what the root cause really is. Okay. Within the realms of your research,

Could you share something insane that you've discovered based on scientific proof? And I hope that this discovery is hyper relatable for myself and the viewers.

Absolutely. So think about stress, right? We all have felt it. We go through it every single day. So one thing that always fascinated me was in Eastern medicine, let's say in yoga, to combat stress, what works best is things like meditation or even breathing exercise, like pranayama, right? So I was always fascinated by that. When I practice it, I feel amazing. But to a Western audience, how do I prove that this is really working?

So in my practice, I combined best of East and West. So I really bring in 5,000 years of science. So what I started doing recently is I started hooking people up to a little device called heart rate variability monitor. Basically what it is, it's a tiny little thing you wear underneath your shirt, right on your heart. So it almost measured like an EKG to show how stressed or relaxed you are based on your heart rhythm.

like ECG exactly. So in real time, it can tell you how stressed someone is or relaxed. Right. So now I tell my patients, close your eyes, I teach them alternate nostril breathing, some yoga based breathing exercises. And I see that number change right away. Got you. So now all the research is coming out saying the way that

yoga meditation really work is by activating this one nerve in the body called the vagus nerve, vagus nerve, not like less, less vagus. So what's fascinating is this vagus nerve starts in the brain and follows this straight path into the pelvis. If you look at the chakras, there's seven chakras, right?

The location of the chakras is exactly matches where this nerve goes to the major organs in the body. So if it goes into the heart, that's the heart chakra. So in yoga, we might say this breathing exercise or this yoga pose activates or opens the heart chakra.

In western medicine, I say it activates the vagus nerve at the level of the heart. Tomatoes, tomatoes, right? Same thing. But it's fascinating for thousands of years ago, you know, people figured out that this is the vagus nerve. If we strengthen this vagus nerve, we're more resilient. We can fight stress. So now I can actually prove the science that's been around for thousands of years.

Okay, wow, you've given me a lot of tangents to go down. I want to talk about yoga in general, something I've been practicing for the last nine years of my life. Some form of meditation have had discoveries, have had experiences related to Asana's yoga poses as well as breathing exercises and obviously the meditation. I'm also wearing a hoop.

So I'm constantly monitoring my stress. It's been a month and a half since I'm wearing this and I've learned a lot about my body. My stress levels drop heavily every time I'm meditating. Now I have the proof. But as a content creator, when we are telling audiences to meditate, not everyone takes it up because they're not able to see the value to their daily lives through meditation. They think that giving 20 minutes to

a process like that might actually be a slight waste of time. And there's other stuff you can do in the 20 minutes. But again, this is happening in my eyes because of a lack of experience in doing meditation, which is why my goal was to make a lot of money through my career and then fund research like this to show people scientific proof. And I'm super happy that now I don't have to make money. You're already doing it.

I'm so pumped about this conversation for this exact reason. There's deeper research about meditation yoga at this point. I would love for you to begin by telling us in medical terms from a Western lens about the vagus nerve. Then we'll break down what chakras are and we'll also get into breathing exercises, stretching, meditation, all of that. But let's start with the vagus nerve.

Yeah. So our nervous system, which basically how our brain communicates with the rest of the body, right? The brain is connected each and every cell in the body through nerves. They're to always talking to each other. And our nervous system has basically an on and off switch. So on basically means we're in fight and flight, danger, stress.

Off means relaxed, enjoying life, resting, digesting food, right? That's where we really want to be. Well, people don't realize that we spend not just hours, days, weeks, months, years stuck in that fight and flight. That puts an enormous stress on our body.

But how do we know this, right? This is where technology can really help us understand what is my vagus nerve really doing? By monitoring your ECG, by wearing devices like this, you can keep an eye on exactly how much time am I spending in that fine flight?

When we're stuck there, we're aging faster. Our immune system is taking a hit. We can't focus. We are anxious. We can't sleep. We can't digest food. It affects every single part of our body. That's why it's so important to understand what is my nervous system doing at any given moment. Wow. Okay. So there is a way to manipulate your own nervous system.

into basically working in a more lubricated manner, right? You're assisting a nervous system just work better in the same way that the gym helps you get stronger.

I think about vagus nerve, think about it as a muscle, right? If I want big biceps, what do I have to do? I have to exercise every day, put some stress, use the biceps every day to make it stronger. So the vagus nerve, we're not using it, we're not activating it, we're just stuck in that fine flight. So the idea is that yoga, breathing exercises, meditation basically flex your vagus nerve every single day to make it stronger.

So no matter how much stress you're facing, you're not going to get stuck in that fight and flight. You're going to be more resilient and get out of it much faster. Okay. So to understand the vagus nerve and its functioning better, maybe a basic question to begin with, what's the relevance of the vagus nerve for a college student?

vagus nerve is so vital, no matter what age you're at. So if you're studying for a big exam, if you're trying to focus, if you're trying to excel in your education or professional career, the goal is for you to be 100% present. You want to use all of your brain. What happens is when we're stressed, we use more primitive part of our brain, right? So we don't remember things that often. So just imagine when you're stressed, what happens, you forget your keys, you forget to do simple things because you're not just present.

So by yoga, meditation, by activating your vagus nerve, you supercharge your brain. So you're able to focus much better, remember things much better. Not only that, process things at a much higher level. So whether you're studying for an exam or career boost or even when you're in your 60s, brain is something we want to keep active and preserve because you want to be as sharp as possible and no matter what age you're at.

Okay, now that we're done with the college student aspect of things, the next obvious question is a professional like myself or yourself. We're also starting our families. So from these perspectives, what's the role of a vagus nerve?

So when you are entering a phase of your life where you are really working hard in your professional life, but personal life also gets busier. So what happens is we're distracted. We're all over the place. We need our vagus nerve to be active for us to stay focused and be highly efficient in every single thing we're doing. When we're distracted, when we're not efficient, that's where stress, anxiety,

ADHD, all of these things take place. And we're just losing energy. We get tired easily. We get cranky or mood gets affected. So if you want optimal brain performance for professional life, personal life, it's so important that we activate the vagus nerve stress and ADHD. So one can develop ADHD with age.

Absolutely. So ADHD, we often think that it's just younger, you know, it's students or younger kids that it comes about. We're seeing an epidemic of ADHD diagnosis in older adults, even people into 50s and 60s. Is it because of short format content? A lot has to do with our exposure to social media. Our attention span has just gotten shorter. The way our brain is being wired is changing so rapidly. So we're encountering this diagnosis literally any age now.

So it's literally like Instagram and YouTube usage in some form is degrading your brain a little bit. Yes. In saying that, of course, there's reading material on Instagram, long form videos on YouTube like this. So I think the practical input here is choose your content and your social media usage carefully.

Absolutely, because you want to flex your brain muscle, right? So if you just focus on short content, quick hits, your brain gets used to that. Versus if you also focus on long from content, also reading books, other ways of absorbing knowledge, you keep your brain healthy and flexible. Okay, we'll come back to the Vegas now, but let's talk about short form content a little bit. This is a conversation I have with my girlfriend a lot. We feel that short form content affects our relationship badly.

Because we're both on it and this is not just us, this is a lot of young couples. But also, it definitely makes you irritable if you do it too much. I personally am a short form content creator, but I feel you should use it in two ways primarily. The first way is to carefully curate your short form feed.

And the second is to limit the time you're using it for by catching yourself when you're going down that infinite scrolling trail. You need to understand that you're getting addicted to that dopamine hit that's been generated through short form content. And we have a doctor with us. She says that your brain degrades through short form content.

Yes. That's true. It's so addicting. That's why we do it, right? We want more and more. So I think the strategy is limited so that your brain doesn't become so numb to it, so used to it, that it just needs more and more dopamine from it. And find other ways of getting that dopamine hit. If we just rely on social media to do that for us, it's not going to work. That's why, you know, enjoying joy, you know, bringing joy and pleasure through other activities to interact with people, reading a book, listening to music,

Dan saying, exercise, there's so many other ways you can get that dopamine head so you need to balance the two. Can we actually slow down the conversation a little bit and enter this world of dopamine as well as short form content? I'd love for you to begin by explaining what dopamine is. And then let's talk about social media usage with respect to dopamine in detail and the solutions.

So dopamine is a little chemical in the brain that tells your brain, I like this, I want more of this. So the reason why we love dopamine is because that was so important for our survival. So when we were cavemen and women, when I ate something that was high in sugar, it was good for my body, right? It's good for my survival. So the brain says, this I love, you need to do more and more. And that expands to so many other things, such as not just food, but even things like sex.

right? And even things that we view, such as short from content on social media, all of that our brain likes and wants more and more of it.

The problem is the more you give it, the more exposure you have to these things, it resets your set point. So now you need to have even more to have the same effect. So that's what the addiction comes in. So you're basically saying that you do a new activity, you're able to create this volcano of dopamine in your head. You do that for a week. Every day in that week, you might feel a volcano of dopamine, but on the eighth or ninth day,

you may not feel it. And therefore you'll have to do more of that activity to feel that same level of the volcanic eruption of dopamine. Exactly. We have to just maintain that level. It's almost like a race, right? You have to keep up with it. That's why it's so, so important to take breaks. Social media breaks limit your exposure to things so your body has the ability to reset your dopamine levels so you don't get addicted.

You still get that nice dopamine hit, but you're not chasing after it where you want more and more exposure. And not only that, when you do that, your brain wiring also changes over time. Okay. Wow. Um, you'll have to get into this a little bit.

So what happens is when we are addicted to something and dopamine becomes scarce, because like I said, for the same amount of exposure, whether it's if I'm spending 10 minutes of social media, it give me X amount of dopamine. A month later, 10 minutes of social media was only going to give me half the dopamine. So what your brain does is increases the receptors of dopamine in the brain. So now I need more dopamine, more receptors to feed. So you see how this is a vicious cycle.

It actually doesn't just have a short-term impact. Long-term impact is that your body becomes almost numb to dopamine, not just from social media, from so many other things. So often people spread that addiction from social media into food. I see this all the time. I'm so sorry I have to pause you a little bit because I want to explain what receptors are in the first place. So our body is full of hormones, but for any hormone to work, you need the molecule of the hormone to fit in with its receptor.

It's like a lock and a key, right? Dopamine is the key. Receptor is a lock. So if you have more locks to open, you're going to need a lot more keys to match it. You're saying that if you flood your brain with dopamine through a single activity every day, your brain starts building more dopamine receptors and says, Hey, feed me more if you want to unlock the volcanic eruption. Exactly. Okay. That's the

underlying mechanism by which addiction develops. It's rewiring your brain. This is any addiction. Any addiction. Cigarettes, weed, alcohol. All works are along the same pathway. Social media addiction, you'll put into the same category. Yes, exactly. Okay. And you said that addiction from one stimulus can spread to the rest of your life as well. Let's break that down from a biological perspective.

