Shawn Stevenson: Welcome to the Model Health Show. This is Fitness Nutrition expert Shawn Stevenson, and I'm so grateful for you tuning into me today. Did you know that getting your body hotter can actually protect you from one of the leading causes of disease in our world today? According to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, upwards of 80% of all physician visits today are for stress related illnesses. Stress is a huge underlying ingredient for the out-picturing of a variety of physical and mental conditions. There's an underlying inflammatory component that comes hand in hand with stress. But check this out, sauna therapy is one of the fastest growing in popularity it's been utilized for a very, very long time by cultures really all over the world, but it's growing as a preferred therapy and treatment for a variety of issues. But one of the most remarkable things seen with sauna therapy is the release of something called Heat shock proteins.

Now, a study that was published in the Journal, Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity found that these heat shock proteins that are released when utilizing things like sauna technology and even through exercise, are able to function as compounds that help to reduce reactive oxygen species to help to reduce oxidative stress that's happening within our bodies, via injuries, via infections, via chronic conditions as well. So not just acute things, but chronic conditions as well, helping the body to reach homeostasis. That's pretty cool. And again, this is something that we can access via our lifestyle choices. Now, again, this can be through exercise, breaking a sweat, all right? It's one of the reasons that we have that capacity, that capability as human beings to be able to do that. Our skin is really a very large eliminatory organ, but it's not just the elimination of toxicants, it's also the release of endorphins that takes place.

It's also the release of these heat shock proteins. Now, the reason that I'm sharing this with you is that I just had an experience of doing an interview in an infrared sauna, all right? Have never, never heard of such a thing. And the person to have this idea, this concept, to do a show, a new podcast that's out now in an infrared sauna interviewing world-leading experts on a variety of topics, is my friend Prince Ea. Now, prince has been a guest here on the Model Health Show, one of the most brilliant creative people I've ever met, and we actually met in St. Louis. We both went to the same university, university of Missouri, St. Louis. Shout out to everybody from the Lou, and also growing up and living around the same area. You know, me living in Ferguson and him being close by as well.

And we've had our worlds intersect many times, actually did a couple of events that he attended before we even knew each other, and to have things come full circle where he's making visits to LA now, I actually, my guy has a place in Portugal. It's so cool to see this expansive thinking that he has, and also having this mission to empower and educate and doing this show here in LA, the Sauna Sessions. I thought it was such a remarkable experience. And also the caliber of questions that he was asking. I didn't want you to miss a thing. So what I decided to do was to share this epic interview with you from Sauna Sessions here, and to be able to share with you some profound insights covering the truth about our genes and disease, why synthetic supplements might actually be doing you more harm than good.

The psychological changes that actually help me to reverse a so-called incurable chronic disease, what my current fitness programme looks like, and also some sobering facts about hydration and brain function amongst many other topics I'm talking about. We're diving deep, we're covering a lot of territory, and again, I'm very grateful to be able to share this with you. Coming live from an infrared sauna. And then actually, there's a midpoint of the interview where we shift over, and then we're doing a foot bath vibe, got a little coconut water, little coconut water that we're sipping on. And again, just diving into these really remarkable subjects, all with the mission to educate, empower to share. And I wanted to share this with you and make sure that you go and subscribe to Sauna Sessions. I think it's going to absolutely blow you away. Such a great concept, but also the man behind it, the energy behind it is really special.

And so that's what I have for you today. Now, keep this in mind by utilizing this insight, this technology of saunas. And of course, as mentioned, just breaking a sweat, doing some exercise, getting out in the sun, or if you want to take it to the extremity, you could put on one of those sauna suits, right? If you ever seen anybody out there training it into trash bag vibes. All right, shout out to Missy Elliot. I can't stay in the rain. All right? That's probably what that was. They feel they full of air, but people are out here doing whatever it takes to break a sweat. All right? But there is more intelligent and efficacious modes to do this. But just keep in mind, when we're sweating, yes, we are sweating out toxicants. We're seeing the export station for our body processing and utilizing stored fat. Yes, that's another thing that's happening. But we're not just losing water as that transport system. We're also losing valuable electrolytes, and we need to replace those because the electrolytes enable the detoxification to happen. The electrolytes enable the process of burning fat to happen. As a matter of fact, this energy exchange in the body, this ATP, right? Adenosine triphosphate, this energy currency of our cells, it is not active until it's bound...

To a specific electrolyte that being magnesium, right? So, if we want this energy exchange to happen in our bodies we need to make sure that we're getting ample amounts of electrolytes. And that process of our body being able to do all these cool things is going down as we're sweating out these minerals that carry an electro charge. That's why they're called electrolytes. And so, make sure that you're eating ample high quality real whole foods that are rich in valuable electrolytes but also especially if you are doing things that are exceptional, if you are training if you are undergoing a lot of stress in your life family stuff work stuff just, please know that magnesium is the number one mineral deficiency in our world today. About 56% of US citizens are chronically deficient in magnesium and magnesium is responsible for over 650 biochemical processes in the human body.

That's a lot of stuff that can't happen in the body without magnesium being present or can't happen efficiently your body has to try to figure things out and divert and function at less optimal levels. So, the reason that it gets zapped from our system so easily is that it's doing so much and it is one of the key minerals involved in stress management. This is why I'm a huge fan of getting a high-quality source of the most important electrolytes in the optimal ratios. And where I get it, they have hundreds of thousands of data points working with elite athletes working with top executives working with everyday folks to find out what is the optimal ratio of the three most important electrolytes as far as supplementation magnesium, sodium, potassium and that's what LMNT has dialed in. Go to drinkL-M-N-T.com/model. That's drinklmnt.com/model and you're going to get a free bonus pack a free sample pack with every purchase of electrolytes.

So, you could try out the different flavors. But here's the thing. No artificial sweeteners, no binders, no fillers just high-quality electrolytes aka various salts. There isn't just one form of salt. We think of sodium only. There's magnesium salts, potassium salts, calcium salts. But getting these into optimal ratios from high quality sources that's what LMNT is all about. Again, go to drinklmnt.com/model. You get a free bonus pack with every purchase. Take advantage head over there and check them out right now. Drinklmnt.com/model. And now let's get to the Apple Podcast review of the week.

ITUNES REVIEW: Another five-star review titled, “Best Podcast About Health” by Paisley 33. “Favorite podcast based on different health related topics. Always learn so much from Shawn and his guests.”

Shawn Stevenson: Let's go. Thank you so much for leading that review over on Apple Podcast. I truly, truly do appreciate that. And without further ado let's get into this very special episode featuring an interview that I did on the brand-new podcast that you need to subscribe to called Sauna Sessions with Prince Ea.

Prince Ea: Well beautiful man. Well, ah thank you for doing this, dude.

Shawn Stevenson: Of Course, man. It's my pleasure man.

Prince Ea: These crazy ideas. I come up with a Podcast in the Sauna. It was an idea I had maybe two years ago. Here we are. Trying them out.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah man you made it you made it work. You know you got some melt proof...

Prince Ea: It just happened.

Shawn Stevenson: Equipment You know. It's awesome man.

Prince Ea: Do you sauna much?

Shawn Stevenson: Man, I wish I did more. You know like we have one, the voltage is incorrect. We got to get that fixed. But you know I do more of the cold plunging.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: In a sauna right now.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: But I do spend a lot of time just out in the sun.

Prince Ea: Okay. Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: Which is, that's why we came here.

Prince Ea: Yeah. Okay. In the sun. Why is why do you spend a lot of time in the sun?

Shawn Stevenson: I mean that's the... It's one of the key ingredients for life on earth. You know it's such a special thing. And you know for me of course just being very science driven just looking at all of the mental and physiological benefits you know it's one of the catalysts for building your sex hormones for example. You know that pathway with the cholesterol getting converted over you know it's just it's so fascinating. But you know I kind of did a dictation on it a little while ago. You know I'm talking about vitamin D. Right? So that vitamin D pathway. And it's not just the sun it's the interaction with our organs. Right? So, because what it does is it creates like a precursor. Right? Interacting with cholesterol in our system the sunlight, this photosynthesis process. Like we're kind of like a plant that got up and got up and walked around you know and but then it's getting shuttled to you know there's a conversion that happens with your liver. There's a conversion that happens with your kidneys. So, we can get all the sun that we want to but if our organs aren't healthy we're going to be lacking in being able to build these really important complex compounds that really create vitality. You know what I mean? But so, since I'm stacking conditions with my nutrition with my moving practices.

Prince Ea: You take vitamin D as well supplement or just get it from...

Shawn Stevenson: No, I don't really need to.

Prince Ea: Fish or like the sun, and...

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. I mean of course there's some plant sources as well. It's D2 though, it's not D3 if we're talking about like you know mushrooms or something like that. Because I... Going through these different I've experimented oftentimes at least a year with just about any nutrition protocol. You can imagine, you know I've been in this field for 20 years. And so, you know looking forward through a vegan vegetarian lens you know it's like okay I'll do the mushrooms. But again, it doesn't matter if your organs aren't healthy to do that conversion, right? From the D2 to go to D3. So, but yeah, we can find it there. There is kind of an interesting source with plants but predominantly, yeah, you're going to look for things that kind of resemble the sun.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: You know like an egg yolk.

