Ayurvedic Secrets Modern Science Finally Proves: Doshas, Seasonal Eating, Rituals, Herbal Medicine & More

Nick Urban [00:00:02]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bio harmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week, we decode the tools, tactics, and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body, and performance span, things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel, and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. Is this the one diet to rule them all? Our guest this week brings a refreshing take on health, longevity, and performance by reconnecting ancient Ayurvedic rhythms with modern life. We explore how seasonal eating, mindful movement, and syncing with nature’s clocks can radically improve digestion, stress, blood sugar balance, immunity, cognition, and pretty much every facet of overall health. What I love about the concept of seasonal eating and why I consider it to be the best diet, if you will, is that it helps protect against the issues of overconsumption of any one food or food group resulting in toxicities, and it also helps protect against deficiencies over the long term. So Joel Green and his immunity code, which is a similar concept behind Joel Green’s popular book, the immunity code and the way.

Nick Urban [00:01:55]:
In case you are unaware, Ayurveda was the first system over five thousand years ago that documented the importance of circadian rhythm and chronobiology, light, metabolism, the digestive fire, and a whole lot more. At one point in the interview, I mentioned this book right here. It’s called Ayurveda. And on page 14, if you choose to pick it up, we talk about a physician named Susratha. And a direct quote from this book, the writings of Susratha impressively anticipated much of modern science. He treated in detail among other topics post mortem dissection, autopsies, and plastic surgery procedures, which centuries later were used as a basis, for modern plastic surgery. Susrata perfected techniques for knitting broken bones with nails. He identified vital points on the body, marmas, which are related to the vital organs.

Nick Urban [00:02:55]:
External trauma to these points may be extremely serious or fatal. Among his other numerous contributions, Sushrata also devised a special treatment of bloodletting to cure blood borne disorders. So we look at some of the concepts and practices used by these ancient cultures, and we say that they’re archaic. We need to usher in medicine three point o as some influencers call it, not realizing that there is a lot of wisdom in these systems that we don’t fully understand yet. And over time, science proves a lot of the things and concepts they came up with to be right. So perhaps bloodletting isn’t for everyone except for maybe those with certain disorders or with iron overload. Anyway, just wanted to clarify that because we bring that up pretty early in the episode, and I forgot the exact wording. But highly recommend this book as well as our guest’s other books.

Nick Urban [00:03:51]:
He wrote a book called The Three Season Diet. He has lots of information about Ayurveda and East meets west and the intersection between Ayurveda and modern science. He is the go to authority on this, and I actually wanted to have him on the podcast for several years. So I’m glad we finally had this conversation. Our guest is doctor John Dillard. He’s a well known expert in Ayurveda and also the founder of Lifespa.com. He has over forty years of experience helping people achieve lasting health, vitality, and longevity. In 1986, doctor Jahn collaborated with Deepak Chopra to train doctors Ayurvedic medicine in India.

Nick Urban [00:04:37]:
Since then, he’s also worked with athletes and high performers such as Billie Jean King, and he’s written total of seven books in over 1,500 educational articles, empowering a global audience of more than 11,000,000 to reverse aging and heal naturally. If you like this conversation, I suggest you pick up some of doctor John’s books, which you can find in the show notes for this episode, which will be at outlier.com forward slash the number 200 and twelve. There, you can also check out the educational articles on lifespa.com, and you can learn more about your constitution type AKA Dosha from the free quizzes he has on Lifespa. If you have any questions for us, drop them in the comments because we plan to record a follow-up on this one, unpacking a whole lot more components and facets of Ayurveda and the intersection between Western medicine and Ayurveda and where he sees Western science catching up to Ayurveda in the near future. If nothing else, I hope this interview convinces you to keep your mind open to different food groups and things that aren’t a usual part of your routine and to, every once in a while, circle back and try integrating them and see what impact they have and to do it strategically, to think through the who, what, when, where, why, and how beyond just the what of the practice, but when are you using it, how are you using it, In what context? With what people? Because all of these factors make a huge difference on either the benefits or the detriments you experience from anything. Alright. With that long winded intro out of the way, ladies and gentlemen, sit back, relax, and enjoy this conversation with doctor John Dillard. Doctor John, welcome to the podcast.

John Douillard [00:06:32]:
Great to be here, Nick. Thanks for having me.

Nick Urban [00:06:34]:
I was just about to tell you back when I was interested in alternative health, alternative medical sciences, these types of things, I started looking into Ayurveda. I came across your podcast, and I researched your work. And I think you are one of the leading voices that’s really merging the Western perspective and the traditional Eastern and, like, ancestral perspectives into one. So great job there, and appreciate everything you’ve contributed.

John Douillard [00:06:59]:
Thanks. Really appreciate that.

Nick Urban [00:07:01]:
So I was recently rereading this book. You might be familiar with it. It’s literally called Ayurveda. It’s one of, like, the the big popular ones. And towards the beginning, the author is mentioning how I believe it’s autopsies. And there there was one other thing he mentioned as being having roots back in Ayurveda and, like, really old history, even though it seems like a newer invention. And I know from your work that you also talked about a lot of the different things, components that are rooted in Ayurveda. I mean, maybe perhaps light, perhaps seasonal eating, perhaps pro metabolism and digestion.

Nick Urban [00:07:37]:
So let’s kick it off there today and discuss some of the things that Ayurveda once foretold and Western science is now validating.

John Douillard [00:07:46]:
I think what you’re talking about there in that book was the first actual surgical text ever written was an Ayurvedic text called Shushrut, and they talked about doing surgeries for many things, you know, and still that’s pretty popular even today. You know, you can take things out and give the body a break from having to repair if there’s damage. So that’s one of the original text. There’s just a lot of really cool ancient wisdom, and I’m not saying that all of the ancient wisdom makes sense. But what I what I tried to do when I came back from India in 1986, I was and I met Deepak Chopra there. I ended up co directing his Ayurvedic center, and I was thrown into teaching the medical doctors Ayurvedic medicine back then. And it I quickly, you know, realized that I had to kinda bridge the modern science and the ancient wisdom. So that sort of launched me into kind of digging into the Ayurvedic wisdom, but at the same time, finding the science to kind of back it up so I could actually make some relevant sense to these medical doctors.

John Douillard [00:08:44]:
And, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since is kinda kinda tying the two together. And I kinda believe and I’m sure everybody agrees that if you look at science alone, you can find coffee is good or coffee is bad or soy is good, soy is bad, milk’s good, milk’s bad, wheat’s good. It’s all, like, so confusing. But if you have an ancient practice that’s been around for thousands of years and you have modern science to back it up, I feel at the very least it’s worth looking at that, you know, because modern science alone, it’s just not good enough, and the ancient wisdom alone isn’t just good enough. So I think we tied it, and that’s what we do at lifespy.com. That’s what I write about and put, you know, put all that knowledge out for free.

Nick Urban [00:09:20]:
That’s a really good framework, a way of doing it. I will, like, look at a topic. I will see what the latest modern western science says, and then I’ll also look at both sides because usually, like you said, it’s conflicting. There’s, like, some schools of thought that say one thing, others that say the opposite. Then I will cross reference that with the ancient wisdom of what the TCM or Ayurveda, these old systems say about it, and it’ll help, like, orient the information I take in. I’m not gonna close close myself off to any new information, but at the same time, it helps, like, tip the scales in one direction or another.

