Epigenetics Explained - Heal Naturally with Healthy Habits, Natural Remedies, Sunlight & Grounding | Chris Voutsas aka Mito Papi explains Omega-3s, Mitochondria, Terrain vs. Germ Theory, Gut Health

0:03 This is the fitness wisdom. Podcast Welcome back to another exciting episode of the Fitness Wisdom Podcast. Today I'm joined by Chris Voltsas, also known as the MiTo Puppy on X and also on Instagram and probably on other platforms as well. And today we're going to be talking about how we have a tremendous power and ability to alter our epigenetic expression because many people think that when they are born and they have all kinds of chronic issues and diseases that they're blaming it on their genetics, right?

0:34 But we don't actually realize that how we have so much power in our hands with our acts and behaviors and thoughts to alter the trajectory of our life and our health. So welcome to the show, Chris. It's an absolute pleasure to have you. Yeah. How's it going? I absolutely love what you just said. Just in terms of the epigenetics and the genetics, my belief is that our DNA, it's not our destiny. Because even though you have these predispositions and maybe like the standard American diet or whatever you're doing will make those predispositions come to light.

1:05 But if you're able to optimize environments and optimize your epigenetics and work towards resolving some of these weakened areas of Physiology, like the gut ecosystem, it's connectomathy, innate immune system, your mitochondrial health. If you do things and utilize interventions that are actually going to kind of resolve these areas that are so suboptimal for living this horrible lifestyle, you can really create a new reality self where you feel the best that you felt in your entire life. Maybe you get that childhood sense of joy back in your life.

1:36 Maybe that's a series of different things start to happen and improve it. So that's definitely my belief. I've lived through that. I've helped people live through that and obviously help them go from a point of suffering to a point of driving. And I do agree with that 100%. Wow, that's beautiful. Well, it's true that people don't necessarily have a supplement or a pharmaceutical deficiency, right? But we have, we all have, like a deficiency towards our natural habitats and it seems that the further we distance ourselves from nature and our natural environment, the more problems we begin to manifest.

2:12 Would you agree? A. 100% Like I think that society is kind of heading in two different directions. You have on one side, everybody's just super, super stoked on nature. Everyone's getting in the sunlight, they're getting and they're moving around a lot, they're sweating, they're sleeping well. They're doing all these things and they're utilizing interventions that are within their own power and they're consistently doing them. They're not just leaning on is the fastest and quickest option. They're not going for efficiency.

2:41 They're going for how effective something is. And on the other side of the coin, you see these people that you know, like the neural link depending like overly depending on technology, people are using Ozempic just to lose weight when like people that aren't even obese or using it just to lose weight and kind of take shortcuts. You see other people that you know that end up with like pre diabetes and they're like, oh, it's my time to hop on Metformin or maybe women even they'll hop on control to address some sort of some sort of hormonal issue.

3:11 And it's very common and people take this easy way out inside of convenience. But it's kind of concerning to look at on a future basis considering the advances that we see in technology with Neuro Link. And you know, like some of those other things coming out, it might be really sketchy to do something in the future. And maybe they'll make that like the primary intervention that they utilize for people, or maybe they'll really integrate it into that system. So I think that we need both systems to be fair.

3:41 Like if I break my wrist, I'm going to put oil on it and hope that it heals. When you go to a doctor. If I slice my arm open, I'm going straight to the doctor if I need some, some sort of like emergency care or some sort of surgery, even if I need like an opinion or some sort of diagnostic imaging might be helpful to utilize that system. So my stance and my viewpoint on this is that holistic health, it has been shut down by the mainstream for like 40 plus years, maybe even longer than that. I think that both need to be viewed really in the same lens rather than just looking at one thing and saying, Yep, this is the only system.

4:17 These are the only people that are given authority to help help us, nobody else. There's no other method of healing. I just strongly disagree with that. And I think that if we do depend on this allopathic system, it's going to be a problem because you're just sitting there and the doctor has like 30 minutes to obviously help you, not as much time. And let's say you're like a really complex case and you need someone to kind of go in like a detective. Do you really think they have that time? They have to see 30 more clients that day?

4:44 Probably not likely. So yeah, it's kind of my stance on everything. I think that we need more like quality between the two systems, especially on the basis of public perception. Absolutely. And that will serve the public the best way. And it's so funny how they call the alternative medicine alternative when it actually was the original medicine, right? Whereas now the conventional medicine is something that just came about not that long ago. Whereas now the alternative medicine that was around for thousands of years from all the cultures around the globe through herbalism and all the different, you know, methods that they use, is now just seemed as something that's totally woo woo, yeah.

5:23 And quite frankly, it's a little bit disrespectful, right? Methylene blue, an incredibly powerful substance that has an affinity for the mitochondria, discovered in 1876 at first as a textile dye, it didn't take long before it was noticed for its unusual biological effects. Here is a list of all the things that methylene blue is known for My personal favorites it is effects that it has on the mitochondria. Methylene blue acts as a redox agent. What this is that it has the ability to grab onto electrons, donate and transfer them anywhere where energy is required in the body.

5:56 And we know that most Neolithic diseases these days are due to a lack of cellular energy, ATP. The more electrons we can get through successfully along the electron transport chain in the mitochondria, the more deuterium depleted water we can make as well as the end of energy production, which is ATP. The energy that we need to power all our cellular processes come from electrons, so it only makes sense. The more we take care of our mitochondria and our energy production, more energy we have for our overall health, well-being, and vitality.

6:25 If you wish to explore the methylene blue that I use, head over to maragimedicinal.com/mobility Fitness and use the promo code MOBILITY FITNESS at checkout for 15% of your entire order. 100% medicine that doesn't, Yeah, that doesn't mean alternative holistic medicine means that you're looking at every area in the body, how it's dynamically connected. You're looking at the weak, weakened areas of your Physiology, seeing how they're bouncing like off one another and supporting each other's systems.

6:55 And you're going in there and you're kind of seeing how can I optimize this and solve this puzzle and how can I help the body heal in a dynamic manner rather than separating it to the individual organ system? Yeah, yeah. I think the issue arises when when people are viewing the body as separate compartments, just as they do in conventional medicine, Right. And everyone's a specialist these days. They're specializing in one area. But you can't. If you're a specialist and you don't take into account how all of the pieces of the puzzle work together, you're never able to truly help someone.

7:25 You're able, yes, you're probably help able to help them to address some certain symptoms that they are experiencing temporarily in that very moment. But how are you going to help them to heal long term when you don't understand that all systems of the body are intertwined? I think that's where the issue lies, that when you ignore the fact that the body is a system that's all intertwined, that when you look at the nervous system, for example, and everybody likes to call the nerves different names that go into the body, all originates from the brain stem and from the spinal cord, right?

7:57 So calling it different names, yes, makes sense if you want to from an anatomical perspective, you know, just to, you know, identify where is in the body. But from a functional perspective, it's all just one nerve. It's like a root that starts from your brain and branches all the way out, Right. So it's insane to think treat the body in separate compartments. I would love to hear your own personal journey, how you actually go into this space of learning about all of these incredible things and what we call the alternative medicine, the original medicine.

8:29 How did you get into this space? Yeah. So I was, I was sick from very young age. I had a little injury. You know what I mean? I see. I don't know if I don't know if I can say it, but I had a little injury to those experimental injections when I was a very young boy and pretty much it gave me 40 plus life threatening food allergies. Couldn't have chicken until I was like 11 or 12 if I yeah, that's so annoying. Third, which is clean, no peanuts, no dairy, none of that like 40 plus food allergies. I even had pizza once when I was an agent.

9:02 It put me into anaphylactic shock. So it was a very severe cake allergies that I had. And in addition to that they would like test me for environmental allergens. I would show up positive for like 74 out of the 80 allergens on the actual panel. I had such bad asthma that I had to do with breathing treatment before school every day and otherwise I would have like full on asthma attacks. If I went to hotels and like the pillow had something that I was allergic to, it would give me an asthma attack.

9:30 And like even I'm like family vacations when I was young, I remember like I would have to like go to the emergency room because of the asthma and how easily triggered it was for me. I had eczema from head to toe. I had to basically put myself in wraps like a mommy for a lot of my life just to get just to manage the eczema also contract. And I was also always like the first person to get sick in my family. So I had C diff once for around four months at a time, which is quite horrible and plenty of other gut infections that happened.

9:59 I was a kid and basically every time I had an infection or whatnot, their solution was to give me an antibiotic. So for a lot of my life, I grew up with pretty much no beneficial bacteria. And yeah, it was very rough. That kind of translated later in life when I went to college and obviously did college kid things like drinking and drugs and that type of stuff. Not proud of that. But when I when I made those decisions and chose that lower state of consciousness, yeah, it really impacted my Physiology.

10:28 And it was to the point where I was like bedridden for months at a time while studying for the Mcats. It was to a point where I would eat like a single rice cake and then start vomiting up stomach acid profusely. And pretty much I was on a mission that like my entire life I had wanted to be a doctor. I was studying pre Med due to obviously being raised around healthcare environments all the time and just wanting to help people And like, obviously banning the importance of what it's like to not have your health.

