Dr. Sean O'Mara: Visceral Fat Expert Explains Gut Health, Weight Loss, Skin Health, Microbiome & Fermented Foods | Carnivore Diet Mistakes, Fasting & Circadian Rhythm

0:04 This is the Fitness Wisdom podcast.

0:09 Today we've got Doctor Sean O'Mara back on the show. And our previous discussion was absolutely fascinating. We went really deep on everything, visceral fat. But today where our conversation is going to be diving in all things gut health because I don't know a single area of life which is actually not impacted by our gut, right? And we've got Doctor Sean O'Mara back on the show to enlighten us on this subject. So thank you for coming, Doctor Sean John. It's a pleasure and an honor to have you on the show.

0:32 Yeah. Well, it's great to be back and thank you so much for the opportunity to come back and share great content, important conversations with your followers. Amazing, amazing. So maybe let's start off basic for people who actually don't know anything about gut health. What does gut health even mean? When you know, when we say we throw these words around on social media, you know, you hear things like health functional training or blood sugar management. You hear all these words, but no one ever really defines things because everything is made so, you know, for quick clips online.

1:04 So do you want to go a little bit deeper and give people like the real understanding What? What do we mean when we actually say guts health? Yeah. So it's really an enormously important area of focus and it really, I think, is best reflected in the history of medicine. So when I went to medical school, the father of medicine that we study is Hippocrates. And he, you know, we take what's called a Hippocratic Oath where we pledge our professional pursuits to be you healing arts and really to get people to be in a noble way and healthy as possible.

1:41 And the father of medicine, you know, Hippocrates famously said over 2000 years ago, all disease begins in the gut. So, you know, full stop, wherever you are right now, recognize that your health is coming from your gastrointestinal tract, your gut, and it becomes an incredibly important area of focus where you should be looking at your health through the lens called the health of your gut. So if you don't really, you know, know what to look at, you know, if you pay attention to what your doctors will tell you, mostly today, modern, it's going to be like blood, lipids, cholesterol, things like that.

2:24 And I would tell you that you should, I'll really be focusing in on your gut. And you know, as far as metrics and markers to follow, you know, you can keep it pretty simple. You know, I would say, you know how well you pee and how well you poop. You know, the quality of your defecation and your ability defecate is going to be more important than even following, you know, your blood markers and your cholesterol. So for instance, I'll give you an example of something that everybody but he should be aware of, which is just of the Bristol stool chart.

3:03 So the Bristol stool chart is a way they teach us this in medical school. But all your followers should look at, you know, a classification system, Bristol stool chart. And I have this on my Instagram page and this shows you the different types of stool characteristics that your stool should look like. So ideally, what you want is a really, really smooth stool. I mean, no cracks and no bumps. So it should be like glass and it should be tapered at both ends. If you look at everything else, nothing else even closely resembles this tapering.

3:40 And the tapering really should be a lot more pronounced. And the reason that taper happens is the functionality of your body in eliminating that stool reflects the degree of how healthy you are. So just how you expel and defecate really is an important reflection of just how healthy you are. So a few characteristics is just the appearance of that stool, but I'd also tell you the smell of that stool, your stool ideally should not have a bad odor. Now, for the most part, people have bad odors, what we call a malodorous stool or bad smelling stool.

4:28 But sometimes you go into a public bathroom and it smells like a dead animal has been left in a very long time. And that is somebody that's really got very bad quality gut health and what's going on there are the microbes that you have inside your gas and intestinal tract, Andreas. These create an ecosystem. When you go to Africa or the the rainforest of the Amazonian rainforest in South America, it has a great smell. It's healthy, it's vibrant, it's vigorous. But if it starts to die and decay, it will have a bad odor.

5:11 And so when you have a bad odor going on in, you know, in your stool, it reflects a bad ecosystem. So you really want stool that doesn't smell. You want a bowel movement that lasts about 3 to 7 seconds. It takes to expel your, your, your rectum, all of the stool residing in your rectum. And it should reflect more a reflex, nothing intentional. It's not like you sit and you strain, it should just naturally happen automatically to the autonomic nervous system and the reflection. The reflex should be smooth and easy.

5:54 No, no effort. It should be pleasant, it should not be painful and besides the nice, the better smell and fast it. It should also be silent. There should be no concomitant pass it to gas, no noise. So if you got gas, you got smell. It takes you a long time. You're unhealthy. Now lots of people want to just take pills, but you know, the healthier you live your life, the easier it's going to be the better you're going to be able to to defecate. But you want that kind of a stool of that kind of an appearance and kind of a, a corollary to that also, which reflects the degree of health is is this right here?