John Douillard [00:09:53]:
Yeah. Yeah. The the a %. I think that that’s there’s a balanced approach. And when you look at, you know, all the crazy extreme diets from being carnivore to extremely vegan, which, you know, none of them do I think is bad or I’m not making judgment. But from the Arabic expect perspective, you look at those extreme diets, and they sort of happen as part of nature’s natural cycles. Like, you have a very austere low carb diet in the spring. There’s just no carbs to be had in the spring.

John Douillard [00:10:21]:
So if you’re living off the land, which all of us did at one point in our ancestry, you’d have to eat a low carb, no carb diet in the spring, and you’d eat an absolute high carb, very high carb diet at the end of the summer. And you would have to eat a higher protein, higher fat diet in the winter just to survive because you’d have to hunt. So all these extreme diets are really a part of a natural nutritional cycle. It takes a year to complete. It’s an annual cycle, not a daily cycle. So when you actually start understanding, how these diets make sense and why they work because they’re part of a bigger cycle. And that’s what Ayurveda was like, hey. We get that you should eat seasonally, and your diet’s gonna change.

John Douillard [00:10:58]:
Your bugs in your gut are gonna change from being more what are called actinobacteria, which get fat and fiber for fuel in the spring, and the bugs in your gut dramatically change to something called bacteria deets in the end of the summer to digest and deliver carbohydrates as fuel. So the fuel supply changes, and that was studies done at Stanford on the Hadza tribe. And they found that their gut microbiome dramatically changed from season to season because they ate seasonally, and so did we forever and ever except for till now. Right?

Nick Urban [00:11:27]:
Yeah. That was actually one thing I wanted to bring up with you. You were the first person I came across who was making a coherent argument in favor of eating wheat. It seems like that’s one of the most demonized food groups, I guess, these days. And perhaps it’s not always great for all people all the time. But at least when I heard you explain why it makes sense and what it does as, like, part of, like, the natural cycle, it made a lot of sense. Can you expand upon that a little bit?

John Douillard [00:11:54]:
Yeah. I I did write a book called Eat Weed, which was extremely contrarian, but it was because of the overwhelming, I I really think, misinformation that wheat is a poison. When you look at the actual science, there is study after study after study showing that wheat and the fiber in wheat and the benefits of wheat for blood pressure I mean, there’s two Harvard studies that showed over a hundred thousand in people in each of those studies. One showed that people who ate the most wheat had significantly less diabetes. The other group, the other study showed that people who ate the most wheat has significantly less heart disease compared to the people who are gluten free but didn’t have to be. Studies show that when you actually have people who are gluten free but don’t have to be, in other words, are not celiac, they have four times more mercury in their blood, significantly less killer t cells and more bad bugs and less good bugs than the people who are eating wheat on a regular basis. So why cannot make sense when people eat wheat and feel bad? I get that. Right? People eat wheat, they feel bad.

John Douillard [00:12:57]:
So everybody is telling everybody, well, then don’t eat wheat, and don’t eat dairy, and don’t eat nuts or seeds or grains or beans or lectins or goitrogens or oxalates. And that list just continues to grow because the plant based foods are harder to digest. The plants produce chemicals to protect them from predators, so they have anti nutrients on them which require a very strong stomach acid for us to digest. And if you don’t have good stomach acid and you eat wheat, which is a hard to digest protein, the gluten or dairy, the casein, you’re gonna eat those foods or beans or other nuts and things. You’re gonna have a hard time digest them. So you’re gonna obviously just blame the food. But they really are canaries in the coal mine telling us that, hey. Yeah.

John Douillard [00:13:41]:
You can take the weed out of your diet and feel a little better, but then in short order, you’re gonna have to take the dairy out, and they’re gonna have to take the beans out and the nuts seeds out nuts out. And, you know, rice and beans have been the staple on this planet for, like, ten thousand years at least. And now I have people who can’t eat rice or beans or grains of any kind. You know? And when I first got into practice in 1984, sure, we took people off of dairy and took people off of wheat in my practice, and they got better. But then in short order, the problem came back, and it became very clear early on, and that was back in 1984, that people were getting better if you took the food out of the diet and eliminated things, but that didn’t help them. And from the Ayurvedic perspective and now Western science perspective, your ability to digest well is directly linked to your ability to detoxify well. So if you can’t eat wheat or dairy or nuts or seeds or grains or beans or all this stuff, nightshades, all this stuff, everybody says don’t don’t don’t eat, then you don’t have the ability to detoxify. Literally, what the EPA reports on is 70,000,000 tons of toxic chemicals are dumped in our atmosphere every year, which filter down on the water we drink, the food we eat, and the air we breathe, which ends up having to be digested and detoxified through us.

John Douillard [00:14:59]:
And if you can’t eat those harder to digest foods, you know, that’s going to be a bigger problem than we think. It’s you know, just taking the food out of your diet for a while, sure. Do it because you feel bad eating it. But now let’s really unwrap the real problem, which is which part of your digestion has been broken down. Is it your lack of stomach acid? Is it your lack of bile flow, pancreatic, duodenal enzymes? Is it intestinal lining, you know, microbiome issue? Is it a lymphatic congestive issue? And all those things are troubleshot through kind of an Ayurvedic menu. We have a free health quiz called the digestive health quiz. People can just take it and ask questions about each part of their digestion and go, oh, I got a screwed up liver issue or bile flow issue or whatever it might be, and then you can use herbs and diet and and things to actually repair those issues versus just, you know, kicking the can down the road and saying I’m not gonna eat x, y, and z. And then next thing you know, you only can eat a carnivore diet because it’s the only food you can actually tolerate, which has no anti nutrients on.

John Douillard [00:16:01]:
It’s not the macho man diet that we think it is because the plant based diet is so much harder to digest, requires a robust digestion, a robust detoxification system. And if you don’t have that, you will pay a price down the road.

Nick Urban [00:16:14]:
I heard you explain somewhere about the reason that grains and, I guess, wheat specifically are important in the fall having to do with seasons and what usually comes after the fall. Can you explain what that is?

John Douillard [00:16:28]:
Yeah. Well, you know, nature had a plan. Right? And the harvest of every season provides the antidote to the extreme of that season. So in the spring, when it’s rainy, muddy allergy season, you don’t get any pasta or pizza. There’s no carbohydrates that would congest you. Even the dairy is for the baby cow. You’re not getting any dairy from that mama cow right now because the babies are getting all of it. And so it’s gonna be a diet that’s gonna give you, you know, roots and dandelion and, you know, spring greens that are very, very astringent and very bitter and very, you know, cleansing for the excess mucus they might have built up in your intestinal tract.

