Welcome to a journey exploring the fascinating intersection of culture and biology, a journey that unravels the mysteries behind metabolic dysfunction. I'm your guide, and in this episode, we'll delve into the profound impact of light, both blue and near-infrared, on our sleep and antioxidant defense mechanisms. Get ready to embark on a quest for understanding, health, and wellness.

Our guest today is none other than the charismatic Jeff Krasnow, the host of the "Health Via Modern Nutrition" podcast. Jeff has interviewed remarkable individuals, from Deepak Chopra to Matthew McConaughey, and he's even had me as a guest on his show. So, let's dive right in and explore the world of metabolic health.

Metabolic Health: A Journey to Balance
Metabolic health is a multifaceted concept that encompasses various aspects of our well-being. At its core, it's about achieving metabolic flexibility, the ability to seamlessly switch between using glucose and fat for energy, akin to a hybrid car shifting between gas and electricity. This flexibility is essential for our vitality.
Think of metabolic health as the efficient conversion of the food we eat into the energy we need to live our best lives. But what happens when this balance is disrupted? Jeff Krasnow's journey into understanding metabolic health began with his own struggles.

From Wellness to Burnout: Jeff's Personal Transformation
Jeff's story resonates with many of us. Despite his deep involvement in the wellness industry, he found himself battling chronic fatigue, brain fog, excess weight, and even signs of insulin resistance. Insomnia was his constant companion, and he realized that he needed to pay attention to the warning signs.
Through objective measures like continuous glucose monitoring and blood panels, Jeff discovered the stark reality of his metabolic dysfunction. His fasting glucose levels were alarmingly high, indicating pre-diabetes, a precursor to more severe metabolic issues.

Understanding Metabolic Health: Beyond Glucose
As Jeff and our expert guest discuss, fasting glucose levels don't tell the whole story. It's crucial to consider fasting insulin levels, a more accurate marker of metabolic health. High blood glucose levels often indicate insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia, both significant red flags for metabolic dysfunction.

The Power of Lifestyle Habits: Jeff's Transformation
Jeff's journey towards restoring his metabolic health involved several key lifestyle changes, culminating in an impressive transformation. Here are the essential habits that led to his success:
Dietary Reset: Jeff started by honestly assessing his diet. Despite shopping at Whole Foods, he realized he consumed too many sugars and starches. He shifted to a low glycemic, high-fiber diet, with a focus on plant-based foods but not excluding lean protein sources.
Intermittent Fasting: Jeff adopted a 16:8 intermittent fasting protocol, consolidating his food consumption into an 8-hour window. This approach allowed his body to balance its catabolic and anabolic states, fostering growth and repair.
Cold Water Therapy: The game-changer for Jeff was integrating cold water therapy into his routine. By taking cold showers or plunges before his first meal, he harnessed the power of thermogenesis to burn fat and elevate his core body temperature. This led to significant weight loss and body transformation.

Aging Gracefully: Breaking the Myths
Jeff's story dispels the myth that age is a barrier to change. His impressive results came in just a few months, demonstrating that it's never too late to prioritize metabolic health. With the right strategies, we can maintain a healthy metabolism well into our later years.

The Cultural-Biological Mismatch
Now, let's address the core issue—what is causing the metabolic dysfunction epidemic? Jeff and our expert guest discuss the profound mismatch between our modern culture and our biological needs. This disconnect drives us towards metabolic chaos and chronic diseases. One key aspect they explore is the influence of light.

Light and Metabolism: The Blue and Near-Infrared Connection
Our modern lifestyles keep us predominantly indoors, with only 6% of our time spent outdoors. This shift in behavior creates a significant mismatch with our biological programming. The impact of this mismatch is evident in the disruption of our circadian rhythms and metabolic health. While we often hear about the detrimental effects of blue light from screens and artificial sources on our sleep, our guest provides a unique perspective. He explains that another crucial aspect is near-infrared light, often overlooked.
Near-infrared light is reflective off natural surfaces like grass and trees, and it can penetrate the body up to six to eight centimeters. When the body receives near-infrared light, particularly at the mitochondrial level, it triggers the production of melatonin—an antioxidant. This is distinct from the melatonin produced in the pineal gland.
The significance lies in melatonin's role as the master antioxidant. It protects our cells from oxidative stress and supports overall health. Therefore, ensuring exposure to both blue and near-infrared light is vital for a balanced, well-functioning metabolism.
Intriguingly, our discussion touches on the importance of balance across various aspects of life—metabolic health, politics, economics, and even music. Just as harmony is vital in music, achieving balance in our bodies is crucial for optimal health.

Conclusion: A Journey to Metabolic Harmony
As we conclude this enlightening exploration into the world of metabolic health and the cultural-biological mismatches that drive dysfunction, we encourage you to reflect on your own lifestyle choices. Are you prioritizing balance in your diet, activity, and exposure to light?
Remember that it's never too late to embark on a journey towards metabolic harmony. Jeff's inspiring story demonstrates the power of making mindful choices and embracing change to enhance our well-being. Join us on this quest for balance, health, and vitality, and stay tuned for more enlightening discussions on the "Health Via Modern Nutrition" podcast.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Achieving metabolic health involves maintaining a balanced lifestyle with key components such as a low glycemic, high-fiber diet and intermittent fasting.
• Cultural shifts, such as excessive indoor living and excessive exposure to blue light, contribute to metabolic dysfunction and disrupt sleep patterns.
• Harnessing the benefits of near-infrared light exposure can enhance mitochondrial function and boost melatonin production, supporting overall health and well-being.

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Transcription

Jeff Krasno: But we are suffering more from an excess of food.

Dr. Latt Mansor: Then it'll just get higher and higher to a point where your pancreatic beta cells fail and then you develop pre diabetic conditions or even worse a type 2 diabetes. 

Jeff Krasno: Because what we're really doing is unlocking. Kind of fossilized sun energy. Hunt together a lifestyle. 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

It's almost like when you exercise, you do see an up regulation of glucose, of non esterified fatty acids, because your body is starting to mobilize.

 

Jeff Krasno: But a by product of these protocols was a weight loss of 45 to 50 pounds.