6:47 Do you see this green fluid here next to this green soda? And what this green fluid is, Andreas, is that is super healthy human pee. And you cannot have that kind of a pee unless your gut is really, really healthy. So you want to make sure that you have an optimized microbiome and you have an optimized diet. So nobody else is talking about this, but I talk about the appearance of stool, how you how you defecate and also the appearance of pee. It should be brilliant. It should be fluorescent green and it should say to your brain, this is good.

7:33 And for the most part, people's urine is dingy yellow, various shades, and sometimes it gets fluorescent if you take vitamins or something like that. But that's really an exogenous contribution. But this really should be happening naturally, and it's a byproduct of a healthy diet where I advocate, you know, a living diet. So eating good healthy meat and what's required to produce this color is keem. Keem is a nutritional element that's found in ruminant meat, particularly if you really want to up regulate and and increase your chance to see this eating liver and particularly in raw form, raw liver from a grass fed grass finish ruminant like a bison, a cow, goat, something like that.

8:31 It's going to give you a lot more brilliant, you know, amount of that heme and that gets converted to Billy Verdon and then to Billy Rubin and then into what you're seeing here, which are tetrapyrol, chromophore. So that's a type of chemical element that's that's really found only in meat eaters. So it's possible that you can get some coloration. It's weaker, but it's not in the IT is brilliant and as healthy and powerful and vegans, but they they tend to have to drink like green teas and then it's very mild.

9:12 It nothing like this fluorescent green. So you want to pee? Well, you want a powerful stream. You want a super healthy bladder, which is a product of a super healthy gut. So anyway, I took a little time to explain that, but you know, you don't have to have fancy laboratory tests. It's just how awesome are you when you defecate? So I, you know, you want to pee like a champion, defecate like a hero. As a saying, I like to say, you know, that it really reflects the quality of what your body produces really is a product of just how healthy your gut is.

9:53 And the last point I'll say about this, this green is you can eat super, super dense heme, you know, grass fed, grass fed beef. You won't make this green pee unless you have a healthy microbiome, a healthy collection of allies inside your gut that participate in, contribute to, and even organize and orchestrate your Physiology, your health. They are actively involved in building your health or destroying it. And it's your choice. How you live your life, what you eat influences who's going to be living inside your gut.

10:38 And you want friends in there. You don't want foes. Foes cause disease, friends cause health. So the healthier you live, the more attractive you build a home for for these healthy microbes. Modern life has created the problem our biology was never designed for. It keeps us stuck in a state of fighting flight. Your biology isn't designed to live there 24/7. The parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest state, is where your body can prioritize restoration, regeneration, and resilience.

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11:36 Because true performance isn't always about pushing harder, it's about knowing how to switch into recovery mode. So if you wish to explore my favorite vagus nerve stimulator, head over to Xeno Well dot AI forward slash mobility fitness and make sure to use the promo code mobility FITNESS at checkout to get nice discount on your entire order. What a fantastic drastic breakdown and so many great points that you mentioned there, including that what you said about the autonomic nervous system. I definitely want to circle back to that as well because maybe you can tell us, you know, how that's actually influenced.

12:03 Maybe that maybe the microbes actually influence the nervous system and that's why maybe, you know, it allows you to go to the bathroom. But we can go back to that in a second. Before we go any deeper though, like I definitely want to get into all of the different systems of the body which the gut actually influences and I want to go down different, you know, pathways, for example, brain health, muscle health, immune system. Well, you've got so much, right? You've got skin, hair, nails. I don't think there's anything which is not impacted right from our from our gut.

12:34 Yeah. So you know another, you know, you mentioned skin. We'll just hit that, you know, when we studied in medicine the different cells in the body there, of which there are about 10 trillion of them, but there are classifications for these cells where they are are, you know, dictate the histological characteristics, making them very different. So for instance, hepatocytes are liver cells, myocytes are muscle cells. Cardiac myocytes are are specifically cardiocytes or cells in the heart. Retinocytes.

13:14 Retinocytes are cells in the retina. Urethrocytes are urethra cells within urethra, ureterocytes. There's there's renal sites, kidney cells, so there's just thousands of different types of cells and we would have to look in a microscope and identify each of these cells. But what's interesting is on the outside of your body, your skin, your exogenous skin is made-up of stratified squamous epithelial cells. These epithelial cells are cells that are unique to the skin, but they are also in one other area besides your skin.

13:55 They line your gut. So think about this. If you're listening to the podcast, you have a continuous layer of cells that are on the outside of your body. And get this, they're right here. They go inside your lips, inside your mucosa, in the back of your throat. They line your esophagus, they line your stomach. They line the 1st and 2nd parts of your duodenum, your small intestinal tract, your colonocytes, your rectum, and then they hit at your anus. They're one continuous sheet on the inside and out.