Prince Ea: It's funny. Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: For example. You know it just might have some of those compounds you're looking for in regards to like vitamin D. But vitamin D doesn't work in a vacuum. And that's part of the problem I have with you know going straight for an isolated supplement version of something. In particular if it's a synthetic version. Like for example a lot of folks don't realize this but the vast majority of vitamin C supplements on the market is made from genetically modified corn starch and or corn syrup.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Right? So, when you are getting those little packets at the checkout. Those are coming from... And oftentimes, they're getting genetically modified, most of it's coming from China. They kind of dominate the market with that. But we don't realize that. We just think, "Oh, this is vitamin C". And so, I just shared a study recently. It was a analysis, and again, it was published in a major peer review journal, finding that folks who were consuming synthetic vitamin C supplements had about 2.5 times higher incidence of developing kidney stones.

Prince Ea: Yeah. Yep.

Shawn Stevenson: Right? So, and then another study that was conducted found that there was an increase in the thickness of the arterial walls of men who were taking these vitamin C supplements on a consistent basis. So, there's a big difference between vitamin C, the synthetic idea, and we can almost match it up synthetically to what is naturally occurring, but it's not the same thing. And it doesn't have all the co-factors and really the intelligence that food has.

Prince Ea: It's artificial. I'm going to get into supplements too, 'cause I got a little beef with supplements that I'd love to hear your thoughts about.

Shawn Stevenson: Sure.

Prince Ea: But Shawn, thank you again for being here. I'm such a fan of your work in so many ways. You’re science driven, you don't run away from the science. You're open-minded. You have this high ethical standard and moral compass, and you keep things fun. You're a storyteller. A little bit of a comedian too. I heard a joke you had said on some podcast you were saying, when you're talking about fat, "People think eating fat makes you fat. That's like saying eating blueberries would make you blue". And I laughed entirely too much from that joke.

But it is hilarious. Man, you just have a such a unique lane and I'm so honored to have you here. I'm curious though, what was the catalyst inside of your story that got you into health and wanting to heal people?

Shawn Stevenson: Well, you just said it, man. It was creating an inroad. This is, we are existing in science. Like science is just happening. We are a part of science, we're a part of nature, and it's a language to describe things. Right? And so it's just an awareness of what's happening versus kind of being ignorant to all that's going on in your place in it all. And so, of course like that, I had science on mute I had my connection to life and to nature on mute. And as a result, my health and pretty much everybody in my family had some form of a chronic disease, which is not abnormal by the way. The CDC just published new data. 60% of Americans have at least one chronic debilitating illness. 40% have two or more. So that's the state that we're in right now. And over 70% of our citizens are now overweight or obese.

And I saw this highlighted in my family in particular with probably about 80% of my family members being obese. And I was "The skinny kid" in my family and my brother and sister were also on the heavier side. And, but I had my dysfunction show up in a different way. Because that's the thing. Everybody's, even if you have the same parents, like you're going to have a different genetic expression. So this is talking about epigenetics right? And, I have a different father than my brother and sister as well. So I had a proclivity towards arthritic conditions. And so when I was 20 years old, I was diagnosed with a so-called incurable degenerative disc disease. And I had degenerative bone disease as well. So my bones were deteriorating so much so that, at track practice at Lafayette High School in St. Louis, shout out to everybody in St. Louis.

Prince Ea: Yes, sir.

Shawn Stevenson: I was doing a 200-meter time trial and my hip broke, so my iliac crest and my hip just broke off just from running.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: And I didn't fall. It wasn't a trauma. It was just, my body was so brittle. And so, my disposition or my genetic, and by the way, talking with the person who really pushed that into our popular lexicon, the term epigenetics, epi meaning above genetic meaning control, is Dr. Bruce Lipton.

Shawn Stevenson: And...

Prince Ea: Yeah, I know him well. Good friend. Biology of belief.

Shawn Stevenson: Oh my gosh. I love that man so much. It's one of those things when you talk with him or when you learn from him, you can't see the world through the same lens again. And he shared with me in a conversation and talking about, because we believe that we have genes for diseases. And he is like, "Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. There aren't any genes for diseases, Shawn be very, very, careful in your language". And of course, he's like, "There are a tiny fraction of true genetic defects". But for the most part, we're talking about, for example, if we say we have a genetic predisposition towards having diabetes, right? What that is, we're talking specifically about type two diabetes, let's just start here. With type two diabetes, we have a condition where there was an onset of it. It used to be called adult-onset diabetes. You weren't born with that condition, something happened and it created an expression or manifestation of the disease. And so, what it is, is your genes are getting read differently to help your body to continue functioning under unideal circumstances, right? And so the unideal circumstances a body that was never designed to associate with so much abnormal sugar, right? So 1900s average westerner is consuming four to six pounds of sugar. So just before that late 18 hundreds today we're talking about...

Prince Ea: A year, four to six pounds a year.

Shawn Stevenson: A year, annually. And today we're talking about somewhere in the ballpark of 70 pounds of added sugar. We're talking added not the naturally occurring sugar. In addition, that will put the average person over a hundred pounds of sugar consumed every year.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: And so with that amount of sugar and the impact that it has on your liver and your insulin and insulin sensitivity and all these things, your body is going to make intelligent adjustments to keep you alive under those unideal circumstances. So it's not that your genes cause the disease. Matter of fact, we haven't found any genes that cause the disease. We found genes associated with diseases but they're not causative of diseases. And that's part of the problem. Even recently, we had somebody who's a so-called health official saying that obesity epidemic in particular with children this is a result of genetics and it's so at this point 2023 as much as we know now to say something like that is so negligent and it's disempowering. It's framed in a way to be empowering because it's like it's making it not your fault.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: And we don't want to create this kind of shame culture. But if we don't equip people with the knowledge of how did this expression actually happen because your genes didn't do this to you, there's certain epigenetic controllers. And one of the things we could talk about today there's epicaloric controllers as well how your body handles calories that you consume that are going to determine how your body's going to be expressed. Because if it was truly a genetic problem, because childhood obesity has tripled in the last 30-40 years, tripled if it was genetic we would have been like this. Something happened because we're talking about a sentence in the grand scheme of human evolution, it's only been a sentence where we have this high rate of obesity in particular with children, right? All this other time we weren't like this so if it was the gene...

Evolution takes time and so to circle it back to my story and how this kind of catalyzed me, pain is a good teacher.

Prince Ea: The best.

Shawn Stevenson: It's a fantastic teacher. And I do believe that we can learn through insight and inspiration but pain is, it's a masterclass. And so, being in this condition to where, I'm inundated with disease. When I received this diagnosis I was living in Ferguson Missouri's trying to finish my undergraduate degree and it was a struggle just doing that because I didn't have a reference point. I didn't have examples of like... I ended up being like a super duper senior just because I just like kept dropping classes like I didn't have a template, a roadmap or a model to follow. Because I'd never known anybody like in my personal life that had went to college let alone graduated, right? And so, I'm trying to create a new pathway, break the cycle but my health was struggling. My vision of success in what my life can be was just in such disarray. And what changed everything man and to make it very simple after I'd been outsourcing my health so long to my physicians who meant well, but they're literally telling me that, I can't help you, this is incurable and every time I'd see a new physician they'd give me a new prescription.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: And so, I'm going in for help because I don't want to live like this in this condition. I'm 20 years old you know 20, 21 going through this process. And by the way my dormant fat genes they kicked on.

Prince Ea: Oh, yeah. Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: By the way I went from being the, "Skinny kid" in my family to joining the club.

Prince Ea: Interesting.

Shawn Stevenson: I was knocking on the door being 200 pounds.

Prince Ea: Interesting.

Shawn Stevenson: And when I see pictures of myself like it's just, I look like I can barely recognize myself. But ultimately everything changed when I realized that I had been giving my potential away to other people. I really bought into their definition of what was possible for me.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: And I remembered and we can all do this whether it's with ourselves or whether it's through our perception of someone else who values and sees us. I brought into my... And I didn't do this on purpose, it just my awareness went to my grandmother who taught me the value of education who always was just, she just would reiterate and just kind of push this idea into my psychology that I was going to be successful. I was going to do something special, I was special. And here I was hiding out in this one bedroom apartment, mattress on the floor in chronic pain taking all these medications over the counter and prescription just to sleep at night because the pain was so bad. And I was just like this my life does not match up to what I believed it could be. And I've had the opportunity to talk with Tony Robbins a bit and he talked about how when your life conditions don't match your blueprint, that's suffering.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Right. And when the life conditions matches your blueprint that's happiness, essentially. But here's the thing when you have this disconnection between these two you can either change your life conditions or you can change your blueprint. And you can instantly change where you are and how you feel about yourself in the world around you. And for me at that time again unconsciously I decided that this was my time to stop outsourcing my health and to take responsibility.

Prince Ea: Beautiful.

Shawn Stevenson: And so, I began to furiously, ravenously study everything about health that I possibly can. But it started with a change in my perception. Because here's the thing, the solutions that have me sitting here with you today already existed. I just my vision, the lens I was seeing life through didn't allow me to see them. So within a matter of weeks I ended up at like a wild oats store in St. Louis. And a friend of mine who I'd known for years she took me there and she was like I thought, just thought they was weird, her and her chiropractor friends. And I was just like... But she took me to this place and I see these books and I'm like and I'm looking for my condition because it says prescription, something like nutrition prescription or something like that in this really thick book.

And I went and I was like there's studies on degenerative disc disease and this thing could benefit, like why didn't anybody tell me about this? And so, I just began to flood my body eventually there's a lot that happens in the gap but just to close off the story. I just began to provide my body with all of the raw materials that it needed to rebuild me.

Prince Ea: Wow, wow.

