Health 1.0 with Ari Whitten

Ari Whitten

The Founder of The Energy Blueprint is Ari Whitten, M.S. He is the best-selling author of The Ultimate Guide To Red Light Therapy, and Eat For Energy: How To Beat Fatigue, and Supercharge Your Mitochondria For All-Day Energy. He’s a natural health expert who takes an evidence-based approach to human energy optimization. He has a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology, certifications from the National Academy of Sports Medicine as a Corrective Exercise Specialist and Performance Enhancement Specialist, has extensive graduate-level training in Clinical Psychology, and holds a Master of Science degree in Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine.

Ari is a tireless researcher who has obsessively devoted the last 25 years of his life to the pursuit of being on the cutting edge of the science on health and energy enhancement. He has deep expertise in mitochondrial health, circadian rhythm and sleep, nutrition, gut health, light therapies, fitness, and hormetic stress. 

For the last 8 years, he’s been developing the most comprehensive program in the world on the science of overcoming fatigue and increasing energy — The Energy Blueprint. Over 10,000 people have completed his flagship program, and over 2 million people have gone through his free courses and masterclasses, frequently with life-transforming results.

Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform and check out the Urban Monk Academy here.

Podcast transcript:

Forget about Medicine 3.0. It’s time for Health 1.0 with Ari Whitten

[00:00:00] Hey, welcome back today. We’re going to talk about why medicine is so screwed up. Medicine 1.0 2.0 3.0, there’s all sorts of things. People are talking about my guest, Ari Whitten. Good buddy of mine is talking about health 1.0. Maybe we’re just looking at the whole damn thing backwards. Enjoy the show.

Dr Pedram Shojai: Ari Whitten always a pleasure. So great to have you here.

Ari Whitten: So great to connect with you as always my friend.

Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah, it’s been, look, there’s a lot of water under the bridge, but every time I see you it’s like a, it was yesterday. I’m just like, I’m excited to hang out and excited to see what you’re up to. You’re one of those prolific health influencers who actually does the thing, right.

Ari Whitten: Not, not just a businessman.

Dr Pedram Shojai: Not just a businessman. Right.

And that’s, you know, again, there’s, there’s a lot of people that come in, in and outta the health space. You know, a lot of ’em never deal with clients. A lot of ’em never deal with patients, and a lot of ’em just don’t look healthy. Right. And that’s not you. So,

yeah. Would love to just get your [00:01:00] backstory so we could talk about energy and vitality.

Ari Whitten: Absolutely. So, um, you know, it’s funny that you bring that up ’cause I tell people all the time, you know, unlike a lot of our colleagues. I’m really not much of a businessman. I mean, I’ve had to learn business to start a business from scratch when it was a, you know, when I was a solopreneur and, and build it from that.

But really, I’m, I’m just a health geek and, uh, I’ve, I’m a health geek who happens to be in business, uh, but I’ve been a health geek since I was a little kid. This has been my lifelong passion since I was 12, 13 years old. And at that time, you know, I was an athlete, I was a martial artist, I was a soccer player, and so I developed an interest in enhancing athletic performance.

And then I got into bodybuilding. My older brother was a bodybuilder and a personal trainer. And so I got into that world of body composition and fitness and all of that kind of coalesced for a very long time. And, you know, by the time I was 14 years old, [00:02:00] I was reading college level textbooks on nutrition and exercise science, and I. And I was uniquely gifted in science. I mean, I was never a good student. I was never pushed to do well, but in, in national standardized testing for, in high school, I was always 98th, 99th percentile in science. Not in other subjects, but definitely in science. Um, and uh, and so that, that was just my natural talents and proclivities.

And then it was that science focus was directed to health, science, athletic performance, body composition, fitness. And that was my world for a long time. I went on to a degree to do a degree in exercise science. I became a personal trainer and all that good stuff, high level athlete for a long time. And then in my mid twenties, something shifted. Uh, I got mononucleosis from Epstein-Barr virus, and I was left with chronic fatigue for about a year after that. It was really debilitating for me. Um, and that, that really rocked my world because I had always [00:03:00] been a fit, healthy. Athletic guy my whole life were just kind of overflowing with energy. And all of a sudden that was taken away from me. Uh, and the very, very short version of the story is I then sought out conventional medical doctors, alternative medical doctors, uh, and, and functional medicine doctors. And for the most part, conventional medicine had nothing to offer with chronic fatigue. In fact, they diagnosed me in the first place with strep throat, and they got the diagnosis wrong and prescribed me penicillin, which obviously didn’t help my viral induced mononucleosis, but they didn’t have much to offer for chronic fatigue either. And, uh, and then the, the alternative functional medicine world was really caught up in this idea of adrenal fatigue. And I was too at that time, and a lot of my mentors, the people I admired since I was a teenager studying this topic, were talking about adrenal fatigue. So I kind of. Got into that, I became sort of personally identified with the diagnosis of having [00:04:00] adrenal fatigue and that explained my symptoms. And, um, and then I kind of discovered that conventional medicine brushes off this whole story of adrenal fatigue as pseudoscience. And at that time at the, it, it, it really irked me to see the way that conventional medicine kind of pushed this aside as a bunch of nonsense. So I had this idea that I was gonna prove to conventional medicine that adrenal fatigue was real and the science does support it.

So I started going into the, the, the primary literature and started to find studies. And first of all, I didn’t find any studies on adrenal fatigue, which was kind of a red flag. I started probing other things like fatigue and cortisol, or stress and cortisol or chronic fatigue syndrome and cortisol or um, burnout syndrome or clinical burnout and cortisol.

And then I would start to come up with studies and, you know, the first interview that you and I ever did, we talked about this. ’cause [00:05:00] I had, I, at that time, I was just coming off of spending a year of my life. Uh, you know, this was, I, geez, 10 years ago or something. I don’t know exactly when it was. But, uh, I had just spent a year of my life basically exploring all this primary literature.

And the, the very short version of this summary of a year of my life is the research doesn’t support that adrenal fatigue is a real thing. And it doesn’t support that the majority of people who have fatigue have any issue whatsoever with their adrenal function or HPA access function. Cortisol levels. And that finding, which went against my bias, went against what I wanted to find, uh, kind of rocked my world. And at that point, as I was exploring what everybody has to offer on the subject of energy and, and fatigue and what controls human energy levels, I, I realized that nobody really understood it very deeply. And I said, well, you know, I’ve [00:06:00] been studying health science and this is my passion, my obsession for like 15, 17 years now. Now I’m uniquely interested in the energy and fatigue side of this story, not just body composition and athletic performance. Why don’t I direct all of that energy to building out a scientific understanding of fatigue? So, and, and, and what regulates human energy levels. And, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last decade.

Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah. And I’m thankful you have because you’ve helped a lot of people. Um, and you know, it’s, it’s complicated fatigue, right? And, and we’re gonna get into your gestalt around it, but you know, you hear a lot, obviously, there’s the adrenal thesis, which you stand against, right? And there’s people still doing all sorts of adrenal work out there.

Uh, then there’s the toxicity thesis that, you know, the reason you’re tired is ’cause the world is filthy and it’s the, the, the chemicals and the this and that and the cloud of gunk that’s strangling your mitochondria. [00:07:00] My bet is you’ll say that’s partially true. Right. Um, right. And then there’s nutritional deficiencies.

Then, then, then, and I think muscle mass, a TP and some of these, uh, areas that we, we explored a, there’s, there’s an interview interview with uh, Ben Koski in here just about focusing on muscle instead of not fat. Right. Which I think people will find interesting in the summit. Um, and my guess is your thesis will kind of ride along that.

I don’t know where your thinking has changed. So,

Ari Whitten: Ben, and by, by the way, Ben’s a good friend of mine. He, he, he stayed in my house in Costa Rica a few months ago, taking care of my dogs while I was in Chile.

Dr Pedram Shojai: you know, one of the biggest problems I had with Ben’s interview is his shoulders didn’t fit the frame.

ari-whitten_1_11-01-2023_132625: yeah, I mean, they’re half the size as they used to when, when he was at the peak of his, uh, bodybuilding career.

Dr Pedram Shojai: yeah. Well, that’s it. And, and that’s part of my thesis here is, um, listen to the people that look the part. Are doing the work, right? And so you are [00:08:00] famously fit and stay fit, and you do the thing and you, and you’re hanging out with guys that are doing the same.

So I’m gonna leave it open like that because you and I haven’t caught up in a bit. So my audience is gonna do a ride along in Ari’s current thinking. Um, but go, go high level and then let’s have some fun with this.

