Probably The Best Description Of Inflammation You’ll Ever Hear

Content by: 180 Nutrition



The above video is 3:03 minutes long.

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Dr John HartThe word inflammation gets thrown around all the time. From bloggers, health nuts, athletes and practitioners; they all say eat this or do that to reduce inflammation! But do you really understand what inflammation is, and more importantly, what low-grade inflammations is?

Well have no fear if you don’t, because if you are willing to commit three minutes of your time to the above video, you will hear probably the best description of inflammation and why you REALLY need to know about it.

This week our special guest is Dr John Hart who is a longevity medicine practitioner. This is probably the most important podcast we’ve done to date and we highly recommend you check it out, as he explains the simple things you can do to avoid chronic illness, live longer, healthier, happier and improve the quality of your life.

Full Interview: Mastering Hormones, Gut Health, Inflammation & Living to 120 Years Old


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Audio Version of the Full Interview Here:


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In this episode we talk about:

  • How to add healthy and happy years onto your life by making simple changes
  • The best description of inflammation you’ll ever hear
  • The best description of leaky gut you’ll ever hear
  • Why hormones are crucial to our health, vibrance & labido!
  • Applying the ‘Big 5’ to avoid the pitfalls of chronic disease as we age
  • And much much more…

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Full Transcript Interview:

Guy Lawrence: Hi, this is Guy Lawrence of 180 Nutrition and welcome to another episode of the Health Sessions. You know, I might be a little bit biased, but it never ceases to amaze me when we have guests on and some of the information that they impart with us and today’s guest is absolutely no exception about this.

I might have repeated it before, but the more I learn I realize the more I don’t actually know. Because every time I seem to explore these rabbit holes, when it comes to health and wellness and life and nutrition and you name it, the more things are just getting revealed to me.

If you’re watching this podcast in video, you probably notice my jaw is opened for half of it, because the information I just shared on you is just absolutely, I find it absolutely fascinating and it’s fantastic to be bringing the podcast to you today.

Our fantastic guest is Dr. John Hart. Now, he’s a fantastic and beautiful human being and he’s a longevity medicine practitioner and we delve into essentially the human body and the life of the human body and how we can extend it and live actually a happier, healthier life going into our 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and even beyond that. Which is awesome!

He talks about two specific things, which is: life span of the human being, but also then the health span of the human being. And the idea is to expand the health span so the quality of your life continues as you get older as well and then that has a knock-on effect, because it obviously affects your life span. And doing this as well, I probably heard the best description of leaky gut I’ve ever heard as well and the importance of it.

So, we dive into so many things and it’s definitely going to be a podcast I’m going to play to myself a couple of times to re-get this information. So, I have no doubt that you’re going to get a lot out of this today.

We also get emails, you know. Sometimes this information is overload, where’s the best place to start? How do we do it? And I find myself repeating these things, so I thought I’d print a podcast.

If you’re new to 180 Nutrition, download the e-book. It’ll probably take you 30 minutes to read. It’s 26 pages. It’s written in a nice simple manner, outlining what we feel to be the best principles for health, to apply for long-term health. Simple as that!

Our 180 Superfood, you know, it’s completely natural. If you want to start cutting out processed foods from your diet, which is what we always encourage and recommend, all you have to do is get some 180 Superfood.

I have it in a smoothie every morning. So, I’ll mix it with some fats, like avocado. I normally put a greens power in if I don’t have any spinach and things like that and I usually us a low glycemic fruit as well. Berries, quarter of a banana sometimes, things like that. And then you’re getting nutrients, you know. You’re not getting just glucose, which is from processed carby foods that most people do. You’re getting the nutrients from all that.

And the last thing as well is, yeah, you can sign up to our newsletter and we send out articles every week. They’re all free. You can read them. All have different thoughts and discussions.

So, yeah, do them things and you’ll be well on your way. Just slowly taking this information in all the time. It’s just as simple as that.

And of course, if you’re listening to this through iTunes, leave a little review, give use your feedback on the podcast. It’s always really appreciated. Subscribe to it. Five-star it, And that just literally helps us with iTunes rankings and continues to get the word out there.

So, let’s go over to John Hart. This is an awesome podcast and I have no doubt that you’re going to enjoy it.

Guy Lawrence: Okay. Hi, this is Guy Lawrence. I’m joined with Stuart Cooke. Hi, Stewie.

Stuart Cooke: Hello.

Guy Lawrence: Well, a little freeze there. He’s back. Our special guest today is Dr. John Hart. John, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on, mate. We really appreciate it.

Dr. John Hart: Thanks, Guy. Thanks for inviting me.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah, with just; what I thought I’d do is just fill in with the listeners a little bit about the background of it all, because we met at the THR1VE symposium, which is probably just over a month ago now and of course, we were all speaking there, with Mark Sisson being brought over, and we came in onto your talk and was just absolutely blown away with what you had to say and you could clearly see everyone else in the room was too. So, we’ve been trying to figure out how we can get that into our podcast somehow. So, we’ll have a good go anyway. I don’t know whether we’ll achieve it, but we’ve certainly got a few questions about to run through with you today, John. So, it’s much appreciated, mate.

So, just to get the ball rolling would you mine sharing a little bit about yourself? What you do and I guess a little bit about your own journey, like you did.

Dr. John Hart: Well, I’ve always had an interest in health and performance and I started off playing sports at a reasonably high level; volleyball and biking and rowing and then went to Uni and got into the Uni lifestyle and did a few degrees and ended up with an interest in sports medicine, sports science and medicine. And since then been training up on all the different aspects of human performance and human health.

So, you get trained in disease and disease management medicine and that’s okay. I mean, modern medicine is very good at treating life-threatening diseases and acute injuries and infections. And they’re the things that used to kill us was acute injury and infections, but nowadays it’s more chronic diseases. Long-term, low-grade inflammation causing damage to tissues that lead to the 70 to 80 percent of causes of death, with chronic degenerative diseases, like heart attacks and stokes and cancer and dementia and osteoporosis.