14:31 And so the appearance of your skin reflects the appearance of what's going on inside your gut. The healthier your gut lining, the healthier your skin. And so as people get more birthday candles on their cake, not because they're getting older, they frequently wear out their gut with more disease. And so their skin doesn't look so good when they're in their seventies, 80s and 90s because that gut is falling apart. But if you are intentional about how you live and the choices you make, you can extend the quality of your gut and it's reflected in the appearance of your skin.

15:16 And so old skin is disease skin that you know you disease as you get more birthday cakes. But candles on your cake. But not if you are living correctly. First of all, you don't want to be eating cake. Get a steak, you know, something healthy or a bowl of tinchy and put your candles in that. But you should not be eating processed cake if you want to have, you know, good looking skin. So that point is really important, your skin and your hair. I'm 63 years old and I have a full thick in a head of hair.

15:52 There's not a bald spot in me. And I'll just do this. I mean, a little experiment, I tell my clients, go into an auditorium, or you could do this in your church or somewhere and look for the Gray hair that's in that. As you walk in, you see everybody's back and look for Gray hair. And usually you'll see a bald spot here. OK. Yeah, that where the hair has been lost from declining blood flow. But occasionally pay attention to the Gray hair that doesn't have that bald spot. OK. And you look at theirs, their stomachs, they'll have a flat abdomen.

16:29 The ones with bald hair will have a bulge. And that is because of poor gut health. And a lot of that is mainly coming from visceral adiposity, visceral fat that surrounds the small intestine, the colon, the rectum, and fills your gastrointestinal tract with inflammatory substances, wearing you out which leak through those types. Epithelia cells, the lining of the gut, leak in in a concept called leaky gut, where toxins, endotoxins, ripple polysaccharides, even pieces of bacteria besides the toxins they create start leaking through those cell lines that should be really tight and then they cause havoc, inflammation.

17:21 So you age your skin, you end up diseasing your small vessels, your capillaries and your scalp. That's a hard area to perfuse right there. And you know, it's a very distill area. And so you ball from that point on. And so your hair, your skin reflect and your nail beds, how healthy your gut is. Wow. Absolutely incredible. Yeah. It just shows you that it's just one continuous network and that nothing in the body is actually separate. So I think this is also why it's so empowering to have this discussion.

17:54 It's to make people realize that just by addressing simply your gut, you can improve so many areas of your life. Right. And we will be getting into some solutions as well. But let's go a little bit deeper into the different areas of the body as well. Talk to me a little bit about the mind, like the mind gut connection or the the gut brain connection. I think that's a very important one for people to understand. Yeah, so. You know the gut returning to these cells, they're called tight junctions, OK, These tight epithelial cells, their approximation, their relationship next to each other and just how healthy they are reflect their functionality.

18:36 They form this barrier that perfectly contains the toxins that are inside our gut. I mean, we have been since the beginning time exposed to things that are toxic to get inside of us. And it's not just through our diet, it's also through the action of microbes to get inside our food. And as a byproduct of their metabolism, their living, they produce toxins. They get released. Your gastrointestinal tract, Andreas, is perfectly, and I mean perfectly designed to contain those toxins within that tube.

19:19 And we learned this in medical school. And if you can grasp, it took a little bit, I remember medical school to understand this concept that what's inside the lumen of your gut, like inside, like where your stool is and your food is technically outside your body because you have a barrier that contains it, but not if it's diseased and those cells become leaky and stuff that shouldn't get in starts leaking in. And I shared how it goes to your skin and causes you get wrinkly looking skin and unhealthy appearance.

19:57 But it, you know, ruins your fingernails and your hair as well, but it also travels to your brain. And these toxins play an enormous role. And brain health and we see the role of diet with dementia and neuropathologic conditions, neurodegenerate conditions like memory impairment, cognitive impairment and loss of executive function. All right, pay attention to, if you're listening here, one of the things that happens to the elderly when they're like 80 and 90 years old, they start talking like I was a little boy.

20:43 I would do a paper route. You know, they talk like that well inside that guy and that woman is still a little boy trapped in a brain. They can't talk and express themselves. But what I will honest to God tell you is I see and men and women in their 70s and 80s and 90s restore their brain. As they restore their health, and their gut in particular, they become faster talking, more articulate and more expressive. Old people have a lack of expressivity. They talk like this, they do animation in their face.

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23:44 The link will be in the description below alongside with a 15% discount code and their. Ability in their executive functions, their frontal cortex and and there are other areas of the brain to get their thoughts out. So maintain your gut and you maintain your brain and help to prevent yourself from becoming diseased as you get older. The truth is I often times say this that the best professional athletes and warriors commandos in the future are going to be men and women my age. Right now in their 60s they will play better soccer, football, tennis than people in their 20s.