Ari Whitten: Sure. So, um, first of all, you mentioned mitochondria. Uh, I, I, I wanna point out just right off the bat that, you know, when you and I first met close to a decade ago, I, you remember I was talking a lot about mitochondria and at that time nobody was talking about mitochondria. And, um, you know, I was talking a lot about hormetic stress.

Nobody was talking about hormetic stress. You would, I would bring up that word and people would caulk their head to the side and be like, what the hell is that? You know? And um, and now it’s popular. Now mitochondria are in vogue. Um, so here’s, here’s the deal. Um, there are lots of [00:09:00] parts of the machine, meaning our body that are necessary to produce energy. There are lots of elements of this system that are. Necessary such that if you were to not have it, it would lead to big problems. Uh, let me give an analogy. So imagine a car there, there are lots of parts of that car that are necessary for that car to function. If you remove the engine block, car’s not gonna work very well.

Take off the wheels and tires not gonna work very well. Remove the spark plugs won’t work on and on and on. But none of those things I just mentioned are the thing that’s actually regulating energy levels. That’s deciding whether that car is driving down the road or it’s at a standstill or how fast it’s going. Okay, does it, is it, is the accelerator pedal being pushed or is the brake being pushed? And that’s the thing that’s regulating it, which is in this case, the human in the car deciding which to push and how hard. So when we look at human physiology, there’s lots of things that are important and do important function.

Thyroid [00:10:00] hormone, you know, you see in the functional medicine community, everybody’s like, it’s the thyroid. No, it’s, it’s the gut. No, it’s the adrenals. It’s the HPA axis. It’s the gut brain axis, right? It’s the immune system. What, whatever. Right. It’s kind of this reductionism down to one system. All these systems are important, right?

And the same is true when we look at different factors like, um, is it’s stress. You know? And you see people, there’s, there’s kind of a, a, I think like a kink in human psychology where we all become obsessed with like the one thing. And we all need to simplify things to make it, reduce it down to this one thing. It’s chronic stress. No, it’s the gut. No. You know? Right. Like it’s, it’s um, it’s leaky gut. That’s the big cause of everybody’s problems. It’s mold, it’s viruses, it’s chronic infections, it’s, you know, trauma, it’s, um, toxins. It’s what, whatever it

Dr Pedram Shojai: We all know it’s the chem trails. Ari, just say [00:11:00] it.

Ari Whitten: that’s right. Um, it’s poor nutrition. It’s, you know, all, all these, all these things, all of these things are important. And all the systems of the body, the gut, the thyroid, the, you know, the HBA axis, the, the muscles, all these systems are important. Um, we need to have a more holistic paradigm, not in the sense of meaning natural, but in the sense of the whole, we have to look at what’s going on in the big picture of how everything links together.

’cause everything’s interconnected. And in appreciating all the, that all the different parts are important. We also need to understand what’s most upstream, what’s actually regulating and making decisions about how this system functions. So I, you know, I explain how that works in the car. How does it work in us? Well, a lot of it centers around the mitochondria. And I say that not in the sense that mitochondria are the only thing in, but in the sense that they tend to be the most [00:12:00] upstream thing in regulating energy of the body. And I’ll explain how this works. So for a long time, for decades, everybody was taught that mitochondria, you know, you and, and and me in our, in our college, in our, um, high school and college and graduate school biology physiology courses, it’s like mitochondria are taught about as sort of, they’re the powerhouse of the cell.

That’s the thing everybody remembers. But they’re taught about as sort of these mindless cellular energy generators, that what they do is they take in carbs and fats, they pump out energy. And that’s the story of mitochondria. And well, if that was. You know, the, the what explains cellular energy production, the story of how to have more energy would be very simple.

We just take in more carbs and fats. Boom, more energy. It’s that simple, except of course we know that doesn’t work. And if anything, the opposite is true. If you take in too much carbs and fats, you lower your energy levels. [00:13:00] Um, so what, what’s going on? And, and this was really elucidated by a researcher named Dr.

Robert Navio, uh, who runs a lab for mitochondrial medicine at the University of California San Diego. And he published a paper, uh, about a decade ago called The Cell Danger Response. And the Cell Danger Response was a synthesis of decades of research on the mitochondria by researchers all over the world who basically were uncovering all these different functions of the mitochondria and realizing that they were way more important and did way more stuff in human physiology. Then simply take in fuel and pump out energy. They do that, but they also do lots of other stuff. And to, to reduce this down, basically what he determined is that the, the mitochondria have essentially two roles in human physiology. One is as energy generators and the other one is as environmental sensors. So they are not just producing the energy, they are [00:14:00] deciding whether or not to produce energy, how much to produce. And the way they do that is essentially by taking samples of the environment, what’s going on in the body and the cell and deciding is it, they’re asking the question, is it safe for us to produce energy? So they’re assessing is there danger present? Is there threat present? Is there too high of a stress load present that’s overwhelming. The body is the body under attack in some way? And if it is to the extent that it senses those danger signals. It turns down the dial on energy mode on energy production and shift is shifts resources towards cellular defense. Dr. Navio calls this, uh, peacetime metabolism and wartime metabolism, and, and these roles are mutually exclusive. So it’s like a, it’s not an on off switch, but it’s like a dimmer switch. The more you are doing, uh, wartime metabolism, the more that energy mode peacetime metabolism gets turned off, [00:15:00] and that is the fundamental thing that’s regulating human energy levels. Now, the, the question is, what are these danger signals? Well, the truth is the mitochondria can sense virtually every type of threat and danger that you can think up, and it’s not because they have a receptor for nutritional deficiency stress, and a receptor for this type of toxin and this type of toxin and that type of toxin and a receptor for. Pathogens and infections and a, and a sensing mechanism to know when you’re physically over training or you’re psychologically stressed or every other type of stressor. It’s because all of these different types of stressors on the system ultimately converge on a few different pathways. Um, oxidative and nitro stress increasing, inflammatory cytokines and cellular damage.

And there are certain signals that get released, certain compounds that get released, uh, from, from inside the cell to [00:16:00] outside the cell when the cell gets damaged. Those are signaling molecules that the body is under attack in some way. That happens with basically every type of stressor you can imagine.

It happens with sleep deprivation, it happens with psychological stress, it happens with toxins, it happens with infections, with physical overtraining, you know, any type of stressor you can mold, mold and you know, whatever else. Um, so it senses everything. And the total load, total allostatic load of all these different stressors, basically that load relative to your cellular capacity to handle stress, your, your stress and energy buffering capacity determines whether you’re gonna be in energy mode or defense mode. Okay? And that is the primary thing that’s dictating how much energy we have.

Dr Pedram Shojai: I love that it’s very succinct and. [00:17:00] Binary in some way as, as far as a dimmer switch can be binary. Right? It’s left right versus on off. Um,

Ari Whitten: binary these

Dr Pedram Shojai: exactly, exactly. That’s very true. Um, and so,

Ari Whitten: but in all seriousness, um, you know, the, this idea of thinking of things as a continuum is, is a useful context and certainly it’s very true here.

Dr Pedram Shojai: yeah, but I mean, so there’s a, there’s another format, right? Like it used to be, we would say you’re either in sympathetic or parasympathetic, right? There’s been a lot of these things that have come through the kind of functional medicine realm in the last 10, 12 years. I’ve heard, I, every time I think I’ve heard it all, I, I’ll, I’ll hear something new.

But, um, how does this switch or this dimmer relate to sympathetic and parasympathetic fight or flight versus, you know, build, rest and digest? Um, is there a correlation or not?

Ari Whitten: there is. So, um, I’m gonna answer this a very, in, in a very short and direct way first, and then we’ll do the longer answer. ’cause there’s another very important [00:18:00] layer to this story, uh, that you and I have talked about before. So. The very brief answer is in, in general, there’s a lot of overlap between, to the extent that you’re in wartime metabolism and this, you’re kind of being shifted out of energy mode to defense mode and the autonomic nervous system.