John Douillard [00:17:06]:
Come summer when it’s hot, you get fruits and vegetables, which are cooling in nature. And at the end of that summer, when all the grains and the berries and the fruits and all that are being harvested, you get this massive amount of carbohydrate, as well as sugar from the fruits, and that provides excess fuel to give us excess insulation to be stored as fat and a reserve base of fuel to make it through the winter. And these are the natural circadian rhythms. And we have studies actually show that there’s a there’s an enzyme called amylase that we only be you know, developed and, you know, expressed back, about two million years ago is when we actually had the ability to digest have our own amylase to digest fruits. And studies still show to this day that we make more amylase for digesting fruits and grains at the end of the summer, which is when they’re harvested, than we would do in the spring. Like, we’re circadian beings, and we don’t act like them anymore, but we still have those those natural inclinations to eat in a seasonal way. So it’s not that you wanna eat grains all the time. The diet should naturally shift.

John Douillard [00:18:17]:
And it doesn’t mean you have to only eat, you know, you know, you know, an austere diet in this year or that season. You just wanna get more of the foods that are harvested in that season. It gets sort of medicinal doses of those spring greens and medicinal dose of those summer vegetables and medicinal doses of that of the end of summer grains and then more protein and fat from you would actually hunt historically in the winter, although you wouldn’t eat. So you get more of those higher protein, higher fat, sort of a chiogenic time of the year, you know, austere in the nature of lower carbs.

Nick Urban [00:18:51]:
Yeah. And what impact do grains and wheat specifically have on the immune system? That was one thing I heard. I’m like, oh, it makes perfect sense that you’d consume a little more in the late fall or early fall, end of summer, that time period, setting you up for what usually comes couple months later.

John Douillard [00:19:06]:
There’s a really cool study on this, and it showed that the Amish kids, right, the they live they have cows as pets. They run barefoot in the barns, and they have the lowest rates of asthma on the planet. And then you compare them to their genetic cousins. They came from the same valley in Switzerland. They’re called the Hutterites. So when they came to America, they became sterile farmers. Everything was sterile, stainless steel, everything. And they have the highest rates of asthma on the planet as kids, which is, like, such a great, you know, steady group.

John Douillard [00:19:35]:
And they found so they went into the barns of the Amish kids, and they found it was that it was the dust in the barns that was irritating their respiratory tract or hermetic effect, which doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger, and just enough to create an immune response to the dust so they have the lowest rates of asthma on the planet. Grains, hard to digest foods that require very strong stomach acid to break down, they will they create a little bit of irritation. Historically, nightshades will do the same thing. Beans will do the same thing. All the anti nutrients that we say don’t don’t eat, they’ll do the same thing. And when you actually avoid those foods globally, you end up without the irritation to actually create what’s called gut immunity, which is 70% of your immune response. That little bit of irritation is why we have a thing called gut immunity. And if you lose that, like I said, the people who eat wheat literally have four times less mercury in their blood, more chiller t cells, less bad bugs in their gut because they’re eating these foods that are seasonal.

John Douillard [00:20:37]:
And in interestingly, your your digestion gets stronger at the end of the summer to get ready for winter, which is cold, so you wanna digest the fire to make that happen. So all this was, like, you know, not a mistake. It wasn’t just random. It was that we would eat those foods when we could digest them better and and actually create a natural alignment of our biological clocks in nature’s circadian rhythm, which is driven by the change of a microbiome, first and foremost.

Nick Urban [00:21:08]:
That’s beautiful. And now I’m sure we’re gonna get accused, especially you, of being shills for big wheat, but nature has so much intelligence in it. Joel Green also mentions how by varying the diet from one time to another, you’re really preventing or drastically reducing the likelihood of deficiencies and also of excess of excess toxicities. And so, like, nature has these checks and balances in place to help make sure that we’re getting what we need but not too much.

John Douillard [00:21:35]:
Yeah. It’s it’s so true. You know, when you when you do an extreme diet, like, if you went on a ketogenic diet for a length of time, your ability to metabolize sugars becomes much more difficult. You’ll find that in the ketogenic diet, you become less tolerant to carbohydrates for a while. So then you have to kinda reset your ability to do that. So so if you go on a ketogenic diet for a long period of time, you actually end up with more blood sugar in, you know, insensitivity to sugars and insulin. It becomes way more difficult. So the idea of doing anything in an extreme way for a long period of time is problematic, and that’s why just the simple idea like, we have grocery list.

John Douillard [00:22:14]:
They’re free. This is the spring grocery list, and all you do is take it, circle the foods on there that you like, and it’ll give you all and and you’ll get medicinal dosage of those foods. This ones with the asterisk are the super foods for that season, but you just wanna get more of them in a natural, you know, recognizable food organic way whenever you can. I’m totally get I don’t know if we even have to mention that I’m get I get the glyphosate thing. I get big pharma. I get big wheat. I get understand all that. But you can get really good quality wheat here in America that doesn’t have glyphosate.

John Douillard [00:22:49]:
There’s companies like ancientgrains.com that you can get really good wheat, and you can make your own bread, and you can actually most most cities have artisan bakers now doing really good quality bread and wheat. But I would suggest that you still be very low carb and get rid of the bread or very little bread, maybe an Ezekiel bread that sprouted this time of the year in the springtime as we’re doing this podcast. And then come end of the summer, you have this luxury of having some of those really juicy carbohydrates again. But then after eating that heavier kind of fall into winter diet, we’re getting more calories to insulate and reserve. Then you go into the spring, this is an austere time of the year. Time to lose the weight, time to burn the fat, time to go into maybe doing some more intermittent fasting or even some fasting or detoxification, something Ayurveda talked about thousands of years ago because even back then, they had, you know, arsenic coming out of the coming out of the ground and into their rice. It’s just many chemicals or or heavy metals are pulled out of the soil even on in healthy plants. It’s a natural thing that they do.

Nick Urban [00:23:54]:
Yeah. Your seasonal food guide is super helpful. I came across that years ago, downloaded it. I actually have it on my phone. When I go to the grocery store, every once in a while, I’ll just pull it up to make sure I’m actually eating seasonally. So I’ll put a link to that resource in the show notes. People can check it out on your website because you write a lot about this type of stuff and really practical, handy tool to have. Also, I know that in Ayurveda, food is only one component of the overall system.

Nick Urban [00:24:21]:
So let’s zoom out a bit and talk about, like, the highest impact either theories or practices or protocols, things that you think have the biggest return on time or energy investment for people to understand when it comes to learning about Ayurveda?

John Douillard [00:24:37]:
There’s a couple of things that that really do stand out. And I I mentioned it briefly that our biological clocks have to be in sync with nature’s circadian rhythms, and they’re not. They did a study here in Boulder, Colorado, UC Boulder, and they took a whole bunch of healthy Boulder types. And they, they measured their circadian rhythms, and their cortisol levels were sky high at nighttime when they’re trying to go to sleep. Their melatonin, which should be zeroed out during the day, was surging, you know, during the day. So they took the whole group and they took them into the mountains. No cell phones, no electricity in bed with the sun, up with the sun, and they completely reset the biological clocks with in sync with their circadian rhythms a % in a week. They did a follow-up study, did a 69% reduction in a weekend.