24:24 Why? Because we are going to learn and get those professional athletes to preserve their health so they will have the same degree of out. And Are you ready for this Even better health than a 20 year old. How is that going to be possible? Because the 20 year old has two decades, only two decades of learning how to be healthy. What happens if you add four more decades, 40 more years of intentional, thoughtful pursuit of optimization of the biology, combining it with position of better skill sets and doing whatever they do, more acquired skills and playing soccer, tennis, football, baseball, whatever sport they do.

25:12 And the same is going to apply to our world leaders. They will be more articulate. They will be better debaters, better communicators. And so in the future, I am saying you will see these dramatic improvements and older people's appearance and their performance across the board. But it is a big world. There's 8 billion people. I'm only working with about 300 right now, and I'm almost completely, you know, turning away from just average people to try to reach more influencers. In the past eight months, I've gotten the very high level political leaders in our country and public figures because they represent a richer target of influence.

26:05 Because if you can get the people at the top to look better, perform better, live better, they're going to be better influencers to get this out to more people. I could take it average person and just blow them up, make them incredibly healthy, but their ability to get an ROI and share that with other people is unfortunately going to be limited. They're not going to be able to influence as many people to stop eating crappy processed foods and to start executing exercising and to start becoming intentional more throughout the day, thinking of their body as really their most important business that they'll ever be involved in.

26:50 But that's how you're going to become more healthy in an optimal way, definitely. Definitely. I think, I think it's so mind blowing how the guts literally controls the brain. Like I feel like, you know, your gut health literally influences your decision making and your behavior. So if your gut health is not, you know, if it's poor, you're going to be like way better, I mean way worse with your decisions. You're going to make bad influence, like bad decisions in your life. You're not going to make the right choices.

27:17 But if your gut is healthy, then you're more likely to have your head on straight. You have better energy levels, you can think more clearly. You don't have so much brain fog. I see this all the time with many of my clients as well. And as soon as we start cleaning up their diet, I fix their entire lifestyle through good circadian rhythms, sleep, sunlight, grounding, all that good stuff. You start to see that their brain fog begins to go away and that's because it has a direct impact on the gut.

27:42 And we will definitely be getting into the things that we can actually do as well. But do you want to go into the mechanism or the connection between? You talked a little bit about the visceral fat and the microbiome, but I would love to go a bit deeper. Does the gut microbiome directly influence visceral fat? And how does the microbiome actually influence weight management in general? Because I know that many people will, you know, are obviously very interested, you know, in weight loss, fat not lost, losing weight.

28:10 So many people are restricting themselves. They're restricting calories. They're doing all the exercise, but they can't somehow manage to maintain the weight. But maybe there is something deeper that we need to pay attention to. Yeah, so. Yeah. That's a great, great set of questions there. So about one year ago, I was working with somebody that changed their diet and started to eat in in a way that I promote and we'll get into that the Living Diet, which is basically a diet of eating healthy ruminant meat with fermented foods and a few other strategies.

28:48 And they, they changed their whole life, unbeknownst to that person that one of their very good friends found out about me was doing the same thing. And they both changed their lives. And they're talking and the one says I'm getting my mother to do this now her mother was 93 years old, Bedrid 3 years, never got out of the bed. The only time she got out of bed was when they used to lift to pick her up to change her diapers and, and, and sheets and stuff like that. And the lady never talked. She hadn't spoken a word in three years.

29:23 She was on Hospice in the home, had caretakers. So the daughter, who was in their in her early 60s, told the caretakers, no more carbohydrates. I don't want my mom being fed any rice. No bread, no ice cream, no cereal. She's only going to get meat and ferments now. This lady was bedrid. She couldn't talk. She didn't get a choice in that. Now you might think that's elder abuse. You pay attention. Now here you pay attention. that Lady in a little over 2 weeks, 14 days, started talking, got out of the bed, started using her Walker, having conversations.

30:04 Still think this is elder abuse. Maybe we need a little more direct confrontation with people about how they're eating. I was flown to the house. 2 weeks later I walked in. The lady is in front of an easel painting with watercolors. A painting. Then she used her Walker to return to her piano. She was a piano player and played Beethoven for me. Age of 93, when just one month before she was in Hospice. Not talking bedridden, not saying we're for three years. So what happened? They stopped the carbohydrates.

30:46 They gave her better nutrition from meat, and then they added in fermented foods. This is a big one. Fermented foods are unlike any other food on the planet because they're living foods. They have living microbes in them, fungi, yeast, bacteria, all these different types of life forms that allow the food to become fermented. And it's the only process that I'm aware of that you can do to food in whole form like meat, vegetables and fruit. And you can actually improve the form of that food better than what it is in its natural form.