Dr. Latt Mansor:

 In this episode, we have Jeff Krasno, who co founded CommunMedia, an online learning platform for personal and societal wellbeing. Jeff also hosts the Commune podcast, interviewing a wide variety of luminaries from Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson to Matthew McConaughey and Russell Brand. Jeff pens a weekly essay exploring spirituality, culture and politics that is distributed to over one million people. In this episode, we talked about the definition of metabolic health, how Jeff reversed his insulin resistance, and the healthy habits that helped him do so. What are the evolutionary mismatches between culture and biology that drives metabolic dysfunction? Giving the examples of blue light and infra red light. in affecting sleep and our antioxidant defense mechanism. Jeff is also a very charismatic storyteller. So please stay tuned and enjoy this episode. Hello, and welcome to Jeff Krasnow to the Health of I Am Modern Nutrition podcast. I know you've interviewed amazing people on your podcast from Deepak Chopra to Matthew McConaughey to Russell Brand. And You've interviewed me. I had the honor of being on one commune podcast as well. So thank you for the opportunity. And now we get the pleasure and the honor to interview you and share your stories with our audience. Welcome.

 

Jeff Krasno: Oh, thank you so much for being here. You're going to flip the tables on me. I'm used to sitting in your seat. So I'm I'm nervous to me,

Dr. Latt Mansor: please. I mean, when you interview me, I learned so much from you. You're just as a, you know, seasoned podcaster as a host, as a guest. I've learned so much from you, so it's good. to really put that to practice now, you know, to see if I actually improve myself. Well, first thing first, we talk a lot about metabolic health and metabolism on this channel. And you and I also spoke at length on metabolic health and how we define metabolic flexibility and flexibility. And as you know, we also talk a lot about ketones and ketone IQ. And right before we press the record button, we were talking about how... I interviewed Dr. Casey Means from Levels, the chief medical officer, just a week ago, and we looked at our continuous glucose monitoring and how our glucose went down after we took KetoneIQ an hour after we finished the podcast. So you were saying, what happens to your glucose when you do podcasts?

Jeff Krasno:

 Yeah, it's, it's so interesting. And first I'll say There are few communicators as gifted as Casey Means she is just a, a gem. So, when I go into podcasting, I generally have a, like a burst of energy. Just around, more related to sort of adrenal energy, so cortisol and maybe epinephrine, like a burst, because, you know, I'm having that that experience, I wouldn't call it a bad stress experience, but it's sort of a stress response down my HPA axis, my adrenal glands are producing steroid hormone cortisol, cortisol then triggers blood glucose because if you think about it, it makes sense in our hunter gatherer lives when we were, have a big cortisol boost, we would maybe be responding to stress and we would want glucose to go to our muscles and our extremities so we could, run swiftly to be, avoid attack from a odd toed ungulate or a saber toothed tiger or something. So, when I am podcasting I'm getting that burst of, of, of glucose, of serum glucose, and then, you know, concomitant levels of, of insulin then from my pancreas to get the glucose out of my bloodstream. But it's always interesting because when I scan my continuous glucose monitor and for those Viewing on video. You'll see that I'm I'm wearing a sensor here on my triceps, but for those just listening You know, this is a sensor that I self apply to my triceps that allows me to measure my glucose moment to moment. And so We often talk about checking our glucose levels post post perennially. I check it post podcast Lee And I generally see you know, not a massive spike, but I might go from, you know, a fasting glucose of 90 to a glucose level of like, You know, 110 milligrams per deciliter. So a significant, you know, 20 milligram spike. And I, I attribute that to that, to that jolt of cortisol that I have. You know, with the, with going into the podcast experience. And that's, that's

 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

very interesting. It's almost very similar to, as you said, you know, when hunter gatherer lifestyle, it's almost like when you exercise. You do see an up regulation of glucose, of non esterified fatty acids, because your body is starting to mobilize all the storage in order to provide these different substrates to be circulated around the body to create energy. So, that's a very interesting observation.

 

Jeff Krasno:

You're absolutely right, if I could just pull on that. Yes. Because when I started wearing it... The glucose monitor, and then I would go out, I'm an avid exerciser, so I'm a, I'm a, still convinced myself that I'm a, I'm a semi professional tennis player, even though my results wouldn't, wouldn't support that, but I would go out and play, you know, an hour and a half of singles, and, you know, then I'd check my CGM afterwards, and I'd see these pretty significant spikes, same thing was happening in the sauna. Like significant spikes and I was like, Oh God, you know, maybe the CGM is inaccurate or something. But no, I think, you know, what we have learned is that there might be a short term spike or in the case of sauna, I might be losing so much fluid through sweat. that you know, that concentrate, that, that essentially blood volume is going down so any concentration in it would go up. So there were certain things that I was, began to untangle there that, that allayed my worry where, you know, a lot of these protocols like sauna or exercise long term are actually very, very adaptive for managing blood glucose levels.

 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

Yeah, absolutely. And don't forget also, you know, the heat may be also jacking up the stress levels as well. And then it might increase, you know, breathing, it might increase your heart rates and all of that. So that all you know, sends the signal that you need energy and you need substrates for energy. So. You know, one of the things that I'm trying to work on myself throughout this journey of being a podcaster and of being the host of HVMM podcast is to be able to explain things much, much in a much simpler term for my audience and, and, you know, being a PhD and starting to learn all these fancy words and initially thinking that these fancy words is what make me sound intelligent. But only to find out that when you are talking to a much bigger audience, people wouldn't even understand you. Right? So one thing I want to ask you is I want to ask about your perspective of what metabolic health is so, so that I can then, you know, steal a little bit from every one of my guests and put together the best definition of metabolic health there is out there and easiest for people to understand so that they can take a step towards a better metabolic health. So, what is metabolic

 

Jeff Krasno:

health? Sure. Well, there's a lot of answers to that question. I, you know, I think about it about in a couple different ways. So, metabolic flexibility, first of all. The ability to shift seamlessly between substrates, between burning fat and burning glucose for energy. So, be a Prius, right? Prius goes from... You know, the, the use of, of fuel, of petrol, and the use of electricity to power itself. We want to be able to seamlessly go from glucose to fat as a, as a fuel substrate source, right? So okay, that's, I think that's a, a really basic definition of good, of healthy metabolic flexibility. I think, you know, metabolic health overall is how efficiently are we process our macronutrient intake into the energy that we need to live vital and vibrant lives. So how, how, how good are we at that? You know and and you know, I often like to get, you know, you can unwind that to so many different levels. You can go all the way back to the big bang, to be honest, because what we're really doing is unlocking fossilized sun energy, if you will. It's all comes from the sun in one form or another. You know, it comes down through you know, As a product of the hu, the fusion of helium or a fusion of of, of the nuclei of hydrogen atoms right in the sun and to produce helium. And that sends off this light, quanta that hurdles through the atmosphere and, you know, and enters our our atmosphere here and, and, and, you know, reacts with a chloroplast and a leaf. And. You know, triggers this process of photosynthesis that captures that sunlight as energy. And then you know, we eat plants and we eat animals that eat plants and there's that process of unlocking that stored energy. And in some ways that's kind of like a more grandiose vision of what metabolism is.