Shawn Stevenson: And your body, our body is remarkably intelligent, far more intelligent than any person that's ever existed. And that's number one. Number two, when I got well, I became so inspired to inform and empower and provide access to other people who were told the same thing, that you can't be helped this is your lot in life there's nothing you can do about it. And through that I shifted my coursework back to science in school but we talked about the...

Prince Ea: What was it before?

Shawn Stevenson: I started off science I went pre-med then because I hated science because of the visceral connection and this leads all the way back to the tie-in point the final point which is, I saw why it turns off so many people is because it doesn't seem, it doesn't connect.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Right, there's no connective tissue. When I'm in my biology class and we're looking at a cell and we're looking at the organelles and the mitochondria, and we're looking the nucleus and all this stuff. We're not really being informed like, "Hey, this is in you and all these parts we're looking at are made from the food that you eat". Right? And so, you get to determine how yourselves are going to actually be structured. Right? And so, I made it a mission to create that connective tissue for people through the lens of humor, through lens of storytelling, through the lens of most importantly, empowerment.

Prince Ea: That's it.

Shawn Stevenson: And just kind of turning people's lights on to all this stuff.

Prince Ea: That's it. In sovereignty is so important, especially over your own health. I talk to my physician all the time. My physician being myself, and I think people need to be their own doctors, I think it's good to do the studies, most people probably don't have time, so they should follow people like you, people who have the background and look at different sources. You said a lot there, and one of the most important things that I took from that can be framed within an analogy, and it was your point about epigenetics, lifestyle versus genetics, nature versus nurture, and a cool analogy I heard was your genetics load the gun, but your lifestyle pulls the trigger. We don't have to activate those genes, the genetic manifestation don't have to happen, we are in control by taking sovereignty, taking control of what we put in our mouths is super important. One thing, when you got in here and got into this Sauna, how you feeling about the way you...

Shawn Stevenson: Feel good. Detox...

Prince Ea: You feeling...

Shawn Stevenson: This sweat is on.

Prince Ea: Yeah, okay. [laughter] Well, I'm looking at you, man, you look in shape, you look like you could probably step on stage of a body building contest.

Shawn Stevenson: Come on now this...

Prince Ea: You're so busy. You run a successful business, podcast, you're an author, you got a family. How do you stay in shape, man? How do you have the... Most people say, "I don't have the time to stay in shape". What do you do?

Shawn Stevenson: I'm going to be, since I'm here with you, man. Just be 100. I'm in 5% of the shape that I could be.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: I'm doing so little these days because I've been... So the past couple of years, obviously, it's been... The world's been pretty crazy. As our friend, Michael Beckwith says, "The world has taken a nightmare pill". And so, I've been so focused on education and empowerment, but I've been doing the bare minimum and a little more for myself. But I really haven't invested in myself like I normally do, but with that said, I'm filling myself up for my mission and there are seasons for everything, by the way.

Prince Ea: 100%.

Shawn Stevenson: So, I've been training, even on my mind while I'm training is service for being as strong as possible to handle any turbulence being as strong as possible to reach in to somebody's heart. And so, that's what I've been doing, and it's only been... I'll probably train three times a week.

Prince Ea: Okay. That's solid. Full body?

Shawn Stevenson: A lot of times it'll... I'll split.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: And then I'll sneak a day in here or there.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: But, I've been doing a lot more hiking with my family is another thing. So, we've dedicated that time hiking together, and just outside of that, just playing, just having a culture. We have a culture of play in my family.

Prince Ea: I noticed that. I watch the Instagram with the stories, the reels. It's great, I saw you freestyling on the other day.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah.

Prince Ea: That's pretty good.

Shawn Stevenson: Thank you. That's the thing that we do. We would just break out into dance competition or seemingly coordinated dance, where we're freestyling. Just embedding these cultural pieces into my kids and just seeing them flourish with it is so cool.

Prince Ea: You mentioned two things, you mentioned hiking, walking, and dancing. I'm a nerd, I like to look at the studies probably not as much as you do, but I'm obsessed with how we can live our best lives, how we can become our best selves, how we can be healthy every cell in our body working optimally. And so, I always harken back to not only our ancient past, but current societies known as Blue Zones. And for people that don't know, Blue zones are places on the Earth where people live the longest, healthiest, happiest lives. The term was popularized by Dan Buettner, he went around and found these different cultures. Okinawa, Nicoya Costa Rica, Loma Linda. And so, going back to the exercise thing, they don't really have squat racks and treadmills, and they're not doing these crazy CrossFit exercises, they're moving, they're walking. They're dancing, they've been squatting in the garden. How important is that?

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. It's the most important thing. We were just talking about this using the stairs coming up here, we want to train ideally, if you're talking about longevity for functionality, things that you'll actually be doing. Can we squat 300, 400, 500 pounds. My oldest son, he can squat probably about 500 pounds now.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Can we do that? Yes, we can. Is it... Are we designed to or is it something that our genes expect us to do? Not so much. Our genes expect us to walk. We're bipedal, it's one of the things that we evolve to do when we're engaging in these activities. We're signaling, these are internal signals going back to epigenetics and the biology belief, there are certain like antennas, essentially with our cells. And I remember in science, we were taught essentially that the nucleus is the brain of the cell, but there's a process called "Enucleation", you could remove the nucleus and the cell can continue living for a nice stint of time and maintain a lot of its functions.

It can't necessarily add in new functions, but it can continue living, if we take your brain out, that's it, you're toast, there is no more life. And so, believing that it's the brain of the cell is a little bit of a misconception or misnomer. And in reality, when we really look at the function of a cell, our cells have the equivalent of these receptors and antennas that are sensing the environment and determining what our cells are doing, and particularly what the mitochondria are doing, what they're making, what kind of new proteins or neurotransmitters, it's all going to be based on our body's perception of the environment. And so, getting these environmental inputs, for example, when you're walking, you're signaling to the environment that I am a person of vitality and need, I'm a contributor to the world around me, I'm moving.

I'm functional. And I don't want to put this in terms of like our definition as humans, as who's valuable and who's not. I'm talking about in nature. Right? Because like I just saw, I was watching with my kids, some wildlife stuff, right? And I saw this lion, it was trying to take out water buffalo. But the water buffalo partners came over and it was a problem. So the lion was already very thin And he was alone.

And so, his template, his potential right now is very shaky of him being able to survive because of these signals, right? Community's lacking now. And also, he's not going to be as active or have the strength to pull that water buffalo down. You know what I mean? So it's a internal and external signal going both ways as to what we're capable of. And the same thing with sex and sexual performance and sex hormones. It's one of those things truly, like we're having an epidemic right now that a lot of people aren't talking about with fertility And these...

Prince Ea: Testosterone too, right?

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. Testosterone has been going down essentially 1% every year for the last 50 years.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: And you add that up, like it's scary.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: And also male sperm count is down about the same, about 1% each year. Miscarriages same thing. Like, and it's...

Prince Ea: Why, what is it? Is it the food?

Shawn Stevenson: Oh man, you're going to open up the...

Prince Ea: The floodgate.

Shawn Stevenson: Can of worms here. But, there are all these, it's so funny, like life imitating art, art imitating life. There's these films about the lack of ability to reproduce as a species, whether it's Handmaid's Tale or The Children of Men, I believe another one was...

Prince Ea: Yeah. That was it.

Shawn Stevenson: But, like we are actually living this out right now. The fertility business, the medicine component, this is a multi-billion dollar business now. It is booming. And with such poor results, some people do end up getting the result that they want, which is to have a family. And it's something it's so primitive, it's so deeply embedded in our desire as a species, like if we get just to the primal side of humanity. All of life is to reproduce and to carry on the species.

Shawn Stevenson: And so, to not be able to do that, it creates such turmoil, mental distress. And so finding solutions, you're always grateful to find them, but the stories of people who didn't find that solution are not talked about enough. And there's so many of these people. And it's unfortunate because again, this business is utilizing all of these systems of drugs and medicines and therapies and various surgeries to try to manipulate the system instead of removing the cause, right? And so, we'll just take this one example, and I wish we could throw the study up for everybody to see, but if people are watching the YouTube version, maybe you can throw it up.

Prince Ea: Yeah, yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: But, a study was just published, just a couple of years ago, looking at the connection between the amount of steps taken per day and testosterone levels. And the researchers found that 8,000 being north of 8,000 steps a day, the study participants had significantly higher testosterone levels than the control group or the kind of the placebo group who weren't advocated to walk as much than their sperm count. But even at 4,000 steps, they had a significant level, but there was a mighty jump once we reached 8,000 steps. And so, now we take that piece with fertility and sperm count, and we say, "Hey, you know what? We're actually the most sedentary population in the history...

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Of humanity...

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Today". Do you think that there's a connection? And doctors are not prescribing steps per day to their patients. They're saying, "Hey, we've got this new, infertility treatment". Right? So the basic things that our genes expect us to do are not the things that are recommended. And you know this is, our system is really based on sick care, it's based on problems. And the treatment of symptoms and not removing the causes of those symptoms. If we actually remove the causes of our epidemics of chronic diseases, these businesses that are, again, multi... As a matter of fact, the United States last year we spent $4.2 trillion in healthcare.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: We're talking about it's the biggest...

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: It's the biggest money maker.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: And the biggest debt.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Like our society is nudging towards bankruptcy. We've already hit that ceiling. But the question is like, who do we owe money to like as a country? Like we're going in debt mainly because of the poor health of our citizens.