31:33 It becomes higher, more nutritious, the nutritional compounds increase in the food and it takes on a new characteristic that it didn't previously had. And there are living microbes that become added into that food. And here's the interesting thing. It improves the quality of that food and you ready for this? It improves the human being that eats that food. It does the same thing. So your broccoli's not doing it and your chunk of delicious red meat doesn't do that. You've got to eat these fermented foods.

32:13 And so the con, the combination of adding fermented living food with the most nutritious food. And if you're a vegan, I've got clients that are vegans adding fermented foods to your vegetables that you're eating. Cut out the processed foods. Quit kidding yourself. Your, your carrot muffins and you know, your, your, your doughnuts made with whatever, you know, grain and secret grains and vegetables that you want to add to them. It's all processed crap, everybody. Knows about vitamin C, but have you ever heard about vitamin G?

32:49 I'm talking about grounding. We know that oxygen is important for our survival, but what if I told you that grounding is just as foundational for our health? Your body is literally a battery and needs to be recharged every single day. Modern life, depleted fatigue, insomnia, brain fog and restlessness. These all sound like a charge deficiency to me. You see, grounding is not optional, it's foundational. This is why I make sure to get my bare feet on the ground every single day and to ensure that I stay grounded 24/7 like our ancestors did.

33:17 I use my favorite grounding sheet as I sleep to keep me connected to the earth at all times. Check out my favorite grounding mats and sheets that I use on a daily basis by heading over to the description below. And make sure to use the promo code attached to get a massive discount on your entire order. Cut that. Out eat vegetables and eat fermented foods with it and you'll significantly improve your your, your gut and your health. But I will tell you that, you know, I've been doing this for 13 years with an MRI measuring visceral fat.

33:48 And your visceral fat goes away faster if you eat meat with these fermented foods. And don't think if you're, you know, some sort of carnivore meat eating bro, or, you know, carnivore babe, where you're just eating meat and you don't have visceral fat. You got it. Carnivores still come to me, big chunks of fat around the hearts, big chunks of fat within their abdomen. Now, vegans, don't get mad at me. You got it too. And in most cases it's worse than the carnivores because you are eating processed foods and you're not eating fermented foods.

34:26 You can't, you know, it's a, there are a lot of things you got to do to get rid of visceral fat. That stuff's been in you for decades. So visceral fats role in all this as it causes this inflammation that lines the gut. It secrets inflammatory molecules that they go directly on into those organs in your gut. So it has a local inflammatory effect, but it also systemically secrets these molecules through its own blood system, blood supply. It's in many ways it's like a disease, an organ of disease.

35:03 I don't like to call it just an organ. I've seen it referred to because of the fact it has its own blood supply and it secrets things that it acts like an organ. It's a zombie organ, it's like a parasite. It's a living parasitic diseased organ inside of you that is slowly killing you, robbing you of your health and filling you with disease. So visceral fat absolutely is a disease process that you need to be aware of. And the only way to accurately assess it and to deal with this, get an MRI and take a look at how much visceral fat that you have within your, your system.

35:45 And a good picture of this is from a political leader who is brave enough in our country, in the United States. He's a governor of the state of Oklahoma, which is a, a state in kind of the South part of our country. And this is his MRI scan. This is his heart. And he, all this visceral fat forming around his heart. This is his left lung, his right lung, his liver. And this is his abdomen, and this is his colon. It's beautifully seen. You can see this big colon. You know, we can even blow it up even more.

36:22 And all this white around that colon is, is, is visceral fat disease. And so this is how you can start to visualize how the destructive influence of this crazy disease process is occurring inside your body. And you don't know. So people aren't aware of it. And most people sadly think that you know, if they're thin, you can't have it. Look at this guy's abdomen. I doubt there are many people listening to this podcast. They're as lean as this guy. He's just so incredibly lean, isn't he? Well, beneath him is this MRI, and he's about half of his inside is disease.

37:12 That's visceral fat, disease in the skinny, you know, 20 something. So that's an active duty soldier. So just because you're thin means nothing except for this one fat. If you have visceral fat, and the chances are you're going to, unless you're one of my clients or you are very into deep research and you'd really know how to skill skillfully test, do your own Mris and figure out how to get rid of this stuff, the chances are that you're going to be filled with this. And the worst thing is when you're a thin on the outside and you're filled with this diseased visceral fat on the inside, Andreas, your mortality is significantly elevated compared to a person that is also fat on the outside because the fat on the outside usually has a pretty substantial amount of subcutaneous fat, of which a particular kind is protective and beneficial.