So what I said before is that the mitochondria are the most upstream thing. It doesn’t mean that the only thing it means, they’re sort of the most sensitive thing. They’re the canaries in the coal mine. They’re the thing that’s sensing it. And then starting the process of shifting physiology. And there’s lots of shifts that take place, uh, at the cellular level, at the mitochondrial level to the cellular level, to the macro level to whole system signaling to inflammatory changes, immune changes in the body, nervous system, autonomic nervous system changes, uh, and lots of other layers to the story of all the shifts that take place when your metabolism. Go from [00:19:00] peacetime metabolism to wartime metabolism. Dr. Navio calls the, the mitochondria, the central hub of the wheel of metabolism. Metabolism. People are used to thinking of this as like something related to weight loss. It’s, it’s become synonymous with resting metabolic rate. But the word metabolism, what it’s really referring to in physiology is the, the totality of all of the biochemical reactions that occur in all of your body. And what he’s saying is mitochondria are at the center of the hub of the wheel of that meaning they are impacting on almost everything that’s going on in our body, impacting on hormones, impacting on neurotransmitters, impacting on the nervous system, and so on. So, um, that’s the short version of the answer is yes, there’s absolutely a lot of overlap. You can’t be in a beautiful nervous system state. Autonomic nervous system state, while your mitochondria are in [00:20:00] wartime metabolism, you know, they’re things in the body are connected. So it’s like one, one system over here is functioning great, and this one’s super unhealthy. In disease. Doesn’t generally work like that.

There’s parts of the system that may become diseased faster than others and where dysfunction may appear sooner. But in, in general, if you’ve got severe dysfunction occurring in one part of the system, especially a really integral part like the mitochondria, it’s going to manifest pretty much everywhere.

You’re gonna have brain fog, you’re gonna have poor energy levels, you’re gonna have poor gut function, you’re gonna have hormonal problems, nervous system problems, and so on. Okay, so that’s the short answer. The longer answer is this. Um, so there’s another layer to this story of, of mitochondria that’s really important and. It is that we need to under understand not only whether the mitochondria are in energy mode or defense mode, peacetime metabolism, or wartime [00:21:00] metabolism, but we also need to understand what is the status of our mitochondria in our cells?

Meaning how big and strong are they physically? What is the physical structure of our mitochondria and how many of them do we have? Okay, and so let me give you some specifics on this. There’s a number of lines of evidence that have shown that the average 70-year-old has lost 75% of their mitochondrial capacity, their cellular energy production capacity. So what, what this is, I want to, I want people to understand this distinction. So one aspect is, let’s say you have a single, let’s say you have, um. A thousand mitochondria in your cells. Okay, so one distinction is to what extent are those thousand mitochondria in wartime metabolism or peacetime metabolism? The other thing is how big [00:22:00] and strong are those mitochondria, those thousands, MIT thousand mitochondria. And the other thing is, do you have a thousand mitochondria per cell or 2000 or 3000 mitochondria per cell? Okay. And I’m just making up these numbers for math purposes here. That’s, that’s a rough average of how much mitochondria we actually do have. Um, but it differs. Some cells have maybe five or 10,000 mitochondria per cell. Other cells have much fewer. So, um, but the basic idea is the average 7-year-old has lost 75% of their mitochondrial capacity. Okay? This is not a small. A small amount. This is as an analogy, this is like going from a Ferrari V eight engine in your cells when you’re 20 to a moped engine or a lawnmower engine when you’re 70. So, and, and this is part of the, the big mistake that people in functional medicine are currently making, even though mitochondria is are, are in vogue now, and everybody’s [00:23:00] talking about mitochondrial dysfunction, most people understand that as simply they, they don’t understand the physical structure side of it.

They see it as just a biochemical thing. So we just need to provide co-factors to the mitochondria. So we, we fix this mitochondrial dysfunction by giving B vitamins and alpha lippo acid and coq 10 and PQQ and you know, things of that nature. Some magnesium and so on. But if you put in the right fuel to a lawnmower engine, it doesn’t turn it into a Ferrari engine. Okay? You can make that lawnmower engine function a bit better. Get the most out of it, but it’s still a lawnmower engine and you’re still going to be at a massive deficit if that’s what’s going on inside your body. So here’s, here’s the, the positive side of the story, because most people are listening to this thinking, well, geez, that really sucks

Dr Pedram Shojai: How do I get my Ferrari back?

Ari Whitten: Yeah. Well the people think, you know, are probably [00:24:00] thinking we we’re, you know, it, it really sucks that we lose that much of our cellular engine as we age. But the good news is this is not actually a natural product of the aging process per se. This is actually a product of modern lifestyles and it’s not just a product of stress and toxins and things like that damaging our mitochondria. It’s a product of lack. Of metabolic stress on the system, lack of hormetic stress, lack of what I call physiological challenges on that system. So the, the principle at play, and, and actually we know this because when we look at lifelong athletes who are 70 years old, they don’t lose 75% of their mitochondrial capacity.

They have the same mitochondrial capacity as young adults do. So that’s how we know that this is a product of how we live our behaviors, not a product of the aging process itself. I should also mention there’s a huge body of [00:25:00] literature that is now emerged linking poor cellular energy production and what’s called bioenergetic reserve capacity.

What is the total energy production capacity of the cell to almost every disease? You can think of all the chronic diseases of aging that kill eight out of 10 of us, heart disease and cancer and diabetes and, and, um, and stroke and, and liver disease. And on and on and on. Um. And the rate of aging itself. Okay? The rate of aging, which is largely a function of how much, uh, cellular damage you’re accumulating, the rate that that’s happening is largely a function of to what degree you have physiological resilience. Do you have stress buffering capacity? And one of the keys to stress buffering capacity in human physiology is bioenergetic energy buffering capacity.

And that comes from mitochondria. That’s, that’s at the core of it. So if you lose [00:26:00] 75% of your cellular engine, this is not just something that manifests as, okay, well I have a little less energy than other people do, and I have more fatigue. So what this is, yeah, you have more fatigue and you’re massively more prone to all these diseases of aging, and you are literally aging faster at the cellular level.

Dr Pedram Shojai: Well, that’s, I mean, so there’s the theory of aging, right, and that all these major kind of chronic diseases lead to that. But everyone in the theory of aging, uh, argument right now is trying to find a rapamycin or a, or a something to solve the clock versus what you’re talking about here. Which again is, is just fascinating how people go about trying to solve these problems in a roundabout way.

So let’s talk about SI mean, half the people listening to this are not 75, but they’re like, oh, damn, I’m headed there, right? [00:27:00] So let, let’s talk about how you stop the bleeding and build the machinery, but let’s do it around doing it the right way.

Ari Whitten: Okay, so let, let’s talk about what you said there. I love what you said. So, and this is where my paradigm will differ from almost everybody out, out there. Okay. Um, first of all. We have to understand that the field of jro science, which is the science of aging, has almost become totally siloed from the practice of modern medicine. There’s almost zero connection between these two fields in modern medicine. We have for nearly a century gone down the path of fixating on the idea that our health is the absence of disease.

That’s what, how we define health. It’s the absence of disease. So as an, as a logical extension of that, [00:28:00] if health is the absence of disease, the way to achieve health is to study disease, and by studying disease and uncovering all the mechanisms of disease and the mechanisms of atherosclerosis and the mechanisms of diabetes and the mechanisms of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. We invest trillions of dollars into that in giving it to the world’s brightest medical scientists, pharmaceutical scientists, to study all these mechanisms of these diseases that are killing us, which we’ve done for 75 years now. And then we develop, we go to the chemistry laboratory and we synthesize chemicals that are targeted to those mechanisms that we have uncovered in our research. Okay? So it’s this receptor, and it’s the LDL in, in getting into the endothelium. And it’s the, you know, this mechanism of insulin resistance and gluconeogenesis and dah, dah, dah, dah, and the amyloid plaques in the brain. And, you [00:29:00] know, depression is a result of this serotonin deficiency in the brain. So once we have that knowledge of the mechanisms of disease, now we go to the chemistry laboratory, we create chemicals, pharmaceuticals, which are designed to impact on or block or inhibit. These different specific mechanisms that are, we, we think are driving these diseases. Okay? And this paradigm has been pretty much an abject failure when it comes to the chronic diseases of aging, the things that kill eight out of 10 of us. So what what’s fascinating is, yet despite that, we keep pouring more money into it. And not only that, but that’s how everyone thinks. We still, almost everybody, you know, who goes to school and studies this and you go, you go become an md, you learn, you go to pathology classes, the study of disease and pharmacology classes, the study of what drugs apply to what diseases. [00:30:00] So it’s kind of interesting to consider where does this, where did this whole idea even come from?