10:56 Like that's a really horrible thing, especially if you're a kid. So yeah, pretty much I was on a mission to go to medical school. And I kid you not, every time I start shadowing, despite like how sick I was, every time I shadowed, I was less inclined to join the medical system because I realized that people like myself that had such complex conditions, it's not fit to treat those people. That system is fit to treat populations, not individuals. That's what you see that all the blood marker reference ranges are based on the normal range, the average American, which is a normal normal range, AKA comparing chronically sick people to other chronically sick people.

11:37 So yes, I had all these issues and I was like really, really sick. I even had a hereditary hemochromatosis, which I found out along the way. And pretty much I was just so dumb with it. Like I was taking the MCAT at the time and studying for it, which takes a few months to prepare for. It's another fun test. I studied for that and basically I was so sick that I was like, I have to find a way to get myself to feel good. I went to every natural path that I can. I went to every like modern MD, I went to all these people in these systems and some reason I still cannot get any relief.

12:13 So basically I like being a pre Med major, being a biomedical sciences major, I said let me just go through the literature and see if there's like anything that I can do to help myself at this point. So went through the literature, obviously started looking into like the benefits of exercising. Well, again, the benefits of just eating a really clean diet away from processed foods. Some of the basics I started implementing right away and even adding like magnesium as a supplements or black seed oil.

12:41 Those are like some of the first things that I did to really help. And the thing that really did it for me out of everything, funny enough, was one little habit change. I just said, I'm going to start walking to the library right after the sun rises every day. I just picked it because I'm a little bit type A and it was able to kind of fit in my schedule of studying for that MCAT and getting the time in. Well, I felt a lot better after I did that for like a month. And I was like, there's definitely something about this walk that's doing something that's kind of aiding in my healing journey.

13:11 So that's when the questions like like marks in my head really started to go off for me. And I was like, there's definitely something about this. And then got onto health Twitter and started really looking into the more holistic side of things. The first account that I ever found was Grim Hood, and he really gauged my interest with everything. Kind of went through his Patreon, got deeper into the literature, discovered Jack Cruz, few other good accounts and I just started to learn a lot of these decentralized perspectives and then from there I just continued to connect with people and learn and obviously just be an absolute savage on Club Med.

13:46 And pretty much by the time I was like feeling a little bit better, at least after the MCAT killed the test, by the way, I did great on it. But right after I was like, I don't think I want to do Med school anymore. So after all that hard work for like 4 years and kind of like my life dream at the time, I had to give that up. And it was a really thing but, and I had no idea what I was going to do after, but I kind of knew that I would be in good hands and I would have followed the right path regardless.

14:13 And yeah, it ended up working out pretty well, I must say. But it was a huge risk on my end at 1st. And it was really scary thing to for me to do. Yeah, I'm really glad that I did that. It was probably one of the most impactful decisions in my entire life. So that's kind of how I ended up here. And ever since I said no to medical school, I've been treating it like I am in medical school. So studying relentlessly, really going through the literature and really just dedicating my life to learning as much as I can about this stuff so that I can help as many people as I can with all this good stuff.

14:45 That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing your story. It's very, very inspiring. No more asthma, that's like, it's been completely gone. No more eczema whatsoever. 35 of the food allergens are gone. Environmental allergens are way better. So I was able to do all of these things holistically, which is pretty groundbreaking. So a lot of people think they're like, just because they have a severe condition that they're never going to heal. But if you're watching this and you do have a severe condition, the one thing you cannot let go of is hope.

15:15 And you have to have faith And the idea going to do this, that you're going to persevere through it, that you're ready to rock'n'roll through this no matter what obstacles coming your way. Because it's not going to be an easy journey. It's an uphill battle. Meaning that you need to have tenacity throughout this entire process. And you really need to be ready to just dedicate yourself to this and be in the zone. And you have to be ready to start sacrificing things. Like if what you do for fun is going out and drinking with your friends, you might have to consider not doing that anymore and obviously asking yourself while you do that 1st place and why it's such a fun thing for you, I suppose.

15:49 And you might have to give up a few other you like in life. But pretty much like you're going to need that tenacity and you're going to need faith, hope and love to carry you through that journey one. 100%, I believe that mindset is so important. I'm really happy that you brought this up because that's a huge part of your healing journey or any kind of journey that you're on. Whether you want to transform your body, you know, go from fat to fat or from skinny to fat or whatever your goal is all from unhealthy to healthy.

16:16 Whatever situation you're in, you need to change your mindset first. And of course, start to take steps towards your goals and towards your journey that you're on so that you can actually start to see some results that can motivate you to keep on going. We everybody needs to start off with little tiny action steps. That's what I tell people all the time. You don't need to start with huge things. It's what you do on a daily basis, little small acts. And I guess we're going to get into a lot of those things today for sure.

16:44 You mentioned a couple of things. Go ahead. I was going to say, have you heard of the law of the aggregation of marginal gains? It's a so it's essentially this theory that, but so you add one habit in there, like waking up and watching the sunrise. You do that for a week. Then you can stack it and add another habit on, such as watching the sunset or getting midday sun. And you can just keep stacking this habits until it kind of becomes a part of your routine. And it's a much easier way of getting into this new lifestyle than just throwing everything in at once.

17:15 So I always, I totally agree with that. Just starting with baby steps. It's kind of what I did on my own journey. And yeah, it's like you're almost transitioning from your old self to the new self in a way. And you're transitioning from these old habits to these new habits. And it's a complete transformation and renewing of the mind, the behaviors, the hearts, all of this stuff. And I've learned from many doctors who have been on the show that if you throw too many interventions on at once, you can freak the nervous system out and you can go into this complete freeze or shut down.

17:45 Or you can going to this sympathetic OverDrive where that healing is never going to take place in that state, right? Healing takes place in a predominant parasympathetic state. So if you're wanting to actually assist your body, you have to, I believe, remove a lot of things from your life right before you start adding things. Because a lot of people believe that, oh, I need to eat more fruits, I need to eat more vegetables, I need to take this supplement. But in reality, they need to remove a lot of the stressors and the stuff that's damaging to their body in the 1st place to allow their body to have this room to be able to build that resilience.

18:24 So maybe you could get into a couple of the things that you feel like are really detrimental to people that they're doing on a a daily basis and they're not realizing it. Yep. That's easy. So first and foremost it would be eating late at night, like sitting under blue light. This is because insulin and melatonin, they're pretty antagonistic to each other. So you're most insulin sensitive generally in the morning and you're most prone to synthesizing pineal gland melatonin in the evening. So if you're eating a lot of foods that are spiking your blood sugar, that's going to cause a serious problem.

19:02 Because if you're in this circadian lifestyle and you're trying to develop a rhythm in your own body, well, you're going to be a lot more insulin resistant and a lot less prone to obviously utilizing those carbs properly in the evening time. So I've always been a big proponent of if you are going to eat anything at night, it should be like maybe a spoon of raw honey and like a glass of raw milk or something very simple and obviously combining it with things, they're gonna drop your blood sugar. So like going on a 30 minute walk after your final meal, making sure that maybe you're doing apple cider vinegar with your meal that's diluted.

19:37 Maybe you're considering berberine or myo inositol on a regular basis to support that blood sugar. But essentially, it's going to be a huge problem in general, just eating under blue lights in the evening, like, I believe. Yeah. But I do recall viewing a study saying that if you eat your food outdoors, specifically carbohydrates, it does tend to have a beneficial effect on your blood sugar spike. So yeah, pretty much like this entire blue light environment that we're stuck in, it's a huge problem.

20:06 So is the EMF picture of things. So I would also recommend, like, unplugging your Wi-Fi router in the evening and kind of creating like a sleep sanctuary where you just have minimal EMF. It's very dark, very cold. Yeah. Pretty much you're not. Living in like a polluted area, those are some big things that also come to mind. But also just being super sedentary, I find that to be a big issue as well. Like a lot of people sit down for like 12 hours a day. And if you look into like the studies and the research on the benefits of even getting like 10,000 steps versus 12,000 steps or 15,000 steps, the difference is like incomprehensible.

20:44 Like it's actually pretty insane. The difference between just getting like 7000 versus 15,000 steps in a day. So I think that getting a lot of walking Epson during the day is very important as well. And a lot of people miss out on this. They would rather just go for a run. They would rather just over train in the gym, which is a huge problem on the nervous system. They would rather do all these different things and like some people, they do a very good job with it because they're conditioned to do so.

21:08 But if you're someone that's looking out for your nervous system and you're just trying to get the health benefits of obviously movements, you should really consider just walking like 10,000 to 15,000 steps a day. Let's see some other, Another thing would be if you have a bad gut, like let's, I'll pick on leaky gut, for example. If that barrier is compromised in any way, well, 70 to 80% of your immune cells are in the guts. So what do you think's going to happen if you eat a food that has an antigen in it or some sort of pathogen on it?