38:18 So superficial subcutaneous fat. So what's interesting is I'm, I'm 63 years old. I, I enjoy an exceptional level of health. I decided to join a men's Soccer League, but it's like what, what Europeans call football, we call soccer here in America. So I haven't played in a soccer game in 50 years and I go out and I play soccer and there's there's a pickup game. I was in a men's like 60s league, but there's a pickup game for 20 year olds, 30 year olds, 40 year olds, 50s and some 60s. I go out there and we got shirts and skins and the best soccer player was this guy that had a thin layer of superficial subcutaneous fat.

39:06 He was from Somalia. He had No 6 pack. This guy was a phenomenal soccer player. And so you need this superficial subcutaneous fat on the outside of your body because it's protective against disease and it's associated with the molecule. Where of this beneficial molecule called adiponectin resides that's promotes your health. And so if you follow MMA and fighters and stuff, the guys with 6 packs, they don't make it, they lose the fight compared to the guy with this layer of superficial subcutaneous fat.

39:40 So there's a lot of verb and myth out there that leads people to astray about when it comes to health. And you want superficial subcutaneous fat. You want to you want a six pack only. You don't want to see the six pack on the outside. You want to see the six pack your dominus rectus only in an MRI scan. But you should have a thin layer of fat that's a mod a modest amount that contains you. So you can't see a six pack. That's what you want to have. And that's where I try to live. What if your healthy?

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40:36 This is why I use a longer HRV measuring device. A longer doesn't just measure your HRV, it analyzes the components behind that number, giving you real insight into the balance between stress and recovery and really helps you understand what state your nervous system is actually in, in just a few minutes every morning. A longer gives you objective feedback on how your sleep training habits and lifestyle choices are influencing your body. HRV is one of the most unbiased ways to see how your daily decisions are influencing your nervous system.

41:03 It shows you whether the things that you're doing are truly supporting your health or creating more stress than you realize. Instead of guessing, you can measure, learn, and make smarter decisions about your health, performance, and recovery. So if you want to find my favorite HRV measuring device, head over to the description and make sure to use the promo code MOBILITY FITNESS at checkout to get a nice discount on your entire order. So are you? Saying that basically people shouldn't strive to get so lean that they actually get to the point where they lose the the subcutaneous fat because due to the lack of the adiponectin, it's actually problematic that is.

41:34 Exactly the point I'm trying to say. And you and you articulated it well and, and you can see this, I'll just blow it up in this image here. Do you see this black line here, Andreas? This is scarpus fascia and it separates your subcutaneous fat into two compartments. So I'll reduce it just to show that this is an adjuvant filled with visceral fat. This is deep subcutaneous fat and that deep subcutaneous fat is actually inflammatory in nature, just like the visceral fat. And so we see this fat also in muscle and the viscera in the adjuvant around the heart and in the flames.

42:16 Your, your love handles back here and put that black line is really key. They don't really teach us in medical school about subcutaneous superficial versus deep subcutaneous fat or visceral fat or the fascia. The fascia when I went to medical school was basically kind of waste this kind of a, you know, extra stuff in there. Well, as it turns out, fascia is incredibly important. It's your fiber optic network in your body that connects your muscle with your fat, with your arteries, your veins, your capillaries, your neurologic tissue, your nerves, peripheral nervous system, central nervous system, and your bones.

43:03 It's in all of those, all your organs. Fascia is the network of communication. It is through which all your health is being regulated and controlled. And so it's incredibly important. So we paid in my practice, we look at that. The interesting thing is Andres, when people come back and they redo their MRI scans, when this goes away and the visceral fat goes away, this is preserved and this gets bigger. The scarpus fascia changes its appearance as the person's health is getting better. So it's incredibly important you, if you're listening today, you're like, I've never heard of these kind of things.

43:47 Well, let me say something to you. It's because you're going to doctors that went to medical schools just like me. And I was trained basically through a curriculum designed by Big Pharma and Big Food. And we have foisted it on the rest of the world. We're a Trojan horse here in America. You brought it into your country when you're silly medical schools adopted the curriculum of American Medical schools. You thought we were showing up with this wonderful gift. So the expression beware of Greek sparing gifts and the Trojan force that that they brought, you know, into the into the fortress and then the Greeks snuck out in the middle of the night and then, you know, took the city.

44:36 So that's what's happened to your medical schools. Unbeknownst to you and your country, you adopted the medical medical curriculum that is devoid of what really works, What matters. Visceral fat, superficial subcutaneous fat, fascia. Paying attention to these things now. How will you know this is going on? Are you ready? Your doctors that are 60 and 70 years old teaching this will look diseased too. The doctors that I teach look like me, healthy. They stand straight, they are articulate, they have passion and they're expressive.