You know, if we think we zoom out and think at the paradigm level, I could go really meta here, but you know, as psychology, as an example, there’s all kinds of different paradigms of psychology. This one says, we’re gonna analyze your childhood. This one says, you know, that’s like Freudian psychotherapy. And CBT says, we’re gonna analyze your negative thoughts and fig and, uh, replace ’em with positive thoughts. You’ve got people saying, you know, oh, we need to heal your chakras and your past life karma. And, you know, you, you have all kinds of different paradigms. These are paradigms. These are ways of understanding a problem and what to do about it. And what most people don’t understand is that the modern medical approach is a paradigm.

It’s a way of understanding what’s going on, and it’s a way that works in certain contexts, and it’s a way that doesn’t work in a lot of contexts. So. Way, the way where this came from was really about a hundred [00:31:00] years ago. We observed Petri dishes where, um, certain bacteria didn’t grow very well when they were next to species of mold. And then certain scientists figured out that this penicillium mold species was producing chemicals that killed the bacteria. And out of that came the antibiotic revolution. And it, and it truly was a revolution. It cured diseases that killed tons of people. And within a matter of days of taking this like heat seeking missile, you put this chemical in your body, it goes in your bloodstream, and it destroys the bad guy. Boom. Disease cured. Okay. And that, that concept was so alluring, so powerful in our minds that basically what scientists did, you know, 175 years ago is basically say, well, if we can do this with bacterial diseases, maybe we can do this with everything else. So let’s study to find what the bad guy is that’s causing heart [00:32:00] disease and what’s causing stroke and liver disease and obesity and diabetes and dementia.

And once we find that bad guy, we develop a chemical that kills it or combats it or blocks it, right? That’s, that’s what we’ve been doing for 75 years. So then you have Jero science, which has emerged and basically these, um, study, these scientists in the field of studying aging have basically said that their central premise is, you know, the whole paradigm of trying to go after specific diseases doesn’t really work. And, um, what the reason why it doesn’t really work. Actually, let me tell you something interesting. There’s a researcher named Jay Shanky that published, uh, a paper a decade ago or 15 years ago. He’s one of the most prominent geoscience, um, scientists. And this paper was an examination of if we cured X [00:33:00] disease, how many years would we live longer? Okay, so our current life expectancy of our population is 73 years old for men, 79 years old for women. What would happen if we cured heart disease? All heart disease cured not, not a treatment that is a breakthrough treatment that reduces heart disease by 20%, which would be a miracle, but a complete cure.

Heart disease does not exist anymore. It went from the number one killer to cured. Nobody gets heart disease anymore. What most people would think is that this would extend our lifespan by 10, 20, 30, 40 years. You know, it would be a major breakthrough if we get rid of the number one killer. Of course, we’d all live way longer. Okay? It actually extends our expected lifespan by about four years. Even if we had the most miraculous breakthrough and completely cured the number one killer, imagine cancer, all the dozens of types of cancer that everyone dreads [00:34:00] so much, if we completely cured all cancers, okay, not one type of cancer, not a 20%, 50% reduction, all dozens of types of cancer complete cure. Okay? It would add about three years of expected life, ex expectancy that, that we could expect to gain from a complete cure. So what people don’t understand is that even if we succeeded in the approach we’re taking now and cured major diseases that are, that are in the major killers, the, I just gave the example of the number one and number two killers, if we succeeded, it still wouldn’t even do very much for us.

Dr Pedram Shojai: So, so we’re talking billions of dollars of research for each of these killers playing whack-a-mole. But just if, if you could expand on, okay, if cancer didn’t get me heart disease didn’t get me, then what gets me expand on what then fills the void? 

Ari Whitten: Okay, so imagine, imagine if we cured almost all the major diseases, [00:35:00] it would actually only lead to an ex expected life, life expectancy gain of about 15 years. Okay? So instead of dying at age 73, you might die at age 88 if you’re a man or 79 for women, now you die at whatever the math is, 90 something, 93 or 94. Um, but even then, most people would actually not realize that 15 years of gain, they would only get maybe five or 10. And the reason why is because most people would die of what’s called old age, dying of old age. Okay. And actually a huge portion of people die of old age, essentially. Um, and what old age is, is multi-organ system failure. Okay? It’s not one specific mechanism that kills you. It’s your body’s basically shutting down. And, and what, what people don’t realize is a huge portion of people are already dying of old age, essentially. Their body’s failing in multiple different ways, but dying of old [00:36:00] age can’t be listed as a cause of death. Legally, it’s not categorized that way. So we categorize it as the most notable dysfunction that’s present. So it’s the complications of diabetes that killed you, or It’s the cancer, it’s the, the dementia. It doesn’t actually work like that. And we know this because when we look at those, that demographic of people, almost all of them have multiple conditions, not just one. They have multiple conditions and they’re on multiple drugs, 4, 5, 8, 12, 15 different drugs. They don’t have one specific mechanism that causes one specific disease. That’s the only thing wrong with them in an otherwise healthy body. They have lack of health systemically that’s driving many different kinds of dysfunction and disease in many different systems of their body. Okay? So this, this is what Gerald scientists know and what they’re saying is it’s not, we’ve got it all wrong. It’s not these specific diseases that are killing us. It’s the rate of [00:37:00] biological aging itself. How fast our cells, our biology is growing older. As opposed to chronological aging, how many days or years you’ve been alive, we’re talking about the rate of biological aging, which is how much damage are you accumulating, how rapidly you’re accumulating that biological damage during the period you are alive.

And you can be either fast or slow. So that’s the central idea of, of jero scientists. And the, the basic idea is whatever these specific things are that’s going wrong with us, the chronic diseases of aging, the main thing that’s driving them is aging. And what we are doing is leaving out the aging part of the equation and just going to the disease and saying it’s these specific, these diseases, that’s the problem.

If only we cured the heart disease, if only we cured the dementia, if only we cured the cancer. But it’s wrong. It’s totally wrong. The reason that most people don’t know that is, and most doctors don’t even know it, is because [00:38:00] the whole industry is set up around disease and disease treatment. So to, to incorporate the, the things that I’ve just communicated to you would mean overhauling everything about the way we do things and, and obviously there’s a trillion dollar industry that’s not particularly interested in that, which has a huge influence on how science has done and how medicine is done and how doctors are educated and which researchers get funded to do, which studies.

The whole system is set up to study disease and develop drugs for disease. What’s interesting is even the jro scientists who know this, who agree with everything I just said, that’s their central premise. It’s aging. It’s the rate of biological aging. That’s the primary thing that matters, not these specific diseases. They are still, I would argue, really operating in the, the paradigm of, well, let’s study the [00:39:00] mechanisms and develop, go to the chemistry laboratory and develop drugs to fix these mechanisms. Okay. So the, the difference is they’re saying it’s not those specific mechanisms over there, the LDL and the amyloid plaques and the, um, you know, the, the what, whatever else, these other, you know, mechanisms associated with diabetes or, you know, things like that. It’s, it’s not those mechanisms of disease. It’s these mechanisms of aging. The telomere shortening the DNA damage, the lack of stem cells, the senescent cells, the NAD plus, these kinds of things. So we need to develop drugs for those mechanisms. Okay. And I personally believe that that is also misguided. Um, they would disagree with me.

They maybe say, my thinking is primitive cool. We we’re all taking bets on what we think is gonna work, and I have my layers of evidence, but the reason that we think [00:40:00] differently fundamentally. My background, as I said earlier, is in physical training. My background is in exercise and nutrition since I was a little kid.

My background is the art and science of how we change human physiology through behavior. And their background is pharmacology and pathology. There are different paradigms. The same way that two people who are in the field of agriculture, one person’s trained in regenerative agriculture and ecosystems designed in permaculture, is gonna see things very differently from somebody who’s got a PhD in agricultural chemicals, agricultural chemistry. Right? They’re gonna have different solutions to the same problem with different side effects. Um, so here’s, so the, that’s, that’s the landscape as it exists right

Dr Pedram Shojai: Couple quick questions on that. Sorry. Couple quick questions. One is how much of it is in your assessment? Obviously we don’t know this answer, [00:41:00] the paradigm through which their mind filters information in terms of pharmacology or, you know, just the way they think versus the way NIH is going to dole out research money and if heart disease is, is number one on the scoreboard, then the heart disease guys get more grants, which means their department gets to thrive.

I mean, there’s the, the, the politics of money I. Then the close-mindedness of humans. That is the unseen, right? And these are brilliant people that are not seeing the limitations of their thinking. Just quick question on that.