John Douillard [00:25:23]:
And I highly recommend that folks should try doing I wrote an article called the no artificial light weekend. We can all just, like, right in the summertime when the sun’s out, you know, longer, we can actually turn off the Wi Fi, turn off our cell phone, turn off the lights, use candles or whatever, and just go off the grid for a weekend. It resets your biological clocks in one weekend by 69%. That’s crazy. And that they did us another study. It was a really landmark study. They took a group of westerners, flew them to Israel, and flew them right back on a plane. And they measured their bugs’ microbiome before they left and when they came back.

John Douillard [00:25:55]:
When they came back, their bugs had already shifted to be more prone to obesity and diabetes. They then took those bugs out of those so called healthy people, suck them into healthy mice, and very quickly, those mice started eating all day long as opposed to at night because they’re nocturnal. And their bugs shifted very quickly to be more obese and diabetic prone. So we are, like I said, circadian beings, and we kind of ignore that at all costs, it seems, and those simple ideas of waking up with the sun. You know, every culture around the world woke up, and they recognized and, you know, spent time. They’re up for the sun at the very least, if not doing some salutations or some type of ritual around the sun. And that’s a time of 100% exclusive red and infrared light that activates your production of mitochondrial energy. It heals and repairs the deep tissues of the body.

John Douillard [00:26:52]:
It gives muscular strength, actually produces a wave of of melatonin that actually surges at night when you sleep. So so it’s like it’s it’s it’s like you’re you’re resetting and, you know, you know, organizing your watches to make sure that you know this is sunrise. Biological clocks for night, go off. Biological clocks for day, go on. And that sets you up for the the whole day. And then we know circadian rhythm say that we should eat a bigger meal in the middle of the day. That’s the UV radiation that happens in the middle of the day that activates metabolism. And that’s why this the the science tells us now that we should eat a big meal, and that’s not rocket science.

John Douillard [00:27:31]:
We know that every farmer in the history of the world, every culture in the history of the world all ate their biggest meal in the middle of the day. You know, that’s why school lunches have hot meals because the farmers were like, I’m not sending my kids to your school unless you give them a proper lunch. That’s why that happened. You know? Now it’s like, I don’t even know what’s going on. My kids are grown, so I wonder. You know? So those are those are the beautiful simple things. Take time. You know? Get up in the morning.

John Douillard [00:27:57]:
You know? Do some exercise. Move your body so the muscles are stronger. I I when my first book, Body Mind Sport came out, I was invited to the Soviet Union, worked with their it was a nose breathing exercise research that we did and published. And their extra they said, you know, we have all of our weightlifters trained in the morning because the muscles are stronger at that time. And that’s that’s this influence of the red and infrared light that makes that happen. You know? And and then the middle of days when everybody would sit down and eat their food to go to Europe, everybody you know, all the Americans are wondering, you know, you know, why are all the restaurants closed in the middle of the day? Because everybody that works in the restaurants are home eating their big lunch at that time of day. You know? And and that was their with their rhythms and their history, and supper came from the word supplemental or soup. So now we have a a culture where we intermittent fast, and people say, well, don’t eat breakfast.

John Douillard [00:28:49]:
Have a lunch and a dinner. Well, that will work. You’ll lose weight, but it’s not aligning your biological clocks and circadian rhythms. The studies are clear. You know, get up, move your body, exercise, yoga, breathe, get your workout done, come back a couple hours later, eat a nice breakfast that turns your your metabolism on, have a nice big lunch in the in the early afternoon, and then a light supper, because you don’t wanna be eating late. And that will deliver so much more benefit. They have studies where they took the same calories. They had breakfast and lunch versus folks eating lunch and dinner, and the folks who have front loaded their meals, same calories, same meal, significantly better weight loss, significantly better metabolic health.

John Douillard [00:29:28]:
There’s just no question about the benefits of aligning your rhythms. So that’s one thing that people can do real easy is just, you know, sit down, take time, and relax when you eat that big lunch. There’s an old saying, if you eat standing up, death looks over your shoulder, not a good look. So that’s also good to take, you know, not being in the car on your run watching a scary movie or the news, which is never good. You know? Those are all, you know, bad habits that we can break. And I think maybe the maybe the most important dumb thing that we all do, and I’m guilty as charged, is you eat a nice big meal, and then you go sit on the couch. And that’s the worst thing you can do for your cardiovascular health. And what Ayurveda talked about thousands of years ago, something called shatha pavalay, taking a walk after your meal.

John Douillard [00:30:19]:
And the studies show that when you eat a meal in a relaxed way, take a rest, sit on the couch for a little while, whatever, but then get up and move. Even if you have to march in place while you’re there for ten, fifteen minutes, or in the summer, you can go for a nice walk after dinner or but move, and that’s been shown to help the food empty out of your stomach faster so you don’t get heartburn and burping and GERD and reflux. It’s been shown to lower the blood sugar spike. It’s been shown to actually deliver the sugar into your muscles through the glute four receptors without requiring any insulin at all, which is, like, mind boggling. And then the impact of that food sitting there on the couch on your arterial lining is the most devastating impact for cardiovascular disease. That’s what causes the initial irritation, and the cholesterol comes to try to do all the repair. But that initial damage comes because either we ate bad food or we ate a bunch of food and sat there and didn’t help the body circulated through our heart, you know, our arterial lining. So that’s like you know? So I’m a it took me a while to really even take my own advice, but now I’m religious about it.

John Douillard [00:31:27]:
Like, I that’s an absolute, you know, nonnegotiable thing is you gotta move after that

Nick Urban [00:31:33]:
meal. Yeah. I’m glad you bring that up. I in order to actually believe these types of things, need to see some my own experience. And I heard that, read about it a long time ago, and it wasn’t until I got a continuous glucose monitor that actually showed me the impact of a even a really quick five minute walk after a meal. It was as strong, if not stronger, than any of the glucose disposal agents, any of the berberines, the metformins, that kind of stuff after a meal. And I was shocked. Like, it doesn’t need to be super long.

Nick Urban [00:32:01]:
Of course, that’s only one facet of it. It’s going on a walk after a meal does a lot more than just impacting blood sugar as you just mentioned. But, like, it’s fascinating to see what a difference this tiny little habit can actually make.

John Douillard [00:32:13]:
Oh, I’m so glad you said that. I hope people really take that to heart because it because it’s it’s it’s such a huge and simple thing to do. And it just really makes you know, when you think about logically, eat a big meal and then go sit. Even your your dog might rest for a little while if they eat a big meal. They also don’t wanna be bothered if you mess with them. They don’t really like it, so they wanna be focused, and we should be focused when we eat our food and then just take a little bit of rest. And then quickly thereafter, think your dog wants to go out, and they’re gonna go to the bathroom, and they’re gonna walk around. They’re gonna move around.

John Douillard [00:32:42]:
It’s sort of the natural cycle of things, and it pays huge dividends without all the berberine and all these butcher agents that generally don’t really move the needle very much at all.