And modern medicine is not that good at that. If I have a serious infection, or I have a broken bone, you know I’ll be going straight to the nearest hospital, but if I want to stay healthy and detect early disease and turn it around, rather than waiting until it gets into the severe, sort of permanent damage, then I think you’ve got to go looking at more functional medicine or integrative medicine techniques to be effective.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Stuart Cooke: Okay. So, just a little outside of medicine right now and, you know, million dollar question on everyone’s lips; in your opinion, how significant is nutrition for overall health?

Dr. John Hart: Yeah, I think, I talk about the Big Five. If you want to have a long healthy life you’ve got to have five things that are working optimally …

Stuart Cooke: Okay.

Dr. John Hart: … and that’s diet, exercise, sleep, stress management, and hormones, probably in that order. I think diet is the most important one. If your diet’s bad, if it’s really bad, you’re not going to be able to counteract that one by getting all the other ones working. But for optimal health, you’ve got to have them all working. Because each one that’s broken is going to lead to degeneration and disease.

So, nutrition, whether that’s diet and/or dietary supplements, I’d put that as the most important one. But you’ve got to put attention on all of them. It’s like, you’ve got a car and you only put attention on the engine. You don’t worry about tires or the steering or the air conditioning or whatever or the hole in the roof. You’ve got to do everything if you want it to run well.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah, and from what we can see, most people aren’t running all five. There’s normally something amiss.

Dr. John Hart: You say most people, all five are not optimal, they’re all broken to a degree and just about everybody’s got sleep that is broken.

When you’re young, your hormones usually take care of themselves. Because in your 20s, Mother Nature wants you operating well so that you can reproduce and raise the next generation. But once you get into your 30s and you’ve done that, Mother Nature doesn’t really need to have you around any more, so it’s quite happy to generate decline and die off. And part of the way it does that is to decrease the production of most of the hormones that control what the body does.

So, the hormones don’t actually do anything. They just tell the body what to do. If you don’t make the hormones, then the body doesn’t get told what to do. It doesn’t do it and you degenerate, you age, you die off and stop off at the nursing home maybe for 10 years on the way.

So, when you’re young, you don’t have to worry about the hormones because it’s in Mother Nature’s interest to have them all working optimally.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: Most people that’s what happens, not everybody, but most people. But certainly as you get older, most hormones decline and then you’ve got to put more attention on it.

So, the way I think about it is, that when you’re young there’s a lot of things that happen automatically and you don’t have to worry about it too much and you’ve got a big reserve.

Stuart Cooke: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: The older you get, the less happens automatically, the more you have to take it out of manual control, if you want to maintain your health. You don’t have to, but if you don’t, you will degenerate and you’ll suffer the disability and the pain and the discomfort and the limitations of what you can do because of that.

Guy Lawrence: Right. And does that slow up the aging process then, by intervening and then the aging …

Dr. John Hart: Yeah. You can think about it as normal aging or optimal aging. Normal aging is the stage of decline that Mother Nature’s in favor of us going through to kill us off. But we’ve got the technology and the knowledge now to intervene in that and have optimal aging, where basically you stay healthy and active and independent and vital for much, much longer and instead of having a long period, say a third of your life in sort of fairly serious decline and decay and disability, you know you can shorten that done to a few years.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah. Wow. I certainly like the idea of optimal …

Dr. John Hart: Yeah. There’s life span and there’s health span. And so, life span is how long you live, but health span is how long you’re healthy.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Stuart Cooke: Quality of life.

Dr. John Hart: Yes, that’s right. So, we’ve sort of extended our life span, but we haven’t really extended our health span yet with modern medicine. You know, it has to a degree, but not as much as the life span. So, there seems to be more of a gap now between the limit of your health span and the limit of your life span.

So, anti-aging medicine, age management medicine, longevity medicine, whatever you want to call it, it’s all about identifying why your health span’s declining and correcting it. So, maintain your health span.

And it turns out that the things improve your health span, also improve your life span.

Stuart Cooke: Yes.

Dr. John Hart: The health span’s the criteria , because there’s no point in living longer if it’s in a nursing home.

Stuart Cooke: Exactly.

Guy Lawrence: If you’ve been dragged over the line, yeah. Absolutely.

Stuart Cooke: And does the strategies, regarding the things that you’ve spoken about, include gut health? Because we’ve been hearing a lot about the critical importance of microbiome right now. It seems to be a bit of a buzzword. Is there; what do you think about that?

Dr. John Hart: Yeah. I think just sort of the big picture is that the things that cause degen; the main thing that causes degeneration and deterioration and aging of the body is inflammation. And the single major source of inflammation is an unhealthy gut in most people. So, by correcting the gut, then you can minimize the inflammation in your body, which then decreases the degeneration and the decay in your body.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: So, I’ll just talk a bit about inflammation, because everybody has heard about the word, but don’t have a picture of what it means.

So, we have the ability to mount an acute inflammatory response, in a local part of the body, in response to the things that used to kill us. The things that used to kill us were infections and trauma.

So, it you get a local infection or you get trauma in a part of your body, you will set up an acute inflammatory response to deal with it. And what happens is your blood vessels dilate, so more blood goes to the area and that’s why it looks redder and feels warmer. And when the blood vessels get leaky, so cells that have transported into that area can get out of the blood vessels and at the same time fluid leaks out with it, so the area swells up and those cells then go around and they eat the infectious agent, whether it’s a bacteria or fungus or parasite or whatever or they eat the damaged tissue. Now the cells come in and repair the damage. And then once it’s all fixed, it all goes away.

So, that redness, swelling, heat, pain is fixing the problem, hopefully and then once the problem’s fixed it all just settles down. So, that’s an acute local inflammatory response, a really good idea to do with infections and traumas that used to kill us.

But nowadays we’ve controlled infections. You know we know about food preparation and food storage and waste removal and antibodies and vaccinations, so infections are not big killers any more. And we’ve got our environment pretty well controlled.

We don’t have dinosaurs and tigers and people with clubs and spears. We’ve got occupational health and safety, so traumas not a big killer any more.

Now, 70 to 80 percent of people die to chronic degenerative diseases, which is diseases that are caused by this inflammatory process being turned on a little bit by the whole body, for decades.