So think about food. We all love sweets, right? So we love something sugary because it makes us feel good, gives us that little dopamine hit. But if because of the social media exposure, my brain has rewired and requires a much higher level of dopamine, to get that same joy from the sugary foods, I'm going to have to eat more and more and more. So any addiction I have will be multiplied x number of times because my brain is just not that sensitive to dopamine anymore.

So the main thing is, you know, I don't like taking things away from people, especially if you have addiction and I take that away from you, you're likely to seek that out even more, right? We're only little kids. If I take the candy away, you could look for that candy even more so. So the idea is replacing it is you're not cutting out anything cold turkey, but you're replacing that dopamine hit, the source of that dopamine hit with something more constructive exercise, meditation, art,

Anything that's going to make you feel good in the long term without compromising your brain health. You got to go from being a bad girl or a bad boy to a good girl. It's a long journey sometimes. But you know, this is also the process of growing up. Like when you enter your thirties, you shed off a lot of habits and they could be social habits as well. I actually think once thirties is a phase of going from being a bad boy or a bad girl to being a good boy or a good girl. Fair to say.

Yeah, because you see the effect it has on your body, your mind, your spiritual health, all of it. And then you cannot help but take notice and change things. Okay. Now within the realms of your research, I have a couple of questions. The first question is,

that what is science learning about dopamine now in 2024, in 2025, what are we still learning about dopamine? And the second question is about that point of regulated dopamine levels. So say if you've become a good boy or a good girl, what happens to your sense of living? What happens to the quality of your life? Both these questions.

So one amazing scientific breakthrough that has come about in the last few years is unlocking this gut brain connection. So until now, we thought that mental health issues, whether it's depression, anxiety, addiction, everything was just in the brain. Recently, we figured out that more than 80% of things like serotonin, dopamine, all of these good, feel good hormones actually made in the gut, not in the brain. We found that out recently? Yes.

So only now we're recognizing that the gut actually is not is our second brain. I call it the first brain because hey, it does more of the work, right? So now the new therapies when it comes to mental health are focusing on how to optimize the gut health. The bacteria in our gut actually making way more dopamine and way more serotonin that we thought, not just the brain. So that's really the game changer in the scientific world. Whoa.

But how come the scientific world discovered the solate? Exactly. Like why did we assume that dopamine serotonin are produced in your brain region in the first place? Because the manifestation of dopamine and serotonin when it comes to mood, anxiety, depression, or happiness, joy, everything was just a brain regulating it. We never thought that the brain was talking to another organ. So recently they did a study in Korea. They made people take personality tests.

And they said, take, fill out this questionnaire. Let's figure out which type of personality you have. Are you the paranoid, the more optimistic? And then they took samples of their poop, essentially, to check what type of bacteria they had. They found direct correlation between the type of bacteria they had and the personality traits they had. So more inflammatory, more negative, bad bacteria they had, they had more negative personality traits.

more anxiety, more anger, more frustration, more sort of a negative pessimistic view of the world. Versus the healthier bacteria that they had in the gut, they are more positive perspective on the world. So it's just one of the proofs that our brain, our gut are so intimately connected.

And there's research papers based on like this. Exactly. So now we're even, this is, I hope no one's watching this after their lunch because I'm going to say something and it might be a little upsetting. One of the frontiers of medicine we're looking at is actually stool transplant.

Yeah. So we're looking to transplant healthy bacteria into the gut as treatment for things like anxiety, depression, autoimmune disease, cancer, even Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, so many things. So just goes to show you that this connection really plays a much bigger role than we ever even imagined.

Yeah, we've had a doctor. His name is the liver doc. He's a friend of mine. He has done the stool transplant thing in India as well for liver health. And we've discussed the poop transplant on his episode as well. But I'd love for you to do a bit of a recap. Viewers are advised to be careful.

I'll keep it as clean as possible. So the idea is that we have trillions of bacteria in the gut and they help us with all sorts of things from managing our hormones, inflammation, our immune system to even our mental health.

So the idea is that if I encounter any disease, then maybe I need to replace the bacteria, get some good guys in, remove the bad guys. The best way to do this is borrow it from someone who's healthy. So just like there is blood banks, sperm banks, there's actually poop banks that collect samples from healthy individuals that we use to put into someone who's battling some of these diseases. In a capsule form, right? No. Is it like ice cream?

So, I mean, okay, we're getting a little gross here, but I'll tell you exactly how it works. You actually put poop with some good chemicals together, you blend it, and then while doing a colonoscopy, you inject that poop inside. So you're not, don't worry, you're not drinking or eating any of it. That's great. It's going the other way, so don't worry. But this is supposed to help your gut produce further good bacteria, right? Yes.

The overarching conversation by having you is about mental health and what I call mental fitness, which is the ability to be ready for life's sad, angry and disappointing phases. I think it's something very underrated and I love my own therapist. I love the process of clinical therapy, but at the same time, it's very, very important to take care of lifestyle factors as well.

Every time we eat, we're not just feeding our body, we're also feeding our guests, which are these trillions of bacteria. So diet probably has the biggest influence or gut microbiome. And that's something we can do to nurture it every single day.

Because we're kind of focusing on mental health for this conversation. I'd love to come back to this conversation about dopamine serotonin with respect to the gut. And I'd also like to bring in this topic of IBS, irritable bowel syndrome. It's something a lot of, and I don't like saying this, but it's something a lot of girls around me are facing. Few guys, for sure, but I primarily see this with a lot of Indian girls especially. I don't know if that's a worldwide thing where it's more girls who are affected by this, but

Every girl I know at least in media, maybe it's because of the scrutiny in media in terms of you've to always look good on camera, etc, etc. It definitely spoils your sense of peace. Bringing in one angle of spiritual stuff here, your Hara Chakra, which is the second lowest chakra.

is kind of supposed to be at the same position as your gut. And they say that when your piece is shaken up in life, that your Harajakar gets shaken up, but it's also synonymous usually with IBS. So there's a lot of gut related treatments you can do for IBS. But I know for a fact, I've spoken to gut doctors about this.

Usually with a lot of IBS patients, if you're able to fix their mental health very deeply through therapy, through other means, the IBS issues get fixed as well. What I'm trying to say here is that your long-term happiness is probably linked to your gut. Now you're the MD doctor. I'd love for you to make this conversation even more scientific and you can tie in the chakra stuff, whatever you wish.

I'm so glad you brought that up. I would say more than 50% of the people I see in my practice are for gut health for IBS. Really? Yes. And it's not something I expected when I started out. But what happens is Western medicine is very limited with IBS. You know, you go to a GI doctor, there might do colonoscopy, some tests say they will say, you don't have cancer, you're fine. Just eat more fiber and come back to me in six months, right? That's why you cut.

There's actually a study that came out that said, people with IBS are willing to give up 10 to 20 years of their life just to feel better. Imagine asking someone who's in the 30s, they're suffering so much that they would rather give up 10, 20 years of their life just to feel better right now. What's the reality of the IBS feeling on the inside? Like, what does it feel like?

It is disruptive to the entire life. I've had patients who have broken up in relationships, who have quit jobs, who have gone into depression, anxiety, because of their symptoms.

So IBS stands for arable bowel syndrome. So it's sort of a basket of different types of symptoms because everyone has a little different flavor of it. So the main thing include things like gas, bloating, stomach pain, diarrhea, constipation. So basically every time you eat, you're getting these symptoms. So on a daily basis, you're suffering. Okay. And what's the mind feeling like? If something interrupted your life every single day and you did not know how your day was going to go, think about how

annoying, but stressful that would be.

You're going to a party, you're meeting up with friends. You don't know if your stomach is going to hurt. You don't know if you might have to run to the bathroom, right? So imagine you are someone young, living up your life and something like this affects every aspect of your social, personal, professional life. So IBS can lead to, it's like a chicken and egg thing. It can lead to more anxiety, more ADHD, more depression, because you're sort of losing control of your life. That's how it feels like.

Okay. So if an IBS patient comes up to you, what is the treatment you give them as an integrative medicine doctor? I'm sure there's like an angle of Western medicine mixed with something Eastern, right? Yes. And I'd love for you to explain the logic behind both as well.

So with IBS, just like any other condition, Western medicine is very good at acute symptoms, loves to put a bandit on something, right? So if I say I have constipation, okay, take this pill, help your constipation, right? So we look at everything in isolation. Eastern medicine takes a step back and says, what is the root cause? Where is this coming from?

So that's the reason why it's so important to ask for, what is your diet like? Is it because you have, you know, poor diet, that's what's triggering? What is your sleep level like? Is poor sleep affecting you, God? What is your mental health like? What's the level of stress you're experiencing and anxiety issues? What's actually going on in your life? So this is how I'm able to connect dots and find that root cause because with IBS, if you just put a bandit over it, it doesn't work.

It really doesn't. Maybe it'll help you for a month. You're going to come right back. So my goal is to take the time to understand the root cause because if we address the root cause, we're not only just going to make IBS better, so many other conditions will get better too. Yeah, you know, at least from an urban Indian perspective, I think every family has one family member, at least two suffering from IBS.

So a lot of people might watch this podcast, feeling great in the stomach, and thinking that, hey, this doesn't apply to me, I promise you it's going to apply to someone around you. It's a very important conversation. And the reason why it's not getting that much attention, because no one talks about it, we're all shy. We don't want to talk about our bowel movements and gas, right? We're shy away from it. I think it's because of the term leaky gut. Yes. It just sounds poopy.

If there was a nicer sounding word for it, I think people would talk more openly. IBS. IBS, yes. And not just, the first step is recognizing it.

You know what's crazy thing I often hear from my patients? Because we don't talk about this enough, people don't even know what normal is. They're just so used to this, they're like, wait, not everyone goes through this? So sometimes I ask patients, especially men. Men are often not as connected to their bodies as women are, right? So often, part of my history when I'm meeting someone, I ask them everything about their poop.

whether they like it or not. So I often ask them, we go, tell me about your bowel movements. And most men will say, oh, everything's good, regular, all good. And I ask, how often do you go to the bathroom? I cannot tell you how many times someone's people have told me that they go to the bathroom once a week. And that's normal for them.

So until you actually ask, you don't even know because people have just normalized it, just part of life. No one has educated them about what normal bowel habits look like. You know, what are you supposed to really feel? What a normal bowel habits look like.

So at least once a day, one to two times a day, properly formed stool. It should not be painful. It should not just fall apart. It should be well formed, not too hard, not too soft. And the main thing is regularity. In this sense, it should be predictable. You get up in the morning, you go to the bathroom, that's normal. But if you have to sort of run every time,

That's not a good sign. So regularity and consistency of the quality of the poop is something you have to pay attention to every day. You got to look in the toilet bowl. That's only what you're going to know. Why is that? Like if you have to run every day, why is it not a good sign? What's it saying about your gut?