Nick Urban [00:32:53]:
Yeah. Yeah. And also, I wanna underscore because, like, this day and age, in the biohacking health optimization world, the idea of postprandial, post meal walks has started to emerge as, like, a thing that people know. But what you mentioned previously, and that is what you do before or during the meal, is also extremely important because I found that if I eat when I’m stressed, my blood sugar spikes higher even if I’m going for a walk afterward. And if I just take a minute to not be in my car driving, not to be focusing on something else, not to even be reading, but just to be, like, with the meal, that gives me the by far away the best response. And I also feel like I digested the food more completely after the meal.

John Douillard [00:33:32]:
Yeah. So true. You know, in India, they eat with their hands. Right? So when you’re eating with your hands, you really have no choice but to be focused on your on your food. You can’t open your phone. You can’t read a book. I mean, it’s just you’re just you’re it forces you to be present, which is really a a really cool thing. I had many experiences when Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova, people don’t know who they are anymore, but but they did the forward to my book.

John Douillard [00:33:54]:
And, and they were coming to my clinic at one point, and I was getting some tennis courts organized for them. And it was back in the late nineteen eighties. And, so I was racing around trying to get stuff organized for them before they came. And, I grabbed some pizza out of pizzerias back on the East Coast, and I’m eating the pizza as I’m driving in my car trying to get everything done. You know? And then I got home. I had a contractor at my house, and I had to deal with him. And I was so tired that I was literally talking to this contractor holding my eye open like this because I was wanting to fall asleep standing up. It was, like, unbelievable.

John Douillard [00:34:31]:
And, you know, you eat the same exact meal in a relaxed way, and it’s digest completely differently. Not that pizza’s good or it’s just but the point is that there’s an impact that we realize that when you’re relaxed and you’re calm, that activates parasympathetic, your parasympathetic rest and digest nervous system. If you’re on the run go go go go go, that’s a fight or flight system that’s saying, get up a tree, save your life, don’t eat right now. We’re being chased by a bear, and we’re not digesting. So if you eat in that state, that food is not gonna digest. And studies show here’s an interesting study about going back to the wheat even. If you don’t have really good stomach acid or bile flow or pancreatic enzymes, which is that upper digestive coordination, The proteins this is the quote right from the medical journals. The proteins and the fats, the gluten and the environmental pollutants and the bad greasy fried food, whatever, fats and proteins, they’ll go in completely digested into your intestinal tract, and they’ll be too big to get into your bloodstream and nourish you, so you’re gonna still be hungry.

John Douillard [00:35:34]:
But they’ll end up going into the garbage can, which is not the toilet. It’s the collecting ducts of your lymphatic system in your intestinal tract, which will go into the lion’s share of the lymph in your body around your belly and hips causing extra weight. It’ll go into the skin associated lymph dumping out as a rash. It’ll go into the brain lymphatic system, the lymph and lymphatic systems in your brain that dump three pounds of trash out of your head every year while you sleep, which cause brain fog and cognitive decline and headaches and migraines and rosacea and all kinds of things, compromised immune response, all these things. In fact, long haul COVID was linked directly in the very beginning of COVID to congestion of the brain, lymph, and lymphatic systems, causing all kinds of fatigue and cognitive issues and things like that. So if you don’t have that ability to break down those foods really well on your stomach and you’re in a coordinated effort we talked about, you’re gonna pay a price. You’re gonna it’s not the those non digested proteins has to go into your lymph as the garbage can, and that’ll give you all the symptoms that everybody blames on wheat. So it’s not the wheat.

John Douillard [00:36:35]:
It’s the ability inability to digest it. I did two podcast interviews with David Perlmutter, who was one of the medical doctors that came to train in my Ayurvedic class many, many years ago. And, and, you know, you wrote the Grain Brain Book, right, all about wheat causes, you know, Alzheimer’s, which is not true. There’s no real good science to back it up. However, if you’re eating processed wheat and overwhelmingly eat it twenty four seven all year long, you’re gonna overwhelm the body with this grain with a weak digestion. And pesticides, by the way, kill the microbes that make the enzymes to digest the wheat. So that’s not a good look either. So next thing you know, you have all this wheat undigested gluten going into your lymph, and there’s the the the enzyme that breaks down, weed called the DPP four literally lives in your lymphatic system just in case some rogue weed got there.

John Douillard [00:37:26]:
But if you overwhelm it, it’s gonna get pushed into your belly. It’s gonna be pushed into your skin as rashes, into your brain lymph causing congestion and brain fog. All these things are mapped out because of a improper ability to digest the food properly, and that’s where all these pieces come in, like sitting down, relaxing, taking time, e walking after the meal, using herbs and spices, different ones like ginger, cumin, corn, or fennel, and cardamom, just those five spices. If you put them, sprinkle it on your food. We have a capsule called Gentle Digest. You can take a capsule before the meal. But get your upper digestion working for you so you can actually break the proper food down properly so it doesn’t end up going into the garbage can, which is not the toilet. It’s the lymphatic collecting ducts.

John Douillard [00:38:09]:
And that’s the system that’s trying to take the trash out and carry your immune system and deliver energy, fat as energy to every cell of your body. And if that’s not working for you, you’re gonna feel all those things, compromised immunity, tired, lethargic, rashy, all these things come. And we blame the food, but it’s not really always the food. Sometimes, but it’s sometimes actually your digestive system.

Nick Urban [00:38:31]:
Yeah. Yeah. Either your own digestive system or you’re conflating the food with the food quality. If you’re getting a clean wheat, it’s very different than a wheat that had glyphosate desiccating it. And glyphosate was originally patented as an antibiotic, so it’s like you’re really decimating your gut microbiome. You’re displacing glycine. You’re doing all kinds of things. I didn’t realize that gluten is broken down by that.

Nick Urban [00:38:53]:
I think it’s the same enzyme, DPP four, that also is breaks down GLP one and is the target of a lot of, like, the GLP one drugs that are so popular these days.

John Douillard [00:39:02]:
Wow. Yeah. I mean, I just think we just keep going to these extreme measures to do things that, you know, if you go to, like, everybody if you go to Europe and, you know, everybody’s skinny there, and they’re eating wheat, like, all day every day. You know? It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s obviously cleaner wheat. And most and it’s changing, by the way, there because they’ve got big grocery stores. But, you know, the last twenty years, things have changed. But, typically, those folks would eat locally. They’d go to the they’d go to the local market for their vegetables.

John Douillard [00:39:30]:
They’d go to the butcher for their meat. They’d go to the the cheese shop for their cheese. They’d go to the bakery, you know, for their wheat. Everything was locally grown and locally harvested, and the baker still make bread every day. Now we make bread that never gets hard, ever. You know? And and it can stay on the shelf forever and ever, and people should know that’s really obviously not what we should be doing. And there’s literally microbes on the counter that normally love to eat bread. That’s why bread would go bad so fast historically.

John Douillard [00:40:00]:
And, but that bread with all the, you know, processed oils, which are preservatives, The bugs have nothing want nothing to do with it. So when you eat that bread or foods with preservatives on them and you eat them, the fats in those foods have been highly processed. Your microbes want nothing to do with it. Right? So our our microbes eat fat. That’s what they eat. But when they put that highly processed fat in there, there’s no place for it to go. So where does all the bad fat nobody will eat go? To your liver and your gallbladder, creating bile sludge. And today, the number one surgery abdominal surgery in America today, take your gallbladder out.