 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

Amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. So. So, in the way of introduction, tell us how did you even get into this area of metabolic health just adaptive health, and... I know that, you know, you run one commune as well, and it's that was the first time I ever met you and your event, it was like, what, last year now? And I've interviewed so many guests that I met during that event. I, I've, I've interviewed with Max LeGuevre, I've interviewed with Dr Terry Walls. Dr. Casey means I just recently was on the model health show with Sean Stevenson, who is reading at your event. So tell us more about your background and how you got into this area. Yeah.

 

Jeff Krasno:

Well, I suppose if there's a thread that's woven through my entire life, it's about community and bringing people together in some way and and generally the focus is wellness or wellbeing. So. I for many, many years ran a festival company called Wanderlust that really spread its wings quite wide. We had events in 28 different countries and all around health and wellness. Specifically I started kind of in the areas more of kind of spiritual health mindfulness meditation, et cetera, and yoga. But that quickly... Expanded to include areas of functional and integrative medicine and biodynamic regenerative farming, essentially the broadest definition of wellness that you could possibly imagine. And I met all these brilliant, interesting thought leaders and doctors and mystics and sages and teachers and and really got a lot of joy and gratification around bringing people together around. those shared values and shared ideas. So that's kind of like what I do. But you know, well into that journey maybe 10 or 12 years into that journey. I really became quite burnt out. I mean, here I was as sort of a, in the wellness industry, but I was patently unwell. And, and I had, What now I understand as all of the sort of preconditions or precursors to metabolic syndrome or metabolic dysfunction. And this will sound very, very familiar to many, many people listening. I had chronic fatigue. I had brain fog. I had a nice little sort of muffin top layer I call it kind of my epigenome because it sit above my jeans and but other things too, you know, I had I started to develop some like brown skin tags, like under my arm and a couple kind of on my neck, which I later kind of discovered are, are actually presentations of insulin resistance, et cetera. But then there was other things too, like, I was a little bit depressed I was irritable I wasn't sort of optimizing at a high you know, my life, I had a really hard time like reading books you know, all of these different symptoms that I think so many people can relate to. And, but. I didn't really pay them much mind. I was like, Oh, I'm just having an off day. You know, I'm not sleeping very well. You know, add that to the bullet point list. Insomnia was maybe my number one Achilles heel. And then I started to actually match objective measures. of disease with subjective metrics. So all of those things I just mentioned were sort of subjective. They're sort of, you know, reflections of my own kind of personal experience. But then I started to wear like an aura ring. And I started to put the CGM on. And I started to do regular blood panels. And then the true alarm bells went off. Because I was running... fasting glucose levels of 125 to 130 milligrams per deciliter. So that's squarely in the pre diabetic mode or range. And of course, that doesn't even take into account what's upstream from that, which is my insulin levels, my fasting insulin levels. Because if you're running blood glucose levels at that level, you know, that's already a downstream marker. You know, that means like, that's almost a certain sign of insulin resistance at that juncture and hyperinsulinemia. So, and I had some other metrics that were honestly concerning as well as it relates to, you know, CRP or inflammation levels, and and I just wasn't also getting good sleep that was sort of obvious, but my aura ring pretty much made that clear on my phone app and you know, I have three kids, man, and, and, and I, you know, I'm 52 years old, I was probably 50 or 49 at that juncture. And I'd also contracted COVID a number of times. The first time I got it was quite severe. And I said, you know, something's really got to change here. I've got to really confront this and and, you know, I know virtually everyone, all of these doctors, you know, wisdom is taking your own advice or at least the advice of smart people. And and I really became quite serious about applying many of the protocols that you talk about so often. On myself, and I became sort of an end of one experiment. I jumped into my own Petri dish swimming pool , and started to really apply everything from intermittent fasting to sort of a keto diet, to cold water therapy, to resistance training to a whole bunch of kinda light therapy techniques to even social fitness. You know, I, I tried to start to really You know, spend active time connecting with others. And the sum of all of those things allowed me to really re instill a tremendous amount of vibrancy and vitality in my life. I recaptured the ability to, you know, focus for longer periods of time and honestly reduced and reversed. My insulin resistance and, and my pre diabetes, so, you know, that's it's been a journey and it's, it's wonderful and and unlike you, I don't have any letters at the end of my name, but I've become passionate about sharing what I know and using my platform to the degree. that I can grow it to help other people, you know, along their similar journey. And, and I, I really think that so many people are, are, were experiencing really pretty much the exact same symptoms that I was subjectively experiencing.