So it's saying that something irritated, right? Some inflammation is happening in the gut where your body is just like, oh my God, I have to go. So that urgency is not necessarily a good sign. It can get worse over time. So it's almost like a little bit of a red flag. You want to pay attention to it so that you identify the root cause before it becomes a full-blown disease.

We had a doctor on the show a couple of days ago. He was speaking about stem cell therapy and he was an orthopedic doctor. And he said that one of the early signs that you need to be careful about when it comes to your bones and muscles are these niggles. So if you're active, if you lift weights or if you dance regularly, you develop these tiny pains in your shoulder and your elbow, whatever.

but that's the red flag when it comes to muscles and bones. You're saying that if you have to suddenly run to the toilet and it's probably not at the same time every day, that's a red flag when it comes to your gut health.

Yes. Pay attention to it before it becomes a problem. Even if your poop is like well-formed. Yeah. If you feel the urgency, like, I got a run, I got to go to now, that indicates some inflammation, some irritation is happening. And you want to get the inflammation in check because as you know, inflammation is a root cause for so many diseases. So especially in the gut, as you know, that's the first step, that's the first red flag. So that inflammation can easily spread to the rest of the body. So the sooner you address the better,

And that's why people start developing allergies, skin issues, right? A lot of that actually starts in the gut. So pay attention before becomes a bigger problem. I can't believe I'm asking you this on the show. So pardon the question, but I watched a reel recently. See, this is a good side of short content that you get to learn like stuff. But they said that if one's fat smell bad, that's also a sign of gut inflammation and actually fats are not supposed to smell.

Yes, that's another one of those red flags, right? That you will find out very quickly. So there is actually tests for this. So there's a condition as an extension of IBS that I often encounter, it's called SIBO, small intestinal bowel overgrowth, which basically means that the bacteria in the gut, there's mostly supposed to be in the lower part of your gut, in the colon. They leave that area and start migrating further up in the gut.

Wow. So that causes much more severe symptoms and produces gases like methane, hydrogen, sulfide that can smell bad cause a lot of inflammation in the gun. There's a really cool device I use in my practice actually. Um, it's like a little breath analyzer. So after you eat, you breathe into this thing and it will measure how much hydrogen methane gas you're producing. So we can see the extent of this condition. And as we're treating someone, we can see the progress as well.

which is fascinating that we can do that. So you can tell the composition of your gut bacteria through your breath. Yes. You can do it two different ways. So in my practice, what I sometimes do is I'll order an actual poop test to look at exactly how many of the good bacteria do you have, bad bacteria, any size of inflammation. Another way to test for this specific condition I mentioned is through a breath test.

Because what happens is as the bacteria in the gut make a lot of this gas, it gets absorbed into our blood, and then we exhale it out through our nose. So that's a simple way of measuring it without having to do any invasive process. But it's fascinating that we can see this right away. You eat something that doesn't agree with you, you see the number go up. So then you're more mindful, oh, this type of food, when every time I eat onions and garlic,

I don't feel well. And you can see that in the test result, right? When you're breathing through. So now you eliminate those foods and you see, oh, the numbers are starting to go down. Right. So then we can tailor a treatment, a diet plan based on actual data rather than just trial and error. Okay. And the effect of foods on one's gut could be different for different people. Yes. Right.

So I'm so glad you asked this because it's one of my favorite quotes in Ayurveda. It says, food that is metabolized or digested processed properly becomes nutrition and nourishes your body. Food that is not processed properly, not digested, metabolized properly becomes toxic and root cause of disease. Food is the same, but your body's ability to break it down determines if this food is going to be nutrition or poison.

Gotcha. Speaking about this, food could become poison angle. We've had a lot of dermatologists on the show, Dr. Rashmi Shati especially, I've spoken to in detail about this. When you start breaking out, if you get even like a single big pimple, it's usually a sign of an irritated digestive system. Of course, there could be other factors, but your digestive system

shows up on your face. That's what I feel. Now you said that your breath is also a sign of it. How your mood changes through the day. Maybe that's also a sign of it. And obviously your poop is like the most detailed sign of your gut bacteria and therefore your gut in general. Fair to say. Yes. So now how do you know?

whether or not your food is harming your gut or not. How do you actually create that diet protocol for yourself? My angle is, I had a lot of acne when I was younger and then I started doing videos and I realized, okay, I need to care about how I look on camera. So over five years, it took me a while. I maintained a food diary and every time I broke out, I'd try recalling what I had the previous day or the day before that.

and through the five-year journey i found that any kind of cheese would make me break out a lot red meat would make me break out when i used to eat meat back in the day milk any milk and for me it was egg yolk but um

I have a lot of Indian friends who are dealing with acne issues. A lot of them have come out. Some of them still eat egg yolk, which is why I think for my body specifically, egg yolk was getting me in claim and obviously my room wasn't smelling great. But I think that's an example of altering your diet or to help your gut, therefore help your skin, your mental health, your energy levels and everything.

One last input here, Doc. I'm not very much for this vegan versus veg versus non-veg conversation. I genuinely believe everyone's bodies are different. Everyone's needs are different based on the lifestyle. If you're lifting very heavy weights, if you're an athlete.

I think your needs will be very different. They may be vegetarian athletes, whatever. I'm not getting into that conversation. I don't have strong opinions there, but I do think it's very important to scan your entire diet and eliminate the foods that cause harm to your skin as well as your gut as well as the fragrance of your room.

Absolutely. It's a very important sign, the fragrance of your room I should add. That's when I ask my patients. I think you really hit a very important point. First step is observing your body, making these connections, right? So I often have people to keep a food and symptom diary. I say for the next week, whatever you're eating, how are you feeling? Let's write it down. Because then you're stable to connect these dots. Oh, I eat this and I felt this way.

And all the foods that you mention are very common culprits of poor gut health or skin acne because these foods are very happy to digest. So simple foods like dal, chowal, something like that is not gonna cause as much of an issue. It's really the heavier foods like dairy, eggs, meat that really can sit in your gut and ferment for days and days. So this is another gross analogy, but I always like to bring it up.

Imagine you're eating a chicken sandwich. You ate half of it. You left it out here. You come back two days later, even one day later. Are you going to eat the rest of it? No, I wouldn't even go near it, right? Imagine you ate that. And now it's sitting in your gut for two to three days. And your gut inside of your body is nice and warm, lots of bacteria. So imagine what's happening to that. It's no different than it's sitting in a hot car or outside for days.

We would even go near it, yet we keep it inside our body. So think about the amount of inflammation that's causing. And that's exactly why I say food that is not digested properly is going to become toxic for you. So you have to do a much better job at observing, is this food being digested properly? How do I feel after I eat? Do I feel energized? Do I feel good? Or do I feel like I just have to take a nap? I just feel so bloated, uncomfortable. That's a sign whether the food is being digested or not.

We recently hosted someone called FARB on this podcast. He's a biohacker. He had major gut health issues back in 2001. It basically was a highly satvic diet, satvic diets in Ayurveda, very vegetarian, very light, very fresh, lots of raw food, et cetera.

He said that he followed it for a while. I think he said something like a year or two fixed his gut health and then he could go back to eating slightly more dense foods. He went back to eating a little meat after that. And again, I've done a lot of podcasts with dieticians. The one commonality I found across all the dieticians that I spoke to is that there's two commonalities. The first commonality is that everyone has a different opinion.

And it's all scientifically backed. So you have dieticians who are encouraging non-veg, you have dieticians who are encouraging vegetarian food. But when it came to vegan diets, they lacked B12 and D3. So you have to supplement for B12 and D3. If veganism is what you want to do, go for it, but ensure you're getting your supplementation, right? I personally feel from a very Indian

perspective. I believe 60% of our country has non-veg, but that doesn't mean they eat meat every day. So what Farb does is that I think he told me he eats a little bit of white meat on the weekends. Again, for the sake of mixing it up, but he's primarily vegetarian because he's kept in mind that originally back in 2001, he had bad gut health.

The other angle is that particular episode didn't get that many views because I don't think biohacking has arrived in India as a concept. I think it's going to get a lot of views over time because that's the potency of that particular episode. And it's the potency of biohacking in general. What we're talking about, this is a very basic version of biohacking in the first place. What I spoke about in terms of diets as a doctor, do you agree with me? Do disagree with me and feel free to disagree.

I agree with you in the sense that there's no perfect diet. I really don't believe that there is no magical diet that's going to suit everybody. And even in your own body, in your own experience, you know what worked for you five years ago, which is not working for me right now. So diet is something that has to be very dynamic. So Western medicine focuses on how much protein, carbs you're getting, keto, vegan, paleo, kind of boxes things in. Eastern medicine says the diet that's best for you is what you can actually digest.

So if I'm super stressed, if I'm sick, just imagine when you're sick, right? When you come down with a flu cold fever, do you crave ice cream? Do you crave pizza? No, you want soup, you want kittari, you want something simple, right? So I always tell people, if your digestion is weak, you want to eat as if you're sick, because that's what's going to match it. Anything more is going to turn into toxin.

So it's way beyond how much protein carbs. Let's just get to the basic. Can you process it or not? That's the correct question here. Okay, gotcha. Do you want to step back into the dopamine serotonin conversation? Because the overarching conversation here was about the brain and the linkage between the gut and the brain. So you said that these field good hormones are also produced in the gut first and foremost. Then they're sent to the brain where the receptors exist and then they

Yes, there's dopamine serotonin receptors, not just in the brain, also in the gut. Oh, wow. Okay. So your stress level, that gut feeling people get, you know, it's actually real. So when we're stressed, when we anxiety depression, and we have lack of dopamine or not enough to match the receptors, you feel it in your gut and your brain.

So a lot of IBS. So a recent study came out that said, if you address stress, IBS symptoms get better. Number one, far more than just diet changes. So we know this underlying mental health influence on gut health is so important to your dress. And you can't just focus on diet or pills for the brain, right? Just antidepressants or something like that. You have to look at all components.

You know, if someone shoots you in your brain or something pierces your brain during a road accident, you die immediately. Is that the case with the gut as well? So if someone shoots you and it punctures your gut, if the gut is the second brain, I wonder what the victim of that bullet wound or the road accident feels.

Yeah, so depends on where the bullet hits you. If it punctures your gut, luckily, we have almost 15 feet of gut. So if you have to remove part of it, you'll still survive. But if it punctures a blood vessel, you're bleeding out, there's sorry, no hope for that. Also, again, hit bring this up, but your poop leaks out, right? And that could cause infection.

So that's a very dangerous situation where if the poop leaks out, then you add bad infection really hard to control. So that can be very, very dangerous. Bullet wounds through like the gut area can kill you. Yeah, either immediately or maybe in a week or two, if the infection sets in. So that's the danger. What's the medical protocol in case you get shot in the gut and your poop leaks out? How do you clean it up?