John Douillard [00:40:38]:
That’s an interesting thing. Right? We’ve created a system where the only solution is to take the thing that stores this bile sludge out of your system, and then you can make bile on demand without having this storage site just get so congested because of all the bile sludge from these foods that your microbes normally would eat, but they want nothing to do with that. So that’s why we just really have to eat what I like to call recognizable food, the best you can do it in season, and, you know, to start to gently shift that microbiome from one seed to the next. You’re gonna crave more salads in the summer and fruits in the summer and crave more soups in the winter. We all do that. We all know that, but we can just take that a little one step further to get the microbiome to shift underneath that diet, which gives us immunity in the winter and decongest you from allergies in the spring and and dissipate heat in the summer. It’s like the natural way of things.

Nick Urban [00:41:28]:
Yeah. I just thought about heuristic based on what you were describing, and that is I’m sure you thought of this. If something kills the microbes, whether it’s in your gut, it’s on your skin somewhere, it’s probably not gonna kill only the undesirable ones at a % effectivity rate. It’s probably gonna be a mix of both. And if you’re doing that, since we have microbes in all parts of our body, it’s a recipe for disaster or at least to consider just deciding to do whatever that intervention is gonna be.

John Douillard [00:42:00]:
It’s so true. There was another one, a landmark study that was done from Stanford as well. And they took went into museums in New Mexico and Arizona, and they found mummies there that were a thousand years old. And they figured out a way to measure the microbiome in the poo of these mummies. And they found so many more diverse species of of gut bugs compared to the modern humans, which were so devoid of any type of diversity that they literally called it an extinction event or lack of microbial diversity. And that’s why we have to really think about that. How are you gonna get more diverse bugs in your gut? Well, the bugs in the soil change from one season to the next to the next to the next. So we really wanna get the spring bugs.

John Douillard [00:42:45]:
We wanna get the summer bugs and the winter bugs. They’re different. They’re even different in the air from spring winter, summer, spring in a forest if you walk through them. The bugs are constantly changing, so we wanna have that happening. We wanna eat foods that are organic the best that we can so we’re eating them in a state that we’re actually inoculating or go with the right bugs for the right season. And I use them in our what I use for Ayurvedic herbs is the whole plant as opposed to an extract, which are sterile. So if you take turmeric and you can make it into curcumin, which is one of 300 constituents and make it a drug, which works powerful for, like, cancers and different they’re really good research. But there’s side effects for even the curcumin that I’ve written about.

John Douillard [00:43:28]:
But when you take the whole plant, 300 constituents, it actually, in study after study, shows they outperform the curcumin. And what we and if you add here’s the formula. 16 parts turmeric, one part black pepper, right off your table, black pepper, increases the absorption of this turmeric by 2000%. And we make that as a formula called turmeric plus. And when I when I we act we import ourself organic, and we actually tap the FDA test them when we get the raw material, and then we have to test it when we make the formula. That’s so part of the FDA rules. And what happened was my guy called me up and he said, John, this turmeric has the bugs on this have exploded. He goes, they’re all within normal.

John Douillard [00:44:09]:
They’re missed. They’re all really good bugs, but this is not a herb anymore. It’s a probiotic. And I was like, that’s the cool thing about when you take ancient wisdom, and you’ll understand that they’ve been formulating, putting these kind of herbs together for a long time. And if it didn’t work, they stop using it. If it did work, they continue to use it. And they found out that when you mix these two together, they all got married, had babies, all these good bugs, and next you have this absolute active kind of activated herb that’s not giving you the medicinal benefits, the turmeric and the black pepper and the increased absorption, but you’re also getting an inoculation of a microbiome. And if you’re eating that in the spring or the fall when turmeric’s being harvested, you’re getting the right bugs for the right season.

John Douillard [00:44:50]:
It’s like it’s like not that hard to figure all this out, but that’s the beauty of Ayurveda really is that it’s a deep study of nature and how to simply align our our lifestyle a little bit, making some tweaks to get those benefits.

Nick Urban [00:45:04]:
We’ll go more into some of those herbs and the formulas, how they rival some of the isolate extracts of they’re getting popularity these days. Before we go into that, though, what are some of the other, I guess, ingredients that people can cook with? Cooking is one of the easiest ways of getting potentially therapeutic dosages of some of these herbs and spices into the diet. And, of course, you’re gonna wanna vary it by season. But are there any that you find come up repeatedly as things that you recommend people add into their cooking?

John Douillard [00:45:34]:
The five spices that I mentioned, ginger, cumin, coriander, fennel, and cardamom, when you look at them individually, they all have been shown to boost digestive strength, reduce gas, reduce GERD. They all have their own profile. But when you put them all together, sort of like the turmeric and black pepper, there’s, like, an exponential benefit that you get. And what I use that for is a reset of the upper digestion digestive strength, increase more stomach acid, increase bile flow, increase pancreatic duodenal enzymes. And when you get that upper digestion working for you, my goodness, you know, then you have everything that goes downstream is gonna be properly digested. And we call it gentle digestive because it’s so gentle that anybody can do it. And you don’t have to take a capsule. You can just make that formula equal parts.

John Douillard [00:46:21]:
You know, try to use really healthy fresh spices versus stuff from the grocery store that might be irradiated. Try to get the best you can. But you can cook with it. Studies show it’s just such crazy science, Nick, that when you take spices and you put it on your food, right, we you all probably know that there’s damage when you cook your food. When you actually cook meat, there’s called heterocyclic amines, which are cancer causing the charred meat. It’s cancer causing. When you actually cook vegetables or starch, you get acrylamides, which are also cancer causing. If you cook anything, you get reactive oxygen species, which are free radical damage to the food.

John Douillard [00:46:57]:
But studies show when you actually put the the spices on your food while you’re cooking it, you actually you actually mitigate the cooking damage on on all fronts. And I wrote an article about this, and I actually studied the the percentage of of benefit you get from all these different a whole list of all the spices so you can kinda look and know, okay. This spice could eat me this much. Nutmeg is great. The five spices I mentioned are phenomenal. You know, oregano is phenomenal. It’s just, you know, we stop using we use salt and pepper in America. I mean, more and more people are getting into spicing their food, but, it goes way beyond making it taste better.

John Douillard [00:47:36]:
It it actually protects the food from the cooking damage. And, like, who knew that? Like, thousands of years, they did it because it tasted better. But did that tradition from ancient wisdom in China and India was brought to the Europe and, you know, cities in Europe became rich and famous because of the spice trade. I mean, they became cities because of the spice trade. And now it’s sort of like, you know, something that sort of, you know, we’ve kind of forgotten about, but that’s something so simple to do and and, hopefully, motivates folks to do that.

Nick Urban [00:48:08]:
Yeah. So about a year ago today, I was in South India, and I noticed they were eating with their hands. And for the first couple days, I resisted it, and then eventually, I tried it. And then I came back here, and I was quite bummed that there’s no culture of eating with hands here. And the people I was with said the same thing. It’s a whole different experience, and you definitely feel more connected to the food. And also I noticed that the food there, they obviously use a lot more spices. And it’s nice because you’re not just getting, like, as you mentioned, the extra flavor, but you’re adding flavor and you’re offsetting some of the damage and side effects that come from just heating meat really high or even vegetables.