Stuart Cooke: Right.

Dr. John Hart: So, the chronic degenerative diseases are caused by chronic low grade inflammation and that’s caused by a whole lot of things triggering off a little bit of this inflammatory process. And so, if you want to have a long healthy life, you want to have low levels of inflammation.

We’re all way more inflamed than we were a thousand years, when we were running around the jungle, touching the ground, out in the sun. Pulling the fruits right off the tree in season. Drinking fresh water. Physically active. Relatively low stress. Sleeping from nine to twelve hours in the back of the cave. Now, that’s what the body expects.

But the current lifestyle is totally different. We’ve got the same body, but we’ve got a totally different environment that we’re asking it to live in, and it’s not getting what it needs. And all these things that it’s being exposed to or things that it’s not being exposed to that it expects are triggering off this inflammation in the body that causes damage.

Guy Lawrence: Got it. What you’re saying then is if your gut is not operating correctly, you’re constantly going to create low-grade inflammation.

Dr. John Hart: Yeah. So, if you’ve got what is called a “leaky gut” or increased intestinal permeability, that’s basically a source of toxicity or infection into the body. So, maybe we talk a bit about the gut just quickly.

Guy Lawrence: Sure.

Dr. John Hart: The thing about the gut, it’s a tube that runs through the center of your body. It’s open at both ends and what’s inside that tube is not yet inside your body. It’s in a tube that’s passing through your body. So, inside that tube there are billions of bacteria. Up to ten times more bacteria in your gut than there are cells in your body.

So, it’s a whole little environment there, a whole new microenvironment in that tube. And if you’ve got the right bugs and they’re happy, as in well looked after, well-fed; then they act as an organ of your body. Now, they’re regarded now that two to three kilograms of slushy poo is regarded as an organ of your body, because it supports the health of your whole body. Just like your heart and your lungs and your brains.

Stuart Cooke: Right.

Dr. John Hart: If you’ve got the right bugs, they make vitamins for you. They help you digest your food. They pull minerals off your food. They stimulate your immune system appropriately. They ferment your food into things called short-chain fatty acids. And short-chain fatty acids are important, because they’re the preferred fuel for the lining of the gut. And the lining of the gut has to be healthy, because it has to function as a semi-permeable membrane. It has to be able to pump through vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fats, etc. from digestion. But it has to keep out of the body, in the tube, the bugs, the waste products of the bugs, the dead bugs, the parts of the dead bugs, and the big undigested food particles.

And if the lining of the gut is healthy, then that will all happen and everything’s fine. The stuff that’s in the gut stays in the gut, and the live body gets the nutrition that it needs.

But if the lining of the gut is irritated or inflamed, then you get a thing called increased intestinal permeability or leaky gut.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: That then lets; so, the lining of the gut then doesn’t work properly. So, it doesn’t pump through the vitamins, minerals, amino acids as well as it should and it starts letting through stuff that it shouldn’t. The toxins and poisons and parts of bugs and non-digested food particles in your gut, into your body.

And your body’s immune system is designed to be constantly surveilling your gut,
your body, for what is not you. Your body’s immune system should be able to find bacteria, infections, viruses and kill them before they can take over and kill you, but to leave you alone.

So, your immune system’s job is to survive foreign invaders. Now, the most likely source of foreign invaders, in the normal body, is from the gut, because that’s where the mass majority of them are.

So, 80 to 90 percent of the immune system is in the wall of the gut, constantly surveilling the gut, secreting antibodies into it, trying to control what goes on in there. And anything that can get through the wall of the gut, your immune system checks it out and says, “I recognize you, you can pass, you’re a vitamin, you’re a mineral, whatever.” Or “I don’t recognize you, you must be a toxin, you must be some foreign invader. You’re not suppose to be here.” and it attacks it and destroys it.

Guy Lawrence: And out you go.

Stuart Cooke: Are there any particular culprits that spring to mind, that really do affect the health of our gut?

Dr. John Hart: Yeah. The two main sort of categories of things that irritate the lining of the gut, to cause leaky gut, are foods and the wrong bugs.

So, if you’ve got foods; there are foods that everybody is sensitive to some degree and there are foods that individuals have their own particular sensitivity.

Stuart Cooke: Hmm.

Dr. John Hart: You kill off the good ones with courses of antibiotics or antibiotics in your meat or chemicals like insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, colorings, flavorings, preservatives, sweeteners, heavy metals; they’re all going to make those bugs either kill them off or sick and angry and then they’re going to react accordingly.

So, if the bugs are not happy with where they are, they’re going to try and leave. And so, the only way out is through the wall of the gut. So, they’re going to get angry. They’re going to get irritated. They’re going to start releasing inflammatory mediators and attack the wall of the gut to try to get out of where they are now, because they’re not happy where they are. It’s not comfortable.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: So, everything you eat, you’re not just feeding you, you’re feed them. So, here’s a little snip; fact that will blow your mind. If you look at all the cells on and in you have nucleuses and in the nucleuses; in the nucleus of each cell is the DNA and the DNA controls what that cell does, whether it’s a bacteria cell, or a human cell.

If you look at all the DNA that’s on and in you, only two percent of it is yours. The rest of it is the bacteria, the viruses, the parasites that live on and in you; us.

Stuart Cooke: Wow!

Dr. John Hart: And that’s normal, as long as they’re the good guys.

Guy Lawrence: Wow!

Dr. John Hart: So, if you think about it from their point of view, they’re actually running the show. We’re just the apartment block; the host and they’re the tenants. We’re just the landlord.

So, as with any landlord-tenant relationship, the landlord has to make sure the tenant’s happy; otherwise, the tenant’s going to trash the place. If the tenant’s happy, he’ll look after the place. If he’s unhappy he’s not going to look after it. And that’s exactly what happens between us and the bugs or the microbiome in our gut.

And it’s the same relationship that we are just coming to understand about the external environment. If we trash the external environment there’s going to be kickback to our health. We can’t pollute the planet and expect to have; be healthy ourselves.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: We can’t pollute our internal environment and expect to be healthy ourselves.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Stuart Cooke: Wow.