So lots and lots of antibiotics, you have to do a very detailed surgery. Doctors have to go in and suction everything out, clean it out. They might not even sew you back up because there's so much swelling and inflammation. And when I say antibiotics, I'm talking about two, three intravenous IV antibiotics for sometimes for weeks.

Okay. Don't mind the morbid question. Okay. But I'm glad you brought up antibiotics because when I was growing up, it was a trend in India. Every kid was on it all the time. Like the moment you got a cold, you'd be given antibiotics. That trend has gone away. Thank God for that. Take us through both the pros and cons. Of course, there's a place for it in medical treatment, but you do pay a price for taking antibiotics. Yes.

We're paying a personal price, but also a big cost of that across the globe is that we are seeing an enormous amount of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance, basically, we are going to run out of options to treat infections is perhaps the number one threat to public health in this world. I think you'll have to do a bit of a 101 on what an antibiotic is before explaining antibiotic resistance. Yeah.

So antibiotics are basically used to kill bacteria. So if I get an infection, if I get a cold sinus infection, pneumonia, urine infection, it's caused by bacteria. I want to take antibiotics to kill them off so I don't suffer long-term consequences from it. It can be very dangerous.

The problem is often when we get a cold or a cough, we don't know if it's being caused by a virus or a bacteria. So back in the day, when I was growing up and you were growing up, you have a little cold, some fever, doctors just write you a antibiotic. Majority of the time, it's not even going to work because antibiotics don't kill viruses. So we started overusing antibiotics, and that's why all these bacteria become resistant to it.

And now we're paying a price because now you have to use even bigger antibiotics to cure a simple infection. You're talking about the effects of the 90s and the 2000s primarily, right? What was the narrative in the medical community about antibiotics back then?

At that time, we didn't really understand the long-term impact of antibiotics on our gut health, that if you wipe out all these good bacteria along with bad bacteria, it doesn't just come back. So studies have shown that even three to five rounds of antibiotics before age five can increase your risk of getting autoimmune diseases by 30%.

Wow, I mean who didn't get that much antibiotics growing up we all did right So it's not a surprise and now all of a sudden everyone's getting allergies these autoimmune diseases because of that childhood exposure Which is mind-blowing to me

And that's our generation mainly. Exactly. And Gen Z's. Yeah, so why do you think we're seeing more anxiety, IBS, more even diabetes, weight gain, cancer? A lot of it starts early on in our life where we're exposed to antibiotics over and over again. It has a permanent effect on our gut bacteria.

I have so many things to say because we've spoken about Gen Z's a lot on this podcast. It's a five year old podcast. And five years ago, Gen Z's were like 20, 19, some of them are 25 now. One of the narratives that's commonly discussed amongst millennials is that here we kind of feel like the Gen Z's are aging faster than we will. Yeah.

like you'll see graying of hair earlier, you'll see the skin age earlier, you'll see muscles age earlier, they'll get more injuries. Like the stuff that happened to us at like 31, 32 is happening to them sometimes at 23, 24. And it's not their fault. What you spoke about early antibiotic use has to have played some kind of role, at least in urban gen Z's all over the world. Right? It's not their fault.

other than the fact that social media was introduced to them early, other than the fact that there's a lot of comparison mindsets now, there's a lot of insecurity. That's increasing the cortisol levels, and that's also making them age further. But there's a lot of stuff that happened in their lives before age 10 that they weren't in control of. But they're paying the price for it now. And that's the reason why any treatment, when we talk about overall health or treating any disease, we have to pay attention to the gut.

Yes, it has a long-term impact, but if we don't work on it, if we don't improve it, we're just setting ourselves for more and more aging, more and more disease and disability down the road. Okay. So with antibiotics, what's the protocol? Say if I'm a 31-year-old male, I have a bad feeble. Am I supposed to take antibiotics on the first or second day of my feeble?

So you really need to get checked out. You first of all need to determine whether this infection is in fact caused by bacteria or virus. Until you know that, let's say you get a test, right, to figure out is this is flu, is this virus, versus actual bacteria, then you can treat accordingly. Now we have amazing tests, we can do that. We don't need to just jump to antibiotics, right? So always get tested, figure out what's actually causing it.

You're seeing antibiotics are so intense as a format of carpet bombing for your gut that you need to check in the first place whether or not bacteria is responsible for the illness that you're going through. And once you have the green light based on that test, then you can consider going for antibiotics.

Exactly. Then you know you're using it appropriately. And once you start antibiotics, the other important thing I always want to highlight is you want to take it for the right duration. Because often people say, I really don't want to take antibiotics. I know how bad they are. So they take it for a few days and they're like, Oh, I'm feeling good. I don't need more. So they stop it. That actually breeds more resistance. So next time the infection comes back, it's going to be even harder to treat.

Because you're giving your body a tiny dose of it and your body's own internal immune system fights it off. And therefore, the next time the antibiotic won't work in the first place.

and you might not get rid of all the bacteria. You might feel better if 50% of the bacteria dies, you're like, I'm done, I don't need this, but the other 50% is still there. So maybe next month, that's gonna become another infection. So the only way to do it right is to first get yourself tested for a bacterial infection and then get an exact prescription from a doctor. Yes. Because if you take it for two days instead of five or six or whatever the doctor says, that's gonna cause long-term harm to your body.

Yeah. Wow. And often what happens is there's so many antibiotics. So it's think about like, if you have, um, you know, a whole list of weapons to use, right? You have a small gun to an atom bomb. So with antibiotics, we have small guns, we have atom bombs. So you don't want to use the big guns early on when you don't need it. Are you comfortable talking about the big ones? Yeah. So there are some antibiotics we really like to reserve for really bad infections.

So sometimes people say, oh, doctor, just give me that antibiotic. It's so much easier to take. I just have to take it once a day. This one, I got to take four times it. I don't want to do that. It's not about convenience because you want to match the right type of antibiotics to the disease or the bacteria you actually have. It's a not.

It's an art and it's a science, right? So that's why identifying is it bacterial virus? What type of bacteria am I dealing with? Which will which antibiotic is going to get the job done? It's so important. It's not just about a doctor. I have this antibiotic leftover. Can I just take that? No, don't make that mistake. Let's flip this whole narrative. Um, say if you're used to taking antibiotics every time you're unwell, which is a lot of urban people. Um,

Could you explain what's going wrong inside their body post that antibiotic use? Yes. So think about a field or a garden, right?

There's lots of flowers, there's some rocks, some weeds too. I take antibiotics, I wipe out everything. Antibiotics will kill majority of the bad bacteria, but there's some that's going to be left over. So next time what happens is those bad bacteria take over more territory, there's nothing to compete, right? Open field, I can grow as much as possible. So now the bad bacteria taking over more territory.

So the next time I take antibiotic, same thing happens again. So now, instead of bad bacteria being 10%, now they're 50% of your gut bacteria. That's going to affect your hormones, your immune system, your mood. So it's not just a matter of treating that infection, the long term impact, you'll feel it in so many different areas of your health. There's a lot of the patients that you see. Yes, unfortunately. And I'll tell you one other thing.

As more awareness has gotten into mainstream and people are like, you really should not take too many antibiotics. We're still seeing this problem because over the last 20, 30 years, what has happened is antibiotics have entered our food systems. So at least in the US, and I'm sure that's true for most of the world, more than 80% of antibiotics are actually used in animals, not humans. And there's no way to regulate it.

They use the atom bomb antibiotics to feed chickens, to feed pigs, to feed cows. So they don't get infected, right? Because we have these massive animal farms to mass produce the meat. And by using so many antibiotics and by eating that meat, you're almost micro dosing. You get tiny little dose of antibiotics every single day. So think about the long-term impact of that in the gut microbiome.

Let's use the section of the podcast to draw out a guideline for non vegetarians or people who eat meat. We're not saying don't eat it, but there's a way to select your meat better.

Let's begin with chicken, most common meat. I know for a fact that the packet chicken that you find in the supermarket, that falls under the bracket that you're speaking about. And this is from back when I eat meat, because I eat chicken every day, and this is something I kind of went deep on. I asked a friend of mine,

who owned a chicken butcher shop where they actually pull it out of the cage and they'll kill it like in front of you. I thought that that's a healthier way to eat chicken, but then I found out that even those chicken are injected with steroids and or antibiotics. I just know at that point that these would definitely inject those chickens from the wholesale farms that the chickens are brought to into the city. So that was our question.

Now, in India, we have this culture of something called Gauti chickens, which means it's the equivalent of farm raised. Yes. The chicken was allowed to go here and there and eat the grass, the worms, et cetera. It's a little more expensive for sure, but that's probably the only safe way to eat chicken. Yes. Anything else?

I think the quality of meat is so much more important than how much amount of the meat you're eating. So I always ask that question to my patients when I am taking a diet history, ask them if you eat meat, what type of meat, what type of eggs do you buy? Where do you buy it from? Because that's going to help me understand how much of it should they be eating. It's not just saying I'm going to eat chicken three times a day. Yeah, but where are you getting that chicken?

spend the money, it's worth the extra effort, the money to get high quality foods. Because what you're not seeing that's on your plate is the hidden pesticides, chemicals, antibiotics, they're going to do so much more damage than just the protein you're getting in the chicken.

Can we speak about eggs as well? Yes. Same rules. I think you're supposed to have farm raised eggs. Exactly. And you know the difference. You see it, right? Sometimes when you buy these commercial-grade eggs, they're big white. They look perfect. The yolk is very light, like yellow. You buy farm raised natural eggs. Eggs not that big. Even egg might be different color, and the yolk is like bright orange. The nutritional content of these two eggs is completely different.

The amount of vitamins, proteins, nutrients you're getting from the farmer's eggs is much, much higher because the diet of those chickens is so diverse. They're not eating soy meal as their diet. That's not a natural chicken diet. No chicken was like, I'm going to eat soy meal. That's processed. They want to eat the worms. They want to eat the grass. The more variety the animal has, the more nutrients you actually get in the food.

You know, this is why the average Indian non-vegetarian probably has it easier than a Westerno. Because in the Western diet, you're probably eating chicken, fish or meat every day. Every single day. It's like at least five days of just vegetarian food. Maybe an egg here and there. But you usually end up eating non-vegetes once or twice a week. So for the Indian viewers, the guideline is just be careful about the kind of non-vegetarian.

Let's talk about seafood as well. Yes. In India, I know for a fact that between May and September, people usually avoid seafood if you're smart about it. Or you go to a restaurant and order this fish called Basa, which is catfish, which I remember again from back in the day. It's not advice to eat Basa or catfish because it's a farm redfish, especially in our country. It tastes like mud.

because it feeds on the mud in the farms. So that's the fish. I know that one is supposed to avoid in restaurants. Avoid during the period of May to September because we have our monsoon and that's when the fish breed. It's also more sustainable way of going about it. But from September to May, what are the guidelines when it comes to seafood?