Ari Whitten: Yeah. I, I, I couldn’t quantify it for you. And there’s no question they overlap massively because the, the way that industry influences things is down to literally the curriculum of medical schools. Like, let me put it this way, 80% of the chronic disease burden are diseases of nutrition and lifestyle. Medical doctors receive almost zero education in nutrition [00:42:00] and lifestyle. Just sit with the absurdity of that. Right. And, and that’s, this is not by accident. It’s not because anybody’s ignorant of the, the power of nutrition and lifestyle and the role of them in disease. It’s because industry dictates the, the, the, that there is a, a financial incentive to do things this way as opposed to this way.

So you, you wanna study how yoga and nutrition impacts dementia? Nah, I don’t think we’re gonna fund that because there’s no money at the end of that. You, you wanna study, uh, what chemicals can be synthesized in a chemical laboratory to slow down the rate of dementia. Yes. We’ll fund you. Right. That’s, that’s how it works.

And on every level in the whole system of how we do medicine. So even within Jro science, the profit incentives are still there. It’s still. Being directed towards biotechnology pharmaceutical companies, because that’s where the money is

Dr Pedram Shojai: So, so interesting. But like you have a pro [00:43:00] football team with a couple stars on it, and you have a losing record. You clear your roster, you trade your stars, you start over because the, the point is to win and allopathy is just not winning with chronic disease.

Ari Whitten: That’s right. And that’s a great way of phrasing it. Let me, let me give you numbers. So we have to understand, as I said before, there’s, there’s, we’re talking decades, multiple decades now, of essentially all the world’s brightest, highest iq. Many of you whom have higher IQs than I do. No doubt. You know, it’s not this, this is a paradigm thing.

It’s not an IQ thing. It’s because my background’s in physical training. So I see things differently, even if they have a higher IQ than me, and I’m sure many of them do. So what I’m saying is. For decades, we’ve been pouring trillions of dollars into all these incredible genius level medical scientists and pharmaceutical [00:44:00] scientists. Now just consider and, and, and we’ve, we have a mountain of knowledge of the mechanisms of disease. I, I mean an enormous body of knowledge on the mechanisms of disease. There’s no shortage of knowledge. So after all of that, and we’ve synthesized millions of potential drug candidates in these chemistry laboratories. And out of those millions of drug candidates, 19,000 of them have gone on to full FDA approval out of those 19,000 drugs that we’ve synthesized over decades of these super smart, brilliant scientists with that knowledge of all these mechanisms of disease. We don’t have a single drug, not one that we know we can give to otherwise healthy people that will make them healthier or will have longevity benefits that out, or disease prevention benefits that outweigh the harms, the side effects [00:45:00] that come with that drug.

We don’t have one drug that we know actually is an anti-aging, health promoting drug. Now there are lots of, uh, potential candidates and there’s all kinds of talk. And, and the reason there is all kinds of talk has nothing to do with the fact that there’s a huge body of evidence showing how amazing these compounds are.

The evidence is really, really underwhelming. Um, and the reason there’s all kinds of talk around it constantly is because the concept of a magic pill, a magic longevity drug, is just so alluring in our minds and we’ve all been indoctrinated. Into this paradigm I just described, to believe that the answers will be found in a pharmaceutical laboratory, in a pill, and it’s, it’s just not true. Now, the last, the last thing I’ll mention here is just to, to, to illustrate this. After all of these decades, after all these millions of drug candidates, you know what the [00:46:00] powerful, the most powerful anti-aging medicine in existence is? Exercise. Maybe second place is nutrition. Okay. A, after all these fancy tests, you know, conventional tests and me functional medicine tests and all these things, you know what the single best predictor, the single test that best predicts your longevity is,

Dr Pedram Shojai: Don’t tell me. Touch your toes.

 I want you go take a look at the temple grounds. It’s where I teach all the mind body practices I learned as a monk, the Shaolin Buddhist stuff, the Taoists stuff, the health stuff, all these wonderful practices. That are actually what I consider my health care practice is teaching people how to fish. 

You do this stuff you get, well, you do this stuff, your body thrives, you do this stuff. You’re happier. So what’s it going to be? You’re going to wait for some doctor to. Fix you with drugs that he was convinced are supposed to help you because he was marketed to. Or do you want to spring the trap and actually get healthy? 

Go check out the temple [00:47:00] grounds@theurbanmonk.com. 

Ari Whitten: you’re not far off.

it’s it’s VO two max. And the second best is muscular strength. These are just, and it’s not that there’s anything magical going on there, they’re just markers for how physically fit you are. Okay. So the paradigm that, that I espouse, which is the subject of my new book, is to, to shift out of this biochemistry centric and pharmaceutical centric paradigm of disease and longevity and energy, and realize that there are macro level forces at play.

And, and specifically if I can, um, break this down, if, if you, um, if you imagine the, the central principle of this is that the human body is an intelligent, adaptive machine. Okay? So if, if we are looking at this computer that’s in front of us, [00:48:00] or this cup or the chair we’re sitting in, or a desk or a bicycle or a car or something like that, the way that those systems work is that. The more they’re subjected to stress. So if you take a bicycle or a car, you drive it down a, a bumpy dirt road. Okay? The more it’s subjected to mud and water and oxidation and sun and, um, you know, bumps and all, all these, you know, mechanical stress and all these kinds of things, the faster that system breaks down, okay? With an intelligent adaptive system, it doesn’t break down When it’s subjected to the right kinds of stressors, in the right dosage, it actually grows stronger. So, as an analogy, think of, imagine a magical sports car that when you, when you take it out on, on windy mountain roads and push it to its limits and rev that engine and, you know, push it as hard as you possibly can.

You go park it in your garage at night and you come back to the car the next day [00:49:00] and that engine grew bigger and stronger. It became more fuel efficient, it became more aerodynamic, and the frame got stronger and the tires developed more friction to grip the road better, and the suspension learned to absorb the bumps better.

And everything about that car got better and stronger. That is an intelligent adaptive system and it’s adapting to the demands. But the downside of having this magical ability is that if you were to leave that car in the garage for two months and not challenge it, you come back to it two months later and the frame is rusting and the wheels are falling off and the engine has shrunk to a lawnmower engine, and everything about that car starts to disintegrate and fall apart. What, what I believe is that this is how the human body works, and I have. I’m writing a book for the last six months, uh, on exactly how that works in every different system of our body. Um, but this [00:50:00] not mysterious biochemicals and LDL cholesterol and, you know, NAD plus and this kinds of stuff, but these macro level forces are what’s driving the physical structure of our body to degenerate.

Dr Pedram Shojai: So you’re falling on panicking ears right now? Uh, two months. Could have been two years, could have been two weeks. But everyone is guilty. The life, I mean, I’m sitting here right now talking to you. Right. You know, I moved back and forth between a standing desk. I we’re all guilty as charged of not revving the engine and, you know, taking those curves the way we should.

Um, is there a Jesus plan for this, right? Is there a redemption for those who are down to lawnmower engine? Like what is the, what is the recommendation set to say, oh damn, start today. How do you start building it back up?

Ari Whitten: You sit in your chair, you twiddle your thumbs and you wait for pharmaceutical scientists to synthesize the magic pill.

Dr Pedram Shojai: [00:51:00] help me o industry.

Ari Whitten: So listen, as I said, there’s no more powerful. We, we’ve synthesized millions of drug candidates. Nothing comes close to the power of exercise. Why exercise? I mean, if you think about it, it’s kind of weird. I know we, it in the sense it’s, it’s normal. It’s an everyday observation. And when, on the one hand, I’m not saying anything original or novel ’cause we’ve all heard thousands of times that exercise is healthy.