Prince Ea: And these, we spend so much money and the outcomes aren't... We don't have outcomes to show for it. Some of the poorest in the, especially, in peer countries, I think we're the worst. Interesting. How you feeling?

Shawn Stevenson: I feel good, man.

Prince Ea: I don't want to push it. I can stand here longer, but I want to keep it healthy.

Shawn Stevenson: All right.

Prince Ea: I don't want anybody to pass out, mostly me. So we're going to step out the sauna, get some little hydration, get a little coconut water and rehydrate. How does that sound?

Shawn Stevenson: Sounds great.

Prince Ea: Cool.

Shawn Stevenson: One of the things that Prince Ea and I have in common is our dedication to physical fitness. We know that being able to experience this life to have robust mental health, creativity and resilience is going to be through really taking care of this vessel that we're experiencing life through. And with that said, there has never been a time that is more conducive to us having a sedentary lifestyle because so much is on automatic, but there's also, at the same time, never been a time that's easier to access fitness. There's so much as far as fitness equipment, there's so much as far as activities that we can do, there's so much as far as brilliant new creative exercises that we can try out, that we can utilize. And it's really about today dialing in what works best for us. And so for me, I'm a huge fan of ease and accessibility. Just like with drinking water, if you don't have a water bottle with you and you're out and about, you can't drink what you don't have. It makes it so much more difficult for you to quench your thirst and or meet your hydration needs if water's not around.

The same thing with fitness. If we've got this barrier where you got to try to get to a gym or you don't have various pieces of equipment, easy access at your home, it makes it another mental barrier towards you doing the thing. This is why I'm such a huge fan of getting yourself a couple of low cost, high value fitness tools to keep at your home for whenever you need them. For me, I never actually thought that I would utilize these tools so often, but life happens. And so, if I can't skate out to drive 10, 15 minutes to get to a gym, or sometimes longer if I'm doing... Going to different gyms or whatever the case might be, then right there at my disposal, I've got these incredible pieces of equipment from Onnit. They're the premier source for steel clubs, steel maces for primal kettlebells.

These are kettlebells that actually have really cool designs that make them fun just to even look at. And it's kind of like with what you're putting on your body, look good, play good, same thing with our equipment. If it's attractive, we just want to go and touch it. We want to go pick it up. We want to do a couple of Turkish get-ups, we want to do a couple of kettlebell swings, we want to do some presses. And also, this is something that my family has been involved in as well. We all utilize these tools and over time, I've just gotten a piece of equipment here, another piece over here, and just been picking up over time where I have this really cool collection. So, I highly encourage to go check them out. You get 10% off. This is exclusive with the Model Health Show, any of their fitness equipment @onnit.com, go to O-N-N-I-T.com/model. You get 10% off storewide, including fitness equipment, and get yourself one of these cool tools.

And they also have really cool training videos. There's of course videos on YouTube teaching you how to use the steel club, steel maces. Once you use the steel mace, first of all, it's going to humble you. All right? You might think you're big and strong, all right? Not strong, strong. But once you pick up one of these steel maces, I'm just going to tell you right now, if you see the biggest one, you think, okay, 25 is the biggest one, 25 pound, don't get it, don't get the 20. Get yourself the 15. Alright, get acclimated because the way that it's designed, and this is a tool that's been utilized by warriors centuries ago and today we're kind of rekindling that connection and training our bodies, hitting different muscle fibers that usually don't get recruited doing conventional, regular run of the mill push-pull movements. This is really activating whole body training. And so, I'm a huge fan again of Onnit and their wonderful fitness equipment. Go check them out onnit.com/model O-N-N-I-T.com/model. And now let's get into this next segment of Sauna Sessions with Prince Ea.

Prince Ea: How you're feeling after that session?

Shawn Stevenson: Feel great man.

Prince Ea: Feel good?

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah.

Prince Ea: Feel light?

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. Feel really good.

Prince Ea: So this is the hydration session where, we got the little foot bath, little Epsom salt. We get relaxed and go a little deep. We call it the hydration session. I know you're a big... You know a lot about food. You're an expert in that area, but how about hydration? How important is it to be properly hydrated? I read a study that said that, I think at least if you're just 2% dehydrated, you lose focus, your attention can wander. Dehydration also, I think it's linked in some studies to colon cancer. How important is it to stay hydrated?

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, yeah. That study is in my book. The... Is published in Medicine and Science and Sports and Exercise. Just a 2% drop in our body's baseline hydration level can create all kinds of cognitive dysfunction, disrupt our reaction time, our ability to process data, grammatical things, we just basically get dumber. And everybody's looking for this super nootropic, this thing to give me the energy and cognitive performance I want. The primary thing is water. Your brain is mostly made of water. It's like we say that, but we don't really get it. Upwards of 80% of the human brain, depending on what stage of life we're in, is made of water. It's the primary macronutrient for human health.

Just being in my nutrition classes in college, we were pounded into these macronutrients, these three macronutrients, fat, carbohydrates and proteins. But what was left out of the conversation is alcohol is a macronutrient, and also water. And water is, again, your body... All of the processes the body is doing, even our mitochondria making energy, it's all happening in a water medium. And so, that's why it affects so much so quickly when we're dehydrated. And I saw your eyes look like, when I said alcohol being a macronutrient.

Prince Ea: I wanted to get into that. Yeah, go ahead though.

Shawn Stevenson: So, but just to finish off with water really quickly. If we understand that our hormones, people talk about these things again, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, things like oxytocin, are stress-related hormones, norepinephrine, epinephrine, adrenaline, all of these things are operating in a water medium. Your hormones are enabling your cells to talk to each other. Without water, the process breaks down. It is that important. And so, I've really been wanting to be a champion for water and for hydration. And I've been... I've weaved that in so much into my content over the years. And I love it because I've seen friends and colleagues integrating that. I worked on this idea and it was first inspired by David Wolfe of this inner shower or inner bath. And so I thought that it made cognitive sense to kind of put it into a story form and just think about how we...

Most people, if they're going out into the world, you take a bath, take a shower or a bath, and we are so focused about this outer appearance, but our health really is from the inside out. And so, in particular, in the morning when you wake up, this is for most people, the longest stint they've gone without hydration. And so you're more dehydrated. Thus when you get up and you use the bathroom, your urine is more concentrated. You see that you can experientially see that happen. And there are so many metabolic processes that take place while you're sleeping. A huge house cleaning. One of the things is your glial cells in your brain that are really... It's a kind of a shout out to the glymphatic system, which is your extracellular waste management system. It's one of its roles. But the glymphat...

Prince Ea: I know about the lymphatic system. You said the glymphatic system?

Shawn Stevenson: The glymphatic system.

Prince Ea: What is that?

Shawn Stevenson: So this is run by the glial cells., but there's this interesting association. And some people don't believe that this exists, by the way, the blood-brain barrier. And I know some scientists are going to be like, who thinks that doesn't exist? But in reality, there is a different operating system happening in your brain than the rest of your body. And this is just logical. Your brain even has certain gates, for example, that allows in glucose. When you eat a meal with sugar in it, your brain will functionally, this is according to researchers at Harvard, will pull in about 50% of that glucose or that sugar that you just consumed from any given meal.

A lot of that's getting shuttled to your brain, thus creating insulin resistance in the brain and leading to, now Alzheimer's is being labeled as type three diabetes. We have an epidemic of Alzheimer's, and it's a big driving force of that is our abnormal way that we're eating. And so, just to circle it all back with water and hydration, all these processes I just named are all happening in a water medium. And, when we really just boil down to the nuts and bolts of nutrition for me, first and foremost, understanding that the glymphatic system is... Let me give you an example. So this glymphatic system that's cleaning house, because you have billions of neurons, that are doing processes. And there's going to be waste. There's going to be recycled cells, there's going to be all kinds of things. The glymphatic system is 10 times more active when you're asleep than when you're awake. And so there's a lot of house cleaning. And another link to dementia and Alzheimer's is an inability of the brain to clean itself. So now we're stacking conditions against ourselves. And so, when we're deprived on sleep, but we're talking about hydration right now, it can be a problem. And so, when you get up in the morning, you are dehydrated. This is a great time to help the flush out those metabolic wastes. Give your lymphatic system your glymphatic system an assist, help the process to help the flush out these metabolic waste products.

Get a clean slate, and take your inner bath to start the day. And so I recommend anywhere from 16 to 32 ounces within the first 30 minutes of getting up. It, that one thing does such a number for our metabolic wellness. And I'll share one more thing. There's this process called water induced thermogenesis. And I talked about this in Eat Smart as well, but the researchers found that consuming 17 ounces of water is what they use in this study within, we'll just say again, within 10 minutes, was enough to generate a burning of fuel or caloric burn of calories from your body of 30 calories just by drinking water. So it's turning up this thermogenic activity by drinking, again, just 17 ounces of water.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: And we could just be like, well, this is just from the body heating the water up. It's not just that, it's making everything work better. Versus the alternative, which is, most people in our society today are chronically dehydrated.

Prince Ea: That's interesting. I have Robby Robinson, 76 year old bodybuilder, legendary guy on, and we train a lot at Venice and, goes gym in Venice, and he always says this, "Prince, water builds muscle." He's like, "Prince, people want to lose weight, they got to drink more water." He's like, "Water is life. It's so important, but it's so many different waters out there. What type of water should we be drinking?"