Nick Urban [00:48:51]:
You’re reducing you’re probably protecting it to cross link proteins and all kinds of other stuff that we’re gonna keep figuring out all the consequences of doing this by itself. But then if we study it in conjunction with the way this has traditionally been prepared, we’ll understand how these systems had it right to begin with, and there’s a a synergistic effect of combining them.

John Douillard [00:49:12]:
Yeah. It’s so funny. When I first went to India in 1986, I spent a year I went there for a three, four week vacation, ended up getting invited to stay there and learn Ayurveda, which I closed my practice in Boulder and never came back to it, actually. And, I’ll stay there for a year and a half studying Ayurveda. And, you know, I was forced to eat with my hands. And after many months of being there with my teacher, I’m eating with my hands trying to get the food in my mouth with and it was difficult. And he looked at me and he said, what are you doing? I said, eating why why? And he goes, do you not know the flick? You’re and I go, flick, what are you talking about? And he goes, well, you’re not eating. You’re not using the flick.

John Douillard [00:49:51]:
I’m going, what is that? So it turns out, you know, he finally taught me because I was getting my clothes full of food every day, that there’s a flick when you eat with your hands. You actually take your thumb and you have to flick it in like that. You know, so you take the food in your hand and then you flick it with your thumb. And if you don’t flick it in, it doesn’t go in very well. And, so I remember we’re getting so excited. I went went was teaching my kids. We have six kids six kids and I taught and when they were really young, I took them to a restaurant. It was an Italian restaurant.

John Douillard [00:50:20]:
We walk in, and all the kids are half the kids are in the bathroom. I come out of the bathroom, and the pasta arrived, and my kids are in there with their hands flicking in the pasta. I’m like, oh, no. No. No. No. And, but the idea is that when you really do eat with your hands, it creates something, a real connection that’s really quite real. And it’s, particularly if you’re I’m a I was always a real fast eater, idiot chew it go, you know, kind of very very we call it pitta, which is a lot of fire and, always going fast.

John Douillard [00:50:49]:
And I learned to slow myself down. But, that’s one way to do it. Just sit down, commute home for lunch, sit down, relax, and eat with your hands. And, it does it does have that. And if you do that in a relaxed way, it makes a world of difference.

Nick Urban [00:51:01]:
I’ve talked a little bit about the doshas in this podcast previously, but I think that’s a concept that people like to rehear and perhaps learn a little bit about. I don’t know, where do you put that on the spectrum of importance in Ayurveda? I

John Douillard [00:51:16]:
think I say important. It’s sort of almost more, like, fascinating because we all wanna know who we are and what our individual strengths and likes are like. So it’s a super simple thing. We’ve already talked about winter and summer and spring. Those are the three harvests. So in other words, there’s a spring harvest we all know. There’s a summer harvest we all know, and there’s a fall harvest for winter eating. And that was my book, The Three Season Diet, which nobody read because they all thought I didn’t know there were four seasons, but it was all about the three harvests in nature.

John Douillard [00:51:50]:
That was way back in February when I wrote that book. So the idea was that there’s three seasons. There’s three major cycles in nature. There’s a cold cycle, winter, and there’s people who are have those qualities inside of them. It’s governed by air, which is cold and dry like winter, and it’s called vata. Those are one of the doshas. The second dosha, which is aspect of nature really, is spring, which is rainy and muddy and heavy. It’s it’s where the earth holds on to war water.

John Douillard [00:52:22]:
And if you walk through the woods in the spring, you’re gonna have muddy feet. The earth holds on to water. You hold on to water during that season, and that’s the quality of we call kapha, which you could think of as cough or congestion or mucus or allergies and that kind of a thing. And, of course, nature’s antidote to that is the the harvest of dandelion roots, which get rid of all that mucus and those kind of spring greens and things like that. So people have a lot of kapha in their constitution are gonna naturally hold on to more water and be a little bit more heavyset, but also be more easygoing and loving and happy. Where the winter body types, the Vata body types, are gonna be cold and dry, and they’re governed by air. So the nervous system will be going really fast. They think fast.

John Douillard [00:53:02]:
They’re very highly sensitive, lots of radar, feel everything. They’re the scouts who can make sure that their tribe is not gonna be in danger. Where the Kapha types are easygoing and common. They sit by the fire, and they wanna tell stories and play music. You know? And then there’s the summer types, the pitta types, the fiery types. You know, summer’s hot and competitive and driven, and these people who are hotter throwing pots and pans, and they’re competitive. They wanna beat the other guy. Right? So but nature has the cooling foods that are trying to cool them down if they could, but, you know, they don’t always get that that memo.

John Douillard [00:53:34]:
But the idea is that that’s a summer body type where we call Pitta, and they’re the competitive and the driven types. And they’re, you know, throwing pots and pans, and they get angry, and they they they eat really, really fast, and they’re constantly on the go and very driven, and that’s their body type. So the three body types are winter, vatas, which is air, fast moving, hypermetabolic, tuta, competitive driven fire, which are, you know, overly competitive and kinda really overachievers, really. And then you have the easygoing spring body type, the Kapha body type, who are the easygoing ones and the calm ones. And there is not one that’s better than the other. In fact, we all have a little bit of all of that, but we all, at conception, get a get a little bit more winter, a little bit more spring, a little bit more summer qualities, and that determines your individual makeup. So if you are a super hot fiery pitta body type, eating spicy food and and drinking lots of beer, which is acidic, and drinking lots of wine and cheese, all these fermented acidic things, then you’re gonna stack the heat in your body on a hot person in a hot season eating hot things, coffee, coffee, coffee, you know, that’s gonna overheat your constitution. So you may not be very feel very good with all that acidic food that gives you heartburn and digestion.

John Douillard [00:54:55]:
If you’re a Kapha spring body type, you’re eating mac and cheese and pizza and pasta all spring long when it’s not even available in the springtime, then you’re gonna be more vulnerable to taking that hypometabolic type, eating very heavy foods on a heavy body type and getting more congested. In the winter, if you’re a cold and dry body type, you know, thinking fast, worry all the time, and you’re eating ice cold smoothies every single morning because you would think that’s the best thing in putting frozen berries in there, eating in cold food and a cold body type in a cold season in the wintertime, you’re gonna aggravate the cold. It’ll create more dryness and more worry and more thinking and more hyper metabolism. So it’s beautiful and logical, really. And then nature always provides the squirrels are eating nuts and seeds in this in the wintertime to naturally antidote the extreme the tendency to be more, we call, lots of aggravated or hypermetabolic, governed by air and stress, which really stress really pushes that air, which is doesn’t have that earth to stabilize it or ground it. So the Vata people, the Vata constitutions are unfortunately way more vulnerable to the impact of our crazy culture, which never seems to sleep, more than the other Rati types do.

Nick Urban [00:56:11]:
Yeah. And it seems like our culture I guess most cultures around the world these days really rewards the pitta types too.