Guy Lawrence: And in your view, John, of what you’ve seen, is leaky gut common? Like, do you think a lot of people; it’s a big problem out there with people?

Dr. John Hart: I think that people who just do what is the standard Australian diet, the SAD diet, and standard Australian lifestyle, will all have leaky gut to some degree. Yeah.

Guy Lawrence: Okay.

Dr. John Hart: And you can tell if you have any gut symptoms; nausea, burping, bloating, farting, episodes of constipation or diarrhoea, cramps, reflux; that’s all the gut is not working properly. And if you have any tenderness in your gut when you push on it, that’s an inflamed gut.

If you have any of those symptoms, you’re guaranteed to have some degree of leaky gut. And therefore affects on the rest of your body from the stuff that’s leaking through your gut, because that gut-blood barrier, you know, that is damaged to cause leaky gut. There’s similar barriers between the blood and the blood vessel wall so, you can get leaky gut. You can also get leaky blood vessels. So, you leak crap into the blood vessel wall and that’s going to end up with blood vessel disease, which is the commonest killer.

If you put all the blood vessel diseases together, that’s by far the commonest killer in our society; is damaged lining or the endothelium of the inside edge of the blood vessels. And there’s another barrier between the blood and the brain, the blood brain barrier.

Stuart Cooke: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: All the things that damage one, will damage the other. So, the blood-brain barrier is there to control what gets into the brain. The body’s very fussy about what get into the brain. But if you’ve got a leaky gut and that’s leaking poisons into the body, and those poisons are floating around in the blood, you’re going to be damaging your blood vessels all the way through and then they’re going to be causing a leaky brain and stuff’s going to start getting to your brain that shouldn’t get there and you get brain dysfunction and brain cell death.

Guy Lawrence: That’s incredible. So, a couple of things that just spring into mind, sorry Stu, before we move on is that, then a leaky gut should be one of the first things anyone should address, really, I’m thinking.

Dr. John Hart: In integrative medicine, that’s exactly the case. We go straight to the gut to start with. Because if you present with a problem in your body and you’ve got a leaky gut problem, if that leaky gut problem is not causing the problem in your body, it’s aggravating it for sure and you never going to win if you don’t get the gut fixed first.

And because a dysfunctional gut is so common, you know, to varying degrees, you can always get an improvement in everybody’s health.

I routinely do a six-week gut detox thing. Which is removing the common food allergens and chemicals from people’s diet and putting in basic nutrients for repairing the gut, repairing the liver, repairing the kidneys for as you detox your waste removal organs, and nutrients for gut repair. And I think about 95-plus percent of people lose a kilogram of fat a week. They sleep better. They have more energy, better mood, better libido. Their whole body responds to just cleaning out their gut.

Guy Lawrence: Wow. Who wouldn’t want a piece of that?

Dr. John Hart: Yeah. You can’t have a healthy gut in this society without taking active steps to achieve it. It won’t happen just on the normal diet, the normal XXunintelligibleXX [:22:53.8].

Guy Lawrence: Yeah. You’ve got to be proactive.

Dr. John Hart: Yeah.

Stuart Cooke: And outside of that normal diet and, you know, stress management and those five almost pillars that you spoke about earlier, is there any specific supplementation that would be the norm, I guess, to treat leaky gut or at least to manage it or prevent it?

Dr. John Hart: Yeah. So, if I’m worried about somebody’s gut, I’ll do some food sensitivity tests to find out what …

Stuart Cooke: Yes.

Dr. John Hart: … they’re irritated; they’re sensitive to and remove those from their diet.

Stuart Cooke: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: Or if people can’t afford that, because that can get expensive, you could just remove all the common ones. You know, dairy, gluten and XXwheat ??? 0:23:34.000XX and barley and corn, soy. You know they’re sort of the most common ones. So, most people get an improvement just by doing that.

It’s difficult in this society though. We’re a wheat- and milk-based society. So, it takes a bit of planning to do it, but it’s quite possible.

And then look at the gut, the bugs, the microbiome and either do some tests to find out what’s in there or just do a bit of a shotgun approach, which also works very well with most people, where you just do some antibiotic herbs, put in some good; which kill the bad bugs. Put in some probiotics that are the good bugs. Put in some nutrients like glutamine and B vitamins and zinc and vitamin D to help gut repair. And silymarin is the active ingredient of milk thistle to support liver function. Those are a few things that have been used for thousand of years.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah, right.

Dr. John Hart: So, as a shotgun approach, which everybody feels better on, whether it’s enough for a particular person depends on what their specific issues are, which the testing can help you. But everybody feels better on when we do that.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah, I can imagine. And another thought that just sprung in there is, because obviously you’ve stressed the importance of the gut and we always talk about leaky gut, but that’s actually just really reinforced the importance of looking after your gut.

And you know, the question that has popped into mind from that is that anyone that goes to their local doctor with symptoms or problems, I’ve never heard of a GP doctor ever saying, “What’s the state of your gut?” Not that I try to go to doctors much. I mean, I guess, why would that be and would that change over time, do you think, John?

Dr. John Hart: Well, I think it will change over time, because there’s so much science behind it now. But you have to remember that doctors are trained in hospitals. And hospitals are there to deal with life-threatening illnesses, infections, trauma, cancers, that sort of things. So, medical schools train doctors to deal with end-stage disease; life-threatening end-stage disease. And modern medicine is very good at doing that and that’s all very useful if you’ve got one of those.

But if you were to not get it in the first place, that’s not what doctors get trained in, you know. They spend less than a day on nutrition and less than an hour on exercise, next to nothing on sleep, you know. These are all the four pillars and hormones are only addressed in terms of extreme hormone excess or extreme hormone deficiencies, not levels that are a little bit too high or a little bit too low, depending on the hormone causing damage and problems over time.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

sj: So, yeah. They’re just not in their training, whereas if you’ve got a naturopath, it’s the other way around. You know, they’re not trying to deal with acute trauma or life-threatening infections, but very good at dealing with all this, you know, the Big Five.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Stuart Cooke: That’s right. Prevention, I guess.

Guy Lawrence: Go on, Stu.