 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

Incredible story. Thank you for sharing that. And I want to point out that you mentioned a very important point about insulin resistance is that when you notice that your blood glucose level is out of the ordinary already, by that time, your insulin most probably will be at a very high level of hyperinsulinemia, or even at a point where your beta cells from your pancreas is not keeping up with the insulin secretion already, so that your blood glucose level keeps going higher and higher. Because at the earlier stage of insulin resistance, you may very well have a normal level of blood glucose level, but your insulin level is much higher. So meaning that you have to secrete a much higher insulin concentrations into your blood. But your muscles, especially your muscle cells, are insulin resistant, meaning that more insulin is needed to stimulate the transporters that bring in insulin that bring in glucose into the cells much more efficiently. So therefore, that create a cascade of events where if you keep on Practicing the lifestyle that is not conducive for your body to repair itself or rectify the insulin resistance, then it'll just get higher and higher to a point where your pancreatic beta cells fail, and then you develop pre diabetic conditions, or even worse, a type 2 diabetes. So that's, that's the point that I wanted to point out and with regards would you like to add anything

 

Jeff Krasno:

to it? Well, no, I just think that that, that point is so important because as useful as a continuous glucose monitor is, like you're saying right now, you might have a fasting glucose level of 90. But that doesn't mean you're necessarily out of the woods because you might be secreting, your pancreas might be secreting so much insulin, working so hard to keep that level that you know, you may be on the road to some of the conditions that, you know, that we're talking about. And so, you know, that's why I think some of the best test, a much better test. of, of your metabolic health is, of course, fasting insulin, it's just typically been a, a, because it's like this little peptide hormone, you know, versus like a, a bigger molecule like glucose, it's just typically been a little bit harder to test for but, but you certainly can ask your doctor to test for it. And that's a way better indication of where you are on the metabolic spectrum. So I, I think that's just a great point. Yeah.

 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

Thank you. And, and for those with continuous glucose monitor as well, I, One small sign that you may be able to look out for is when you have a bleep, when you have a spike in blood glucose, generally, when you have a healthy body, you should go back down to baseline fairly quickly, like half an hour, an hour as you will see that that spike go down, you know, a nice little, little hill, if you would, when you look at the graph. But if your insulin resistance, you most likely your glucose will stay up for a little bit longer and then taper down as your body secretes more and more insulin. So that's another sign that you may be able to just observe as a, hey, you know, my glucose is staying up for a little bit longer than I would expect from a normal healthy body. So then you go and test your fasted insulin and then you'll find out.

Jeff Krasno:

Yeah. Yeah. One thing I'll just add there, one of the protocols that I began to sort of adopt religiously, much to the kind of mockery of my daughters was post prandually or after meals I would generally do like 40, 50 push ups. I couldn't start with that many. Now I can totally crank them out. But getting any sort of physical activity, After eating was one of the really, really key protocols for me at the beginning and still for managing glucose levels because your muscles are essentially just like a glucose sink or vacuum. And you know, when you're, I mean, in a resting state, they do require insulin, but when you're contracting your muscles, they will uptake glucose. Even in the absence of insulin and so, you know, just for anyone listening, you know, this, my wife and I now just have like an absolute non negotiable habit of after dinner, you know, we clean the dishes and even just walking and cleaning the dishes with three kids is moving around, but we always take a walk and just we don't do vigorous exercise at night because sometimes that can keep you awake later than you want to be, but like a 10 or 15 or 20 minute walk, and that is one of the best things that you can do for, for blood glucose regulation. And, you know, I can see it right on on my app. That's, that's

 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

a great advice. And I've interviewed a lot of coaches, doctors, they all talk about having just a short walk after your food definitely helps lowering your blood glucose tremendously and also help increase insulin. sensitivity of your muscles, especially when you are working out those muscles, because that's giving signal that for it to pull into glucose and that insulin sensitivity is super central to that mechanism. So as you were talking about, you know, your habits and your the things that you adapted in terms of your lifestyle habit, that leads me to my next question, which is what has been the game changing habit for you? That leads towards the consistency of a habit change, of a lifestyle

 

Jeff Krasno:

change. Yeah. Well, I'll lead into it because it's really the coexistence and sort of the matrix of a couple of different habits. And then the last one lopped on top of it made the big difference. And You know, I didn't start to adopt these protocols for the purpose of losing weight but a byproduct of these protocols was a weight loss of 45 to 50 pounds. Now I've, I've put on maybe five or six pounds now of muscle, but I really, really leaned out. And, and so I'll kind of just bullet point the first two. And then I'll get to the game changer. So, First was, I just really had to be honest about my diet. I, I, you know, I essentially thought I was healthy, and, you know, I shopped at Whole Foods, right? That's healthy. But, you know, when I, upon more profound examination, you know, I, I was really you know, consuming too, Many sugars and starches and carbohydrates, et cetera. So I really had to just focus in on my diet and adopt a low glycemic, high fiber diet. That was really the first thing that I did. It was plant focused, for sure but not at the complete exclusion of, of meat. Mostly fish, for me, but, you know, I don't want to get into the, the, the great diet debate there's too much I was going to say,

 

Dr. Latt Mansor: do you want to, do we want to go to carnival versus vegan here?

Jeff Krasno:

Yeah, I, I don't think so because, to be honest, there's so much tribalism around that. I think really, it's just really high fiber, you know, relatively. Low glycemic, I'm not even anti carb, it's really more about the glycemic load than it is like the carbs per se, because carbs is fiber you can have low glycemic carbs, you can have leafy greens and salads and, and lentils and beans and, you know, to some degree, some whole grains, I think that that's honestly fine I think where you get really, really in a danger zone is a high carb diet, Also, in the presence of high saturated fat, that combination together is, is, is danger because you're taking, you're at high insulin levels with also a lot of high calories and, and that you're going to end up storing a lot of fat that way and, and there's so many knock on impacts of, of that. But let me just, I'll get through it. So sort of a ketotarian, low glycemic, high fiber diet. So that was number one. Number two was I started to adopt an intermittent fasting protocol. So I adopted 16. 8, consolidated all of my consumption of food in an 8 hour window. No, I was not fundamentalist or neurotic about it necessarily. More or less from 10. 30 to 6. 30 or something like that. But, you know, sometimes I would cheat on the edges. But pretty disciplined about my 16. 8 protocol. So both those two obviously were having the impact of lowering blood glucose. And when I was lowering blood glucose, I was lowering insulin, and I was balancing sort of a catabolic state with an anabolic state. So I was allowing my body... To grow when it needed to grow, especially taking in enough protein to be able to do that, but also allowing my body to repair and to, to activate certain pathways like AMPK and autophagy, et cetera. So so those were kind of the first two protocols. And I saw. really significant amelioration of my metabolic health with just those two. But sort of the cherry on the top was the integration of cold water therapy onto those. And, and this really had mostly to do with the oxidation of fat. I basically just lost a tremendous amount of visceral and kind of Ectopic, but basically fat around the middle. In and around my organs. And probably in my organs too, though, I don't necessarily know that. But but certainly my waistline went, my hip to waist ratio went, weigh, became normal, basically like 0.7 or something like that. So there was a, a really, I think I went down to a 30 from a 36 inch waist to a 30 inch waist. And that's, that's significant. Yeah, it's pretty significant. So especially at like my age, you know, I'm 52. So, you know, keep the faith out there. If you're in your fifties, there's still so much you can do. I get to interview all these