45:16 They don't act like they're in their 60s and 70s. Don't be careful about the 20 year old doctors. They haven't learned enough. You want to go to the Gray hair types, the silverbacks, which exist in nature. They're the leaders. They have the most skill sets and most knowledge. But the ones that are healthy run the shop. They're at the top. The clan, the tribe, the herb. So what we have to do is change the curriculum of medical schools and Secretary Kennedy, our secretary of health, RFK junior, you know, he was the nephew of JFK, one of our favorite famous and he was a very popular presidents and and as and his dad was Bobby Kennedy, attorney general running for president that his dad and his uncle both were assassinated.

46:06 Well, Secretary Kennedy wants to get our country really healthy. He is a disruptor. I really admire this guy. And so he's trying to change the curriculum of medical schools, but there's a lot of people that opposed him and for political reasons. But let me just show you this interesting, you know, making the point about trying to be as healthy as you can be. Let me show you this interesting slide of legs. OK, you can look at people's legs. There's this this slide here. But I want to show you something building on it a little bit better.

46:45 This image with these these legs with a few other legs added into them right here. So I've added a few more. This is the one that you typically see on the Internet. I added my 21 year old assistant. He's got really nice muscles and his bones are really thick. See those smaller white dots he's got? He's got very thick bones. Compared to this 44 year old, the white dots are bigger because the bone is thinning. But this, my 21 year old assistant is the health, you know, super healthy legs, 44 year old guy, pretty healthy.

47:22 This 174 is a disaster. They've super thin bones. They're almost all white and their muscles are shrunk like raisins filled with fat. This 74 year old is better muscles, but their bones are thinning as well. But look at these. These dots are pretty small. Muscles are huge, no fat, very very little subcu of the deep kind on their legs. This guy is 72 year old Secretary Kennedy, RFK Junior. Look at that guy's legs. He's just not talking the talk. He's walking it. And you know, people are so critical of him, but the guy really takes help seriously.

48:06 He turned himself around from addiction and tasted what health was like from his disease state. And then he asked God to help him do the same thing for America. And he'll help the world if we can get this message and we get to redeem ourselves by admitting that we were a Trojan force. We spent spread processed foods and alchemy, you know, just delivering medications and prescription drugs instead of messaging. Hey, how you live your life is far more impactful than any medicine we can give you. That is the new message that I want America to fall on her knees, beg forgiveness what we did and spreading this terrible, you know, curriculum of medical schools and teaching countries and our humanity across the world that we share the gift of health most people.

49:03 Focus on nutrition and exercise when it comes to health. And that's cool. But if you're sitting under artificial lights all day, that's quietly sabotaging your health. That's not going to get you very far. As an educator, podcaster, and fitness professional, I care about recovery as much as I do performance. The biggest secret to recovery isn't supplements. It's light. The light that hits your eyes is literally the instruction manual for your body. It says your sleep, energy, metabolism and your hormones.

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50:16 The link will be in the description as well as in the pinned comments. Huge thank you to VRAS for sponsoring the show, I love it. I love it. Your your service is so important. Doctor Sean, how much time do you have left? Do you have much time? I've. Got 10 minutes, 10 minutes. OK, OK. I was going to ask you one question about the connection between muscle and gut health, but maybe we have to save that for another time because I want us to talk a little bit about solutions and practical tips. You already sprinkled quite a few nice ones throughout this entire discussion.

50:45 But if you want to maybe summarize for people like why it's actually so important to eat the fermented foods and is there any other lifestyle practices which actually help us to improve our gut health beyond food as well? Yeah, so I have. This little tip sheet that I go on the Internet and this is how you're going to, you know, when I work with clients, I'm doing one-on-one. I'm like a basketball coach. Don't come to my basketball coach, my court, unless you were really serious about wanting to play basketball.

51:18 But don't stay at home if you're really serious about playing basketball, come to me, one of my coaches, OK? But I'm going to show you how you can do this online and it's going to be about as good as trying to do this. Learning basketball, watching a video. You can do this on your own online, but it's way, way better to work with a coach. But here are 6 tips. How well you do these things is going to predicate how well your return you're going to get. But we also give people 44 other things, but these are 6 basic ones.

51:55 One is cut out processed foods and carbohydrates. I talked about that. So you don't want to be in processed foods, carbohydrates, you want to eat fat and protein and you want to eat super healthy meat, you know, the best kind of meat that you can get. Our ancestors didn't just shoot any bison in a herd or any woolly mammoth. They look for the most nutritionist, best one to consume because that higher level nutrition and then practice regular extended fasting. Fasting is something our ancestors had four forced upon them because they didn't always have a successful hunt.

52:33 And so when we study people that do extended fasting when I'm not talking about the bullcrap little intermittent fasting. Oh, I'm factor seeing intermittent fasting. I fast for 6 to 8 hours of you know a day. Baloney. That's a little bit. That's like saying, well, I'm going to only learn half my alphabet or something. It's crazy. You got to do a lot more than that if you're really going to get optimally healthy. And I get my clients fasting, Don't be afraid. I get them up to it a period of time.

