After 7,000 Videos, I Have to Come Clean About This
In a Nutshell
Modern environments sabotage health more than diet through chronic sitting, engineered dopamine addiction from social media and processed food, constant estrogenic chemical exposure, disrupted circadian rhythms from inadequate morning light, and social isolation that raises mortality risk 50%. Movement from daily physical work outperforms exercise and healthy eating for longevity. Fixing these five environmental factors controls health outcomes more than food choices alone.
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I have made over 7,000 videos over the past 20 years, primarily focused on helping people get rid of junk food out of their lifestyle. Not everyone responds to that approach. A lot of people still have problems and a lot of people still can't lose weight when they clean up the bad things in their diet. Recently I wrote a book called Change Your Environments. The book is about finding the gaps in your environment and then redesigning your environment so your body can thrive.
We are living in a very modern environment that is drastically different than the one our bodies evolved from. Today I'm going to talk about five things that are more important than your diet.
I'm not even talking about exercise. I'm talking about movement or motion. Our ancestors walked for literally 5 to 9 miles every single day. They lifted things. They carried things. They bent down. They were working a lot outside. We're like the first generation in human history that completely sits still for 8 to 10 hours straight and then you go to the gym to work out for 45 minutes. That doesn't turn that switch back on. Maybe a little bit, but it doesn't really move the dial.
Motion eliminates stress in the body, especially mental stress that we accumulate primarily because we don't move enough. I live in a farm now. I have two neighbors, two older gentlemen that live on pure junk food. They smoke. They chew tobacco and they seem to be fairly healthy, at least from the outside, despite what they eat. But guess what they're doing all day long? They are outside doing physical work from the time they wake up to the time they go to sleep.
There was a massive 40-year study tracking over 70,000 people. These were fit people with very poor metabolic markers. And they found that those people outlived the unfit people who had clean markers. In other words, the unfit people who didn't exercise who ate healthier. Movement tends to be higher in seniority than your diet.
On my personal cell phone, you will not see any apps for Tik Tok, Instagram, or Facebook. Even though I do massive social media on those platforms, it's not because I have low willpower or I have a lack of discipline. It's because our modern-day environments have been engineered for addiction at every level, especially social media.
Social media is switching to shorts, so you can then flip through these entertainment segments over and over and over, and it's incredibly addictive. Every time there's some type of entertainment you get this little dopamine spike. Our foods are highly addictive. In fact, there's food scientists that have been working for decades to make your food so addictive through turning off your ability to be satisfied.
You cannot win. You think you have a lot of choices. You don't. You're being controlled hook, line, and sinker from social media, from the food chemicals, from the engineered environment that's around you. Trying to say no to this and resisting is very difficult, especially when you're tired, you're hungry, and you're stressed.
The dopamine in your body will actually create cortisol. It builds up as pressure, forcing you to eat the junk food or the stress increases in your body. So, you eventually lose pleasure from the food and you're basically eating it to relieve stress that is being created from this feedback loop.
Almost every major industrial chemical that's produced now, pesticides, artificial fragrances, mimics this one hormone called estrogen. Estrogen has as its base this ring. It's called a phenal ring. These phenal rings make up most of the thousands of commercial products out there. What do you think it does to a small child when they're developing, or even a young teenage girl? She's going to go through puberty earlier. So here you are trying to eat organic food, healthy food, low carbs, but you're being bathed in all of these estrogenic chemicals.
A lot of people already know about the blue light from your cell phone that interferes with your sleep. But that's only really half the problem. Your brain runs on a master 24-hour biological clock that is reset by the morning sky where you have blue light. The majority of blue light that you're exposed to is actually coming from the sky.
It's a good thing if you're out in the sun in the early morning. Sun will literally give you up to 100,000 lux or brightness of light, which is very therapeutic. Versus your lights in your house, if you're lucky, might give you 500 lux. It's just not enough to create the contrast which creates the stimulus and helps the circadian rhythm so you can actually go to sleep and wake up and feel refreshed.
People that don't get early morning exposure to the sun do not sleep well. This creates problems in melatonin and when someone doesn't have a good night's rest, it destroys their metabolism despite how healthy their diet is. Just one night of four hours sleep will drop your killer T cells. These are part of the immune cells specifically to kill cancer and viruses. It can drop them by 70%.
There was a landmark meta analysis reviewing 149 different studies over 300,000 people and they found that chronic social isolation increased the risk of early death by 50%. That makes loneliness more dangerous to your lifespan than obesity, physical inactivity, or alcohol. It's equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
When people connect with people they trust, their body produces antistress hormones called oxytocin. It calms down the nervous system. It sends signals that you are safe. When you're super connected to a person and you lose that person, there's a condition called broken heart syndrome. Acute emotional loss physically weakens and reshapes the heart muscle within 48 hours following a loss of a spouse. Diet doesn't even come close to fixing that stress.
Even in practice when people would develop autoimmune diseases or get sick, I always ask them what happened just before this. And out of all the stresses, the loss of a loved one is at the top of the list. It is the most dangerous stress to your body. Your body actually cannot heal in an environment of isolation.
Yes, junk food is bad, healthy food is good, but there are actually nine environments that everyone lives in, whether they know it or not. This is really about putting you in control over your own health through changing your environments.
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