21:38 What do you think's going to happen to your gut? You're going to have, you're just going to be like an inflammation machine. Basically the idea and fixing a lot of this stuff is we want to reduce inflammation, improve redox, and get your body as close to homeostasis as possible. But if you have leaky gut, for example, how in the universe are you going to be anywhere near homeostasis if you just have a constant inflammatory response going on? Now imagine you add dysbiosis picture where you have an imbalance of beneficial bacteria to opportunistic or yeah, more opportunistic or pathogenic microbes.

22:15 If you have this and you have like an overgrowth of gram negative bacteria, they have an antigen in their actual cell membrane called LP's. And the LP's, it carries an antigen and it's more of an endotoxin by itself, but pretty much the LP's, it can activate an immune response and do the same thing. So now imagine you have a bunch of foods that you might not be able to tolerate. Imagine you have a bunch of antigens from that. Imagine there's toxins on the food like glyphosate and pesticides. Imagine you eat that you have low acid and you're not doing a proper job of killing off those things.

22:49 And imagine you have a bunch of gram negative bacteria that are releasing endotoxins while having leaky gut at the same time. You are going to be an inflammation machine. You're probably gonna have a ton of food activities. It might even be accompanied by something like Candida or fungal overgrowths. Parasites might even be involved. So this is what we're looking at with the gut. It's a very complex picture, and even if you have low levels of beneficial bacillus, I'll pick on Lactobacillus. Lactobacillus is really important for preventing Candida from overgrowing in the actual gut.

23:23 So if you have low beneficial bacteria, it puts you at further risk for these genetic predispositions to come into play. It's a huge problem. So one thing that I work on with essentially every client that I work with is really making sure that the gut is optimized and the terrain is good, that the balance of bacteria is good, the overall microbiome is good, and yeah, it's huge. Light influences every single system of your body from mood, skin health, cognition, energy levels, gut health, sexual function, training, performance, recovery, wound healing, body composition, and so much more.

24:00 This is why I make sure to block the harmful artificial blue light and expose myself to the beneficial wavelengths of light. Optimized my biology? Upgrade your biology today by upgrading your light environment. Head over to emrtech.com/mobility Fitness and use the promo code Mobility Fitness for a Massive 20 percent discounted. Check out for the best red light therapy panels on the market and the best blue light blocking glasses. I love it how you talk about the terrain because still a lot of people.

24:27 Don't understand about this idea right about the terrain versus the germ theory, because in today's like science, we look at it from a germ point of view that everything is out to get us right and that the body is this vulnerable thing that's super weak and that we're, we need to protect ourselves at all costs. We need to wash our hands all the time. We need to obsessively clean everything. But I tend to disagree with that like so much because I feel that, you know, we've got, we are covered in our own beneficial bacteria, right?

24:58 And we, our bacteria are assisting us in combating the opportunistic bacteria, right? And they are having this battle all the time on our surfaces and our internal environment. And I feel that if we're all the time fearing the external bacteria from the environment, thinking that it's out to get us, that's also part of us, right? And we're not building any resilience against our environment if we're always killing it. But if we are more in alignment with it, like, you know, when you look at kids when they are young and they are eating the dirt, for example, that they're building their immune system, that's how they become more resilient.

25:35 But as human beings, I mean, adults, we think that it's somehow different. Yep. If you look into like, the statistical data on the incidence of food allergies and the incidence of like how much more hygienic humans have become, it's like there's a pretty strong correlation between the two, it seems like. And the human hygiene hypothesis, it's a major hypothesis that kind of goes over why we have more allergies, why the immune system isn't being entrained properly. And one of the reasons for this is because a lot of people, they're deficient in Bifidobacterium or they have low diversity of it.

26:09 And Bifidobacterium is extremely important for training our innate immune system to actually understand like what's an antigen, what should our body attack and what should our body not attack or kind of hate on essentially. So yeah, it's another big part of the picture. But even going back to the whole idea of our environments and nature, if you're in like an industrial city that's polluted, like I'll pick on LA for example, like if you're there and obviously the air quality is bad, you're in this city, there's a bunch of pollution everywhere, you're in a like a dirty area that isn't necessarily going to be good bacteria.

26:43 When we say like it's important to outside and get good bacteria, we mean like nature, like being out in nature, being out in soil, like that's the good stuff. But I would, I would obviously support the idea that you should be a little more hygienic if you are living in like a industrial city environments with all these toxins around everywhere, bad stuff, because this is just a guess too. But I'll be willing to guess that there's a lot more opportunistic bacteria out there that may even be more virulent that can be bad.

27:15 Like, yeah. So that'll be my stance on all that. 100%, yeah. I think that the more we have removed ourselves from nature, the more it has been more necessary to take extreme measures, right? Like now these days we're taking a bunch of supplements because we are sort of mimicking our ancestral diet and our ancestral environment or trying to mimic it so we can even be at a baseline health level. Whereas before, because we were living in alignment with nature, eating with the seasons and all that good stuff, and being exposed to the elements and and the nature's microbiome, our body was able to thrive 100.

27:51 Percent, 100%. Yeah. So, so basically I just feel like now because we have, we are taking all of these things, it makes us feel like, oh, we don't need to necessarily get back into nature, right? And then we create this disconnect and we feel like we don't need to go back into it. So what do you think that are? You already mentioned some of the things, but what do you think are some of the biggest needle movers for people that they can start doing on a daily basis? And that you also did that that can transform people's health no matter what part of the journey they're on?

28:23 Yeah. So I stress this to every client of mine and to everyone in general, because the supplements are good, right? Like we can use those for very specific purposes to move the body closer to homeostasis if we're trying to like, get rid of a bacterial overgrowth, get rid of a fungal overgrowth. So I use those and they're in my tool kit. But yes, the big needle that does it all is that return to nature. It's waking up, watching the sunrise, getting an ample amount of morning sunlight, getting the UVA on your skin.

28:54 So obviously having as little clothes as possible in those morning hours and just being in that morning sun, like getting morning movement, getting that blood flow moving, extremely important. But it doesn't only go there with the sun. It's important to get your vitamin D status up, especially if we're talking about the immune system. Vitamin D is so important for your immune system. And if you live somewhere like California, for example, like Southern California where there's just EMF everywhere, it might even be more difficult for you to synthesize that vitamin D, which is something to always think about.

29:25 But pretty much like vitamin D, super important. We're saying get your midday sun, but don't burn. Like we're not advocating to go and get a sunburn. We're advocating to go and do the sun exposure responsibly, safely build your solar callus before we get morning sunlight, evening sunlight to support that. But getting that midday sun, not only for the vitamin D, but for the melanin as well is going to tremendously protect, protect us. And it's kind of like an electrified society built with Emfs. It's going to serve us as a bit of protection and lucky I'm Greek, so I Tam pretty well, but I think that the melanin is a yeah, it's a very important aspect of this picture.

30:03 So midday sun, morning sun, very important evening sun is it's just as important. So like I think it's really important just getting the sunset, being out in the evening, being able to obviously get a time to decompress. And then from there, like in my opinion, not least you should be having like good sleep rituals and kind of treat that after sunset period as a wind down period where you're transitioning from the daytime into the evening so that you can get a restful sleep because all of the healing and all of the good stuff that happens when we sleep that night.

30:34 So if you're not able to sleep properly, it's a huge problem that we need to obviously address and fix. And it's nothing to be concerned about. Like, yes, it's a problem, but you shouldn't let that give you a horrible feeling. You should simply just take action and start doing things that'll obviously assist with your sleep and tell yourself, hey, I'm going to fix this. I don't know how long it's going to take. I don't know who I need to speak to to do this, but I'm going to fix this and it's going to be all good.

30:58 And then if you kind of think about it from that lens, it's going to help out your nervous system a bit. Another thing would be magnesium supplementation. I know you like to talk about food and supplements a lot, but if you look at the soil quality with a lot of this stuff, it's gone down overtime. And we really do like we don't have the same soil as you've been in the past. And a lot of our nutrients that we're getting from these foods, they're depleted and we're not having as many. So I'm a big proponent of supplementing magnesium.

31:27 I think it was over 80 to 90% of adults. We're deficient in magnesium. So it's a big issue right there. And yeah, I would really recommend doing that. I like to do magnesium malate in the daytime as like an anti fatigue thing. And then I do magnesium glycinate or magnesium tolerates in the evening time. And then in the middle of the day, I'll spray on some magnesium chloride or something, which which is pretty great, but that's another huge thing. Another thing would be just taking care of your fitness and exercise without overdoing it.

31:57 So make sure you're hitting the gym like 3 to 4 times a week and getting good resistance training in and using more of like an evidence based plan to do this. And then let's see, there's definitely some other things that are like grounding, for example, you want to support your redox, which is basically just the balance between antioxidants and then free radicals. So grounding is going to be huge. If you can go to the and stand there, standing in the ocean water ground puts you in a natural Faraday cage protecting you from a lot of these Emfs.