So with seafood, just like animals, most of the fish is actually grown in farms, right? Highly confined area, lots of antibiotics are given to fish as well. So you're not immune to that. Not only that, because of the environmental pollution, you also worry about mercury levels. So we're seeing very high levels of mercury in so many fish. So people eat fish a lot. So in the US, I see this a lot because a lot of people say, I don't want to eat meat as much. I'm going to switch to seafood. Then you start seeing the mercury levels go up.

And you're still just as exposed to antibiotics. You know what crazy thing is in the US, there's this whole trend of eating salmon. Like the salmon fish is supposed to be very high. Heart healthy, right? Lots of omega three fats, very healthy for you. That's only if you're eating wild caught fish. So salmon is very expensive, extremely expensive, and not always environmentally advisable, right? Really? Because we're over farming.

So the problem is when you eat farm raised salmon, if you just look at it, it looks like double the size. And farm raised salmon actually doesn't have that pink color. It's gray. So they actually feed this chemical called astaxanthine to the salmon to give it that pink color.

Most people don't know. Farm is salmon is great. It doesn't look like anything like salmon. So fish are actually fed fish well supplements, Omega 3 supplements, and this color to give it that color, right? So you're not really getting any health benefits from eating that stuff. It just has processed. So what guideline do you have to see food levels?

So at seafood level, I always say go with sustainability first. Buy local as much as possible. So if it's local, then you know it hasn't traveled thousands of miles. You have better control over is it in season? Is it a good time of the year to eat it? So always think about what's local, what's in season first?

Just because salmon is all the rage doesn't mean if you're in Mumbai that you are eating salmon that's been caught or processed somewhere thousands of miles away, that's not sustainable. It's also not going to be good for your health. So seasonal, local is always the way to go. But one thing I always focus on is everything in moderation.

But the beautiful thing about our body is our body is so intelligent, it knows how to detox. If we give it the right opportunity to do so. And this is why in Eastern medicine, in Ayurveda, there's a concept that from time to time, especially the seasons that you mentioned, why are you supposed to do a formal detox, like punch a karma around that time?

Because our body is right. It's full of talks in a certain time. So we have to detox to protect our body, our immune system, our liver, our gut health. So punch karma is a process that you do at the brink of seasonal change, right? Yes. When you're going from like winter to spring, spring to fall. Yes. Got you. But it's an elaborate process as far as I know. Yes. But I'm happy to tell you my personal story about this. So in

April 2020 at the height of it.

I was in New York City at one of the busiest hospitals on the front line seeing the worse as you can imagine. I got pretty sick. I had two days to recover and I had to go right back because it was such a shortage of doctors. It wasn't until about six or eight weeks later when I had a moment to even think that I realized something is wrong with my body. My hair was falling out in chunks. I was losing weight. I was getting short of bread just even going one flight of stairs. I'm someone who can exercise for an hour. No problem.

So what I had actually was long but I didn't realize that no one knew what even it was let along what long it was. I was struggling. So then I came across I was one day on Amazon.

buying toilet paper as everyone who was doing in the US at that time. And I have no explanation for this to this day. I think it was like divine intervention. That's what I believe in. That a book about 185 year old yogi popped up on my suggestion list in Amazon. I had not searched any books or anything. I have no idea. It was an out of print book. There was one copy somewhere. I bought it. Well, what book was this? It's called life of 185 year old yogi. It's about tapas viji Maharaj.

knew nothing about this, bought the book, I read it. So in this book, it talks about ancient technique that yogis use to reverse physical aging. And it's called kaya kalpa, kaya body, kalpa means transformation. So it's an advanced level of detoxification and activating your stem cells that yogis did to keep in excellent physical shape. So they could continue meditating, continue their spiritual progress. Wow.

So this yogi, tapasu ji Maharaj, was actually a prince and patayala in the late 1700s. And then he became a sadhu. And he was doing deep meditation in the Himalayas, extreme, extreme things. One time he raised his arm up for 12 years. He would meditate in severe cold conditions, severe hot conditions. So obviously his body took a beating, right? He was aging. So he met this other yogi and said, I know this technique called kaya kalpa.

So when he was around eight years of age, he went through this process. It was a one year grueling process. But when he came out of it, he was almost 30 years old. That's what he looked like. New hair, new teeth. It sounds like magic, right? It sounds like something mythical. But the process was so intense that he went through to reverse aging, activate the stem cells. And the idea behind punch karma is something very similar. So inspired from the book, I said, I'll do punch a karma. I did it for a month. It was very intense.

And I cannot tell you, like I would not have believed it until I went through it myself. After a month, one day I was sitting there, I felt so much better, never better in my life. More energy, more lightness, more clarity in my head. One day I was sitting there and noticed my nails. It's like I literally just caught my nails two days ago and it's going right back. I had never seen my hair and nail grow that fast. I'm vain just like anyone. I want my hair and my nail to grow.

But what it was indicating that something major transformation had taken place inside, right? So that's how I got to experience firsthand the power of detoxification, the power of punch a karma. And that changed my medical practice. And I cannot tell you how many patients have put through that process and the results I've gotten, it's just unremarkable. Okay.

This is why I'm this excited about this conversation. Now, firstly, I'm brown. You're also brown. So, like, I think on some level, you're able to talk to me about this in a slightly easier manner. But say if I was black, white, Asian.

And I'm hearing about Ayurveda and all this stuff for the first time. My obvious question to you would be, Hey, what's the proof of that 185 year old guy? Yes, we have pictures first of all of him. So there is proof. But here, let me tell you, as mythical as this sounds, it's actually hyper scientific. So let me walk you through the process, what the Yogi went through. And I'll explain to you in scientific terms what it did.

So what he did, first of all, a special hut was created. A kudir was created for him that did not let any sound or light inside.

He entered that hut for one year. So the idea is you want to mimic conditions as if you're in the mother's womb. Complete sensory deprivation. Our senses drain so much of our energy, especially when we're scrolling, watching TV, it drains so much of our energy. Second thing, prolonged fasting and meditation. So you slow down the basic metabolic rate in your body. So you're basically putting your body in a state of hibernation.

And obviously meditation, all of that activating the vagus nerve, it switches your body into the super detox mode, where it's able to not only remove the toxin, but activate the stem cells to regenerate organs. And the only food that he really had was

fresh cow's milk and some herbs. So when I'm talking about this on different podcasts in America, people always like, what herbs were they? The magical herbs, like it wasn't the herbs. If I took those herbs, it would not have the same effect on me, right? It was everything the Yogi did to get the body in that state is what worked.

sensory deprivation, fasting, meditation, activating the vagus nerve. So we all have that capacity in our body. So when I talk to a Western or a skeptic audience, I always say, we're doing this in the lab. In the lab, we're able to regrow organs, regrow liver. It's possible. We're doing it. It's just Yogi's figured out thousands of years how to do it.

and we're the first generation that has this opportunity to study these things scientifically. We're the first generation. Again, the western angle on this whole topic could be, hey, show me the proof. Hey, I'm waiting for the research. Usually the eastern angle on these kind of conversations is let's study it more. Maybe what you're saying is right. Maybe it's wrong, but we'll only know through study.

And we hope that it's right, of course. But I think that over the next 10 to 20 years with everything that's happening in the field of longevity and anti-aging in the West, they're finally going to land up on a lot of this Eastern medicine stuff.

put a lot of research behind it and then figure out how to get to their goals of longevity through ancient techniques. In the same way that things like ayahuasca or peyote have come back to the forefront when it comes to mental health and evolution, this stuff is going to come to the forefront when it comes to skin health, organ health, et cetera.

Okay. The yogis were the ultimate biohackers. They really were. So now the biohacking I see in the West is very superficial, right? Yes, you might inject yourself with fresh plasma, stem cells, take all these peptides. You do all these crazy things in the name of longevity. But the real longevity is about activating the stem cells, going into a state where your body's able to clean up, remove those toxins. The body can do this on its own. It doesn't need all this bells and whistles. We just never give it the chance to do that.

Brian Johnson, the person who's trying to be immortal, he's been on the show. And we spoke in detail about this Western science and Eastern medicine angle. He was not closed off to it. But what he said was that within South American culture and African culture and Eastern culture, you have these philosophies.

And I asked him that, okay, if I'm able to get you proof and scientific research papers, would you be willing to try out these term stuff? He said, yes.

And in my head during that podcast, I thought, okay, maybe 10 years later, I'll find some research papers somewhere. And today, I'm glad I met you. I'm going to get you guys like connected, because I think that you're the scientist effectively trying to figure out the proof behind all these Eastern angles. And he's the experiment for mankind. And I know for a fact that he's very happy to live for 400 years.

But he's just trying to find a pathway and there's something very beautiful about his intention. He's going at life very intensely. He's obsessed with it. He's not bothered about what people are saying. And he's very aware of the fact that he's going to be valued probably in 2424 rather than 2024. Yes.

So you guys need to get in touch for sure. Because I think a lot of your research will help him in his process. We recently had a stem cell oriented doctor. I'm from a family of doctors. My cousin is becoming an orthopedic surgeon. He told me that within the realm of orthopedics, stem cell therapy has been introduced as the 12th modality of going about orthopedic medicine.

which is a huge step forward in the world of medicine in general. And after talking to that doctor, what I realized is that stem cell therapy based research has gone the deepest when it comes to bones and muscles, but it's also evolving when it comes to the rest of the body. And I'd love for you to again, big down the Western medicine angle on stem cells, but we'll continue our conversation. And we'll talk about how your own human body

is already producing stem cells in your bone marrow and we're also capable of naturally releasing stem cells into our own bloodstreams.

Correct? Yes. Okay. Let's take off from where we left off. Yeah. So the reason why stem cells are gaining so much attention, because first of all, let's talk about what stem cells are. Stem cells basically are these baby cells that can turn into literally any other cell in the body. So they can become your hair, your liver, your heart, your joint, your muscle, anything.

So imagine as a scientist, it's so exciting to say, why don't I figure out how to turn these cells into anything I want? If I do that, I can cure so many diseases. And that's exactly what we're trying to do. But the issue is how do we control so that it doesn't become a cancer cell? That's the biggest limitation until now in the stem cell research is how do you prevent those cells from becoming cancer cells and how do you turn them into what you actually want?

That's what's been the barrier, but we're really aggressively tackling it. And this is really the future to be able to tap into our own bodies, a billy to heal, to repair, regenerate at a capacity that we've never seen before. Are they produced primarily in the bone marrow?

Yes, but they can also be found in other areas in the body. So for example, the root of your hair, your hair follicles, liver, the fat tissue. So stem cells can be found in many other areas that makes it easier to harvest them. So sometimes the bone marrow is not the easiest place to harvest. So often we use the fat tissue to harvest stem cells. We separate them out and then we inject it wherever we do need it to go.