But why is it healthy? Why is like, what is exercise? Why is it healthy? It’s moving your physical body, vig vigorously. Now consider even that’s kind of weird, like why is moving your body vigorously such a potent disease, preventive medicine? Right? If you, if you were like an alien, if you knew nothing about human health and had never heard exercise with healthy you, somebody told you for decades we’ve been studying millions of drugs, we’ve, we’re gonna find the answer [00:52:00] to disease prevention and longevity. Oh wait, it turns out that moving your physical body vigorously for like 30 minutes or 40 minutes a day actually is way more powerful. It’s kind of weird, right? So, um, if you also know that moving your body vigorously creates a big spike of free radicals and creates a physiological stress response with adrenaline and, you know, sympathetic fight or flight activation and all these cortisol and all these kinds of things that most people have a negative association with, now it’s even weirder ’cause aren’t free radicals like really damaging to our cells shouldn’t. If anything shouldn’t. This whole moving your body vigorously, that creates this stress response and all these stress hormones and the free radicals, shouldn’t it be damaging to our bodies? Right? But it’s not the most potent longevity drug there is and the most potent way to, um, and these physiological challenges more broadly are the most potent way to recover your cellular [00:53:00] engine. Going back to that, rebuilding your mitochondria back into that Ferrari V engine, V eight engine, and getting youthful levels of energy back, it’s also the key to that because energy buffering and stress buffering capacity are at the core of disease prevention and longevity. These concepts all go together. So why, why, why is exercise this way? And the reason why is because the body is an intelligent, adaptive system. It requires we, we have evolved to require challenge in order for the system not to fall apart. Okay, so the, the principle is this, in a, in a nutshell, if I go to a gym and I lift heavy objects, if I challenge my muscles to move heavy objects, my muscles will adapt to that stress, that demand. ’cause they, they, it’s not that they want big muscles, they just care about survival. So if you give it the signal that [00:54:00] you need muscular strength to survive in this environment, your body will adapt to that survival signal by growing in bigger, stronger muscles. Okay? But if you break an arm or a leg and you immobilize that muscle in a cast, you don’t use it for two months. You get that cast sawed off by the doctor, two months later, you look down at your leg, it’s half the size of the other one. ’cause the opposite principle is at play. The muscles are atrophying now from not being challenged. Okay. That same principle occurs at the level of our mitochondria. It occurs at the level of our heart with what’s called cardiovascular reserve capacity. It occurs at our muscles. Obviously it occurs in our bones. This is why we lose bone density as we get older and become frail. Um, and frailty. Physical frailty. Also, loss of muscle strength is a major driver. The most, uh, common driver of early death [00:55:00] in adults over the age of 65. And the most, uh, the number one cause of disability and loss of it.

Physical independence. Okay? It’s physical frailty. That’s not from mysterious biochemicals, you know, and senescent cells and NED plus and stuff that can be fixed with pharmaceuticals. That’s from the signals that you’re providing to your body. How strong does it need to be? Okay. Cardiovascular reserve capacity.

I already told you. Uh, VO O2 max is the number one predictor of longevity. Mitochondrial reserve capacity is critical. For disease prevention and longevity and slowing the rate of aging. There’s even such a thing called cognitive reserve capacity. Pedram, do you know how you build? So if, if I build stronger muscles by challenging my muscles with lifting heavy weights, how do you think I build more cognitive reserve capacity?

Dr Pedram Shojai: Read a book, learn something.

Ari Whitten: Exactly. So there’s all [00:56:00] this research on how cognitive reserve capacity, the extent to which we challenge our brain, our mind to learn things, um, and, and have demanding jobs and so on, that where we’re actively engaging and using the cognitive systems in our brain is linked with massively lower risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s, right?

It’s not mysterious amyloid plaques that we need pharmaceuticals to interrupt the, you know, go in and block this chemical that’s involved in amyloid plaque formation. Okay. Oh. Um, it, when we build better brain power from challenging our brain, it protects us massively from those amyloid plaques, from Parkinson’s, uh, from from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Um, and just to extend that one, one more layer, we also know that mitochondria play a big role in there. We also know, you know, there was a study, I believe, outta Sweden. They followed 1400 women over 40 years and looked at the incidence of dementia according [00:57:00] to fitness levels. And they found that, um, the, the group with the highest level of fitness reduced their odds of having dementia by 88% in the lowest fitness.

It was almost half the women, 45% of that group that got dementia and Alzheimer’s in the, the highest levels of fitness. It’s almost 0%. It’s almost none of them ever got ever developed in this 40 year span of time ever developed. Dementia and um, and, you know, there’s, there’s lots of reasons why. So if you compare something like that, physical capacity, you know, cardiovascular capacity and cognitive reserve capacity, you’re massively reducing your risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s.

There’s no drug or no combination of drugs that can come anywhere close to those kind of effects.

Dr Pedram Shojai: How do the mitochondria now play into that? We talked about mitochondria, we talked about hor. That [00:58:00] stressors, like how does it come back? Are we, you know, if I start moving my body, start building cardiac muscle and you know, leg muscles, is it the density of the, the mitochondria and the muscles? Am I building new Ferrari engine?

Am I restoring, like, let’s go back to that metaphor so everyone understands how this works.

Ari Whitten: Yeah. So this is, this is, um, this is an important principle. I’m glad you asked this because. We see energy and fatigue as kind of this mysterious phenomenon that like, it’s who knows what’s going on and these mysterious biochemicals inside of our body, but to a large extent, we need to understand it through the frame that I just presented here.

So let’s imagine some, somebody’s dealing with the problem of, oh, I’ve gotta, I’ve got a really, I’ve got really weak muscles. Okay? How do you, how do you solve that problem? Okay? You challenge the muscles to grow and bigger and stronger. Okay? Now imagine I told you using this same [00:59:00] frame. Imagine I told you, Hey, I’ve got, I’ve got really weak mitochondria.

What do you think I should do about it? What makes sense to you Now?

Dr Pedram Shojai: Start using your muscles.

Ari Whitten: Start using your mitochondria.

Dr Pedram Shojai: exactly.

Yeah.

Ari Whitten: them. They, they grow bigger and stronger. I just told, I told you, the brain can go stronger, the heart can grow stronger, the muscles can grow stronger, the bones can go stronger. Guess what else Can mitochondria?

And we lose 75% of that cellular engine as we grow older in most cases. How do we grow it back? We’ve gotta challenge the mitochondria. 

We have. The body only cares about survival. It doesn’t care whether you walk through life with a degenerated brain and a frail body with no muscle on it and no strength, uh, or an atrophied heart. Uh, it, it doesn’t care whether you walk through energy.

Uh, we walk through life overflowing with energy or with chronic fatigue. It cares about survival. Okay, so what are the signals that you’re providing with providing your body [01:00:00] with that are saying, here’s what you need to do in order to survive the demands of this environment we’re in. If you never provided the signal that it needs to be able to produce lots of energy to survive the environment that it’s in what reason does it have to have more energy? Most people don’t think of energy like that. You’ll see lots of doctors and functional medicine doctors talking about, you know, this hormone and this biochemical and toxins and viruses and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Nobody’s understanding it like this. Okay? This is what is the physical structure of your cellular engine and what are the signals that impact on that system?

How do we have a robust, strong, powerful cellular engine or a weak one? What, what’s the determining force? It’s the amount of demands on that system. So, um, how do we create those demands? What I call physiological challenges. There are exercise is essential, and there are multiple types of exercise, mainly [01:01:00] resistance, exercise, uh, sprinting or high intensity interval type training.

Uh, and endurance exercise is, is huge. Um, thermal stress, heat, and cold. So think like saunas, um, fasting hypoxic stress. There are many, many others as well. Um, even cognitive stress, cognitive demands is going to build mitochondria at the level of the brain. That’s part of how we increase cognitive reserve capacity.

So the different types of stressors will have their each have their own fingerprint of adaptations that they’re stimulating and how, but they all stimulate mitochondria because whatever demand you’re putting on the system requires a bioenergetic supply. You’re put, you’re putting more energy demand on that system.

It requires a response. Okay? So, um, each one of them stimulates adaptations in different parts of the system. So certain types of, uh, physiological [01:02:00] challenges will stimulate the heart, for example, and mitochondria and the heart and the muscles of the heart and the chamber of the heart, the left ventricle to expand, to pump more blood with each stroke. Um, some of them will stimulate the muscles to grow the fast twitch muscles and more mitochondria in those specific tissues. Some of them stimulate at the level of the lung, stimulate some stimulate at the, uh, at the brain. Some stimulate the vascular supply to grow more new blood vessels and, and also put mitochondria in all those new blood, blood vessels.

So, um, each one is stimulating different kinds of adaptations and building mitochondria more in different parts of that system. But that’s, that’s the basic idea of how it works. And one of the most essential things to have more energy is you’ve gotta build your cellular engine.

Dr Pedram Shojai: You’d mentioned allostatic load earlier in our hour, right? There’s, you know, it all works unless it’s too much, [01:03:00] right? So we need a somewhat of a Goldilocks zone of enough stress to tell the body to go versus the guy who collapses, right? So how do we gauge that?