32:27 And so to be a huge part because we know that we have this modern adaptation of EMF's in our society, we're doing this call like over computers where we're getting bombarded with EMF's and they are the most pervasive environmental toxin in our existence currently, I believe. So the only way to counter this is to do what we can about it. So ground a ton, get your sunlight on deck, maybe even supplement vitamin E if you have to. Very difficult to get that from the diet. Yeah, pretty much utilize these different measures to actually kind of help with that.

33:00 Those would be like the very basic things to kind of build a foundation. But one other thing I might mention just due to my nutrition background, is you really want to like track your food for like a week and just be honest with yourself and say, where am I at from a micronutrient standpoint? So if you download Corrodo Meter, see where you're at for like a week, say, am I getting like vitamin B1 enough? Am I getting vitamin B9? Am I getting enough folate? Am I getting enough B12? Track that stuff.

33:26 And if you want to get a little crazy about it, maybe you can look into like the ratios of different things like your zinc, copper ratio, your magnesium, phosphorus ratio. This is something that I do for my clients and you would be surprised of how big of a difference it makes in your life when you just really dial in your eating and optimize it and just set like your meal times good. Get your circadian rhythm on deck and then even have the meals and make more of a rhythmic fashion. You're eating like 3 meals a day essentially.

33:55 That's going to be another huge thing. So yeah, let's say that those are like 4 of the pillars that I really focus on when I actually work with someone. But yeah, like those lifestyle things are so important. And if you're a bit more complex, you're probably going to try those things and maybe they'll get you like to 50% of the way there sometimes. But a lot of the time you will have to do extra interventions if you are a more complex case, kind of like I had. And that's what that's a very important thing that I learned from my journey that cannot be understated enough in this in this space in general.

34:28 100%, yeah. Like the basics in the foundation are necessary for everybody, no matter where they're at, like if they just want to be healthy in general. But I just feel like if someone needs to take their health, you know, if they're not well, if they're sick and they need to really build that, that charge, I feel like they need to take that extra measure and be super duper cautious with all the things that are that you previously mentioned that are zapping people's energy source. So if you are, you know, not feeling great or you're, you're having some condition, I feel like it's even more important to pay attention to all the things that are stealing your energy and focus on all the things that are giving you the energy that Chris just talked about just now, which is basically this.

35:09 The sleep, the sunlight, the right food getting, you know, the grounding and all of that good stuff. Taking the right supplements and getting the right balance ratio of minerals and nutrients 100% because if you don't have those. Yes, yeah. These things are universal. It doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what your genetic background is, unless you have like some really crazy allergy to the sun, which I have met some people who have that that I've had to help them through. But like, these are universal to all people.

35:41 And like, as humans, I believe that we're designed to be doing this stuff and we're meant to be doing this. And if you look into like, even like 400 years ago, we were doing this stuff all the time. We were getting sunlight, we were depending on natural lighting sources. We weren't messing around with this. Like, did you know that influenza never existed until EMF's? Like basically a thing like influenza, there is no known cases of it until EMF's were introduced into society. So well, basically it's a matter of figuring out these modern adaptations.

36:12 Now that we know that we have these pervasive environmental toxins such as isolated blue lights and EMF. Even things on the guts like that are damaging it. Like if you're eating ultra processed food for 20 years and then training like a madman all throughout high school and all throughout your 20s because you want to look like everyone else or whatever. I hate to break it to you, but that's probably not the best idea for your guts. And if you're genetically prone to these issues, it's going to lead to a whole host of other issues.

36:40 And out of all of this, I didn't even talk about the mitochondria yet. That is like the most important part of this picture and that's why I bring up the lights and the EMF because those are very important for your mitochondrial health. And even getting like that morning red light, it's going to be really important because that's actually going to hit your your cytochrome C oxidase in the actual mitochondrial and it's going to lead to the synthesis of your sub cellular melatonin, which is basically your master antioxidants.

37:09 Like I see a lot of people talking about glutathione injection. Well the OG glutathione injection is going outside, grounding and getting morning sunlight like that's 100. Percent. Getting all those actual benefits. Nice. I love it. Yeah, we should dive more into the mitochondria. 100% we were going to get there anyway. But like, this is such a fascinating discussion. I'm loving it already. I'm sure that the audience is already mind blowing. I've had a few mind blowing moments until now. So it's it's really, really great.

37:39 I feel like we should talk about something a bit more controversial on the diet side of things before we dive into the mitochondria. So what do you think about omega-3's? There is a lot of discussion going around on Twitter, you know, health Twitter about there are some people who say that omega-3's are bad because they get oxidized when you go in the sun and it causes lipo, full skin. And there are other people who say it's one of the best things because we've evolved with, you know, consuming omega-3's for millions of years.

38:05 You know, it's or it's in our tissues for so long. So what do you think about omega-3's and what's your stance than that? What I would ask to these people is how come our ancestors were like on the coast, were able to eat just copious amounts of Omega threes and not have all of these problems? Like if Omega threes are really the issue and they were inherently bad, then we would like, that's like a really absolute take, right? It's not accounting for any nuance. Especially when you look at the chemical structure like DHA, it is essential to our biology.

38:38 DHA is extremely important for our circadian signaling, our metal chondral health, even it composes some aspects of the actual membrane in our brain. DHAI believe is one of the reasons. And that's an omega-3, right? So even the like DHA is one of the reasons that humans have been able to evolve and become as smart as they are. I believe it's extremely important to the functioning of our brain. And I think that a lot of people like ain't the villain and they only point out fish oil that's rancid.

39:06 They'll take this one brand. They'll be like, look, this, it came back oxidized. Well, you're not speaking for fish, you're not speaking for eating Whole Foods sources. You're not speaking for cod liver oil. You're just pointing out one thing and then creating a false narrative around this little scientific nuance that you failed to explain. And it's a huge issue in my opinion, because a bunch of people, they're going to be missing out on the importance of eating seafood and eating these really nutrient dense sources.

39:34 Let me take it a step further though, because the big argument with poofas is that they make you very inflamed and that they get oxidized. Well, big thing to really consider here is that our actual inflammatory response, it's dictated by the ratio of DHA and omega-3 fatty acid to arachidonic acid and Omega 6 fatty fatty acid. So this ratio is much more important to consider when you're looking at that picture. And I think it like that would even urge me to say, hey, I want more DHAI, want more EPA in my diet.

40:06 Like, there's nothing wrong with these things because they're really good for your actual inventory status. And if you look in the actual literature, there is like a mountain of evidence on the benefits of Omega threes for our cardiovascular health, for our neurological health, for just a very wide range of our health as a whole. Like it is so important to get that through nutrition. And if you're just eating and if like if you're fearing olive oil, for example, I would really just like, I would ask you to take a look into like your own views and see, like, am I being biased here?

40:39 Because if you look at all of the literature and every single like piece of data that we have, it's almost all in favor of one thing. And then you're over here saying the exact opposite. So everyone else is wrong. Everyone that does all of these studies and devotes years of their lives to these studies are wrong. And only you who read Ray Pete's forum is right. Isn't that a little arrogance? Like that's what I would do, right? So in my opinion, Omega three's good. Don't buy like some ghetto rancid fish oil.

41:07 That's probably not a very good idea and I think. Oil is. Great. Yeah. Eat real fish. Like, I'm Greek, I'm Mediterranean, so I love seafood, love fish, love. It's just the best, man. Like, you can't beat it. And you're not only getting omega-3's from fish, right? You're getting zinc, you're getting copper, you're getting like the entire package of nutrients. And we want to talk about mineral balancing, all of that. Well, eating real food, I think that nature accounts for the mineral balancing side of things for us.

41:38 And it kind of expects us because obviously as being people that were hunter gatherers in the past, it obviously expects that we're going to have like a wide variety of the foods that we consume throughout this process. And it is like the OG way of mineral balancing in a way, which is pretty cool to think about. But seafood I'm very positive on. With that being said, you might want to be careful with like tuna. It is known to be a bit higher in mercury. So that is why I stick with like set men, trouts, sardines.

42:06 Like, how can you be sardines? I'm like the sardine poppy in another life. It's the best. So yeah, it's really that I was saying, yeah, pretty much it's the Omega threes. I think that the arguments inherently does not account for so many different nuances. And I can even take it a step further and talk about cardio lipin and the actual benefits of having Omega threes and sixes in the cardio lipin structure in the actual mitochondria. Like, that's another argument that people bring up, but you just really can't find any evidence supporting it.

42:38 And these are the discussions, I think that need to be had on, you know, like more intellectual spaces like Twitter. So what would be the best diet from your view for human beings? Because there are many people who consume, you know, plant based diets. And I've got nothing against people who eat whatever diet, they can eat whatever they want, right? As long as it's coming from nature and they are getting what their body needs. But what do you think the most optimal diet is for human beings? And also if you can tie that into omega-3 is coming from plant based sources versus the fish?