53:07 And I have a little bit of a bio hack. I've learned certain species of bacteria. We don't have to get into that. When you consume them, it takes away your hunger and give you energy, and our ancestors would do that. Why and how they would drink certain Creek water, certain watering holes had bacteria in them that when they were starving and hungry and weak, they drink the water. The bacteria would give them peptides and they would be able to hunt again. And we do this now today you manipulate in the microbiome through certain probiotic species.

53:45 I'll be long, you know, talking more about this in the future, but we hope to be able to get this license and get it out to help people lose weight, optimize their health through through these probiotics. And then maximum intensity exercise, springing push ups, pull ups and the hormetic exercise like going into a sauna, doing a cold plunge, exertional kind of exercise and then restoring the microbiome, eating fermented foods chewed together. So consuming at the same time you're eating meats or if you're vegan, just eating vegetables.

54:19 Make sure you're incorporating the living food. And I call this the living diet. I trademark that term to help educate people about the need to eat a certain diet. The living diet, Living food. Living fermented foods. Add it into whatever diet you eat. If you're carnivore, add in fermented foods to your meat. If you're vegan and you don't want to eat any animal products, add fermented vegetables and fruit into the vegetables you're living. So you get that living diet and then prioritize sleep and circadian rhythms and then target it all.

54:55 What you should be paying attention to is an MRI amount of fat you have around your heart, the amount of fat in your muscles, the amount of fat in your in your adjuvant and the the different type of fat you have around your skin. Is that the disease kind deep subcutaneous fat or the beautiful superficial subcutaneous fat? So you ladies listen and you see Cellulite, you know, dimpling and women, they've got these really fat legs, lymphedema and stuff. There's a much higher amount of deep subcutaneous fat going on in there.

55:31 And so you've got to get rid of your deep subcutaneous fat, which is proportional to the amount of visceral fat you have and the amount of fat you have within your muscle. So one leg has a lot of fat and it looks beautiful, it's smooth, it's gorgeous. It's the Kardashian, you know, thighs and butt. The other type of fat is dimpled, wrinkled, and it has of the same amount, but it's a different type of fat. It's disease. You want to optimize healthy tissue and you want to eliminate diseased tissue.

56:03 So an MRI allows you to do that. Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much, Doctor Shawn. I really enjoy always your energy and the enthusiasm that you bring your presentations. The way that you elaborate and information is super informative and engaging, and I'm sure the audience is really going to find so much value from our discussion today. And I will actually make sure to pin the previous discussion that we had on all things visceral in the description and also in the pinned comments. But in case people don't know you, where can people find you, connect with you and work with you?

56:32 Yeah, so. A good way if you're interested in working one-on-one either with me because you want to be the best biological version of yourself as possible, then you can come to see me at my website, doctorseanomara.com, DRSEANOM, ara.com. I also have another website if you're not able to come to me, I'll listen. People think I'm expensive because I charge $20,000 to come and spend 8 hours with me that's actually cheap try to have an 8 hour surgery for just $20,000 yeah. So yeah, it takes a lot, you know that get me for 8 hours and do a full body MRI scan and all the other testing we do and the whole team approach on you.

57:21 So I'm really still a pretty good bargain that the trick is trying to get into my schedule with everybody else. But our partners that you can see that do the same thing I have oversee cheaper, another website you can look at doing more affordable plans and some lower options is just growing better, notolder.com Growing better, Not older.com, which is the title of my book that I created. By the way, there's about 30 books out there that use my name. They're all fake. I only wrote one growing better, not older.com.

57:55 Everybody else is just copycatting my name and I had to trademark my name. And we're we're just about there and we'll stop all the craziness. Even World leaders 5 think they're buying my book and they're buying the wrong book, which is kind of crazy. And I'm writing a second book with my chef called, you know, the Living Diet with my executive chef, Chef Nick, that'll be coming out. And it will be a cookbook on how to eat, incorporating fermented foods into the living diet. So you can look forward to that.

58:26 Perfect. And also I'll make sure that you just, I put all the links in the description below as well, so people can find the correct ways and also maybe the correct links to your actual book as well. So thank you so much, Doctor Sean. And of course, I'd love to have you back on the show because because of course, there's so much that we can talk about, right? Health is so multifactorial. Gut health literally is the foundation of health, right? So thank you so much and please stay on the line when I end the call if you guys.

58:49 Enjoy the topics and guests I bring on the show. I would really appreciate if you left me a five star review on Spotify and subscribe to Fitness Wisdom Podcast on YouTube as well. This helps us spread the knowledge and wisdom with the world. Until next time.