Shawn Stevenson: All water is not the same for sure. And part of the... It sounds strange even for me to say it because it was drilled into me and pretty much everybody so much in school that water is H2O. H2O, H2O that's it. That's, it's water is water. But you'll never find pure H2O in nature anywhere.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: It doesn't exist. Water is known as the universal solvent, because it's always combining with things that are in its environment. Whether it's salt or whether it's Kool-Aid, water's going to integrate with it. And so it's able to combine with more things than practically anything that we've discovered. That's why it's called universal solvent. And so, with this being said, in nature, you're going to find water plus minerals. That's what our ancestors were striving to find a spring, or a safe source of water. And that's where we set up the community, the civilization. And today however, we have so many advances in how we can extract water.

Now, this gets in the conversation about what's ideal. So we obviously want our water to be safe. So many people even today are dying because of having a lack of clean water. The ideal source of water that our bodies are most acclimated to, because water is also information, it's carrying information, about Masaru Emoto's work in The Hidden Messages in Water. And, water can be used in all kinds of technologies. Water does have a form of memory storage capacity and conductivity and all these things. With that being said, ideally we're going to have water that has been integrated with minerals naturally.

And so that's going to come through springs, spring water. Basically that water is going through the earth's filtration system. And we think about this really immaculate process of how that water got there, through, again, thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years really, of this hydrological cycle and integrating itself going through this filter. And they're in these underground lakes called aquifers. And for a spring, this is when the water finds its pathway back to the surface and presents itself for life to consume, essentially. So that's spring water, that's the ideal source. There's going to be inherent fear sometimes about, is this safe if you go to a spring, because we are used to getting our water from Nestle. You know what I'm saying? In a plastic bottle with the estrogens, and we can get into that, because we're so disconnected. We don't trust ourselves, we don't trust nature. There are going to be microorganisms, that's normal. And your body is probably going to be better off from associating with them. You're not going to get sick.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: For the most part, there are some springs that might be high in certain things, like...

Prince Ea: Sure.

Shawn Stevenson: There's lithium springs in Missouri that we used to go to. And man, it's not a everyday drinking water.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: At first you feel amazing. It's just like this, the... It should be illegal essentially. Like this is, you're not supposed to feel this good from drinking water. Like, I feel so clear and I feel so connected. It's just like, it's hard to explain. And people used to come from all over the world to go to that spring. It was like this storied prize thing. Now it's just like this kind of shanty little barrier over the top of it. Nobody in town knows about or uses it. When we would go and fill up bottles, the little kids in the neighborhood, they might bring like a little pail or something and play in it.

Prince Ea: There was a New York Times article a few years ago about why... It was titled 'Should Everybody Be Taking a Little Lithium?' And it cited certain studies that they've done of lithium in water systems and lowering suicide rates.

Shawn Stevenson: And depression. Yeah.

Prince Ea: And depression. Yeah. So lithium is just... Yeah, it's an incredible mineral.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. But now we get into the synthetic version of things versus the naturally-occurring thing. And again, and also who's profiting from that. And the list goes on and on and on. So treating our water system, which, for example, fluoride is used as a treatment in our water today in municipal water. And there's a significant amount of data now, peer-reviewed, published in prestigious medical journals, about concerns over having too much fluoride, conditions where... Because fluoride is... It's proposed, the reason it's in our water supply, is to make our teeth healthy. But we know that fluoride is close to... Our teeth are essentially bones that you could see. And so, if it's affecting your teeth, it's affecting your bones. And we have this fluorosis process where we have the chipping of teeth or the chipping of bones, your bones break easier. I broke my hip at track practice. And the thing we... All we knew was fluoridated water. That's all we knew. We're just drinking stuff out the faucet. Could that have been a contributor? We don't know if we're not running studies on this to find out. But we do know that it can create patches and weak spots in our teeth, and so that's one thing. And also, a big concern in some communities is the impact on fluoride with the brain, and the pineal gland in particular. So there's a calcification process. And then also the overabundance of fluoride being kind of...

: The human body is so interesting in where certain minerals will hold up shop. Because even your heart's needs are different from your liver's. Your heart will rapidly consume a lot of the magnesium you consume. And magnesium has been used in, for example, even open heart surgeries a lot just to make sure the heart keeps beating. And so this conversation I had with Dr. Oz just enlightened me to that. I was like, "You know what? Dang, I never thought about that." 'Cause I was sharing with him some data on magnesium and heart health. He's like, "Yeah, we use it in surgery."

Prince Ea: Interesting.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. Anyway, so there's this attractive force with the pineal gland, and this is going to be a potential for messing up your sleep quality and melatonin secretions and all kinds of other stuff. And melatonin is a very powerful anti-cancer thing that our bodies produce.

Prince Ea: Yep.

Shawn Stevenson: So, here we go. We've got spring water, top tier.

Prince Ea: Spring water at the top, okay.

Shawn Stevenson: The next tier is going to be well water, where you drill down into the aquifer.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: But it hasn't gone through the earth's... That reoccurrence, nature hasn't presented it. And this is what humans are doing today, we'll go to a town that is lacking clean water, drill down, create a well. That water is... Well, you know what I mean? It's okay. It's good. And it's definitely ideal compared to people going down where the animals, everybody is, the rhinos and crocodiles, and all this stuff, and it's just collective thing and there's feces and all the things.

Prince Ea: Coli, yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. So you obviously want to... That's a huge upgrade. So I'm not trying to water that down. Damn. I didn't even... I didn't need to do it.

Prince Ea: Comedian. I told you.

Shawn Stevenson: But, so well water would be ideal. Then what about our day-to-day lives, municipal water supply? If you don't get a water filter, you become the filter. You are the filter.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: And right now, I share this study as well in the book. There was a nationwide study of municipal water supplies from coast to coast, from California to New York, and they found dozens of pharmaceutical drug residues in municipal water supply coming right out of your tap in your kitchen or your bathroom or your shower, dozens. So, antidepressants, chemotherapy medications, NSAIDs. And the question is, how the hell is this in our water supply? And it's just this, we're part of nature. Humans are consuming these things and they're metabolites, they're pissing out, excreting these...

Prince Ea: It's from agriculture too, right?

Shawn Stevenson: Yes, because we're using some of this wastewater to grow food as well. And that can sometimes, depending on where you are, have an easier path into the water treatment facility. We don't have technology to remove that stuff yet. And so again, you become the filter.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Not to mention the heavy metals, not to mention the things that are used in the water, but it's without an informed consent, because people don't know the potential risk with fluoride, for example. Not saying that fluoride can't be beneficial, but you've got to understand, like, if you're drinking two gallons a day, some people that's their goal, a gallon of water a day for example, of fluoridated supplement water, could that be a problem? Plus the chlorine added, it's a primary treatment mechanism. And again, we probably want that versus consuming something that can make you blatantly sick.

Prince Ea: Yeah, yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Versus a potential slow death or a slow destruction of your microbiome, for example. Because chlorine is a very strong antibiotic.

Prince Ea: Oh yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: It's a killer. And your microorganisms living in your gut, these are very, very, very tiny microorganisms, and so they're going to be at the mercy of the stuff that we're putting in there. So with that said, ideally you want to get a reverse osmosis system.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: Not... I'm sorry, I did this initially, almost 20 years ago. When I found out about this stuff, I went and got a Brita water filter. If you read it, it says remove the smell and taste of chlorine, it does not remove chlorine.

Prince Ea: Not actual chlorine.

Shawn Stevenson: And Brita is made by Clorox.

Prince Ea: Come on, no way.

Shawn Stevenson: True story, true story.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: And so it's kind of like... But it does have like, some of these to kind of mimic the earth's sedimentary layer and all this stuff. So it's cool, it is cool.

Prince Ea: But ideally you want to reverse osmosis.

Shawn Stevenson: Reverse osmosis.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: But now reverse osmosis is creating a essentially a H2O, blank water.

Prince Ea: Yeah. Nothing in it.

Shawn Stevenson: Right? And so we need to give that water some structure. Give it some information. There's some data on consuming distilled water and reverse osmosis water without minerals and leaching, the potential for leaching. They're taking things from you versus adding to you. And I think it's very minuscule, it is. But it's a concern for people. And for me, it's just like, why not do the best thing? So if you're doing reverse osmosis or distilling your water then I highly recommend adding back some high quality salts. So humans forever, for thousands of years have prized salt. Salt was even used for salary. The word salary is derived from salt.

Prince Ea: Interesting, really?

Shawn Stevenson: Right? Yeah, yeah. So this was something that people were getting paid for. You ever seen those goats that are like hanging out on the side of dams like risking their lives and doing all this crazy stuff? They're trying to get a lick of some minerals.

Prince Ea: Yeah, true. That's true, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: You know what I mean?

Prince Ea: Yeah, that's true.

Shawn Stevenson: It's such a valuable thing in the animal kingdom. And again, we separate ourselves mentally from it but it's such a valuable thing. So there's Hawaiian black salt, there's Celtic Sea Salt, there's Himalayan pink salt, there's so many different salts and/or adding back some essence from fruits and vegetables as well because there's electrolytes and salts in there as well.

Prince Ea: Got it, got it, okay. Okay, all right, that makes sense. Reverse osmosis, well, actually spring water, if you can then reverse osmosis and add in...

Shawn Stevenson: Well water. Spring water.

Prince Ea: Spring water, well water.

Shawn Stevenson: Well water. That's artesian water. If you ever hear artesian water, that's well water.

Prince Ea: Oh, interesting, okay, I didn't know that. Okay, okay. And lastly, the RO with added minerals or fruit.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah.