Stuart Cooke: Well, I was …

Dr. John Hart: Prevention and early detection, that’s where the; because you do your prevention stuff and you’re going to definitely decrease your risk of getting anything. But you still get stuff. So, if you do get something going wrong, you want to pick it up early, rather than wait a couple of decades down the track when the damage is done and is permanent and much harder to reverse.

I think most people on average; if when you’re 40 you’ve got five hidden diseases. So, hidden disease is something that you don’t know you’ve got, because it hasn’t caused any symptoms that you feel. Hasn’t caused any signs that somebody else can see. But it will in a couple of decades, whether that’s a heart attack, a stroke or cancer or dementia, or whatever.

So, most people on average, five hidden diseases when you’re 40. Ten when you’re 50. Twenty-three when you’re 70. And one of them will kill you. Depends on which one gets bad first. But most people don’t even know they’ve got them, because they’re hidden and they don’t go looking because Medicare doesn’t pay for that.

Medicare will give you million of dollars once you’ve got the cancer or the heart attack.

Stuart Cooke: Yes.

Dr. John Hart: They’ll spend million of dollars on you then, but they’ll give you next to nothing to stop you getting it.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: So, it’s not a conspiracy theory. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but you know, that’s where the money is. The money is your paid business. If people are sick and you can just control the symptoms, but keep them sick, that’s; from a business point of view; pharmaceutical companies, surgery companies, that’s where the money is. You want to do that.

You don’t want to stop people getting sick with relatively cheap non-profitable, non-payable treatments. That’s not a business model.

Stuart Cooke: It isn’t. Well, there’s not money if you don’t visit the doctor’s, I guess.

Guy Lawrence: That’s incredible. That blows my mind.

Stuart Cooke: So, with that alarming statistic in mind, I would love to talk to you a little bit about your strategies for life extension; which we were blown away with your talk at the PrimalCon earlier on in the year. So what; can you just run us through your strategies a little bit, in terms of …

Dr. John Hart: So, the big picture is identify the sources of inflammation; the causes of inflammation and get rid of them and put in things that dampen down inflammation. Find out what you should have that you’re missing or put in other things that are optional that help dampen down inflammation.

That’s sort of how I think about it as the big picture. Then to burrow in a bit deeper, you’ve got to look at the big five. So, diet, exercise, stress management, sleep and the hormones. So, if you want to look at each one of those, you know, I’m sure people listening to this have got a pretty good picture.

I like the primal type diet.

Stuart Cooke: Yes.

Dr. John Hart: But you’ve still got to; you can still have allergies.

Stuart Cooke: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: Your individual allergies to content of any diet. So, ideally you’re finding out what you’re sensitive to and then doing all the low-carb, no processed foods. Get all the chemicals out.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: Organics in season. Locally grown, all that sort of stuff.

Exercise. You know the body is designed to move. I think as Mark says, Mark Sisson says, it’s, “Move off. Lift heavy and sprint occasionally.” I think that’s got the guts of it, a lot of science behind how that all works now. You know we’re designed to move. The body does not like not moving. Now, NASA worked out on the astronauts, that lost of gravity is a killer.

If you sit for more than eight hours a day, it’s as bad as smoking for your health, even if you’re exercising every day at the gym. So, doing two of these is a bad thing. So, getting a stand up desk or standing up from hour desk every half hour and taking ten steps to get the blood going and moving actively.

So, moving often and lifting heavy, you know, maintaining muscle mass is crucial. You know, we used to think that fat and muscle were just benign tissue, you know. Fat was just a little balloon of energy for use later. And muscle was just something we had to have, because it moved our skeleton. But; and even bones now, as well. Bones, muscles and fat they’re all endocrine glands; they secrete substances into your blood, which affects the health of the rest of your body.

So, fat cells. Fat, fat cells are XXover four? Overfull? fat cells 0:30:47.000XX to create inflammatory adipokines, which damage the rest of the body.

Muscles secrete over 700 XXmyoclinesXX, which support the health of the body. So, muscles secrete a thing called; one of the things it secretes is a thing called brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It was first discovered in the brain, it’s a really important thing for growing new brain cells and brain cell health. The muscles also make it when you’re exercising; you’ve got healthy muscles.

So, that’s one of the ways that exercise improves brain health, brain function, and decreases dementia.

Guy Lawrence: So, would increasing your muscle mass help with all that?

Dr. John Hart: Yes. Yeah, within limits, obviously, but more to the point, maintaining it.

Guy Lawrence: Okay.

Dr. John Hart: At a more 20-, 30-year-old level.

Guy Lawrence: Yup.

Dr. John Hart: So, the loss of muscle mass as you get older is called sarcopenia. And if you lose muscle mass, you lose these pro-health XXmyoclinesXX that come from the muscle. And you lose your ability to move your bones so your bones become weaker, which means you lose the hormones that come out of the bones. So, you get a double whammy. Where you’ve got weak muscles more than likely to fall and unable to stop yourself. Because you’ve got weak muscles you haven’t been able to maintain strong bones, so you’ve got weak bones, you’re more likely to break the bone when you fall on it.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: And you know, fractured hips and femurs and wrists are common causes of death, because people get immobilized and then everything goes down in a spiral and they end up with chest infections or clots in their legs and it ends up killing them.

Stuart Cooke: So, weight-bearing exercises then, you think, would be a good strategy for long lasting health?

Dr. John Hart: Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of stuff coming out saying that cardiovascular exercise is not the best way to go. So, aerobic training; see the whole aerobic thing started in the 1960s when Dr. Kenneth Cooper discovered that if; instead of putting people with heart attacks in bed for a week or weeks …

Stuart Cooke: Yes.

Dr. John Hart: …you got them up and walking, they did much better with a bit of exercise. Not too much, but a bit of exercise.

So, that’s the whole aerobics train, where the craze came from. That’s when the jogging craze all started from, from that a bit of aerobics exercise is good enough for heart attacks, so it must be good for everybody. So, everybody went nuts on that.

But you can overdo it. See, aerobic training is quite stressful on the body so, that pushes cortisol up and that just stresses hormones up and that’s a bad idea.