In terms of orthopedics, what that doctor told me is that they pull the stem cells out of the bone marrow inside the hip bone because it's the spongiest bone and it's the most accessible. And then they inject it into the joint that needs help. So I have an ACL tear right now. I'm actually going in for his therapy in some time. And he told me that injecting it in the knee is not that painful. Shoulders also not that painful because the size of the joint is big. But if it's the spine or if it's your fingers,

elbow it can be slightly discomforting but that's just limited to the realm of orthopedics.

Parally speaking, we're talking about longevity here. And perhaps in 20 years time, we'll be living in a reality where dermatologists are using stem cells for your hair, for your skin. Maybe lung doctors are using it to help people who've been long-term smokers rebuild their lungs. Gut doctors might be using it. Heart doctors might be using it. Brain doctors might be using them, of course. Okay.

Now, I will let you carry this conversation forward based on whatever you like. I would love for you to also speak about how you can generate stem cells to a larger degree within your human body and talk about the scientific aspect of that as well. Yes.

So stem cells love to go, but they're needed the most. We often don't even have to direct it. The problem is how do we activate it? In order to activate the stem cells, we sort of have to do what the yogis do. We have to orient our body in that direction.

So if all day long, I'm stressed watching TV, eating heavy foods, my body's capacity is just focused on how do I do this? How do I manage the stress, break down the food I'm eating? It doesn't have any time for detox, repair for stem cells. So that's one of the reasons why in Eastern medicine, I read out specifically, we talk about if you want to activate the stem cells, you have to reduce all the other noise.

you have to save your body's energy and attention and refocus it in the right direction. In a very practical sense, sleep a lot more. Yes, all the opposite of what we normally do, rest restoration and another big part of this is actually fasting.

Right? A digestion takes up so much energy. So by fasting, whether it's you're avoiding food or you're eating very, very simple foods, you conserve that energy that can be shifted into detox. So that's one of the main things we do in Panchakarma in the Ayurvedic detox is first step is simplifying your diet. You're eating things like kichri, you're fasting longer. So you save that energy and tell your body, use this for detox, repair and regenerating the stem cells.

Take me through the consumer perspective when it comes to Panchakarma. If I come to you and ask you for a Panchakarma based treatment, I would love for you to also share the price, but also tell me what you take my body and consciousness through. Yes.

So in Panchakar, there are four stages, and it's very important to go accordingly. Most people want to jump to the detox, because that's the part you really want, right? But the first step is preparation, the most important one. You don't go from just eating, being stressed, and running around to detoxing. You have to ease into it. Step one is cutting back, preserving your senses, not too much social media, talking less, seeing less, eating less, right? So less is more in step one.

But is this like an extended duration that I have to stay in a clinic or is it guidelines for lifestyle? Yeah, so there's a lot of versions you can do. There's obviously more intense, more involved. So when I wrote the book, I put in a 28 day detox, a reset, which is very much inspired from Panchakarma, but it's much easier to do on your own.

All right, same principles, but we're taking a lot of things out that require a lot of supervision and guidance, but everyone can do some aspect of it and benefit from it. So preparation and then your body's ready for detox. During detox phase, we simplify our diet even more to something with Ayurveda calls a mono diet. You stick to one protein, one carb and one fat.

and that is kitschy often. Because mung beans is a complete source of protein, the rice is very simple form of carb easy to digest, and ghee, not just a healthy fat, ghee has a huge detox property to it.

And then step three, just as you eased into the detox, you have to ease out of it. So step three is reintroduction. You're slowly ramping up your activity, slowly adding different foods back into your diet, waiting for your digestion to get stronger. How long are we eating ketamine for? At least a week. At least a week. Yes. That's the only meal you have.

pretty much. Yeah. Wow. Okay. And that's what gives you the results really, because you, we don't appreciate how much work it is for a body to digest food, right? Especially when we're stressed, we're running around, our vagus nerve is not activated. So it's like an uphill crime every time we eat.

So when we conserve that energy, you feel so much more relaxed. You feel more energy. You know, people are like, oh, I'm going to get you. I'm going to be so weak. It's the opposite. You got actually more energy. No fruits or vegetables, either.

You can, but what I typically recommend, fruits should always be separate from any grain. There's a big scientific and Ayurvedic principle behind it. But basically what you're eating are foods that are very easy to digest. Think about when you're sick again. You eat some fruits, you eat some kitties, some soup, broth, those type of things.

Gotcha. You eat it. Your body can't digest raw and cooked at the same time. And raw foods are harder to digest. So typically cooked vegetables are much easier. So during the detox phase, we really stick to very cooked, literally like baby food. That's what we're eating. And then you reintroduce it slowly. And the last part, that's what we all want is a rejuvenation phase.

Think about, you know, before you move into a new house, what do you do? First, you do deep cleaning. Then you put all your new furniture in. So if I want to rejuvenate, if I want some of these herbs that we use for rejuvenation to work, I need a clean slate first. So then when you take some of these herbs and continue some of these principles throughout your life, you reap the benefits. And usually two to three months after you do punch a karma is when you really start seeing it in your body. Like what?

Like I said, more energy, more clarity in your brain. You see your hair, nails, skin look completely different. Your bowel movements become more regular, right? So these are all subtle changes that are happening way deeper inside of you. So you said that there's a 28 day program, which is doable for the average everyday urban human. Exactly. What about the intense one? The intense one, I always tell people to work with an Ayurvedic expert.

There's no cookie cutter approach to it. It really is to be hyper-customized to what type of imbalance do you have. They need to know what dosa, what your dosa is, what imbalance you're experiencing. And then they customize the treatment plan accordingly. So it's not something you take lightly. It's a commitment. Your body's going through a lot. And remember, detox is not just about physical toxins.

a lot of emotional, mental, spiritual toxins are so surface. So you want to be in the right, not just physical state, but also mental, emotional state to be able to handle it. What happens? Well, there will literally be, so in my personal experience, would have done punch karma. There'll be times where I'll just be sitting there and all of a sudden I'll have memories from childhood.

or dreams that I dreamt many years ago will pop up. I don't know the explanation behind it, but there's something much deeper in your brain that is coming to surface and even emotions. You will all of a sudden feel a sense of joy or sadness, right? So it's a little bit of a roller coaster, but you know something is taking place. Things that were hidden, things that were buried are surfacing because your body needs to process those as well.

Okay, this happens a lot when you begin meditating as well. Yes. You first see your negative thoughts. And if you've just started meditating in life, you're probably going to see some heavy duty thoughts. Then if it's a habit, you end up seeing the negative thoughts, which are a little more short term, your own sense of anger, your own sense of creed, et cetera.

I think it's the brain's way of flushing out things it doesn't need. It's just coming to the surface and your conscious mind is able to see it. And I intend on talking to neuroscientists about this very soon on the show. But that's my conjecture. But coming back to the Panchakarma.

I'm gonna switch gears a little bit and ask you what the billionaires that you treat. These are all American people. Right? Probably never heard the word Ayurveda. In India, when I'm talking about Ayurveda on the show, I have to tread carefully because we sometimes get a backlash from the medical community. And I get why because there's a lot of fake Ayurveda doctors out there.

A real Ayurvedic doctor has to treat every patient very subjectively, very carefully. It's just like an allopathic doctor. But the thing is, if someone is not good at their job or someone's not qualified, they can end up giving an Ayurvedic ingredient

to a patient where maybe the need for the ingredient doesn't exist or it's not given in the right proportion. And then you see cases of liver damage, gut damage because of that Ayurvedic ingredient. And I feel this one angle pisses off a lot of Indian doctors that the fact that over the last 20 years they've seen a lot of cases go wrong with Ayurveda. I think the culprit there is quacks. Yes.

the people who aren't qualified. But there are Indian doctors like my friend, the liver dog who pushed so far at the other end of the spectrum because of the things that they've seen in their own career. They're coming from a good place. Everyone's coming from a place of healing the patient. So I have to tread very carefully when it comes to Ayurveda conversations. I'm for it. I want the world to know about these things.

I also know that there are American content creator doctors. I think Dr. Mike, I don't think he's very for it. And then apparently there's an Indian doctor and they had this conversation in a podcast. Are you familiar with what I'm saying? I don't know where that debate went either. My point of saying all this is that you're working with some American billionaires who are obviously rational thinkers. They've seen life. I'm sure many of them are self-made. A couple of questions.

What ruins the health in the first place? Second question, how do they accept this Indian therapy in the first place? I'm assuming that you show them the scientific proof, the research papers. Yes. So when you have all the money in the world, you have access to everything, right? You can go to the best clinic, best doctors. What these people are really seeking is an advice that they can trust. So that's the reason why they come to someone like me.

I get the same salary, same paycheck, whether I see a billionaire or someone who's homeless, right? So I will not shy away from telling it the way it is. There's one segment of billionaires who come to me who say, give me the latest and greatest blood tests, you know, everything that's out there from longevity perspective.

Some people will say, give me the Eastern wisdom. That's what I'm seeking. So people come to me for all different reasons. But I'll tell you where I start with them. There's one question I typically start with when I see people who are highly successful. And I ask them, how do you want to die?

I know I sound like a bird from show layers of like evil, like villain when I asked that question. And the last thing you want to hear from your doctor is like, how do you want to die? But it is such an important question. And when I ask someone, how do they want to die? I don't mean like in your sleeve, get it by a car. What I'm asking is what type of physical mental spiritual state do you want to be in when death is at your doorstep? The only thing I can guarantee is you are going to die. I'm going to die.

You always talk about longevity, adding years to your life, but I want to talk about adding more life to the years that you have. It's a very different conversation. The quality of your body, mind, spirit. Exactly. And that is something we can ensure. Whenever death comes, the work that needs to go in to optimize our physical mental spiritual state needs to start right now. It's not something you do when you get a diagnosis of cancer. And I ask this question, whether someone is 21 or 81, it doesn't matter. It has nothing to do with it.

especially when you meet highly successful people who are used to go, go, go, sometimes I need to get to their core and shake it and wake them up to see the bigger picture. They're very fixated on the latest blood test and this and that and I need to take a step back and force them to look at the bigger picture. If I don't do that, it is very hard to motivate them to change something.

And one of the biggest problems I see in when I meet these people is that as much money as they have, they actually don't have much control over their life. They're like, Doc, I'm sorry. I don't get to go sleep wide because I'm traveling all the time.

What do you eat while I eat on the go? Don't have time to sit down and eat. So the fundamental things that you need to do, take care of your body, it's ironic that they don't have time for it. So unless I shake them to the core and make them see the value of investing in their own health and avoid taking shortcuts, I'm not going to get anywhere. So that's the difference is I really have to get to the source of why someone wants to be healthy. What does life mean to them? And how is someone going to die?