Prince Ea: Okay, all right. All right, beautiful. So Shawn, I want to get into some interesting topics with you. Controversial topics with you. One of which, going back to food, you're an expert in food. You're an expert in health and nutrition. When we look at where most people get their information from, they get it from Instagram, a lot, certain influencers, people might've been getting information from the Liver King who recently came out and they said his physique wasn't actually because of he was eating bull testicles, it was from steroid use. So people get information from Instagram but there's no... There's fact checking on politics but when it comes to health stuff, not as much. But then you go to government and some people get their information from the CDC and these organizations and we all know that that might not be the most ethical or forthright source to get information from.

Then they go, "Okay, all right, well, what about my doctor? Can I at least get information from my doctor?" And you look at a lot of physicians. I think almost 50% are overweight. The number one disease for physicians is like all of us is heart disease, that's how most physicians die. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is there's just, there's so much out there, so many different perspectives, so many diets, you got carnivore, you got keto. You got go back, you got Atkins, you got this and that. Well, I think there was a poll that came out that said many people are overweight and just too confused to do anything about it. So Shawn, I say all that to ask, what the heck do we do when it comes to getting solid information for our health and longevity of ourselves and our families?

Shawn Stevenson: It's incredibly simple, just listening to the advice of our ancestors. What have humans been doing the longest? What got us to this place? That is the best piece of advice you can give yourself. And create a conscious or intentionally created bias. If something doesn't fit into that, be skeptical of it but still be open to it. Because again, showers were not normal, you know what I'm saying? 200 years ago and people were still hooking up and probably some crazy smells, you know what I mean?

Prince Ea: Never thought about that.

Shawn Stevenson: A shower can be a great innovation, you know what I mean? But everything can be taken too far as well. Some people are so obsessed with cleanliness they're wiping away their microbiome that's protective and that allows feedback for interacting with other people and having a healthy matchup of pheromones and attractiveness and all those other things.

Prince Ea: Not to deviate, but hand sanitizer. You've got some interesting thoughts on that. On the PURELL and the hand sanitizer. What are your thoughts?

Shawn Stevenson: I mean, again, this is a huge moneymaker. It's a big industry and they just... Their bottom line has skyrocketed. They've made so much money the last few years. And for me, again, it's having... My intention even in the beginning of all the dissonance was just for us to not venture into a place of idiocy and start doing self-harm under the guise of protecting oneself. Because our skin is intelligent. It's the outermost portion actually of our nervous system. And it is remarkably complex and we come in with a blunt instrument in the form of really dense alcohol-based compounds with a myriad of other toxic substances. And alcohol is also something that is, it's a driver. It drives things into your skin by doing this practice for a lot of people. And I just saw it. I was just at my youngest son's basketball game. People break out the hand sanitizer. A kid was coughing over in the corner, square squirt, and it's just become second nature. And the ramifications. And of course there are plenty of examples of damage, people's hands being physically damaged by utilizing these hand sanitizers too often.

But also this is the bottom line. This is the most important part. By damaging the protective layer that exists on our hands, we become far more susceptible to things getting into our skin.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Ironically, like so now truly, if you're not continuously 10, 15, 20 times a day hitting this PURELL or, this hand sanitizer your skin is constantly more vulnerable to allowing in all manner of pathogens.

Prince Ea: Wow. That which is meant to protect us is actually weakening us.

Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Now the context, again, everything has it's place.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: If you were just out, you were at the gym. And you just saw the guy, he just walked out.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: He just took a deuce.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: And he's just all over the barbells. And you using the barbell, it's of course. And you're now, you're shaking people's hands, all the things, and you want to, now everybody's getting some chips and guac.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Right?

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Maybe you hit spar...

Prince Ea: Sparingly.

Shawn Stevenson: You know what I mean?

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: Just there's a context for all of this.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: But what we've become as a society is we've lost a lot of our basic understanding of health and our connection to nature and the natural world. And we know this. We are in the world. We want to be in the world, but not have the world. Of course we can be aware and have all of these other practices, but we still live here. And the truth still, whether we understand it or not, is that we are a part of life.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Every single thing going on in this universe is affecting us. We have a 24 hour solar day that is affecting, we have chronobiology is the, this the latest, like hottest, fastest growing science and how what time of day it is affects your hormone production. Your neurotransmitters, your digestion, all of this, every single thing about you is affected by what time of day it is. And the more you're disconnected from nature, hiding out in our rooms, hiding out in our homes, in our office buildings, the more that clock gets out of sync and disease and dysfunction takes hold. That's number one man, creating a cognitive bias to like, what have we been doing longest?

Prince Ea: Yeah. Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: To get us here as a species and develop this highly complex brain. It didn't just happen. We've had this same brain for tens of thousands of years. And that was evolved on... And by the way, this is another really important piece. Your brain is made from the food that you eat, every single cell in your body, when you look in the mirror, you're seeing the food that you've eaten. It's so powerful. And so, what are you making your brain out of this highly complex structure? Masaru Emoto, modern day Einstein, he gets that label. He said that the human brain is the most complicated object in the known universe. It is powerful beyond measure. It's so incredible. And we all have one. That's the coolest part. It's like we all have one of the most complex objects in the known universe.

Prince Ea: The only organ, the name itself. That's, yeah. Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: But here's the thing. We often, we don't have an instruction manual.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Or guidance on it. And so following that template, what have our ancestors done historically? And this is the principle is they've eaten real food.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Real food, earth grown nutrients, things that are close to nature. Whether that's just plant or animal matter. This is what we evolved with. We don't need to get into politics about it, just be honest about it. You can't, well, you can, of course you could be idealistic, you can make up stuff but the truth is, our species evolved as omnivores eating all kinds of stuff.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: But in close proximity to nature, a Twinkie or little Debbie snack cakes and fruit loops and all of this stuff. These are all newly invented things by food scientists and chemists using a gas chromatograph and identifying certain flavors. And I could break this whole thing down. It's an abomination. But this makes up the majority of the average person's diet today.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: And this is in the BMJ, the average Americans diet adult is upwards of about 60% ultra-processed foods today.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Right.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: For children is far worse. This was published in JAMA. I'm on a huge mission to educate people about this. Nearly 70% of our average children's diet in the United States is made of ultra-processed foods now.

Prince Ea: 70%.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. It's 67% right now. And we jumped just in the last 20 years. It was already, and outrageous 61%, now it's 67%. And so number one, what did our ancestors do? Eat real food. And number two, there are going to be different diet frameworks and perspectives.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: And that's wonderful. That's wonderful. All of us are very unique. We all have a unique metabolic fingerprint. And with that said, certain diets are going to work for certain people. And you mentioned earlier in our conversation about the Blue Zones, the diets of people living at these various Blue Zones are very different. And that's not talked about enough. It's just like we get a Vanilla perspective of what that is. But the humans are traditionally eating foods that are in their environment or that are indigenous kind of to where they are. Life is presenting, nature has been presenting foods that the human, that our genes have become acclimated to associating with in a healthful manner. We haven't had time to acclimate accordingly to Cool Ranch Doritos. You know what I'm saying? Again, we can eat them.

Prince Ea: Like the charms.

Shawn Stevenson: But what is going to be the genetic, these are all epigenetic or should we give it this proper name? Nutrigenetic.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Nutrigenomic Influences. We have entire fields. So much data on this now, but the average person doesn't know because they're just trying to feel good. And so the Liver King is going to come along, it looks like, idealistically, a young guy with obesity skyrocketing in particular in adolescent.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Young men. And they see that and it's like, "Oh, yeah. I want to do what that guy's doing". And that's... We do want to model health but what I would implore people to do is to listen to your inner guidance system.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Most importantly, and for most of us, because we're so externally based and we're just inundated with all this stuff on social media, we're such a just swipe culture next, next, next, next.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: We don't allow ourselves to think and to go within and to listen to this inner information, this inner guidance system that's screaming at you like, "Hey, this guy's lying." We all know if something, like, there's an inherent thing to know, like, something's off here. And so, not to say that this person's bad or that... Anybody who is saying something you disagree with is bad. It's not about that. It's not about labeling that. It's about what feels good and feels right for you right now. And giving yourself permission to change as things change. Absolutely. Look for models, but most importantly, you are the most important voice in your choices. And no one else is like you, that program that worked for them, is probably going to be slightly different from you long term. In the short term, we can get a lot of results.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Just by trying something different.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Because the human body's always looking to acclimate, to find homeostasis. So when you throw a new thing in there, you're going to see results. And so stay open to that. Keep yourself open to a diversity of inputs and communities and teachers and all the things. Try not to be dogmatic. Try not to vilify people who are doing something different than you. So we can all have healthier conversations.

Prince Ea: Yeah. Yeah. That vilification happens a lot. I like that. Listening to the wisdom of the ancients and the wisdom of yourself. The gut feeling, the... Go with your gut. I think is super important. And in order to do that, we got to be putting good things into our gut to build that healthy microbiome system so we make better decisions. Shawn, in the time that we have, which is a few minutes, I wanted to ask you about supplements. The supplement industry is a $40 billion industry. Some people say that supplements are great, supplements can change your life. Other people... I've read, I've been to physicians who say, supplements don't even worry about them. What do you think about supplements? Are we just... Are we taking supplements, just creating expensive P or do supplements really have an impact on our health?

Shawn Stevenson: Just listen to the name of it. It is a supplement. It's a supplemental thing. It's a add-on. It's an addition. It's a compliment. The foundational focus for us as a species needs to be real food, where oftentimes supplements are derived in some form or fashion from earth, even in synthetic forms. We talked a little bit earlier about synthetic vitamin C...