Stuart Cooke: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: And especially the XXultra stuffXX. It’s very catabolic on the body and break down heart tissue now. They’ve done studies showing marathoners destroy heart tissue. Now the damage gets scarring in their hearts from that severe XX???stuff [::33:28.0].

Dr. John Hart: So, what you want to do is just want to maintain your muscle mass and maintain the stress on the bones. And doing 60 XXtechnical glitchXX [:33:34.6] you better get 100 percent. You’ve got to tell the tissues, “You are not strong enough for what I want you to do. You need to get stronger and that’s 100 percent.” And that’s heavy weights. And you can do heavy weights and by keeping the rest period minimum, between sets, you can get a really good cardiovascular workout. So, you get a heart workout. You get a lung workout. You get a breathing muscle workout. As well as, putting a load on muscles and tendons and bones so that they can maintain it …

Guy Lawrence: Interestingly enough as well, John, back in my day as a fitness trainer, I’d see increased lung capacities more through weight training than I would through cardiovascular, you know, those exercises as well.

Dr. John Hart: If you go higher than 100 percent with weight training that’s going to push your limit. Where 60 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate, that’s not pushing the limit. That’s grueling, it’s long, but it’s not …

Stuart Cooke: What about if you go hard with high intensity workout for five to ten minutes? Swinging a kettle bell for instance and things like that.

dJ; Yeah. So, that the sprint often part of it.

Stuart Cooke: Yes.

Dr. John Hart: No, no. That’s the sprint occasionally part of it.

Stuart Cooke: Right.

Dr. John Hart: So, move often, lift heavy …

Stuart Cooke: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: … sprint occasionally. So, I mean, I like high intensity interval training. Only once or twice a week if you’re doing it properly. And it’s 30 seconds flat out. 90 seconds slow. Resting. And then repeat that a few times.

Stuart Cooke: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: By the time you get into five or six or seven sets of that, you’re puffing like a train and you know you’ve worked out. You’ve got large muscle groups going. And that’s telling all the brain that the whole body is under stress and then the brain starts releasing all these growth hormones to get you to stronger, anabolic hormones.

Stuart Cooke: Got it.

Dr. John Hart: And so you don’t want to be doing XX??? risersXX and bicep curls and wrist curls [:35:22.5]. That’s sort of a waste of time. That’s not going to have an systemic effect. You have to do all these big muscle group movements.

So, high-intensity indoor training, I wouldn’t do sprinting, because I think there’s a bit of XXunintelligibleXX [:35:33.7] risk for that.

Stuart Cooke: Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: XXunintelligibleXX [:35:35.1], swimming, rowing, auto climber, you’re not lifting a kettle bell weight around.

Stuart Cooke: Okay.

Dr. John Hart: But not too much. There’s people that do that high-intensity stuff four or five times a week and they’re just on a XX 0:35:48.000 hidingXX to overtraining and injury and illness.

Stuart Cooke: Interesting. Interesting. And we won’t see you anytime soon on the City to Surf, then, I take it?

Dr. John Hart: Absolutely correct. You might see me XXthere?? 0:36:00.000XX a couple of times, but that’s all.

Guy Lawrence: I don’t know if you saw in the headlines this week; I say “headlines.” I saw it in the news anyway. I can’t remember the gentleman’s name in America. Someone… XX0:36:14.000XX. But they reckon they’re only maybe 10, 20 years away from being able to make the human being live to up to a thousand years, was the claim in the title of the article. I don’t know if you saw that, but do you have anything…

Dr. John Hart: The guys who look into this stuff are basically saying we should all now live to 120. Genetically we programmed to live to 120 and there are people who do it. The only reason we don’t is because we kill ourselves off earlier by doing all the wrong things or not doing the right things. XXThe Big Five 0:36:42.000XX is a start.

So, most people’s genes should enable to body to survive to 120. A few have got just bad genes; they’re gonna die early no matter what. But most people, it’s 120, as long as you’ve got your lifestyle properly sorted out.

But in the next 10 to 30 years there’s a bunch of technologies that are going to become available, generally available, that are already in research. You know, with XXtelemarized 0:37:05.000XX activation and gene therapy and cloning and nanotechnology, artificial organs, that routinely people are going to live to 150.

In fact, they are pretty sure now that the child that’s going to live to 150 has already been born. There’s already children around who are going to live to 150 with this technology that comes out.

And then once you get to 150, once you get a handle on what you need to do, you are absolutely past 200, 250. I think that’s going to be pretty… And then the important thing is it’s not gonna be the last 100 years in a nursing home. It’s going to be active, independent, vital, productive, looking after yourself, contributing to society. It’s going to be; actually it’s going to be a big shift in society and we’re actually the cusp of it, the borderline. We’re the last generation that has not had access to this technology for our entire life.

The kids that are being born now are going to have access to this early enough in life that it’s going to significantly extend their health span and their life span.

Guy Lawrence: That’s incredible.

Dr. John Hart: Assuming they do the right thing.

Guy Lawrence: Don’t abuse it. Yeah.

Dr. John Hart: With their lifestyle.

Stuart Cooke: My word. I’m just trying to think, you know, in 150 years’ time, trying to get a park down at Bondi Beach in the Eastern suburbs with all these people.

Dr. John Hart: I bet there will be better transportation then. It will be old news. You’ll go down a wire in a little box or something.

Stuart Cooke: Of course. Teleportation. Sydney Transport will have that in the bag, I’m sure.

So, during your talk that we spoke about a little bit earlier, there were a few words that cropped up, and they were… “Peptides” was one. And I think there was another drug that was linked to anti-aging.

Dr. John Hart: Yeah. Metformin.

Stuart Cooke: Metformin. That was right. Is that gonna be part of this strategy, moving forward?

Dr. John Hart: It’ll be part of it. It will still be the Big Five. You’ve heard of the Big Five, and there’s no shortcuts around that. But then there’s things you can supplement the Big Five with. So, that’s where the peptides fit in. There’s a lot of different peptides. Peptide’s just a short protein, and there are ones that can support and supplement processes in your body that are degenerating.