What's the process from that point? I help people identify what really matters to them. Where are they lacking, right? If it's in the spiritual realm, if it's in the mental realm, or is it the physical realm, and then we identify a focus area and say, okay, we're going to work on this. We're going to work on this.

And physical, obviously, people always worry about the physical part. My knees are hurting. Oh, I have stress, anxiety. I want to focus on that. If I don't work on the mental and the spiritual part where the source of that imbalance really is, I'm not getting to the root cause. So when I help someone see the bigger picture, they're more likely to invest in their own health and say,

okay i'll prioritize my sleep i'll prioritize what i'm eating more than the meetings or the traveling right so they have to see the value in why they're making the change before they actually commit to it so the physical part is gauged through blood tests i'm assuming exactly the mental part is probably gauged through a psychologist or a therapist and the spiritual part

That's something I do. So asking questions like, how do you want to die? I ask people about what is their biggest fear? What is the best day of their life, the worst day of their life? So by asking these probing questions, you'd really try to understand how much work have they done in the spiritual realm? How much time have they invested in that? Wow.

Because without that, everything else is going to be a band-aid, right? I'm not here. I mean, I can easily sell people the latest blood tests, supplements, diets, all of that. But I know in the long run, that's not what's really going to give you results. I need to get to the root cause, the source. Okay, so we spoke about Panchakarma for releasing excess stem cells.

Again, people understand that from a physical perspective that, hey, you know, an excess of stem cells in my bloodstream will heal me from the inside. I am pretty sure that there is mental health benefits of that as well, because you've got to heal. That's an obvious physical, into mental transition. We spoke about that on the show as well.

Is there anything else you'd like to add about treatment mechanisms that you have found work really well for a large majority of people? Because I will open up the spiritual stuff, but after this part. But I think one aspect of Panchakarma that we can practice on a daily basis is fasting, intermittent fasting. I know it's all the rage right now, but I can tell you majority of the people who are doing intermittent fasting are doing it wrong. This is how most people do it.

They wake up and they say, I'm not that hungry. I want to skip breakfast. So I can get that intermittent fasting. Lunch comes around. They say, you know, I want to be healthy. I'm going to have some salads, some vegetables, something simple. Then the afternoon evening comes and you are so hungry. And then you eat your biggest meal at the end of the day, much later in the day. That's what most people do and say. Dr. Perique, I do 16 hours intermittent fasting.

You know, you should be impressed that I'm doing it. But I tell them, when your intimate fasting window doesn't align with your internal body clock called circadian rhythm, it's actually counterproductive. In Ayurveda and even in, you know, many ancient worlds are saying that you eat breakfast like a prince, lunch like a king and dinner like a popper.

we do the opposite, right? That's how intermittent fasting is not supposed to work that way. So one of the best things you can do is incorporate fasting into your daily routine.

Pretty much everyone can do 14 hours into been fasting. Earlier the dinner, the better. Later the dinner you're eating, make it lighter, easy to digest, right? Don't skip your breakfast. So by doing regular into been fasting, you're giving your body the opportunity to do a little bit of cleanup every single day. So the toxins are just piling up, right? So that's something we can all do. And if you think about in our Indian culture,

There's a big emphasis on fasting, right? There's always some kind of fast. And I used to always wonder about that. I'm like, I used to get annoyed with my family members who are always fasting. I'm like, on the shredda, you know, this is nonsense. There's so much science behind this. It's fascinating as I learn more about how important fasting really is. That's something we can all do and reap benefits.

Also, in India, when someone's saying that they're fasting on a particular day, I've noticed that there's very few people who will actually not eat anything and just drink water. Most people end up eating really light food. They call it Upvaskarhana, like fasting food. Now, as an empty doctor, do you think that having that simpler food, you know what Sabudana is? Yes. Food like that, without too much masala, without too much spice and salt. Does that also help heal your digestive system?

Yeah, so what I say during the day, whatever you're eating, you simplify it. Make it simple, whether it's sabbadah, kichu or fruits, or just regular kichu or mung beans, anything that's easy to digest. And at night, you give yourself at least 14 or 16 hours to work on that detox. So the balance between two is more sustainable rather than doing hardcore uplas, where you're just not eating anything for 24 hours or 40 hours. That can be too intense for most people. Gotcha.

So start slow, read your body, but really make it part of your life. Gotcha. Okay. Now let's open up the spiritual part because at the start of the podcast, you spoke about the vagus nerve. I'd love to revisit that. Fair to say the most important nerve of your body. Absolutely. The master nerve that controls literally everything in the body. Can we talk about the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system related to the vagus nerve? Yes. Go for it.

So think about driving a car, right? Same car, if you put it in the forward gear, it's going to go forward. If I put it in reverse, it's going to go backwards. Same car, same BL, same engine, everything. A nervous system is the same. If I'm in fight and flight, a very different set of chemicals will be activated in my body, especially the stress hormone cortisol or adrenaline. If I put my nervous system in the relaxed mode, vagus nerve will be activated. When I do that,

I'll fight inflammation. I'll make my immune system stronger. I'll make my brain neurons even stronger. So many different things are happening. Every single cell in the body is going to behave very differently. This can happen outside of sleep and meditation. Absolutely. So it definitely happens during your sleep and meditation.

And you probably see that in your whoop, right? Yeah. You see the heart rate barrier, like the markers change so much. Using the whoop has been the most important thing I've done in my late 20s and early 30s. Definitely my stress levels fall in phases of my sleep. And then when I meditate, it goes down like crazy. I feel incredible post meditation. I feel incredible if I've had a good night's rest.

But you're saying as a doctor that there's a way to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system, there's a way to activate your vagus nerve outside of meditation and sleep. Yes. How? There are so many ways you can actually do it. So what I typically tell my patients is come out with a prescription of things they're good. They are going to do every single day to activate the vagus nerve. If meditation is not their cup of tea, don't worry about it.

Even things like walking in nature, listening to certain types of music, taking a hot bath, going into the sauna, journaling, writing down your feelings, praying. All of those things can actually activate your vagus nerve so tremendously. And think about it just as a muscle, right? If you wanted to get stronger, you have to activate it every single day.

And every day you are going to make it so that you're able to handle more stress, more stress, more stress without snapping into that fight and flight. That's the ultimate goal. Stress is not going away, right? We're not here to hide from the stress. What we're trying to do is make our nervous system so strong and resilient that whenever stress does come, we're not just ending up in the fight and flight forever. And we're able to still activate our vagus nerve so we can recover much faster.

Also, if your ambitious stress is just going to keep increasing in your life. So you have to figure out these hacks and these are hacks. Last night, a podcast with Mr. Beast got scheduled, which is what we're going for right after this. And I had to realign four podcasts to just make room for this one. My whoop stress meter kind of broke. It flattened out at the top.

And I knew I'm not going to be able to sleep. So I did what I normally do, which is that I did a light stretching session for 15 to 20 minutes. And I sat to pray and meditate after that. Before I began the stretching session, I did a breathing exercise, a normal home. Yes. What do you call it in English? Alternate nostril breathing. Alternate nostril breathing. Set my brain straight, stretched, prayed, meditated, slept well.

woke up well, meditated when I woke up. And this has been my routine to handle the level of anxiety that I feel as a YouTuber or more or as a podcast. That's a whole other conversation. But my point is,

Do you think stretching, meditating, brain? These are quicker ways to activate your way of the snow. Absolutely. And we need those, right? So I use analogy of a cell phone, right? You have your mobile phone. You're using it all day long. It's draining the battery. You have to charge it every day for it to work. There's so many things stress pulling us in different direction that drains our battery. Emotional, mental, spiritual, physical, all sorts of batteries. How are you recharging it?

Right. So pick something that you enjoy doing that you can tap into in a moment's notice and make it part of your daily routine. So whether as soon as you wake up, it's five minutes of just breathing, five minutes of meditating or five minutes even journaling before you go to bed, whatever it is, make it part of your life. And that's going to help maintain your level of battery, that energy that we all seek. Do you think it's subjective for everyone?

It can vary. So this is what I do in my practice. I'll give you a real life scenario, what I actually do. So when I see these CEOs, these billionaires, they have a harder time understanding. They obviously are stressed, but they're like, yeah, but I'm also doing all this work. Stress is inevitable. I can handle it.

So I put this little device on them that measures that heart rate variability in real time, but it also has this really cool feature where I can set it at different levels and I'll vibrate. So once it goes below a certain point when you're entering the fight and flight, it'll vibrate a little bit.

So then that's how in real time you know, oh, this conversation, this argument I'm having with my loved one, me getting stuck in traffic, like what are the real situation scenarios that are putting me in fight and flight? It's not that obvious to people. We think we know what's stressing us out, but we don't really know.

So by having that data, you know, every time I have this conversation, this meeting, this situation, I'm going to fight and flight. It's not worth it. If I'm running late for a train, it's not worth me going to fight and flight. So when that thing vibrates, you take a pause, you take 3D breaths to reset your nervous system, activate the vagus nerve. So when you become conscious of this, it becomes part of your life. And then you recognize situations that need a lot of work that you need to pay attention to.

So it's hyper-focus, hyper-personalized approach to stress management by combining the technology and by combining some yoga-based techniques. So generally speaking, if I'm dealing with a high stress day and I have an hour as a doctor, what would you advise me to do in that hour?

We draw your senses, close your eyes, right? Don't speak for at least five, 10 minutes. Focus on your breath, take deep breaths. That's the best way to reset your nervous system and get your vagus nerve activated. And the more stressed you are, the more often you take these breaks. I know for a fact that...

the pace of your breathing can severely affect your mind and your consciousness and how you view the world. So say if you're feeling very stressed, if you're feeling very anxious, what's the quickest way to bring down that anxiety? Is there a breathing technique? So the best technique for this is called diaphragmatic breathing. What you're using is a secret muscle that we all have between our lungs and our belly called diaphragm. Most of the times when we're breathing, we're breathing right here. That muscle is not even being used.

Like we're shallow breathers. In order to activate the vagus nerve, we have to use that muscle because the vagus nerve goes right through it. So you breathe through your stomach? Exactly. So you expand your belly as you breathe in, you relax your belly as much as possible. And then you breathe out just from your nose or even from your mouth, if that's easier for you to begin with.

The goal is to prolong the exhalation more than inhalation. When you do that, you get more vagus nerve activity. So just taking a nice deep breath in through your nose and then out through your mouth, almost like you're blowing out a candle but doing it very, very slowly. Even if you do it for three or five breaths, I've seen it. I've had people hooked up with different sensors. Within three breaths, you can get out of fight and flight.

I feel high right now. Right? It does. It actually secretes endorphins the same chemicals that you get when you exercise. So even three breaths can be a game changer when used in the right way. I highly recommend the listeners to pause the video and do this immediately and then continue watching the video, but pause it right now. And we're back. Speaking about feeling high. Yes. I don't know why I'm asking you about weed.