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: Being... So it's one of the biggest selling things in its standalone form, but also in multivitamins.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: And that synthetic form of it is derived... The vast majority of it from genetically modified corn starch.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: And corn syrup. Does that speak health? These are all terms that should put up a red flag.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: And so it's matching up, again, looking through the lens of biochemistry, which we have this thing, you know this... There was this moniker, better living through science. And my... It's not an argument, but my turn towards reality is that everything is science.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: It's not better... We were science before when people were hunting and forging and all that, this is all science too. But because it's a lab this is science.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: And so when we can identify, I mentioned earlier, a gas chromatograph. So this was an invention where scientists found out, okay, these flavors that we experience when we eat certain foods, that's all chemistry. It's just a certain formula. It's a certain equation. It's a certain outline of certain compounds and molecules. And we can take that, we can extract that combination that basically, we'll call it a little... A sentence, we'll call it a sentence or a string of information. So we have a strawberry and we found out the formula that gives strawberry this particular note.

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: We could take that formula now and we can add that to cereal. We could take that formula, we can add it to soda. Now, we don't just have soda water. We have strawberry soda. Now here's the thing, it's not going to taste exactly like it, but it's just enough to muddy up the waters. To give you a sensation like, "Oh, this is a orange soda, this is an orange this, this is an orange that". No orange necessary. Because we cracked the code on flavors. And so, but here's the problem. We evolved with this really intelligent system of biological feedback. So historically, when we would consume a flavor, it came along with certain nutrients.

Prince Ea: Yep. Yep.

Shawn Stevenson: So it's post-ingestive feedback is the term for it. And so now we're consuming a thing with a certain flavor cascade that's no longer coming along with those nutrients. It's going to create inherent biological confusion. And so now when you are getting a craving for a certain thing, what would naturally drive you to go and eat this certain thing to give your body the magnesium it needs, the zinc, the copper or whatever it is we pop in again diet soda and a sandwich.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: And so we're getting the sensation of having something in our system. But we're going to continue to be hungry and have cravings because we're not actually giving our bodies what it's asking for, what it's screaming for because of all of this flavor confusion. To put all of this together in a nutshell, our bodies are immaculately intelligent. Our ability to relate and interact with food and with nature is so profound, so powerful. But when we're adding in all of these newly invented things, it could throw off the system. And so to answer the question on supplements after we check the box, having a diet that's foundational on real food. There is going to be a dramatically less need to buy a $50 supplement or whatever the case might be.

Prince Ea: Gotcha.

Shawn Stevenson: With that said, there is absolutely a place, again we can look at "Better living through science and chemistry" and do some things that can have high leverage. For example, having a concentration of omega-3 fatty acids. Which this is in the top five nutrient deficiencies in our society. And some data that was using FMRIs and I talked about this in Eat Smarter as well, the scientists use FMRIs to look at human's brains. And they found that people had the lowest intake of omega-3 fatty acids, had the highest rate of brain shrinkage. The brain volume, they were losing volume of their brain and it was four grams a day. Today, it's not necessarily going to be a easy go for people to get in four grams of DHA. In particular it was DHA. And so having a supplement can help in that process. And here's the key, the key words, real food based or whole food based supplements. Right. So this isn't synthetic. This is from a real food and it's in a concentrated form. You know same thing holds true for vitamin C. We can have concentrates of "Super foods" like camu camu berry, Amla berry, Acerola cherry that have not just the vitamin C content. By the way, Dr. Duke, who worked for the USDA. He became like an obsessed in and expert in botanicals.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: Because he saw some of the data that the popular kind of government institutions were pushing into culture was not, we were seeing more sickness. It's just like something's not working here. And he found that camu camu berry, he was really one of the pioneers of this, it has about 700% of your RDA vitamin C in just like half of a teaspoon.

Prince Ea: No way.

Shawn Stevenson: Like, just a tiny amount.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: It just blows away most other things.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Right. But it also has all of the other co-factors, you know, these kind of bio potentiators that actually allow your cells to recognize it. Versus this blunt instrument. In the form of vitamin C, synthetic vitamin C, as I shared with you earlier, we have peer reviewed data, prestigious medical journal showing two and a half times higher incidence of developing kidney stones...

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: By consuming synthetic vitamin C.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Supplements can supplement an already real food or healthy nutrition protocol, use whole food based supplements. And you'll have a great combination.

Prince Ea: What do you take, what supplements do you take?

Shawn Stevenson: I listen to my body. It's the ultimate thing.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: And this is tough. I listen to my body, but also I also go on my life experiences. Right? So if I know, for example, I've been doing a lot of things that maybe my body has a little bit more inflammation. I've got a turmeric.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: Supplement. Right?

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: It's a concentration. It's a whole food organic version of turmeric, concentrated. It has the curcumin, all these things that are, again studied so many studies now. On its anti-inflammatory capacity. But it's also anti-cancer. It's an anti, anti-angiogenesis. One of the few foods discovered that can cut off the blood supply to cancer cells.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: So that is way different than this blunt instrument.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Right. Of something taking an NSAID or, you know some anti-inflammatory thing. Right? So I'm getting the anti-inflammatory thing plus all this other great stuff.

Shawn Stevenson: Right? Because it's a real whole food. So occasionally I'll do that.

Prince Ea: But you listen to your body, you don't do this stuff religiously. Like you don't have a stack of magnesium that, before sleep or when you wake up, you don't take like a D or K two or you just...

Shawn Stevenson: No.

Prince Ea: Listen to your body. You're tuned in to how you feel physically, emotionally, mentally, and then you have a pharmacy...

Shawn Stevenson: Yes.

Prince Ea: At your house.

Shawn Stevenson: That part and also begin paying attention to what's going on in my life. For example, like maybe if I'm traveling, for example, I up the whole food forms of vitamin C.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: Right.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: So camu camu berry, amla berry. But these are... You can get supplements that are concentrates of these things.

Prince Ea: Interesting.

Shawn Stevenson: I am a fan of supplementing DHA.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: In EPA, Omega-3 is for most people. Magnesium is the number of mineral deficiency in our society today. About 56% of Americans are chronically deficient at magnesium. Magnesium is responsible for over 600 biochemical processes.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: That we are aware of about 625.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: So, this means your body can't do certain things without it, or can't do them efficiently. You know a lot of them have to do with the parasympathetic nervous system, relaxation, muscle function, cognitive function. But you can also get magnesium. And magnesium by the way, is a salt. There's different salt. We just think a sodium is a salt. There's magnesium salt, there's calcium salt. These are under the guise of these electrolytes. That's another thing that we can supplement today. But the supplementation can be as easy as a high-quality salt or when you are supplementing electrolytes. Make it sure if you can, that they're coming from an ethical place. Right? So, they're earth grown, naturally derived combinations of electrolytes. Electrolytes are essentially minerals that carry an electric charge.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: So, they enable your cells, they have signal transduction to talk the cells work...

Prince Ea: See that's why I love you man, 'cause you just break it down. I never heard that. Like, I know electrolyte, potassium, magnesium, sorry, but it carries an electrical charge. Of course. That's so beautiful.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. It's so remarkable. And again, all of this stuff is occurring in nature and we keep trying to trump the system and find a way to like do something better. And we get into that place where people are going and getting this hot supplement and missing out on the 99% of what gets you results and trying to lean onto this one thing. That's the problem. You know, so it's not a problem. The one thing, you know, this 1% isn't a problem. But if you have that 1%, like that gives you that extra, that tiny little bit of edge versus most people are becoming reliant on those things just to get by. You know and so that...

Shawn Stevenson: It's really simple when it boils down to it with our uses of supplements look for earth grown nutrients, concentrations of Whole Foods, but we've got to really shift our focus to getting a lot of these, "Supplemental nutrition, nutrients" from real food.

Prince Ea: Awesome. Love it. All right. Let's have a little rapid-fire thing. That's first question. Three foods we should not be eating.

Shawn Stevenson: McDonald's, french fries. I don't want to actually, let me not throw labels out but I'm going to throw this one out since I was going to say Entenmann's. The pastries.

Prince Ea: Oh, I Used to eat those a lot.

Shawn Stevenson: I would go to the outlet. You remember the hostess outlet was in St. Louis?

Prince Ea: Yeah. Yeah, of course.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah. So I go there, man. But I'm just in particular, all of this concentrated sugar and refined starch and also all the preservatives and then things like that. I'm not a guy who's like, don't ever do even as I said, the McDonald's thing, like if you're in a bind. You know what I'm saying?

Prince Ea: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: So be it. But, and I don't want you to place a feeling of guilt, but it, they're very, very unhealthy. The last one would be, this is very difficult. And I'm just certain foods pop-tarts. All right. So McDonald's, fries.

Prince Ea: Okay. Yeah. Interesting.

Shawn Stevenson: Entenmann's and pop-tarts.

Prince Ea: Okay. All right. That'll work. Three kind of bio hacks that feel illegal to know.

Shawn Stevenson: Getting sunlight in the morning. Just getting outside, even in on a overcast day, just getting outside. I do this every day. I've been doing it for, I don't even know how long, I'll just get outside and go for a 10 minute walk every morning.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: Without fail, even when it's raining. Let's say 365 days, I'll do a 360. Every now and then I'll just get on like a vibration plate, but it's still outside. I'll do something.

Prince Ea: Gotcha. Outside with the sun.

Shawn Stevenson: And so it's, you don't have to, I'm not talking about staring into the sun.