Ari Whitten: It’s a great, great question. Great to reconcile this with what I’m saying. So first of all, not all stress is created equal. There’s, there’s two important aspects to this. One is, what is the type of stress? Certain types of stress, if ’cause this is stress is a broad word that describes hundreds of different things. Okay? So there’s certain types of stressors and psychological stress or emotional stress. Your girlfriend breaking up with you is different than overdoing it in the gym, right? And it is different than having an intense infection, COD or a bad flu or mononucleosis or something like that. And lots of other examples. Um. What is the type of stress? Some are [01:04:00] more biologically compatible than others, meaning some are much more likely to cause harm than others, and some are much more likely to cause beneficial adaptations than others. Not all stress is equal. The other really important, uh, aspect of this is, um, chronicity versus acute stress. Okay? In general, any type of chronic stress is going to be harmful. Even if we took something like exercise, which I just told you, is an incredibly potent medicine, if you do eight hours of intense exercise every day, you’re gonna be pretty screwed up by it. You know it’s gonna be mostly harmful for you. You can overdo anything. Um, sun exposure is vital for your health. You can overdo that. You can even overdo food even if you ate healthy food. You can overdo it, where if you just really overconsume it, it’s harmful for you and it will cause fat gain, it will cause metabolic problems. It will cause [01:05:00] insulin resistance. So everything can become harmful when you do too much of it and too chronically. And certainly that’s true of psychological stress. It’s true of toxins especially. And again, each type of stressor has its own fingerprint of how likely it is to cause harm and how likely it is to stimulate adaptations that lead to to benefits.

So being chronically exposed to mold is likely to cause harm, not very likely to cause benefits, right.

Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah. And that’s, you know, that’s where people don’t know how to gauge it, right? You know, in the same system that’s putting out research in a biochemical model, it’s also training, uh, patients to think one size fits all. And so, look, if, if, if you say sauna’s good, I’m gonna spend the rest of my life in this sauna.

It’s not how it works, right? It’s, it’s an ecology model. So just high level, I know we’re running outta time here. High level what’s, you’d mentioned a [01:06:00] number of the stressors, heat cold, uh, psychological, physiological. Um, I think we, you know, from before, I know bitter is part of it, right? Uh, what else is part of this gestalt?

How do you pepper your mitochondria on a, in a systems based model to bring the system up on all fronts?

Ari Whitten: The different types of exercise, first of all are, are absolutely essential. So we’ve gotta get that dialed in. Um, and we need multiple different types of exercise to do this well, the most essential one for mitochondrial health systemically. Um, not only in the muscular system, but also in the cardiovascular system.

In the respiratory system, uh, in the vessels, the blood vessels themselves. And at the level of the brain is zone two endurance exercise. And this is exercise specifically in the roughly 60 to 70% of your max heart rate. [01:07:00] Uh, and staying there for roughly 40, 45 minutes or, or more you could stay there, is sort of a minimum of about 40 minutes. Um, and the reason that this is so potent in stimulating, uh, benefits for the mitochondria, particularly at the muscular level, but but also throughout the body, is the fuel sources that are used during this activity. So the basic gist of it is, as the intensity of exercise increases. We will rely less and less on fat to fuel that exercise and more and more on, uh, carbohydrates to fuel it. At a certain point, the intensity not only shifts from burning predominantly fat to burning carbohydrate, but it also shifts from burning the fuel inside the mitochondria to burning fuel outside the mitochondria. So when we do very intense, uh, bursts of [01:08:00] effort, it’s predominantly fuel that’s being burned outside the mitochondria.

And the reason why is that the, we have another energy production process that, um, is faster than the mitochondrial energy production process. And so if we’re doing something that’s really fast, intense burst of efforts, we have to use that faster system. Now the problem with that is that we’re taking some of the stress load. Off the mitochondria when we do that, so where we, where we increase the demand on the mitochondria and before it drops off and switches to fuel production outside the mitochondria instead of within the mitochondria. That point is right around what’s called zone two endurance exercise. Okay. Around 60 to 70% roughly of your maximum heart rate, and you stay there for about 40 minutes.

That puts the maximal amount of [01:09:00] demand on mitochondrial energy production, and by virtue of putting the maximal amount of demand on that specific system, we’re, we’re concentrating the amount of adaptations that occur at that level. So that’s certainly number one. Um, but we

Dr Pedram Shojai: Question. Question on that real quick. Most people have not done the fancy VO two max. Do you recommend Harris Benedict equation? Like how do you, how do most people back out the their max to then go 60, 70% of that number? Um, you know, back a napkin calculation even.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, so the, the way you do it is by estimating heart rate. Um, so the max heart rate is, uh, you can be estimated roughly. It’s not exact, obviously, uh, and it differs a bit between individuals, but the max heart rate simple equation is 220 minus your age. So I’m 40 years old. It’s 180 for me. Now. The true number also is going to be [01:10:00] influenced by, you know, maybe some degree genetics.

And certainly it’s influenced by your health status, your fitness status. So maybe my true as somebody who’s very fit for a 40-year-old, maybe my true maximum heart rate is one 90 or maybe 200. Okay. And also it, uh, goes in the other direction. Um, who, there’s a guy, Phil Maton, I think, who was a big advocate of, of, um, a particular kind of running, like how to improve running performance.

He would have people stay in this zone and he had basically this equation. You estimate your max heart rate in this way, and then it’s like plus or minus five or 10, I think he’s got a calculator on his website, plus or minus five to 10 for are you fit or are you overweight and that sort of thing. And so you can, you can further, um, estimate your maximum heart rate based on your age and those other factors. And then from there you just take, okay, what’s 60, [01:11:00] 70% of this, let’s say 65% of this. So you just go times 0.65 and uh, and now you have that number. Okay. And that’s the beats per minute that you wanna stay at.

Dr Pedram Shojai: And that’s beats per minute. 45 minutes to hit the sweet spot is, is right around there. I, I heard, you know, 45 to 90 minutes depending on who you talk to. So you’re saying 45 before you really getting the, the squeeze out of the lemon. And then at that point, at what point do you know when to stop?

Ari Whitten: Well, you, you’re, so the, the thing with this type of exercise is that it’s not going to be exhausting. You’re, you’re not going to exhaust yourself. And I mean, you will initially probably if you’re really outta shape, but for somebody who’s in shape, you’re going and doing this exercise and it’s relatively easy. This is not, it’s, so there’s, there’s five zones, okay? And there’s some different systems. Sometimes they break it down into six or seven, but zone five is the most intense zone. So that’s where [01:12:00] you’re like going all out and you’re gonna feel wiped out and exhausted. Zone two is a moderate intensity. So like walking is zone one. Zone two is a light jog or pedaling on the bicycle at something beyond just sort of a very casual pace. You’re going a little bit higher intensity, but it’s not really hard where you’re pushing really hard. So it’s something you can sustain for a long period of time. You’re not wiping yourself off out. The where you know to stop is, um, essentially what your current capacity is. So I’ll give you an example. Um, I stop just based on time. Okay. I’m, I’m just going, I’m gonna do a 45 minute session or a 50 minute session when I get to that number. Okay. Time’s up. Um, my parents are just starting out on this.

They’re in their seventies, um, 75, almost 80 years old. My mom’s almost 80. Um. I’m, I’m just getting her back into this. She had a hip [01:13:00] replacement recently and now I’m getting her back into doing this. So just a few weeks ago, she just started and she could do only eight minutes on the elliptical machine at this heart rate.

Before she felt like, okay, this is too much, this is very hard. Okay, now she’s doing, you know, a few days later she did 12 minutes. She just told me the other day she did 24 minutes. So she’s gonna take, in a few months, it’ll take her that time to, to build up to 45 minutes. But as far as when she knows to stop, it’s really okay, what was day one?

How much could you get in this zone? Eight minutes fine. Day two, the next time you do it, try to get nine minutes or 10 minutes. And it’s really that simple. The systematic progression part is really critical to understand, because again, going back to what I said earlier, the body only cares about survival. What that means is you have, if you want it to adapt, you have to give it a survival demand. If you already do something that it’s, it’s [01:14:00] capable of, it doesn’t, that doesn’t push it. It doesn’t create a signal for it to adapt to anything. So at best you’re going to just maintain. But if you actually want to create, stimulate new adaptations to improve your physiology, you have to have this systematic progression built into it.

And that’s based on wherever you are at currently. And how do you build on that?

Dr Pedram Shojai: And to follow with what we’ve been talking about. When she was at eight minutes and now she’s at 24, is that quantity of mitochondria, quality of mitochondria, like what does the engine look like in that adaptive difference between her sessions? Like what? What is happening inside that’s building?