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44:04 Use the promo code Mobility Fitness at checkout for a nice discount as well. Yeah. So that's another thing that I like to bring up a lot with diet. You got to look at the context, right? Like is this person experiencing gut issues? Do they have like histamine intolerance? Do they have like fungal issues? Like are they got to have like potentially blood sugar spikes that cause fungal proliferation that might resist the antifungal treatments? So you got to look at that question 1st and say, art, is there any like ailments in my Physiology that's impairing me from doing things like eating vegetables, eating different foods like eating grains that are higher quality, even eating things like sourdough bread, unless you have celiac, of course.

44:47 Like you got to look into your Physiology and say like, are there any issues here that might, that might make this food problematic? And then from there, rather than saying like this food is inherently bad like a lot of people do, you have to just admit to yourself and say, Hey, my Physiology, it's not where it needs to be right now. And I need to work towards improving it so that I can eat more of these foods because they do have benefits. And these foods, God in nature, these foods aren't inherently bad.

45:13 I don't believe that God creates foods that are just out here to kill us like carrots. Like I really disagree at that point. Someone said that carrots are really deadly for you in the theory created by Bill Gates, but I don't think that's very true. So that's wild pretty much like in favor of a more omnivorous diet. So you're just eating like a balanced diet, right? Like you're getting your 30 grams of fibers from fruits, berries, vegetables, carrots, cruciferous veggies, those types of things. And I think it is important to get veggies in your meal and fruits, if you can't tolerate them, it's something that you got to work towards, right?

45:52 Because you do get benefits from them and they're not objectively bad. And it's not very intelligent to just fix a on oxalates when there's the entirety of the human body that you're not accounting for. That's just my stance. It's in my eyes. People like like we have this big picture, right? And we all understand that it's like a really complex thing that none of us fully know. And people just really, it's like you take a magnifying glass and you just look at 1 little aspect, it oxalates and you just hyper fix it on them.

46:19 And you just start calling every vegetable bad, even though we have plenty of evidence and plenty of human beings that eat vegetables themselves that have no issues to it. So at the end of the day, like, as horrible as it sounds, it is a skill issue. So you really do have to figure out how to kind of resolve that. Yeah, it's a skill issue at the end of the day and something that people have to look towards resolving. Now, if you do have a certain condition and it requires you to eat more carnivorous or something, and it's some sort of like really new thing that's complicated, I'm always going to keep myself humble intellectually and always understand where that person is coming from rather than obviously like going really hard at them and saying you're objective.

46:58 No, I think that it's always important for people to feel seen and understood because at the end of the day, these are people that are going through certain sicknesses themselves and they found the diet that was obviously able to help them a lot. So a little nuance I wanted to add in there, but pretty much I would say in terms of a diet, like you want meat, I think that's pretty Dang important. Obviously like red meat, seafood, high quality poultry, you could do that too, but it's it's harder to find that these days.

47:26 I'm a big proponent of wild game yet so like venison, elk, bicep, it's my favorite. And then lamb is pretty Dang good as well. Seafood, I think pork, it has nutrients. I just don't eat pork personally. I'm not like the biggest fan of it. But yeah, pretty much like fruits, veggies even like if you prepare rice correctly or buckwheat, like those can be good sources too. And even even if you have a good fermented sourdough bread and you don't have intolerances to that, it could be a good option. But it really depends on where your Physiology is AT.

47:59 And you have to have that honest conversation with yourself many times over. So that would be a kind of my take on what a really good diet would look like. And it's going to depend on person to person. We always got to be striving to where you can just go, go to the store, get a wide variety of foods and be able to tolerate it all so that we can get that wide variety of foods in. Because getting that wide variety of foods in and food cycling and doing all this stuff, it's actually going to help enhance your beneficial bacteria diversity and it's going to really help that aspect of the gut lighting.

48:32 It's going to really help the out the overall inflammatory status of the body. So it is a good way of optimizing Physiology. And yeah, that's what I would say to that. In terms of the whole plant based arguments where I can get my, you can get your like omega-3, some krill oil or algae oil or one of these other random things have knocked on down that rabbit hole too much. I, I personally have worked with a client who is more plant based. I've mostly worked with people that are more like obviously balanced and omnivorous because to be quite honest, I think it would be.

49:07 It's just misaligned with my beliefs that we should be eating no meats. I think that meat is very good for you. And yeah, I think it's a very important thing to eat. So I don't really take on clients that kind of refuse to eat any meats, even seafood. Like if they want to be pescetarian and eat seafood and I'm totally good but that. But if it's like no meat, what's? So I just can't do that on my protocols. And I think it's going to be like, like it's going to be so difficult and we're going to have to take so many extra steps just to get your normal nutrition and because we're cutting out these key nutrient dense food groups.

49:39 Also, I don't know why I didn't bring up eggs. Eggs good. They're like a multivitamin. Like eggs are the collagen. Getting a good glycine and methionine ratio and is really important because if you're getting a bunch of muscle in your diet and not enough glycine, well that's horrible for your rate of aging instead of causing a lot of problems. So collagen, glycine, extremely important to add into your diet. Yeah. And just those things are going to be really crucial. So like just having a wide variety and obviously looking into like ancestral tradition and seeing like the fact that our ancestors, they would eat like the organs and they would eat all this different stuff.

50:16 And they would basically ensure that they have nutrition that they needed down at a very detailed level. And that means looking at like all these different micronutrients and seeing if you're getting the right ratios of them and if you're getting the right amounts of them. Beautiful. Yeah, And our ancestors would have eaten nose to tail, right? They would have eaten everything. So they wouldn't have eaten just the, the muscle meat like we do today. And I feel like it's so important to eat a huge variety.

50:42 And I loved your balanced approach that you answered the the question so nicely because it it really isn't so black and white as social media influencers make it to sound like that, you know, that something is trying to kill you or that you should avoid at all costs. Or many people say that, you know, when they've done the carnivore diet, they've eliminated all the fruits and vegetables and they're got healed. But did they actually heal if you still can't eat fruits and vegetables? Yeah. What happens if you add those foods back in?

51:12 Yeah. So that that's the thing. What I want to say is that, you know, I don't believe that you've managed to heal anything. You've managed to reduce definitely your symptoms that you're experiencing. That's a. Good. Thing which is great, but you need to then work on rebuilding back your ability to incorporate the entire world back into your life because what happens if you by accident eat something that's not on your menu, you know, and then it throws you off balance and then you have an inflammatory response and you feel like, oh, then you get this confirmation bias that Oh yeah, that's why I'm doing the carnivore diet because it allows me to not have all these inflammatory issues and every time I eat something it re triggers my response.

51:54 I did the carnivore diet last year for four months and it felt pretty great, well, for the period that I was on. Then eventually towards the end of it, why I stopped was because I started to experience muscle cramps and I was having difficulty falling asleep easily. I felt like my body was burning through a lot of magnesium for some reason, so I was even taking magnesium supplementation. Of course I was training a lot as well like I am now, but now I'm feeling 1000 times better because I'm eating a way more balanced diet.

52:26 I'm eating fruits and vegetables, everything is seasonal and local that I'm eating and everything is from my environment. I just feel like my body is more hydrated, I feel more balanced in my system, and my gut is so good. Now towards the end of my carnivore experience, I also had difficulties going to the bathroom as well. So I realized how important it is to actually incorporate some fiber to some degree in your diet every single day. Say again? Well, think. About this because if you're not getting fiber in your diet and you're not getting any prebiotics, what is feeding your beneficial bacteria like what's.

53:05 Feeding that, that's a huge argument, yeah. Yeah, if you're not getting 120 grams of carbs in a Dick, how are you going to keep like, proper thyroid function for a long period of time unless you're just a menace with the cold exposure? Like that's the one little hack that you can do if you are on a carnivore diet to keep your thyroid good. Got to really optimize the cold exposure and really optimize the seasonality of things. But I think this goes back to the seasonal eat, right. I think it's cool to eat more carnivorous during the winter seasons when we're out outside all the time.

53:37 And obviously in this state of cold thermogenesis, it's really beneficial in particular for the NAD plus to NADH ratio and the mitochondria. It's another important thing that it can be utilized for. And that's why I think that life is like a process of seasons. So like obviously maybe in the winter time, you're eating more carnivore slash, keeping the carbs a bit lower. Maybe as you approach the street to spring, you start adding some fruits in there, you start adding some some tubers in there, you start adding some rice in there, things around those lines.

54:06 And then maybe during the summer, you add even a little bit more carbs when the sun is shining, all that fun stuff. Then maybe during the fall time, start getting cold again. You can drop down back to like more of a paleo approach. But in general, when I work with clients, I think almost like a lot out of the time, at least I like to keep them between 120 and 150 grams of carbs. Because 120 is kind of like like the lower range in which when you know, like you're really looking at, hey, the thyroid is supported enough here.

54:33 And then 150 is like the higher range. You're like, if this person has insulin issues that we have to look out for, it's probably more responsible to keep them in this range to avoid any excessive blood sugar spikes. Right, OK. And yeah, and that's another thing as well where people online are saying about the carbs, you know, they're vilifying the carbs that it's they're not good and they causes all this inflammation and problems in the system. When in reality you need to be asking the question, why is the body not able to tolerate the carbohydrates in the 1st place?