It's gotten legalized in the US. Again, I don't have strong opinions on either way. I think there's a lot of people who are against the legalization of marijuana all over the world, and I see that happening inevitably. Because I see it happening in America, I see it happening in a lot of other countries. I think just like alcohol addiction, it can go wrong. Because at the end of the day, you are relying on an external substance for feeling something that your body doesn't really have to feel.

And in saying that there are a lot of medical benefits of THC CBD, obviously, I have also seen enough and more cases where I've seen a person dealing with some kind of chronic anxiety. And sometimes they'll

This has become common in India. You get gummies in India now, but they are medically licensed gummies. And they'll end up taking a medically licensed gummy once a week. And it actually kind of has a good impact on their anxiety levels. But the issue there, I feel is that people don't limit themselves to like once a week. It's just like alcohol.

I personally feel I have consumed a lot of pot in my life when I was younger. I think more than once a week has some kind of a long-term impact on your mind. Dr. Huberman that's spoken about this in one of his podcast, he said that in his eyes twice a week is as far as you should go. And if you go beyond that, it leads to chronic anxiety in the long term.

And this is besides the fact that if you have any kind of mental health trouble, like if you have schizophrenia, then of course. But this is the medical gauge on THC usage. What do you have to say about marijuana generally, both from a Western science, MD perspective, the Ayurveda perspective, go for a dog.

I actually prescribe a lot of medical marijuana in my practice. The way I use it is often as a substitute to something else someone is taking. So someone has chronic pain and they're taking these heavy-duty pain medications. I know marijuana is going to be a safer option for them, right? So it's often as a safer alternative to something that could be far worse or far more addicting. For anxiety, I see a lot of people taking things like Xanax, right, chronically, not a good thing.

So maybe switching them to a little bit of CBD, THC at night might be beneficial, helping them get off some of those medications.

So that's how I use it. But it's a very thin line you have to walk. If you're just swapping one addiction with the other, it's not going to serve you in the long run. So if you are trying to come back on more heavy duty medications like opioid Xanax, fine, you can use it every single day. But if you're using more recreationally or just to help with a little bit of anxiety or stress, then more than once or twice, if you're using it, it will start rewiring your brain. Coming back to that idea is the more

Cannibutinoids, THC, CBD circulating in your brain, your body's going to make more of those receptors. So now to get the same high effect, you have to take even more. You get right back into the cycle, the vicious cycle of addiction. We spoke about it at the start of the episode. Exactly. Yes. It's basically the same, grandmom logic of, hey, don't do anything in excess.

Anything excess is poison, right? So there's a lot of benefit to marijuana. There's a lot of therapeutic potential, but we use need to use it in a very careful way. Yeah. Do you think this therapeutic potential for the average everyday human not dealing with any kind of chronic trouble? Like you said, you give it when someone has chronic pain or anxiety and they're taking some medicine, which would actually affect the liver and the kidney. Yeah. So this is just a safe alternative.

It is safe for alternative, but doesn't mean that if you're otherwise healthy, doing fine, you don't need to nicely get into it. It's like saying, you know, alcohol has some benefits, a glass of wine, but if you've never had any alcohol, is wine the best way to kind of take care of it? There's so many other things you can do for your health. So I would rather not open that door that can be a slippery slope for many people, rather use other options. Okay. What did doctors talk about THC usage in the West? Like when you meet other doctors, what are the conversations like?

I think the sentiment has changed tremendously in the last 10 years because in America we face a huge opiate crisis. We were just like antibiotics, we were writing opiate prescriptions to everyone and all the time. So we saw a massive increasing addiction and that's from overdose saying. What happens when you take an opiate like you get a high? It's the same pathway as taking heroin.

So it gives you a very nice numbing effect, so people get addicted to it really quickly. And then you need higher and higher dose. And then comes the dose at which you essentially stop breathing.

So we were seeing so many overdoses in so many different settings. As a country, we had a reckoning. We realized that this is a slippery slope. We have to stop this. We have to look at other alternatives. And that's where a lot of research actually went into looking at not just marijuana, even things like acupuncture, meditation, yoga. You won't believe this, but

About four or five years ago, American College of Physicians, which is one of the biggest organizations for doctors, came out and said to treat low back pain, which almost one into Americans have. To treat low back pain, first line therapy now, before you even give paracetamol or ibuprofen, they said, we need to look at acupuncture. We need to look at meditation, yoga, massage.

big-body organization of physicians is saying we need to do a better job at incorporating these evidence-based Eastern medicine.

into a repertoire and not just jump to medications because we have seen what it can do, the damage it can do. So imagine now doctors, they are saying first line, you got to use acupuncture meditation. So this week only happens when there is so much research behind it. It doesn't happen overnight. The research is already there. The question is, are we practicing it or not?

Honestly, America is leading the way in terms of whatever America does, the rest of the world ends up copying. So the fact that this body of physicians says this, I think times are hopeful. Does the average Westerner accept these therapies though? I'm just asking from a place of curiosity, not judgment. Yeah. There was a recent survey that said more than 40% of people in America are already using these things.

Right? The problem is they're not really communicating that to their doctors or doctors are not aware how to counsel someone because in my medical school training, I never learn about acupuncture.

The shocking fact is, in my four years of medical training, in medical school, I got four hours of educational nutrition, four hours in four years, even though we know diet is fundamental to literally everything we treat. So you can see there's a big gap between our medical training and what the science is really showing right now. We're lagging a lot. We have a lot of work to do to catch up. Which is why the best doctors are the ones that stay students for life. You have to keep learning about

adjacent subjects. Okay, another adjacent subject when it comes to drugs. We're talking about love. We had someone on the show speak about epigenetics. I think it was FARB. So epigenetics

I would love for an MD doctor to explain it, but this is my understanding that you have a certain genetic code which you're born with through your parents, but through the course of your life, you can take actions that can either negatively impact or positively impact your genetic code. So if you're someone who's addicted to smoking or drinking, that's going to show up in the genetic code of your kids who are not born yet.

This is why epigenetics matters. But I've heard a positive narrative from a friend of mine, Akshath Rajan, who's a biohacker. His narrative is that he read a study on how love, cuddling and in excess of oxytocin a little bit positively impacts your epigenetic profile.

far more than people give credit. So I'll give you a story. So in 1978, researchers were doing a study to understand how high fat, high cholesterol in our diet was actually causing heart disease. So they took a group of rabbits and they fed them very high fat, high cholesterol diet. And most of the rabbits, like 99% of them develop heart disease as they predicted. It was a small group of rabbits that did not.

So they were scratching their heads trying to figure out, okay, what happened? Did we not follow the protocol? Turns out the research technician who was taking care of those rabbits would pet them, would sing to them as he was feeding them. Because the rabbits were far more relaxed and happier, even eating a diet very high in fat and cholesterol, they did not develop heart disease.

a mental emotional state has such a dramatic impact on our how body reacts. And this is exactly why I focus on it. You can eat a perfect diet. But if you're lacking that emotional mental component to it, you're just not going to get through the cells. So why not we look at the big picture? You'll always see this with happy, older people. The happiest ones are either the ones where they have a very stable and fulfilling relationship and or love from family around them.

I've come to realize and this happened after I saw Reel on Instagram. I saw this old British guy, very happy. He's like, I eat four strips of bacon every day and I cook it in lard. And there was like,

like an inch of lard in his frying pan. But he was very happy and he's like, I'm more than 90 years old, I'm healthy. And I'm like, happiness has something to do with the long-term health of people. That's what they say about Warren buffet as well. Yeah. That he has a Coca-Cola and a McDonald's burger every single day. But I think he's, I'm sure he's above 90. Yeah. Happy and healthy. And he has a stable relationship. So love has something to do with long-term health. I just can't tell what.

a lot to do with it. That's why we need to invest enough time and energy, not just taking our physical mental health, but also our social health, right? Nurturing the relationships. And I've seen this play out in the hospital. So as a doctor, one of the biggest privileges I have is to see people at the end of their life, right? And that gives you a window on what life really is like. Wow. So one time when I was a resident, I took care of one of the richest people on the earth.

Like generational wealth. Like if I say the name, like everyone knows who this person is. Older gentleman in his 80s, the most polite, nice man. He was in the VIP floor. So I would check in on him every day. The seven days he was there, the only person I saw was his assistant. Never saw a family member come by, no one, right?

And on the contrary, at the same time I was taking care of another patient, not on the VIP floor, he was a janitor, so he would clean the toilets and clean the floors at a local school. And we had to control how many people would come into visit. He had students, teachers, students from 20 years ago coming to see him, not to mention his family, his neighbors, right? So, and I saw a big difference in how fast two people healed.

So yes, we can say the antibiotics did the work, medications did the work, but I know that emotional, that love that one person felt definitely helped a ceiling process for someone who did not. So very big contrast, and this is where you see things play out and really understand what's truly important.

I mean, I'm sure that on a biological level, it may have something to do with oxytocin and serotonin. Of course. Your vagus nerve, right? Love cuddling. They've seen, you know, there was a study that was done in University of Washington where they took a group of college students and then they showed them, they did different interactions with animals. So first group got to cuddle with dogs and cats and pet them. They saw their quarters all drop within 10, 15 minutes.

The other group got to see pictures of cute baby animals. Their cortisol also dropped versus compared to control. So that's why sometimes I say if you got to scroll on Instagram at night, watch some cute like

puppy videos or cat videos. That'll probably have a much more positive impact on you. And that's also a quick way to de-stress, right? So we take some of these little things for granted that if you have a pet, the pet is doing amazing things to your physical, mental, emotional health. When you're playing with a child, like some of these interactions, we don't realize how much it charges that emotional social battery for us and will help us live a long, healthy life. Okay.

Yeah, I don't know why we didn't bring up love in that vagus nerve section. Seems pretty obvious. Sometimes if you're just spending time cuddling with your partner, there will be a moment, maybe 15, 20 minutes in, where you do feel a bit of a buzz. What is the buzz?

The buzz is that burst of endorphins, serotonin, dopamine. So once you hit a threshold, all the receptors are getting full with that dopamine and serotonin. So you feel this natural calmness, this joy, this euphoria to a certain degree. So as you build up to it, and the more you do it, again, you're resetting that threshold. This is one of the healthy ways of getting that dopamine hit rather than the unhealthy ways we talked about. And probably the cheapest way to go about anti-aging.

Right? Let's find a partner. Instead of fighting with your partner, cuddle with us. So that's a prescription for our success. One last section on today's episode because we're talking about love. It's an adjacent topic. Sexuality in general. Where does it fit into your treatment mechanisms?

I'll let you go for it. In terms of, because we've covered every single topic, I think we've covered gut health, dopamine, all that. Maybe I can twist the question a little bit and begin by speaking about hookup culture and one night stands, et cetera. What has your experience as a doctor taught you? And generally, what is the role of sexuality when you combine it with monogamy?