Ari Whitten: So in the studies that. Show this loss of 75% of mitochondrial capacity as we grow older. This is a combination of, of two. It’s more than this, but two fundamental things. [01:15:00] One is the, the mitochondria that are present are physically shrink, shrinking and atrophying and becoming more damaged, becoming more dysfunctional, losing their ability to produce as much energy. And in addition to that, there’s also, so there’s, there’s a 50% reduction in terms of that, in terms of, okay, um, if you’ve got a thousand mitochondria in the cell, those thousand mitochondria now can only produce 50% as much energy as they used to be able to when you were younger. In addition to that, it’s also the case that there used to be 2000 mitochondria in the cell, so there’s also a 50% loss of mitochondria.

They literally shriveled away, atrophied and died off. And so both of those two things are occurring. And if a 50% loss of the number of mitochondria and a 50% reduction of energy production capacity by the mitochondria that are present is, is if you do the math, that’s a 75% loss [01:16:00] of mitochondrial capacity.

So when we do these kinds of physiological challenges that stimulate the mitochondria, we are reversing both. So we stimulate mitochondrial growth, we stimulate many different adaptations in at the level of the mitochondria and increased, um, complexes in the electron transport chain and lots of other things. Um, the physical shape of the mitochondria and the structure, and there’s mitophagy and mitochondrial, fission and fusion and lots of other dynamics that are taking place. But the basic idea is mitochondria are growing bigger and stronger, and we’re stimulating mitochondrial biogenesis to create more mitochondria in there. And this is. This is not a small effect. So there, there’s studies that, um, that have shown within eight weeks or 12 weeks of putting, you know, 65-year-old people on, um, high intensity interval training program or something like that, that, that you can stimulate an increase of [01:17:00] mitochondrial capacity by 60 70% in two to three months. So, you know, what took decades to lose doesn’t necessarily need to take decades to regain. It can be months to regain.

Dr Pedram Shojai: That’s the, the funniest part of this whole story, and we’re running outta time, and I wanna come full circle on this kind of paradigm shift, right? That is the miracle drug by all stretches of the imagination. If a drug did that in three months, oh, you just take this drug for three months and here’s your result, it would be the number one blockbuster drug of all times Slam dunk book closed.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly right. And I’m glad you brought that up. That’s something I, I literally say, and, um, maybe I’ve said it to you in, in a past interview, or maybe you said it to me and, and I stole it from you. I can’t remember. But, um, you know, I, I open up my, my book on red light therapy, for example, with exactly that line.

If, if there [01:18:00] were a drug that could do this, and certainly this is true of nutrition, certainly it’s true of exercise. It’s true of all these different physiological challenges. Sauna therapy, for example, we’re talking, it’s associated with. 60 plus percent reductions in risk of dementia. Um, 50, 60% reductions in stroke and, and cardiovascular disease reductions in the major killers and, you know, all kinds of other benefits.

Improving sport performance, enhancing recovery, combating depression. Um, IM improving overall energy levels by bolstering mitochondrial health, improving cardiovascular function, lots and lots of benefits. If there were a drug, as you said, that could do that, what a sauna does or what exercise does, any one of those things, it would be the best, most potent, amazing miracle drug the world has ever seen.

Every doctor would just prescribe it to everyone in the world, and your doctor would look at you like you’re nuts if you don’t take this drug. But what people [01:19:00] don’t understand is these drugs already exist. They’re just not in the form of a pill from a pharmaceutical company.

Dr Pedram Shojai: But Ari, how do I do it without exercise? And that’s the problem. We’ve been trained to not understand that we have to play an active role in our wellness.

Ari Whitten: I, I, I believe that, and, and this is the argument I’m making in my new book that we, we need to shift, you know, um, I was reading Peter Attias book, uh, outlive, and he makes this, um, he presents this construct of medicine 1.0, 2.0 medicine 3.0. 1.0 is the ancient Greeks who were the first to say, and you would probably argue with this actually, ’cause probably some, you know, the, the ancient Chinese and maybe the. Some of the other Eastern medical traditions maybe came first. I don’t know the exact timeline, but, um, the ancient Greeks and their four humors and Hippocrates and, [01:20:00] uh, the, the idea that disease was coming from natural forces from that diet mattered and other natural things were, were causing these disease was a, was a breakthrough.

And that’s what he’s calling Medical One Medicine 1.0. Because, um, previously there was, uh, um. The focus was basically on, like, disease is a will of the gods and supernatural forces and that kind of thing. Medicine 2.0 is essentially what most people are doing now. It’s conventional medicine. It’s got lots and lots of breakthroughs.

The antibiotic revolution. Um, Viagra, uh, you know, there’s certainly a long list of other things. Emergency medicine, prosthetics, you know, there’s, there’s, I mean, when you’ve got trauma, when you’ve got broken bones, you’ve been shot, you’ve been a bad car accident, you know, it’s incredible what, what we can do with Medicine 2.0. But Medicine 3.0 is his idea that that, um, for all these [01:21:00] chronic diseases of aging medicine 2.0 has not been successful, this pharmaceutical approach. So what he’s saying is, we need Medicine 3.0 that intervenes earlier, and nutrition and lifestyle are the big key to that. Um, I would argue first of all, that. Lots of natural health experts have been saying that for decades. Um, so there isn’t that much new there, but I actually believe that there’s a further shift that’s necessary, which is that we need to get out of Medicine 3.0 towards health 1.0. And what, what I mean by that is we need to stop externalizing all of our power and saying, please, you know, I’m gonna go to the doctor and they’re gonna run tests on me and find my dysfunction and they’re gonna prescribe pharmaceuticals for me and that’s gonna make me healthy. Right? And instead of that, we need to start thinking of ourselves as athletes. We need to [01:22:00] have the mindset of an athlete, not the mindset of a sick medical patient in need of testing to figure out dysfunction and taking drugs, but the mindset of, of an athlete where we’re saying, I’m going to train for energy. Resilience and disease prevention and longevity. Okay. We’re not training for performance in a particular sport. We’re training for longevity. And that, I believe is an important, uh, mindset shift that we, we take the power away from all the pharmaceutical companies and the medical industrial complex, and we put the power back into the people.

We realize that they are actually the ones that control their, their health destiny.

Dr Pedram Shojai: I love that almost a, a shift into saying you have to train to be a grandparent, right? Like you, you want the privilege of being able to be with your grandchildren. You have to train for it. I think Mother Theresa said it in a slightly different way, but the same kind of thesis. She won’t go to an anti-war [01:23:00] rally, but she’ll go to a pro peace rally.

Right. It’s not about disease, it’s about vitality, right? It’s not about how do I lose weight, it’s how do I build muscle? How do I build capacity and resilience and all these things, right? Uh, Ari, your hero. Always a pleasure. Um, really enjoy the work that you’re doing. Can’t wait for the next book. I’m just a big fan of the work that you’re doing.

How do people find you?

Ari Whitten: Uh, the best place to find me is, well, my, my new website is human optimization.com. That’s the one that’s being launched. Now. My previous brand that I’ve been building for the last decade or so is the energy blueprint.com. Now I’m kind of shifting everything over to human optimization.com.

Dr Pedram Shojai: I can see why. Thank you so much.

Ari Whitten: Thank you, my friend. Always a pleasure.

Hope you enjoyed that. I love Ari’s fresh perspective on this. Our he’s just coming in from a different angle, looking at this saying, well, that doesn’t make sense. And so what does right. And what makes sense is what we talked about in this show? 

I’d love to know how this is [01:24:00] resonating with you. 

Go ahead and visit my site. The urban monk.com. Check out my courses. You could always email us support@theurbanmonk.com. Let me know who you think would be great for the show, what conversations you’re enjoying, what you’d like for me to speak more about, check out the urban monk academy. It’s where I teach all of this. 

And then some. Um, Ari has been in a number of my series. Ari is one of the stars in my energy reset masterclass, or has been around for a while. Uh, we do a lot of work with Ari because I respect the guy. Check out what he’s doing. Also check out the functional fitness masterclass in the urban monk academy. 

It’s where I looked at the premise of people who were weekend warriors saying, oh, that’s interesting. You want to get fit and healthy and you get motivated and you jump in and you hurt yourself. Why? Oh, because you don’t have this base level of fitness to allow for your body to move in this way. So I got three of my favorite experts to teach how to phase yourself up so that exercise can make sense. Don’t hurt yourself. 

The point is to sustain this stuff. Check out the functional fitness masterclass, check out everything in the urban monk academy. I’ll see you around.

www.theurbanmonk.com