As a general rule, drugs tend to block things. And they block a process, but they also block other things as well, and that’s where the side effects come from. Whereas, the peptides generally… and hormones and vitamins and oils and all of that sort of stuff generally supports functions; increases functions. So, as things decay and degenerate from whatever influences, these things all counteract that and get them back close to the level they were when they were operating 100 percent in your 20s.

So, there’s peptides that increase growth hormone release. Growth hormone’s your major repair hormone. There are peptides that accentuate testosterone’s effect in particular tissues in the body. There are peptides that come from muscles when muscles are stressed, to cause muscle growth, so you can take peptides to accelerate that. There are ones that come from your immune system that trigger tissue repair and fighting infections. There are a whole lot of different ones.

And then metformin’s an interesting one. I first heard about it as the world’s first anti-aging drug, from a doctor in the UK, Richard Lippman, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1996 for his work with antioxidants.

And he said that metformin the world’s first anti-aging drug, this is why it is, and I take it. So, I thought, that’s interesting, so I went and looked at it and he’s right. So, most drugs have their main effect; well, the main effect that we use them for. And then other effects as well, which we call side effects. But metformin has a bunch of side effects, but unlike most drugs, the side effects are all really good.

So, it has its main effect, which is sugar control. That’s why it’s still used around the world as the first drug for treating diabetes. Which is a good thing to keep your sugar levels down, because the sugar in your body is a toxin as well as being a drug of addiction. But it has all these side effects: it drops your cholesterol, it’s anti-inflammatory, it stimulates the same genes as calorie-restriction diets, it’s anti-cancer, blocks the conversation of XXerevatase?? 0:41:45.000XX, which is an enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen.

It does a whole lot of other things which are all very positive things. So, that’s probably why it’s the world’s first anti-aging drug.

And it started off life as just an extract of the French lilac plant, which has been used for thousands of years to treat diabetes. But it’s the active ingredient that’s been put out in the drug.

And after a hundred years of being out, it’s still the first drug around that worked for diabetes, despite the billions of dollars that have been spent on new anti-diabetic drugs. They’re not as good, because they don’t have all the side effects metformin has.

Stuart Cooke: Wow. It almost sounds like that particular pill would do so much more for us than our multivitamin; our daily multivitamin.

Dr. John Hart: Yeah, I don’t know if I’d go that far. I think a good multivitamin is very supportive of a whole lot of things, but I think I; I sort of routinely put people one five things. If you walk through the door of my clinic, there’s five things you’re gonna get, because the evidence shows that bang for your buck, it’s all there.

And that’s a quality vitamin, a good probiotic, a good fish oil, a good magnesium source, and vitamin D. Because everybody’s low on vitamin D. Vitamin D’s not a vitamin; it’s a hormone, which is anti-inflammatory, so that’s all that inflammation stuff, it’s a powerful anti-inflammatory. It’s anti-cancer, it’s immune system regulatory, calcium for bones and tissues. And the thing, the trouble, with vitamin D is, A, it’s a hormone. And, B, you can’t make it if you don’t get sun on your skin.

As we’re all cave-dwellers now, we don’t get enough sun on our skin. Because remember, we evolved on the equator with no clothes on. The human species evolved living on the equator with no clothes on. And we’re hunter-gatherers. So we’re outside all day. And that’s how much sun we expect to get on our skin.

We don’t do that anymore. We’ve moved away from the equator, so it’s too cold, so we’ve got to wear clothes, we get worried about getting sunburned, so we have Slip-Slop-Slap. And so we don’t get anywhere near the sun exposure our body expects, so we can’t make the vitamin D that our body wants, and we suffer the consequences.

There’s some guy who worked it out that 200 times more people die from not enough sun exposure, i.e. not enough vitamin D, than who die from too much sun exposure, i.e. skin cancers.

Guy Lawrence: Wow.

Stuart Cooke: Boy, that’s an interesting stat.

Dr. John Hart: And we worry about the excess sun exposure and skin cancers, when it turns out more people are dying from not enough sun exposure.

Guy Lawrence: So, so often, regarding vitamin D, so, during the winter, can we supplement vitamin D and have the same effect for sunshine.

Dr. John Hart: Yeah.

Guy Lawrence: We can.

Dr. John Hart: Yeah. It’s the same thing. It’s biogenical. It’s the same thing.

Guy Lawrence: But then come summertime, would we take vitamin D as well?

Dr. John Hart: Well, most people who live and work in the city, they’re cave dwellers, they don’t get enough sun even in summer. Yet most people I see, they’re 50; their vitamin D level is 50 to 80. What you want to be is 150 to 200. That’s the ideal range. So, most people are half of what it should be.

And even in summer, unless you spend the weekend down at the surf club or you’re working outside. But just because you’re outside doesn’t mean you’re getting sun. If you’ve got clothes on, if you’re standing upright and the sun’s hitting your head, not your face, and if you’re in the shadows like you are walking around the city, you’re not getting any sun. So, just because you’re outside doesn’t mean you’re getting sun exposure on your skin.

Stuart Cooke: So, what would be the optimal amount of exposure, full-body exposure, from a time perspective.

Dr. John Hart: Well, they reckon 10 to 20 minutes of lying in your bathers, flat on the ground, when the sun’s overhead, is about what you need to make enough every day. But in winter, even that might not be enough, because they say that 37 degrees north and south of the equator, the sun is so low in the horizon that it has more atmosphere to go through before it hits; the sunrise has more atmosphere to go through before it hits the ground that it gets filtered out and even in those positions north and south, you can’t get enough sun exposure.

Guy Lawrence: Wouldn’t cod liver oil be a good vitamin D source?

Dr. John Hart: No. That’s not enough.

Guy Lawrence. Oh. It’s not enough?

Dr. John Hart: Most people need four to six thousand international units a day. And your standard, over-the-counter vitamin D capsule dose is a thousand. So, most people are not even getting that. You know, a normal multivitamin might have two or three hundred international units. So, that’s not touching the edges. And you’re not going to get enough from food. There’s a little bit in different fatty foods. But not enough; not compared to what the body’s expecting to be able to make itself from sun exposure over your whole body, all day, as a hunter-gatherer over the equator.