55:03 Why is it not able to utilize the carbs? Because it's not that any specific macronutrient is not a problem, right? It's just more about your why, in what situation and circumstance do you need and what kind of individual can tolerate eating more carbohydrates or more energy in general? Like when I hear a lot of these discussions, no one ever talks about like the energy intake side of things because I feel like calories do matter because they give us a perspective in terms of our portion of our portion sizing, you know?

55:35 Yeah. It's. Literally thermodynamics. I always find it to be funny when someone's like, the calories really exist. Are they there? I'm like, yes, they are there. Actually. Calories in, calories out is real. But here's the deal. When you go in those BMR calculators online, they're just estimating based on your ice and weights and age and body fat percentage what it would be. Perhaps you have a slower metabolism in reality. Perhaps you have a faster metabolism in reality. We don't really know that.

56:03 We don't know the exact amount of calories that your body is burning in a day. So what I always say is if you're trying to lose weight, gain weight, like use those calculators and see how they go at 1st and then see like on the actual scale how your weight is changing and get a sense of your actual metabolism. And then kind of look around in your environment. Like is my gut good? Do I have excess visceral fat? Is my liver functioning well or my mitochondria functioning well? Am I doing the circadian stuff?

56:30 Am I getting enough melanin, obviously, and getting enough sun exposure in the summertime? Am I walking enough? Like when I work with some people, they'll be like the scale. This isn't dropping, Chris. And I'm like, how many steps a day? How many steps are you getting? How many workouts a week? Because there's the calories out portion of things too that people neglect. They just think if I eat 1800 calories today, it's just all gonna fall off, right? Well, no, you gotta move too. Like the movements is a really important part.

56:59 100% yeah, it's definitely important. It's important to have everything together. You can't just do only one of the things. That's why you talked at the beginning about the four pillars of health, right, which is basically your sleep, your fitness, your circadian rhythms and the nutrition. Well, of course you can add in their relationships and you know, the emote, the stress and all that, all that stuff as well, which is contributing to your overall health and well-being. You can't just focus on the one pillar of health and just expect massive results.

57:28 That's what I teach my clients as well, that it's very important. The more pillars of health you add together, the faster you're going to see results. Of course, it can be quite overwhelming to do everything at once, which is why we said at the beginning that it's important to take little tiny action steps and make small swaps along the way. What you mentioned previously about vitamin D and getting the vitamin D from the sun, what would you say to people who say, well, Chris, the sun is dangerous, I don't want to be in the sun so I can take vitamin D?

57:58 What do you say to those people? It's. A hate. I hate to use this word, but I must. It's a skill issue at the end of the day. Because if you're, if you think the sun is dangerous, I would first and foremost ask you to go into the literature and ask the question, is shining UV lights on a cell culture study the same thing that's happening in real life? Is shining isolated UVB light without the other spectrum. It's like the visible spectrum, the red lights, the NIR, all these other things that we know are good for us.

58:30 Is isolating only the UV really going to be an effective measure of whether the sun is bad for us or not? My next thing would be, are you burning when you go into the sun? Is your diet good? Are you actually into a lot of this stuff? Are you getting your morning sunlight to prevent burning in the afternoon to kind of prime melanin production? Have you been tapering on your actual sun exposure? So starting with like maybe 10 minutes and then moving it up overtime because the, the entire name of the game is to not burn.

58:59 And I think that it's going to be far more beneficial to receive this vitamin D and make it on our own rather than just supplementing it. And I do have people supplement vitamin D sometimes, but only in very extreme cases where they're like very northern latitude. They're they're just unable to get the synthesis up over time. We'll measure their levels and they just can't get it up. Maybe they're in a really bad environment for the synthesis of it. Maybe they have a a mutation on their vitamin D receptor that's actually a real thing, by the way, pretty crazy.

59:28 It would be not fun to have that. But yeah, pretty much there's these different contexts in which it could be beneficial. But for most people, I would say it is far more recommended. Should just go and get this by going in the afternoon sun. And I would recommend downloading an app like Meister Katie, an app by Sarah Kleiner. The yeah, it's a great app. It'll tell you when the UVA comes out. It'll tell you how much vitamin D you're synthesizing based on your skin tone and whatnot. And you want to aim for around 5010 thousand IU of vitamin DA day.

59:59 And in order to protect yourself, you got to build a solar callus, right? You got to get outside in the mornings. Watch the sunrise, get that morning sunlight on your skin so that your body has like the cues to protect itself. And then when you go and actually get your sun exposure for vitamin D, you want to be laying flat. So you want like around 40% at the minimum of your skin being hit by this vitamin D. So if your idea is, hey, I'm going to get my vitamin by walking outside in the day, you're probably not going to do a very good job of synthesizing it.

1:00:31 You need to be laying flat in order to actually get that. So the sun rays are hitting you at the right angle so that your body is synthesizing that. Recommend exposing as much skin as you're able to to the sun as well, just to aid in that vitamin D production. And then you want to start off slow. So like if you're a Fitzpatrick one or two skin type, you wanna start off at like 10 minutes probably. You do not want to, you don't wanna overdo it. And then once you feel that maybe a burn is coming on, go in the shade, go inside.

1:01:01 That's the whole point of the sun exposure. It's supposed to be a new lifestyle habit, not just some sort of pill you take every day. You're supposed to actually use that as a time in the day to obviously like clear your mind, think properly, relax that your nervous system like there's a reason for this. And it's a great thing to implement into your life to actually build more order into it, in my opinion. So yeah, basically you want to get morning sunlight, make sure you're tapering your way up responsibly with midday sun exposure.

1:01:32 Oh no, I got a call. Oops. All good. You see me? Sorry about that. All good. So. So my bad. So basically what we're looking at here is you want to get that midday sun exposure and you want to make sure you're tapering your way up properly. And then not only that, you want to get that evening sun exposure because it is really healing for the skin and it's really healing for these areas. And I forget the exact science behind it, but I know that what's his name, Blue Light Diet. He has some really good information on his Twitter and I verified with all the literature that he posted, I think it was him.

1:02:08 It might have been quantum biology collective as well. It was one of those accounts. And I saw some really interesting research on the idea of what evening sunlight does for our skin and kind of the healing properties that it promotes for our skin. But even sleeping well too, right, That skin repair and everything. Is it to be important? Yeah. 100% So yeah, that would be my it's for. People that are very against the sun exposure or people that think it's dangerous. If you do it irresponsibly, yes, it's going to be dangerous.

1:02:38 But if you do it the right way, like intended us to, then no, it's not going to be dangerous. It's going to be beneficial. And when you weigh out the pros and cons between sun exposure versus no sun exposure, you are going to tremendously benefit from the sun exposure. A lot of these anti sun people, they kind, I don't know if you've seen the bench warmers. It's a it's an American movie. And basically it's like this baseball team and this guy has this brother and he's very afraid of the sun. Like he's overly horrified of it.

1:03:04 I'll probably put a reel out on it soon, but he's basically over horrified of the sun. And when he walks outside, he has like a panic attack and is just losing it. And that's what I think about when I see these dermatologists that like to come on the Internet and hate on sun exposure. Like are you really like it's like a disgrace to your ancestors to be that afraid of going outside, in my opinion. And you kind of need to check your in shack the literature and really reassess your beliefs if you think that the sun is objectively dangerous no matter the circumstance.

1:03:34 Yeah, definitely. I love the nuanced perspective that you bring because, yeah, it's so important that people don't just go out on the weekend, right? And they just lay all day in the sun. And just because they think because they have sunscreen on that they can lay all day 8-9 hours in the sun just because they have sunscreen, you know, anyway, we're, we're a little bit against sunscreen, obviously, but for, for good reasons, right? Because of course, anything that you put in your skin is going to be absorbed into your lymphatic system, into your bloodstream as well, because your skin is one of the largest organs of your body, right?

1:04:09 So even if you think that, you know, you're just, it's just staying externally that that stuff is chemicals, right? And what's it doing? And plus, when the sunlight is striking the skin, the science behind this. Yeah. Yeah, exactly like I want. To say like, like, but you always see like with supplement labels, never put this in the sun. It's not a good idea. How come they don't say the same thing with all of these chemicals in the sunscreen when you're shining UV tand actually on these chemicals in your skin, It's probably not the best idea.

1:04:42 Like even since I was a kid, I always refused to learn sunscreen. Like I always hated it. I was always the one in my family and it was like, no, I'm not. Intuitively in you before I knew that. What was that? Intuitively, you knew, yeah. Intuitively I knew and like I've always been very against sunscreen and I think that you're like, unless you're living at like a severe latitude mismatch, let's say that you're like lineage comes from like Norway or something and then you're living in Australia where the UV's like 13.

1:05:11 Then you might have to start thinking about like a mineral based zinc oxide sunscreen to actually help you out because otherwise you're just going to be sitting at very high UV at a very evolutionary mismatch match. And that's why I think that I live in Georgia right now, which is pretty close to Florida and the United States. And I think it's like the perfect latitude for my Greek heritage, my ancestry, similar to the UV and everything. And it's what's the? Latitude there. I think it's 33. OK. Yeah, Cyprus is I think 32, so we're pretty similar, yeah.