 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

doctors, scientists, and cool people in this health and fitness industry, all made possible because of this podcast that is funded by the company I work for, which is Health Via Modern Nutrition, or HVMN. And it is not that they pay me to do this, but I genuinely love and believe in the product Ketone IQ. I use it every day. Before my podcast, before my workout, or even after my workout for recovery. There hasn't been a single supplement that can give me such a drastic change in subjective feel within minutes As much as ketone iq has for those of you who do not know me i'm from malaysia I got my phd from the uk and my passion is in science and chronic diseases And I believe it is all about transparency Scientific integrity and about sharing with everyone so that everyone can benefit from it If you like this content and our work, please do support us by liking, leaving a review, or sharing with your friends and families or even buying a shot of Keto IQ at

Jeff Krasno:

any sprouts nationwide in

 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

the us. And the first shot is on us. Just scan the QR code and you'll get your money back for your first shot. You can also use the code H V M N Pod 20. That is H V M N P O D 20. And get 20 percent off your first purchase at the HVMN website. I can do

 

Jeff Krasno:

a hundred pull ups a day now. Two years ago, I could basically do one. So there you go.

 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

So for people who make excuses that it's like, I'm too old for this or my body doesn't work as well. Throw that out the window and just do it

 

Jeff Krasno:

persistently. That's right. I mean, there was an amazing study. There was a summary of it. That came out in the New York times, I think a couple of years ago. That showed that metabolic rate does, you know, doesn't really decline from age 20 to age 60. It's actually what is bringing down basal metabolic rate is the over excess or over presentation. of fat of adipose tissue. And Dr. William Lee, who you should definitely talk about goes into this in some great depth. So he's really the expert there. But the moral of that story is that we can maintain a very, very healthy metabolism through our fifties and into our sixties and into our seventies if we do the right things. So I low glycemic, high fiber diet intermittent fasting protocol. And then the dollop of, of, of low glycemic whipped cream on the top is was cold water therapy. And the timing of the therapy was what I started to play with and where I really saw a lot of results. So, as I mentioned, I would consolidate my food consumption in an eight hour window, start my first meal. Around 1030. So, before I broke fast, maybe at like 10 o'clock, I would take a cold plunge, more likely a cold shower just because that's a little easier for me. We do have a cold plunge up in Topanga but I'm not always there and I don't always have the commercial ice delivery going but a cold shower and and I would be in the cold shower for 90 seconds to two minutes and and then I would get out and let myself kind of shiver. I wouldn't really drive myself off. So, what's going on there? Like, I understand, you definitely understand the underlying physiology, what's happening here. But, because I was in a low, I had adopted a low glycemic diet, and because I was in a very, very fasted state at that juncture, My glucose levels were super, super low when I got into that cold shower. Now everyone needs to be safe, you know, you don't want to like, do anything that's gonna compromise your ability to like actually stand up and function. But, in that low glucose state, then I would take a cold shower. And my core body temperature, as a result of taking that cold shower, would plummet. And my body, the thermostat that sort of exists in my body, in my, you know, pre optic area here, would basically signal like, whoa, we gotta get you back up into that Goldilocks zone around 98. 6. So we need to engage in this process called thermogenesis, right? It's essentially the heating up of the body. Heating up of the body requires energy. your mitochondria that's producing that energy needs to get fuel to be able to do that. So it's like looking around, and what's available to me? Very, very little glucose at that juncture because of the reasons that I just enumerated. So what happens? You know, basically, you start to convert, you go into this process of lipolysis, essentially converting triglycerides in... stored adipose tissue into free fatty acids and I think glycerol is another part of it or or into ketones and you start to burn those ketones for thermogenesis particularly in this tissue that's now very famous known as brown fat which is brown because it's very high in mitochondria and mitochondria I think have a lot of iron in them and so it makes it brown and it is a a highly metabolic The functional tissue, this brown fat, and and very responsible for this process of thermogenesis. So, I was basically burning fat to upregulate my core body temperature. And, lad, I gotta tell you, like, in a very short period of time, I could almost stand in the mirror. And watch my body shape change, you know, it was that extreme, you know How long

 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

did it take you like for you to even notice a physical difference?

 

Jeff Krasno:

Not that long to be honest. I In about Three or four months time, I lost that like 45 to 50 pounds, mostly just like all stored energy, stored fat, stored energy in fat tissue basically. And then, you know, I really leaned out, probably maybe even too lean. Because this is like the great. This is the whole thing, right? This is the whole balancing act. The dance, you know, this is the exciting, dynamic, tenuous, sensitive part of the whole dance is that you don't want to suffer from over nutrition, but you also don't want to suffer from under nutrition. You don't want to always be catabolic or you don't always want to be anabolic. You want to find that beautiful Goldilocks zone where you are essentially have lean muscle that you're growing when you're need to grow and you're repairing when you need to repair. And so kind of from, you know, from that place of really losing a lot of weight and, you know, reversing a lot of my insulin resistance then I had to sort of get smart about resistance training and strength training and and... Maintaining the right level of muscle mass and that's very difficult when you're engaging in like intermittent fasting and, and some of these other protocols that I'm talking about because you know, it's very easy to, to to go through hypotrophy, not hypertrophy, but it's very easy to atrophy essentially your muscles. When you're in low nutrient states, so this is like, and also while

 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

you're doing the workout itself, while you're doing strength workout, if you don't have enough feel due to your intermittent fasting or just in general less calorie intake, it may cause you to fatigue faster and thus, you know, might be a risk of increasing injury as well. Ah,

 

Jeff Krasno:

100%. And, you know, now I'm 52, as I've, I think, mentioned more than a few times, and I started to think about, like, You know, bone mineral density and sarcopenia and like I want to be 80 and lifting my grandchildren above my head. You know, I want to be 85 and playing doubles with my, you know, with my tennis partners. And so, you know, you really have to think about how you're going to balance all of these things. And you know, we lose, I think, about 10 percent of our muscle mass every decade. So maybe on average 1 percent a year and and so, you know, you really, in middle age, you know, or earlier, you really want to start to think about this stuff now because all of these conditions, as we know, whether they're chronic disease or more like sarcopenia or osteoporosis or et cetera, they're all progressive in nature, right? They're all they're, they're not like, you, you're not, it's not the nightmare where you're getting chased by the chainsaw murderer right away. It's a very brooding, sort of slow, unfolding, suspenseful nightmare, like a French movie. And so, but that gives us a lot of agency, you know, and that's why it's so important what you're doing and what I'm trying to do is educate people early on. So that they can start to adopt the protocols that are going to help them, you know, add life to their years, you know, not just add years to their, to your life as, as Mark Hyman says. That's, that's,

 

Dr. Latt Mansor:

yeah, beautiful saying. So as we're talking about educating people and as we're talking about a lot of people are experiencing similar predicaments as they go through life, as they age, as we increase our risks of, different metabolic diseases. What do you think is the mismatch between culture and biology that is essentially pushing us towards the direction of metabolic chaos?

 

Jeff Krasno:

Yeah. Well, there's so many examples of that. I mean, you know, we've kind of hinted at this idea that that really health is balance. In virtually every system, not just pertaining to the human body, but you could look at the health of economics, generally a healthy society is characterized by a nice little bell curve where you have a thriving middle class and or, you know, even in politics, like healthy politics is, is characterized by balance and compromise and common ground. And you know, even in a, I don't know, in a piece of music, you want the violins balanced with the timpani, with the, you know, with the horns, etc. And, really, in the human body, balance is known as homeostasis, and you can have glucose homeostasis. You can have all sorts of different kinds of equilibrium that happens in the body. So that's really what we're going for. You know, that's the goal. But as you know, and as I'm sure all of your listeners know, we are in a state of wicked imbalance in our society. And that imbalance is manifesting in all of these chronic diseases, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's cancer, fatty liver disease, kidney disease, et cetera. So what's causing this imbalance, right? Well, of. Tens of thousands of years. Evolution is god damn slow. You know, you take my great great great great great great great great great great grandfather times 600, who might have lived in the eastern plains of the Serengeti in Kenya or whatever, and you give him a shave and a nice three piece suit and you put him on Fifth Avenue. No one's going to turn their head. He essentially had the same underlying biology as me. But what has changed is our lifestyle and our culture. So, they didn't really have too much Alzheimer's back then. You know, they didn't really have any diabetes. They had a little bit of cancer. But, you know, now we look at these cresting rates, and so what's causing that? Well, there's evolutionary mismatches. Our culture has essentially, no problem, our culture has essentially hijacked Our evolution and these chronic diseases, they're not a bug in the system at all. They're actually a normal and expected result of our adaptive mechanisms trying to cope with our culture So our culture is essentially taken adaptive mechanisms and rendered them maladaptive. So let's, let's maybe give a couple examples of that, right? The, maybe the simplest, easiest one is with. The way that we consume light, for example. So we, in our modern culture, love Netflix. We love 24 7 on demand entertainment. It's such a comfort. It's such a convenience. I love Succession. I love Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm. There's tons of shows that I love. And it's so tempting to, you know, watch Netflix at night, right? Okay. And or whatever your subscriber or streamer is. But what's happening there? Well, we've had, you know, our evolution. We've co evolved to develop these certain kinds of neural ganglia. These kind of what they're called intrinsically sensitive retinal neural ganglia. In, in the inferior part of our eyes, of our retina. That sense. a certain slice of the light spectrum known as blue light. And, you know, we hear a lot about blue light and how it's not good to take in blue light at night. But why? What's happening there? Well, we evolved with living more or less outside. You know, we basically, the sun, the rising of the sun was our alarm clock. So we would get up. We would take in a certain amount of this blue light. into this inferior part of our retina, that would send a signal down to these like two little nodes called the suprachiasmic nucleus, which would send another signal to the pineal gland, which is sort of the master clock gland, and it would say to the pineal gland, hey, in about 14 hours, can you please release this hormone that we know called melatonin, because it's going to induce some grogginess right when we need to go to sleep, because sleep is somehow adaptive, And because, you know, it, it cleans our, our glymphatic system, goes into effect and our, you know, we consolidate memories, we really, and we need, we restore, so we really need this sleep in about 14 hours. This is the way we evolved. This was an adaptive mechanism. And so for tens of thousands of years, as we lived in hunter gatherer societies, we woke up, we got blue light, we had this kind of yin yang of sort of cortisol during the day, and cortisol going down at night, melatonin rising up at night, inducing grogginess, going to sleep. At night, you know, our hunter gatherer ancestors would gather around a fire, right? And, and, you know, share stories of the day. All that light, of course, was in the inferior part of our field. So we were getting it in the superior part of our eye. And it was also amber light, not blue light. So it didn't have the effect of, of the downstream endocrine effect. And so we evolved this way with our environment and our conditions. And over tens of thousands of years, but now in a very, very short period of time, we went and said, no, no, we're going to get blue light all the time. We're going to get blue light in the morning. We're going to get blue light all day, you know staring at our computer screens and our iPads and our flat screens. And then we're going to get it after dinner at night for three hours. And what we've done is essentially. Screwed with our endocrine system and disrupted our sleep. And as you know, I mean, when you disrupt your sleep, you absolutely dysregulate your insulin sensitivity and a whole bunch of other things that we don't necessarily have to talk about. So really what we need to do when we understand that mechanism, then we can realign with our adaptive advantages. You know, with our evolutionary advantages. And so, you know, there's a lot of hacks that one can do there. I mean, you know, whatever. You can obviously, you can wear your blue black glasses. You can not watch Netflix at night. You can shut your computer down. You can put the blue filter on your devices, etc. But most, you can get blue light in the morning. When you wake up, get outside and get that, that spectrum into the inferior part of your retina. But understanding the mechanism allows us to then alter our behavior and adopt the protocols that are going to keep us in, in, in homeostasis, balance that wake sleep cycle. So that's like just one example of how culture has essentially usurped or hijacked our, our adaptive mechanisms. I mean, obviously the, probably the biggest one out there is... The overabundance of, of an over availability of, of food and, and obviously not food of the highest quality, mostly very processed foods and refined sugars, refined grains, starches high glycemic carbs, et cetera. And, you know, we've lost that balance. You know, we used to go through periods of significant scarcity and our bodies. The foundational brilliance of nature has informed, engineered our bodies for scarcity. It's like David Perlmutter and Rick Johnson, they both wrote books about this, but it's like we used to go out and harvest fruit, for example, figs, in the fall, and we would gorge on figs, you know, because... Because essentially, like, we knew that scarcity was just around the corner. And fructose in those figs would then be synthesized in the body to uric acid. Uric acid gives a signal to the cells to become insulin resistant and to store fat because the body inherently knew that scarcity was coming and we would need that warehouse energy to get through the winter. Right? So we were designed to be fat in the fall. We want to be fat in the fall. Right? But now, there's no winter, really. It's cold outside, but it doesn't affect the overabundance and overavailability of food. 365 days a year, 24 7, in and out of season. Doesn't matter, you can get those, you can order them up in the palm of your hand. And I say that with an asterisk because Food scarcity is a real thing, and it does impact way, way, way too many people. But we are suffering more from an excess of food right now a surfeit of food versus a glut or a dearth of food. So, you know, these are the ways, just a couple of the ways that essentially culture has moved faster than evolution. I mean, you know, we all have thermostats on our walls that, you know, we keep, so we can keep this like perfectly comfortable little temperature. Well, our bodies wanted a certain amount of cold and a certain amount of heat. Not to the point where you're hypothermic or, or you're overheated, but you wanted a certain bit. And now, you know, we've learned that, you know, these, what we call now adversity mimetics, sort of deliberate protocols. That induce hormesis or a kind of you know, a positive health conferring response in the body to stress. Now we, we're starting to know about all of these things. But, you know, we've fallen into this comfort trap. Of, you know, comfy chairs and big puffy shoes and, you know, perfect little thermostat settings and food whenever we want it and on demand entertainment whenever we want it. And, you know, honestly, like the, the knock on impacts of that, you can see it. You know, it's chronic disease. It's obesity. It's back pain. It's inability to deal properly with stress. It's distraction. It's irritability. It's all those things that I mentioned that I had early on in the, in our conversation. So, you know, I think once you, this is the fascinating, amazing thing. It's like once you become curious about this, incredible feat of engineering known as the human organism. Once you start to, you know, understand some of its mechanisms, then you can leverage it for its adaptive mechanisms and its advantages.