Prince Ea: Yeah. Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: I'm just talking about the ambient light. Those biophotons help to sync up this chronobiology. Right? So these clocks within every cell in our bodies. I remember in school hearing the term circadian rhythms and it sounded like a horoscope or something. Like what? But today we know that these circadian clocks are functional genes. These are genes and proteins in every cell in our body, and they're constantly trying to sync up with our environment. So that would be number one. Number two would be play.

Prince Ea: Big one.

Shawn Stevenson: Playing more. I just, my, youngest son just had a basketball game. It's his first season playing. And him and his team, they went off. They were doing their thing. It was really cool to see after the game was over, all the parents dispersed, except a few kind of hung out with just say like, four parents was the only one hooping with the kids afterwards. We were having a good time. I was given these kids an opportunity to like, challenge themselves after they just spank these kids like, play me. And so, but also giving them the encouragement, all this stuff And so.

Prince Ea: That's awesome.

Shawn Stevenson: I don't think about that stuff often, but I just thought about it because you brought it up. Like where's an example, where I'm playing with the kids. And doing what would be considered the kids’ stuff or making myself look a certain way. And so, we have a culture of this, and this with my family we're always just having fun. And, I'm grateful that I've instilled it in my family, there's, and as far as the longevity benefits the benefits with our cardiovascular system. One of the things in particular, I just shared, oh, it's actually coming out this week, and I don't know when this is coming out, but I did a masterclass on the impact that love has on our health.

Prince Ea: Wow. Beautiful.

Shawn Stevenson: And so, I had this conversation with Dr. Robert Waldinger, out of Harvard, and he had the longest running longitudinal study on human longevity. And he shared with me the number one thing, taking in all the confounding factors, possible diet, exercise.

Prince Ea: This Is it the grant study or something different?

Shawn Stevenson: This is the essentially human longevity study.

Prince Ea: Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: It's been 85 years and.

Prince Ea: And A Harvard grant study. Maybe it's another one parallel one. But...

Shawn Stevenson: They combined two studies together, so maybe it might be a part of it. But the number one marker for longevity was relationships. The number one thing. And he's like his fellow colleagues, like, we didn't want to believe it, it doesn't make sense. But then he is like, it did make sense because it's a stress reliever. And all of the chemistry that comes when you have warm relationships. And I'm telling you, there are few ways better to connect with people than through play. And you learn a lot about people too. You learn a lot about their personalities. And I saw that with the kids. Like I knew who the tough kid was, the resilient, the most resilient kid. I knew who he was. I knew who the kid who was building confidence, but still uncertain. And I knew the kid who was a scrapper, who was willing to do whatever it takes, even though it hasn't played out in their life yet. I could already kind of see those things. And I could speak to that personality.

Prince Ea: Yeah. If you look at the animal kingdom, even adult animals, they play. They love to play. We we're just so as adults, human adults we're just so uptight.

Shawn Stevenson: We say it, stop playing. Grow up, you know?

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: So that would be the other one. And also, again, just the, the biochemistry testosterone's going to go up. It's important for men and women, and this is another thing, a break a paradigm here. Unfortunately, a lot of people have not been privy to this information, but if we're talking about the amount, the sheer amount of biochemistry or hormones in women, testosterone is the most dominant. Women have more testosterone than any other circulating hormones.

Prince Ea: Wow. Okay.

Shawn Stevenson: All right. So do they have more estrogen than men? Yes. Do men have more estrogen than more testosterone than women? Yes. But testosterone is important for all of us. So testosterone, oxytocin goes up. This bonding hormone. This is tied to longevity as well. It has relaxation and anti-inflammatory qualities as well. The list goes on and on. So play would be the second biohack.

Prince Ea: Beautiful.

Shawn Stevenson: Third one. This to turn into... This was not rapid fire. Third one would be, I'll just tell you man, for real, sleep.

Prince Ea: I was going to say, I was like, he going to say sleep. Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: It's the most powerful, of any type of intervention, there's nothing more powerful than sleep. There's nothing that... There's no supplement, there's no lifestyle factor, there's no biohack, there's nothing that can outperform high quality sleep. You get so much from it. When I talked about testosterone, there was this recent study that was done and it utilized young men, young healthy men and they sleep deprived them for just about a week. And they get... Had them to get, like, we'll just say it was under six hours of sleep, and in that study period, their testosterone dropped by 10 to 15%. Now that it might not sound like a lot, but what it was equivalent to was as if they were suddenly 20 to 30 years older.

Prince Ea: Wow.

Shawn Stevenson: All right. Testosterone directly, it's like a charging station. When you go to sleep, it's like your Tesla getting connected, charging up your testosterone. There is a direct connection. And as you're up during the day, testosterone just going down. Except we could do stuff to have little spurts of it, but nothing compares to sleep for your immune system. The immunomodulation, your cognitive ability, man, like, I can go on and on and on. You know? It is the ultimate. And if we respected that and understood that as a culture, put more value around that, we would be living much more vibrant, healthy, enjoyable lives in our waking hours.

Prince Ea: Wow. Beautiful. I always say sleep your way to success.

Shawn Stevenson: Facts.

Prince Ea: That's the way to do it. Quick game. This game is called Best Ever. What's the best advice you ever got?

Shawn Stevenson: I would have to say the thing that consciously changed my life the most was my mother-in-law when she said that if she could give the world one thing, it would be meditation. And at the time I didn't understand it. I thought she was crazy. I hadn't meditated before. And so I was like, I literally thought when she said, "If I can give the world one thing, it would be meditation". I thought mentally I didn't say it, but I was like, give me a million dollars. Like, what are you talking about? If you're going to give the world something, give them some, give them some money. And I was just so ignorant and I didn't know what I was in store for. I really... The reason I'm here with you today is because of her man. Like, she was a part of this process. I got introduced to myself through meditation. And so, that was the first domino when she said this outlandish thing to me. But it made me curious. And her being a teacher, somebody who'd been meditating for decades and also teaching and connecting my science brain to like these benefits. There was so much that I couldn't explain with words that I was... That I got access to. So, that's what it would be.

Prince Ea: Best investment you ever made?

Shawn Stevenson: My relationship with my wife, by far, it's not even close. Not even close.

Prince Ea: Best book you ever read?

Shawn Stevenson: Oh man. What phase of life? So that's just... This is so Tough. I'll tell you the two, can I tell you two that's popped up for me?

Prince Ea: Yeah, yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: 'Power VS. Force'. By Dr. Hawkins.

Prince Ea: Yeah. David Hawkins. Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: And, 'Everyday Enlightenment' by Dan Millman. It brought more practicality to what will be put under the umbrella of a spiritual practice.

Prince Ea: Beautiful. When was the best time in your life?

Shawn Stevenson: Now.

Prince Ea: Best quote you ever heard.

Shawn Stevenson: I'm going to paraphrase because there's a many different versions of this, but it's from Einstein. He said that the most fundamental decision that we make, the most important decision that we make as a human being is the decision of whether we live in a friendly or hostile universe. I grew up seeing through the lens of his hostility. And I realized that I have a choice. And I started to see things differently. And having that quote is something that I refer back to, especially with all the vitriol, the stuff that can be happening in the world. We can become dogmatic, we can become complacent, we can become argumentative. But it's coming back to a choice that I get to make of whether I live in a friendly or hostile universe and having a feeling in a deep seated belief that the world, life is for me and not against me. And I get to choose. Because there's evidence of both at all times, you know what I mean? But making that decision of whether we live in a friendly or hostile universe, that would be it.

Prince Ea: It's beautiful. What's your best health practice. Would it be sleep, prioritize sleep, or...

Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely.

Prince Ea: Yeah. It's the number one.

Shawn Stevenson: It's the number one. The number one.

Prince Ea: And the final question is a question I ask all to guests, and I think I know your answer, but I'm not sure. But if you could wave a magic wand at the world, and when you wake up tomorrow, whatever your wish was, would be granted and the world would be changed in just that manner that you wanted it to be changed in, what would it be?

Shawn Stevenson: Ah, man, this is tough because I'm going to preface this by saying that I don't think that we have the right, you know what I mean? We're robbing the process, so what is, is, is beautiful. And if there was one thing it would be, it would be for all of us to recognize our own unique gifts. That would be what I would, if I could wave a wand, that would be that. So, we would have so much more self-value and appreciation, so much less comparison and jealousy and envy, dissonance. If we could within ourselves, recognize our own unique gifts and talents and capacities and couple that, with being able to see that in other people and appreciate in other people, I think we would heal so much.

Prince Ea: It's a Beautiful wish. Wow. Shawn, thank you so much for coming on Sauna Sessions. It was good to sweat and to have these beautiful conversations with you. You really... You dropped a lot of, a lot of jewels on us today. I appreciate it, man.

Shawn Stevenson: My pleasure, man. My pleasure. Thank you so very much for tuning into the show today. I hope we got a lot of value out of this. Again, this is a very special episode where we were partnering with the brand-new ßshow Sauna Sessions from my friend Prince Ea. Go and check them out on your favorite podcast platform, subscribe to the show. There's so much more good stuff there. And if you enjoy these insights and you think it can be valuable to a friend or family member or somebody that you care about, please share this episode with them. Spread the goodness, spread the empowerment. Let's make wellness go viral. I appreciate you so much for tuning in. We've got some epic masterclass, some world-class guests coming for you very, very soon. So, make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day. I'll talk with you soon.

And for more after the show, make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions videos for each episode, and if you got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome. And I appreciate that so much and take care, I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.