1:05:41 Right around the same latitude. And yeah, it's a great latitude really. But pretty much like that's what I'd like to consider, like if you're having a good latitude mismatch or match for your heritage and all of that. But I have a friend, he's from Chicago and he's Polish and the dude gets like Tanner than me sometimes. It's pretty insane. So I do think that just because you come from like a northern latitude doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to have issues with the sun, as long as you do it right.

1:06:08 Yeah, I 100% agree with that. Yeah. It's so important that people just take the time and they respect nature, right? But nature is so powerful in all its forces. We need to respect it in all the ways. We can't just think that, oh, like we're go from an indoor environment to an outdoor environment, just spend all day in the sun and think that we're going to be OK when we haven't done all of the circadian practices that you talked about, which is, you know, blocking the blue light at night and having a good night's sleep and waking up with the sunrise.

1:06:36 And all of this process is foundational to being able to tolerate more sun exposure during the daytime. But if you don't do those practices and you have a lot of stressors in your life, well, don't expect that you're able to tolerate the sun well and then blame the sun on for what it didn't do. This is this is the thing, right? So I would love to move more into the mitochondria and maybe talk a little bit about, because I think you know quite well on this topic about what nutrients are, are good for each part of the mitochondria, meaning the electron transport chain.

1:07:11 So maybe you could explain the electron transport chain within the mitochondria and what nutrients benefit each part of the electron transport chain to optimize energy production. So we'll start off with just like a general overview of how the of how the metabolism works. So obviously you start off with glycolysis, which takes a glucose molecule, turns it into two pyruvates and that pyruvate, it gets oxidized and then that obviously will turn into acetyl COA at some point. And you know, all the other fun byproducts that enter into something called the TCA cycle in the actual mitochondria.

1:07:47 And once you're in the TCA cycle, there's a ton of different cofactors that are required. A cofactor you can think of, it is like, it's like, it's like what Shaq is to Kobe. Like you need the actual, you need the cofactor for the enzyme to work very well. And without each other, it's probably a lot less efficient. Sometimes like enzymes are entirely dependent on nutrients and it will limit like the rate limiting step in the reaction and cause serious problems if you don't have these nutrients. That's why nutrition on a cellular level is so important for us.

1:08:18 But if you think about the actual things that are going into this, like 2 ones that really come to my mind right away would be vitamin B1, thiamine, and then vitamin, vitamin B3 and niacin. That'll be another very important one. I believe vitamin, I think B5 is involved in it. It's a bunch of the B vitamins and then a few other things that essentially serve as cofactor or this actual thing, even like tryptophan that that amino acid is going to be important in this. Tyrosine is going to be important for the overall circadian picture of things outside of this.

1:08:49 But pretty much like these nutrients are going to be very important for all these different aspects. And even things like PQQ, which you can get from cacao nibs, you can get it from Kiwis. It's going to be really important for the actual mitochondria as well. So Coq 10, that's another one that you can get it from beef heart. It's pretty Dang great. So yeah, these are like some of the nutrients that are pretty Dang great for our mitochondrial function. And when we think about the electron transport chain that comes after the Krebs cycle, which is obviously it's taking in these molecules called NAD Plus or NADH and then FADH 2.

1:09:24 And then it's obviously donating some electrons to the electron transport chain. And then the electron transport chain, it's like this magnetic. Great. It's like this electromagnetic. Yeah, this electromagnetic gradient almost where electrons are just moving through it and then hydrogen is getting pumped up across the actual membranes. And what's happening is we're forming a hydrogen gradient above here, right? So there's a bunch of hydrogen and it wants to go back down because it's following certain equal principles of equilibrium where we need like an even amount of height on each side.

1:09:56 So as this. Is like pressure. Yeah. And as the actual carriers move it through, you're getting obviously hydrogen ions pumped above up here, and pretty much they all want to move down. So our bodies are brilliant because what happens in the mitochondria is they move down ultimately. And then this big old rotor basically starts moving and it's able to change chemical confirmations and then make actual ATP, which is our body's energy currency. So this entire process that's dictated by all these micronutrients, lights and all these other factors, it's one of the most important processes of making energy in our body.

1:10:36 And this is part of the the reason why I stress a lot of these factors because the actual mitochondria is so complex and there's so many angles that we have to consider. Like even if you look at the electron transport chain, what is the end products reaction? It's it's water, it's cellular water that is obviously very unique to different forms of water that as we know it pretty much. And it's basically just deuterium depleted. Our body, by the way, is like the best source of making deuterium depleted water.

1:11:05 So keep that in mind. But pretty much it's going to be really important to kind of optimize that electron transport chain. And let's say you are eating out of season and you're living in like a northern latitude and you're ordering like, let me think you're ordering like bananas from like Costa Rica, but you're living in like northern Canada. Well, that might be an issue. Deuterium side of things, right? Because deuterium, it's an isotope of hydrogen, but it has an extra neutron. So it's like fat cousin pretty much.

1:11:34 And what you got to consider if you have a build up of deuterium in your cells and you have an excessive amount of it, the deuterium, it might kind of clog the ATP synthase Roder as it spins because it's bigger and it might actually cause a more ineffective output of energy in our body. So it's a huge problem kind of looking into that side of things. But it's nothing that I like overly stress over or get crazy about, but it's something that I'm always very aware about and that's why it's helped people.

1:12:02 Like if you are able to eat seasonally, it would be a much better option for that reason. Plus many more. So yeah, it's kind of like a general rundown to the mitochondria. Now that was fantastic. I think that's so important for people to understand because when you realize that the source of life basically in your body is your ability to create this, this water, basically this deuterium depleted water. And to hold charge in that deuterium depleted water for the cells to be able to use that charge to make the ATP, the energy for the cells.

1:12:36 That's giving us our life force energy. And if we are hampering for whatever reason, our mitochondria to be able to produce that energy. So what you just said, even just from the eating out of season, that's going to disrupt our mitochondrial ability to produce energy. What other things? You already mentioned them previously, but maybe you could directly link them to mitochondrial dysfunction? What are what is leading to mitochondrial dysfunction in our modern day? Yep. That's a great question. So glyphosate is one of them.

1:13:07 We know that glyphosate is a mitochondrial toxin. We know that a lot of pharmaceuticals can act as mitochondrial toxins. We know that pharmaceuticals that are deuterium bombs can be mitochondrial toxins to an extent. We know that isolated blue lights in the evening and even during the daytime right now, like I should probably have my blue light blockers on like you do. That can be a mitochondrial toxin as well. And it can be a big issue just for the entire thing. Emfs, it can be a huge problem as well to think about.

1:13:35 And then let's see, those are like the main ones like because it's really easy to get hyper fixated on like some of the other areas. But the like the Emfs and then like a lot of the pesticides and a lot of like these random pharmaceutical drugs, they, they can tend to be pretty Dang bad for our mitochondrial health. And even just not moving it up isn't really good or even like overeating all the time can be a problem. Or even maybe just eating just infinite amounts of cane sugar and trying to rely on glycolysis slowly, maybe that'll be a problem too.

1:14:07 So a lot of these things are, you know, a lot of these things can kind of act as mitochondrial toxins. And if you look, yeah, there is a study that I read a while back, they looked at like a tissue sample from like a 5 year old and a 95 year old. The five year old had like perfect. The only difference was that the five year old had like really healthy mitochondria, then 95 year old had damaged mitochondria. So it's pretty significant to realize like aging, it is primarily a process that takes place to our mitochondria and our inability to make energy the same as we get older.

1:14:43 So obviously like your mitochondrial health, like once that starts to suck, basically everything else starts to suck because what does your body rely on to do? A lot of these things relies on ATP as its energy currency, right? So if you're not synthesizing a lot of of that, what's gonna happen to your other systems? They're all gonna start becoming dysregulated. Your bodies have this inability to heal. Not only this though, but even things like trauma and stressors like that, it can activate your cell danger response and then really screw with your mitochondria, for example.

1:15:14 So you gotta include the picture as well. So pretty much the mitochondrial perspective and the decentralized perspective is to make this return the nature because it's one of those things out there. Well, you can reduce how much EMF you're exposed to. You can reduce how much blue light you're exposed to greatly. Those are two major levers that you can push. You can also get grounding in to help out mitochondrial. You can also get all these other good things in there. You could also start eating foods that nature provides us that have all these nutrients that are going to support our mitochondrial health.

1:15:46 So yeah, those would be some of the major things that come to mind when I think about our mitochondrial health as a whole. That's beautifully explained. Yeah. It gives people so much power to realize that it's so simple. Really, all you have to do is just reconnect with nature and just minimize a lot of the damaging time that people are spending indoors unnecessarily. So if you don't need to be indoors, you know, if you can spend more time outdoors. Like, I like to do as much stuff outside as I can.