Dr. Latt Mansor:

It is so true. It is so true. One of the main motivator for me to even ended up studying biology by technology in my undergraduate and my masters was the fascination of the human body. the fascination on the DNA and how just strands of molecules can become this complicated, sophisticated organism that does multiple processes at the same time in different parts of the body. So, and I love your explanation of the blue light, like that is the wonderful ability of yours that I was talking about at the beginning of this. episode about how, you know, you can tell when somebody can explain a complicated concept in a way that is so easy to follow and so easy to comprehend. So thank you very much for that, because I think you're the, I think we talked about red light and blue lights and sleep and optimization around sleep, but I think so far you're the first to really break it down from. A physical light point of view to your physiological change to the endocrinology side of your body, which is brilliant. Love it.

Jeff Krasno:

I'd love to say, I don't know how much time we have. I'd love to say something else about light. Because there's a whole other really interesting component to light. And and I'll try to do it quickly because I want to be mindful of our time. But, you know, one of the artifacts of culture, of modern culture, is we're never outside. We're almost never outside. I think the last statistic I read said we spend 6 percent of our time outside, so 94 percent of our time inside. So what does that mean? You know, how does that jive or not jive with our our engineering, with our, with our biology. So we talk a lot about blue light. That's kind of over here on the light spectrum between sort of like 380, 500 nanometers over here. On the other side, kind of closer to ultraviolet. On the other side, on the other side of the visible light spectrum, there's what is known as infrared light or near infrared light. And what we're finding out is that our bodies also. really benefit from getting near infrared light as much as, you know, we talk, we hear about UVB and the sort of like yin yang of UVB, like, you want some because you want to be able to produce vitamin D, but you don't want too much because you don't want skin cancer and melanomas, etc. So you got to balance that. On the other side of the spectrum, there's near infrared light. Amazing thing about near infrared light, you don't actually have to be in direct sun to get it. It is actually highly reflective off grass and trees and anything green. You also don't need to be in a t shirt. Infrared waves, because the nature of the waves, they're longer, will penetrate not only a shirt, but they will penetrate... up to six to eight centimeters through your epidermis, into your body and they, when you get infrared light at the level of the mitochondria, it has, it stimulates the production of melatonin inside the mitochondria. I'm not talking about sort of intracellular Me melatonin from the pineal gland, I'm talking about inside the mitochondria and melatonin. That's actually where 95% of the melatonin is produced inside the cell there. And it is the master antioxidant. And so one of the byproducts just of healthy cellular respiration. But certainly out of like. Disregulated cellular respiration or energy production is the, is the production of what we know as reactive oxygen species or free radicals, etc. Hydroxyl radicals etc. So, and too many of those, when you're not maintaining that tenuous balance between ROS, between reactive oxygen species and antioxidants, it leads to oxidative stress, right? That can cause all sorts of downstream impacts, heart disease, etc. So, what you're doing when you get outside, even in a shirt, in a park, in nature, is you are stimulating the endogenous production of melatonin as an antioxidant at the mitochondrial level and that will neutralize those free radicals. And so, being inside 94 percent of the time, you're missing out on that. And there's all these studies. I mean, it was interesting. It's like if you look at like the people that suffered the most from C O V I, they were generally also people that had high levels of oxidative stress. So then, you know, you ask yourself like, can we get outside more, you know, to be able to, you know, take advantage again of our evolutionary advantages that was designed to produce the master antioxidant melatonin. At the at the mitochondrial level. So, that's another reason just to be outside, right?

Dr. Latt Mansor:

It's simple. It's simple. Does it count, does it count if it's through a very big window? You're looking through.