Guy Lawrence: Got it.

Stuart Cooke: Got it.

Interesting.

Guy Lawrence: Great advice. Yeah.

Because most people don’t even think about these things, at all, you know. So, next time I see you running on the street in your swimmers, I’ll know why you’re doing it.

Stuart Cooke: Doctor’s orders. I’m going to the beach. I know you take cod liver oil capsules, Guy, so I’m sure that you’re going to be rattling away on the internet ordering yourself some pills tonight.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah.

Stuart Cooke: That’s interesting.

So, we have kind of touched on this a little bit. Just your thoughts on the future for the medical industry, whether you think that that’s going to be an integration of the nutritionists and naturopaths and doctors and DNA specialists and the like.

Dr. John Hart: Yeah, I think… So, you’ve got conventional medicine, which is very good at acute illnesses and symptoms of serious diseases. And then you’ve got the integrative medicine branch, which is more the preventative early detection sort of things. And there’s not so much money in those, because there’s no XXpayable? 0:47:33.000XX drugs and expenses there.

So, there’s a lot of forces wanting to keep things as they are, because that’s where the money is. And a lot of money being spent by very clever companies with very clever marketing people with huge budgets to promote the current status quo.

So, they’re not gonna let things slide without a big fight. But I think people are starting to walk, talk with their feet. I think people are realizing that modern medicine has its advantages but it has its weaknesses and that alternative or integrative or natural medicine, whether it’s through a naturopath or integrative doctor or herbalist, can provide other things that are not available. And that’s the two together that gives you the best overall result.

So, if you can use the technology, access the technology that we’ve got to do testing and early detection, and use the nutrition that’s been around for thousands of years, basically, and the basic rules that have been around for thousands and millions of years, and put them all together, I think you’re going to get the best result.

Stuart Cooke: OK. That wouldn’t be that dissimilar, really, to what you guys are doing, I guess, right now. Would it be?

Dr. John Hart: Yeah. That’s basically what integrative or functional medicine is is using the technologies and the science and the physiology to determine information about how things work and combining it with non-patentable tools or technologies that have been shown to work, not only from thousands of years of experience, but also now with the science, we know how all these different herbs and vitamins and minerals, how they work, and how they decrease inflammation and how that then helps with health and function.

Stuart Cooke: Perfect.

Guy Lawrence: Fantastic.

John, we have two wrap-up questions on the podcast for every guest. And the first one’s very simple. But it does intrigue people. Can you tell us what you ate today?

Dr. John Hart: Today, breakfast was a bit on the run so I had some activated organic mixed nuts and some dried organic blueberries. And then I had a late lunch, which was meat and veg, basically. And then I had an early dinner just before this, which was basically meat and veg again.

Guy Lawrence: Perfect.

And the other question is, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Dr. John Hart: I think my rowing coach said to me in high school, “You only get out of basket what you put into it.”

Stuart Cooke: That’s true.

Dr. John Hart: The second bit of advice I got was that persistence is one of the best skills to have.

Guy Lawrence: Persistence. Yeah, that is true as well.

Dr. John Hart: There’s no shortcuts to things, you know? Things that are worth having, that are valuable, you’ve got to work for them. You’ve got to put some time and attention onto it.

Guy Lawrence: Yeah, you’ve got to go for it. That’s prudent.

And for everyone listening to this who goes, “My God, I’ve got to come see John Hart,” or wants to learn more, where would be the best place for us to point them, John?

Dr. John Hart: Well, I work at Elevate Clinic in Sydney in the CBD. Spring Street. So, Elevate.com.au. And I also have an online business that sells peptides, so that’s PeptideClinics.com.au. That’s got a website with information and there’s a chat line and people online from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. if people want to talk about peptides there.

Guy Lawrence: Fantastic. Brilliant.

Well, we’ll put the links up once the show goes out and everything else. We’ll put them at the bottom of the post. Because we transcribe the blog as well, so if people want to read it they can find out more.

But, John, thank you so much for coming on the show today. That was fantastic. I have no doubt a lot of people are going to get a lot out of that and certainly get everyone thinking. That was amazing.

Stuart Cooke: Absolutely. Absolutely. I know I did. I can’t wait to rewind and listen to it again.

Dr. John Hart: Thanks for the opportunity, guys.

Guy Lawrence: Awesome. We appreciate it, John. Thank you very much.

Stuart Cooke: Thank you, John.

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180 Nutrition

This article was curated by 180 Nutrition who were founded in March 2010 with the goal to offer the very best in natural health supplements and resources. The passionate team are aligned with leading health and wellness professionals including nutritionists, naturopaths, functional medicine and exercise specialists. They regularly connect with... Read More
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5 Replies to “Probably The Best Description Of Inflammation You’ll Ever Hear”
Ken says:

Hi Guy / Stu,
I’ve recently started listening to your podcasts over the past two to three months and my partner and I really enjoying listening to you content.

This episode by far was one of not only your best podcasts but all of the others out there. Dr John Hart really resonated with me in his ability to describe gut health and the importance of fixing it.

As someone who is constantly struggling with Gut Health, digestive issues, a bad relationship with food and long working hours and all at 28, this podcast really helped me boost my confidence to stick at and maintain a good diet.

I am also going to be looking up Dr John to try and visit him when we travel from central Queensland to Sydney in a few weeks.

Thanks
Ken

Guy Lawrence says:

That’s fantastic Ken, thanks for sharing 🙂 You’re in great hands with John and I have no doubt you can make the changes you want if you go after it! Tell him I said hi 🙂 Guy

Amy says:

Absolutely incredible information. Thank you for this. Will help me explain even more to my clients and help my own health. I have been treating my leaky gut for a while with amazing results but this will help me help others at a faster rate with excellent information.

Thank you

Amy Mercado
Twitter : @ammieelou28

Guy Lawrence says:

You’re welcome Amy… Glad you enjoyed 🙂 Guy

Fern Kilburn says:

I read this with great interest. Dr John Hart is a very experienced guy on this subject and I recently watched a video on YouTube about peptides that features him discussing the subject. He’s certainly an interesting authority on his skills.

Comments are closed.