1:16:15 You know, when I, when I wake up in the morning, I go outside and I look at the sunrise. For example, I live upstairs in a, in a building. So I'm not getting grounded in the morning immediately. But after I've eaten my breakfast, I go down to the sea because I live really, really close to the sea in walking distance and I jump in the sea every single morning. So I'm getting my daily grounding in the morning time. So I'm getting not only the grounding, but I'm also getting, as you said, that EMF protection as well because it acts like a Faraday page in the sea, right?

1:16:45 So none of the non-native electromagnetic fields are able to impact me. And I feel like that's an opportunity for my nervous system to say, oh, finally you're giving me a place, a space for to be without all of these stressors. 100% do you do you sleep with like a grounding pad or anything? What are your thoughts on that? No. No, no, I don't know because I've, I've read a lot about, you know, plugging it into the walls and is that actually good if there's dirty electricity in the walls and all this kind of business and because I haven't mitigated that A. 100% yeah, I definitely get that.

1:17:18 It's it's something that I always say humble about. I'm like genuinely my answer for the grounding mats or whatever is I don't really know. But my idea right now and what I potentially think could be the case is if you're living in like a house and you don't have like a bunch of like power lines around you and you're in an environment that's relatively free of EMFI think that it could potentially be beneficial. But I think you would have to have like a very specific set of environmental conditions, review that through that lens.

1:17:48 Oh 100%, yeah. I totally agree with you. And that's why I've been very skeptical about using one because I feel like is it going to be a positive or a negative? So what I try to do is just get grounded as much as I can throughout the day. So for example, like after I've done my morning swim, I'm going to do my work outside on my balcony. I'm going to sit in the sun with as less clothes on as possible or even without clothes if I can. And just like, you know, make sure that no one is watching around, you know, And then basically just get my sun exposure throughout the entire day as I'm using my tech because I find that that's way less damaging on my eyes because every time when I'm working indoors, I find it so much more detrimental on my eyes.

1:18:28 Even if I'm wearing blue light blocking glasses, I still feel that I have this eye strain because I just feel that the Emfs are so pervasive and. The closer you are to your screen, obviously the more of a problem it's going to be for your eyes as well. When you're just fixating your eyes, you're really zoomed in like that, it's going to be a big problem. Yeah, the inverse square law, yeah. So I actually did like a little experiment to my dad and he had like very bad back pain, very bad back issues.

1:18:55 I had him do the grounding mat before bed every night and he said it actually it drastically helped his back pain. So just from hearing that, I was like, whoa, like that might be a good idea. But like my parents, they live in like they live in their own neighborhood. It's like gated and whatnot. And they're not like in like the city they live in like the mountains. And it's like very isolated from a lot of the EMS. So that's why I think for like situations like, and you're just dealing with so much pain and you're not able to like potentially get enough grounding during the daytime that it could be a potential hack.

1:19:28 But with that being said, I'm not like 100% certain on this. I haven't read any literature that shows like the differences between regular grounding and grounding maths. If you're a researcher, that would be a great study to upload, please. I'm waiting. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, I mean, it's a very nuanced discussion, just like you said, like with everything, right? It's not so black and white. Like I'm not in disagreement with the grounding mats at all. I just feel like for my situation, because I'm, I know that throughout the day I'm getting so much grounding.

1:19:58 I basically go 3 * 3 * a day. You know, I get in the sea twice a day. I get I lay on the grass. On the UVB hours, like in the midday, so I like one hour there. So basically when I'm doing all of that, you know I'm getting at least three hours of grounding per day. I know it's not that much in contrast to our ancestors, right, who are grounded 24/7 on the earth, but I feel like it really does make a massive difference compared to in the winter time, for example, when I'm grounding a little bit less because it's so much colder outside and not so pleasant to spend so much time outdoors.

1:20:32 I just find that wow, like I get such a massive benefit from the grounding, especially from the anxiety aspect. Like I feel less way less agitated in my my system. My nervous system feels more calm and I just feel more regulated. And I feel that's such a huge thing. Do you find that it regulates your nervous system as well? Yeah. So yeah, it totally does for me. And the huge thing with it, like I'll have clients and they'll have like Constipation, for example, and they're having really hard time with motility.

1:21:01 Literally something as simple as getting them to ground and increase that will make a huge difference. It's actually pretty significant how often I see it happen. There's actually also the studies and research supporting the idea that grounding on a regular basis will actually normalize your cortisol rhythms. So rather than having such dysregulated rhythms, the grounding is going to help normalize, stabilize them to where you're not just chronically stressed or in the sympathetic state all the time.

1:21:29 So I do find this to be one of the most things that you can do for your health on that lens. I've also seen research showing that it's really good for improving sleep quality in people, which it definitely is. I can say that first hand, especially if I'm living in this EMF. And so I think that grounding is like an absolute hack. I would recommend going to Earth Poppy's account. He's another Poppy. He makes grounding shoes. They're very Dang good. And yeah, I'd recommend. It's called Olympus Earthquake brand.

1:21:58 And you can, yeah, you can do a little bit of a hack by just putting those shoes on and walking around throughout the day, like doing your normal stuff, being grounded, like, imagine that. What a hack. So I think it is a blessing that we have access to resources like this. And I think it makes it a lot easier to obviously go about grounding in our daily lives and get more of it in. This was such a fantastic discussion, Chris. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. I'm sure that the audience have has managed to get so much value from this episode.

1:22:29 We dropped so many knowledge bombs and a lot of good info for people to apply right away into their life. So there's literally no excuse for you to not immediately start to feel better and to realize how much potential people actually have you know and control over the lives you know, to take action from the, you know, from the mental aspect and to on the physical aspect as well. So you're such a wealth of knowledge, Chris. I would love to do this again in the future. I feel like there's so many more questions I wanted to ask you, but I want to be respectful of your time because I know that you've probably got some more stuff to, you know, to do today.

1:23:03 So where can people find you, connect with you and work with you if they wish to do so? Yeah, so I actually have a website getting made finally, but that's not the reality right now. So if you want to find me, just go to my Instagram. It is at the MITOPAPI, the MiTo Poppy, kind of like it says on my name, but just with the in front of it. And then on Twitter, I'm just MiTo poppy. So same thing you see listed on my name down here. And yeah, MITOPAPI and yeah, just feel free to shoot me Adm, shoot me a message.

1:23:36 If you're wanting to work one-on-one, you're wanting to join my school community, shoot me a message. And yeah, I'll add you to that. I'll get things set up and whatnot. But yeah, to shoot me a message. DMS are wide open. And yeah, if you are, if you're someone just looking for getting healed and you're just on this journey, I would encourage you to obviously sit down and journal how you feel about this, how things have gone the past few years for you. Track where you are right now, right now, Like try to quantify how your symptoms are and really just commit yourself and devote yourself to healing.

1:24:07 You're not going to know all the answers in the beginning. So while you don't know all the answers, why don't you just include and implement what you do know, Like the sun, like the EMF stuff, the basics. Include that and then you're on your journey. Maybe it's not going to be like very perfect right away, but as you continue to do those things consistently, this is when you can start seeing like which practitioners am I aligned with? Is there anyone in particular that I'm wanting to work with? Does my case require a practitioner can resolve just through the lifestyle changes?

1:24:37 I always recommend seeing if lifestyle can fix it before obviously making like a massive investment. But yeah, pretty much like throughout this journey, it's going to require a lot of tenacity, a lot of willpower. And it's not just you're changing your physical self, your mental is changing and the spiritual side of yourself is changing as well. And it should be this one beautiful, dynamic connection in which your mind, body and soul are changing and moving you towards a different state of life.

1:25:04 You're going to feel, feel different. Your relationships are going to feel different. Everything in your life is going to change. And it's a good thing. It's a very beautiful thing that you're going to be experiencing. And yeah, I would always invite you to just make sure you're holding on to that faith and the idea that you can heal. Make sure that you always hold hope in your heart because what's like, what sounds better to you? You have a 0.001% chance of healing. Like, would you rather just take that chance or would you just rather choose 0% and give up entirely?

1:25:33 I don't know about you, but I'm always taking 0.01% chance and putting everything I have into it because I want to fight for a better future for myself. I want to fight for a better future for everyone around me. And no matter what it is in life, you always want to take the 0.01% chance when it comes to something as important as your health. And then finally, once you realize those two things and you're filled with faith and hope, you're going to be able to function from a state of love because you understand where you're going and you understand everything that's going to happen.

1:26:02 And you're able to just live in the present, knowing that the future in good hands and knowing that even when uncertain times come up, things will be handled properly. So that's my bit of wisdom for everyone who's obviously on a healing journey, even practitioners who are working with other clients. So yeah, that's all I got to say. And thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. And yeah, you were a great podcast host. Thank you so much, Chris. Those were wonderful words of wisdom.

1:26:30 I mean, people are going to find this episode so valuable, honestly. And you know, that's exactly what people need to hear, right? You're giving them that hope, that light that you you need and you're spreading your bio photons across the globe through the Internet, right through through the centralized Internet. They're trying to control us with. You are using it to enlighten people. So that's wonderful. Thank you so much. This is the Fitness Wisdom podcast.