Jeff Krasno:

That is actually a very good question because blue light is not good at traveling through windows. So you really need to get outside. for blue light. Because, you know, it is closer to the U. V. Spectrum. So it's more from a amplitude and frequency perspective as a wave. It's more up and down, up and down, up and down. Obviously, infrared is a little more like a like a, you know, calm, calmish ocean. And that my guess is that that kind of wave has an easier time traveling through a window, but I will come back to you on that for sure. But the, the real thing is, is like, again, you can go into a long sleeve shirt, you can sit under in a shaded area, etc. You don't have to be out in the direct sun and and you can avail yourself of this near infrared light. And and that could have so many positive impacts. Because, you know, if you get oxidative stress, you've got a lot of Ross running around your body. Like, all of a sudden, like, you ask, like, how does LDL get oxidized? Well, does it come into contact with reactive oxygen species in the endothelium? Like, I don't know, you know, the, again, this is all the stuff I'm learning, but Once you start to like bring the light, it's funny, you bring a torch out into the, into the dark night and it reveals a lot more dark night, but you know, you start to actually untangle you know, some of these foundational ideas and, and, you know, I think it's, it's a lot of fun to, to explore them.

Dr. Latt Mansor:

That's the funny thing about science. The more you learn, the more you realize what you don't know. And, and so, so from your explanation about the infrared light being able to penetrate your shirt and your clothing. So what you're trying to say is that all these people on social media, trying the infrared, all fully naked, it doesn't add any benefit to it.

Jeff Krasno:

I mean, from the science that I am familiar with I, because of the nature of the waves of infrared light. And the way that they penetrate yeah, you don't have to be naked, but being naked, hey, you know, it's there, there's a usefulness to being naked and maybe not from for light, but for definitely for other things.

Dr. Latt Mansor:

There you go. There you go. That's super interesting. Well, I've got, I mean, I've, I've still got questions if, if we can, if we have time, but unfortunately we are running out of time. One of the things that I wanted to ask Jeff is. is, you know, mysticism in modern medicine. And that's like an area that I'm sure we can talk for at least half an hour on. So we'll have to have Jeff back for, for, you know, part two of interview with Jeff. So any closing remarks you would like to add for our audience and also please let us know where can we find you and follow you and learn from you on the internet. Yeah.

Jeff Krasno:

Well, my, my Closing remarks, I'll just tease out that bit on mysticism and medicine. One of the central tenets of the Buddha was we are impermanent beings. And when you start to examine the biochemistry of your body and the 37 billion billion chemical reactions that happen every second. Or the 70 or the 39 trillion bacteria that turn over in your gut every couple of days. You start to actually grok the fact that we are very impermanent beings. We're always in a constant state of flux in relation to our exposome, to our environment. You know, to our friends, to our food, to potential toxins, to potential behaviors like exercise, etc. So... Once you grok that concept of being not fixed, it's scary, but it also gives you tremendous agency because when you know you're not fixed, when you know that your fate is not just determined by your genes, then you can adopt behaviors and protocols that can bend the arc of your life towards vibrancy and And efflorescence and effusiveness. So that's the great news about what's going on right now. You know, in the same way Einstein blew up Newtonian physics, you know, folks like you and folks in the functional medicine, medicine space are saying, Hey, the same thing we're not fixed. Epigenetics, neuroplasticity, the microbiome, we're constantly changing. And there's the, the incessant opportunity to make our lives better, you know, if we choose to. And and, you know, this is the message I think that we We need to bring to the world because, you know, we see a lot of societal inflammation out there, a lot of inflammation in the body politic. I think that inflammation in the body politic is a direct reflection of inflammation in the body. In the human body. If you wake up... And you've got two chronic disease conditions and you can't afford your insulin, you're probably fucking pissed off and you deserve to be. You know? And, and that's gonna spill over into how we treat each other and how we, and what our public life is. They wake up and they chose violence. Yeah, that's it. I mean, and I get it, man. I get it. So, so, you know, this is, this is our, our common you know, quest here is to bring greater, greater health to the world, but health with all of its knock on impacts with peace and prosperity and kindness, you know, it was just, that's the main thing. It's like we can talk about all of these, you know, geeky sciency issues all day. I love it. But at the end of the day, it's just about being kind. It's about being kind to each other, about being kind to your body, to loving the things that love you back. And and this is the, this is, this is what makes life worthwhile. So anyways, yeah. I love ca, you know, talking with you. You know, you're just such a gentleman and you're so smart. Thank you. And and you're a very, very kind human being. Oh yeah. If you wanna find out what we're doing, check us out@onecommune.com. It's o n e commune.com. And my podcast is the Commune Podcast. I also write a newsletter that gets published every Sunday to about a million and a half people. So I'm, I'm over a literary barrel every week. And and yeah, we, you know, it's, and it's not about me at all. You know, if you come to our platform, it's really what we are is a commune of, of brilliant human beings, of doctors and, and authors, many doctors that you feature. On the show and, and really covering all the topics that are germane to, to wellbeing. So thanks so much, man.

Dr. Latt Mansor:

That is such a great point. And just to add some notes to what you said as well. It's not about me. It's not about us. It's about the community. It's about being kind to each other. And this is something I realized even more recently as we are growing as a company, as HVMN, I'm growing my social media platform as well, when people attack me and the first thing I do. And it's. I take a step back and say, Hey, I'm going to put my ego aside and I'm going to talk science. And if I'm wrong, I say I'm wrong. Usually they are either at a loss of words, if they're really coming with malintention, or if they're really open to learning, they will actually be much, much kinder in their words and their choices, how they. Sort of come across and another point about you saying that everything is impermanent. I really resonate with that. And as you said, you know, everything in our bodies are constantly turning over and changing. And not only that gives us hope that we can change what we were born with, i. e. the genetics and predisposition of chronic diseases. But also, also remember that whatever good. that we have may also come to an end, which gives us the opportunity to really appreciate and hold on to and value what we already have, because again, nothing is permanent. And therefore it's about appreciating the present and what we hold

Jeff Krasno:

dear. So true. The key to happiness is loving what you already have.

Dr. Latt Mansor:

Yeah. On that note, thank you very much for Being here jeff and it has been a pleasure. Always a pleasure to speak to you. So thank

Jeff Krasno:

you very much Yeah, thank you so much. Let's do it again

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