John Douillard [00:56:18]:
Yeah. Yeah. We are a dopamine, you know, driven culture. So reward means that you’re gonna, you know, put out what you put out there. You know, you you eat what you keep. You you you’re yeah. You you know, or you eat what you kill is what it is. You so you get that reward chemistry, and we are very much addicted to that.

John Douillard [00:56:39]:
The cough up easygoing body types, they’re more we call altruistic. They love to give and they care and they’re kind and they’re gentle with others, and they get their joy from giving. The epitotypes tend to get their joy from getting. Doesn’t mean they don’t give, but they also sometimes give really big too, but this is general generalization. Where the vata types, they aren’t necessarily, you know, giving or receiving. They are really the highly sensitive ones, the artists, the ones in the cave that are drawing the beautiful pictures on the cave walls, and the kapha types are sitting by the fire telling stories. And the pitot types are trying to build an extra deck with windows that overlook the valley. I mean, they wanna change everything, make everything better.

John Douillard [00:57:23]:
You know? So they’re always never satisfied with the status quo. They want more and more and more and more. And, you know, we need all of that, really. It’s beautiful.

Nick Urban [00:57:31]:
I’m gonna be a bad interviewer now and ask you a two part question. The first is, is there any, like, scientific validation, modern, say, genetics or epigenetics or a combination of the two that validates the idea of these different constitutions, if you will, the different doshas? And then, also, once someone knows their dosha, their dominant dosha, is there any, like, particular thing they can do with that information or knowledge?

John Douillard [00:57:55]:
There’s absolutely good science behind this. You know, we know that we call it endomorphs or mesomorphs or ectomorphs, and those that’s the original kind of constitution that we know people at ectomorphs are more vata. They’re more thin framed. The mesomorphs are that medium frame pitta constitution, we call it summer based, really. And then the, mesomorph or the endomorph or the kapha types, easygoing, calm tend to hold on to more weight. So what do you do with that information? One, it’s nice to know that I mean, if you’re a pitta body type, you kinda sorta know it. Right? You’re hot. You’re throwing off the covers all the time.

John Douillard [00:58:26]:
If you’re a Vata, you’re you’re always trying to get more covers. You’re always cold. You always need a sweater. If you’re a Kapha type, you’re kinda you don’t really bother so much by the weather. Although you have a tendency to, you know, gain more weight, be easygoing, calm. You’re not big about you’re hypometabolic. You’re like, you know, my one of my daughters was Kapha, and I go, let’s go for a run. And she would go, why? You know, like, why do I have to do that? Like, what’s the point? Like, you know, she was just, like, easygoing and calm.

John Douillard [00:58:54]:
And I go, well, we could have fun. And she’s like, running? Fun? Like, like, they need motivate. They need to, like, kick a ball or do something to make it exciting for them to wanna be engaged. And when they do, they’re phenomenal. Exciting for them to wanna be engaged. And when they do, they’re phenomenal. They’re all phenomenal on all all aspects. But here’s what the takeaway is.

John Douillard [00:59:11]:
If you do we have a body type question on our website. It’s free at lifespot.com. We find out what your body type is, and you have all these questions you ask, and there’s a profile. There’s your mental profile, your physical profile, emotional profile, behavioral profile. You see, okay. And then you have your overall constitutional type. And you say, okay. I’m more like me.

John Douillard [00:59:28]:
I have more pitta and more kapha, so I don’t have that much vata, believe it or not. So because I have a lot of pitta, therefore, burned off all the hair in my head. That’s a pitta quality, by the way, or extra gray hairs burning it off kinda thing. Then in the summertime, I have to be careful not to eat a lot of very acidic foods like beer and wine and cheese and barbecue and spicy food and even fermented foods. Like, I’m not gonna drink a 20 ounce jar of bottle of kombucha, which is lactic acid bacteria fermentation requires acidic, agents to heat the and ferment the food. So it’s too much of that in a season of the heat and a body type of heat stacks that, and that can overheat and create inflammation for you. So for me, I try to eat more fruits and vegetables, bigger salads, you know, those kinds of things during the summer months. Right? And in the springtime, I go on a very, very like, right now, we’re doing this in the spring.

John Douillard [01:00:28]:
I go on a very low carbohydrate diet. You know, really, you know, as low as I can do it just to just cycle some carbs in a couple of times a week, and I try to be that. That’s what nature would do. There is no carbs at this time of the year. And that makes sure you don’t get that extra weight. In fact, you lose weight even if you’re on a Kapha body type. It’s a great time to lose the weight in the spring. That’s when we should be doing that.

John Douillard [01:00:48]:
And then, of course, in in now so those two seasons are my my seasons I have to be careful of. Because I have a lot of pitta, I tend to get overheated and, you know, things like that. And then because I have a lot of kapha, I tend to be more vulnerable to gaining more weight. I have a thicker frame. You know? So I have to be careful in that season. So if you’re a Vata body type, then that’s your season to be more concerned about. Eat more warm cooked foods to nourish yourself and calm your Vata. You know, all the GLP one agonist foods that actually help that are the foods that balance the stress.

John Douillard [01:01:24]:
It’s sort of crazy. Like, when you look at in Ayurveda, the original concept of people who are gaining weight too much was to actually help them deal with stress, to give them foods like soups and stews and and and grains to help calm down their nervous system to to ground them. And that grounding would give them the ability to lose weight. Because when you’re under stress, you store fat. Right? And your digestion doesn’t work as well. So it turns out that I wrote an article about this as well, that all these foods that are we think are the foods that would make you gain weight, the sort of richer foods, they actually are foods that have natural occurring GLP one agonist effects on your body. So they’re the ones historically that would actually help people lose weight, the ones that would help de stress you. So that’s what the that constitution would say, oh, I take away.

John Douillard [01:02:14]:
I’m really Vata. I’m constantly worried, can’t sleep at night, restless, worried about everything, then heavier foods will calm you down. Pita, I’m fiery. I’m competitive. I’m driven. Can’t slow down. I’m overachieving and overworking. I need to cool my nervous system down.

John Douillard [01:02:30]:
Right? And, do things that help make you love and care for others. And then the Kapha types, you know, they need to move their body and not eat that heavy food in the heavy season where they’re not gonna be able to digest it. You know?

Nick Urban [01:02:45]:
So I think I already know your answer to this one. If you’re in the summer months and you are a pitta dominant person and you want to, say, capitalize on some hormesis so that your body adapts and can better tolerate the extreme temperatures, say, of Austin where it’s a 10 degrees outside. I’m gonna guess you’re gonna say no to the sauna even though afterward it makes it feel easier to tolerate hundred degree days because you’re really just increasing the heat dramatically? Or is there a rule for, I guess, exacerbating the imbalance temporarily so the body can self regulate back into balance?

John Douillard [01:03:23]:
Yeah. That’s a really good question. I think it’s a matter of dose. Right? You know, I think it’s you know, when you take a sauna, the benefits of a sauna are so, powerful. Now from the Ayurvedic perspective for that pitta body type and in general, when we actually do Ayurvedic deep rejuvenation detox treatments, we use steam and saunas on a regular basis. But we do one thing that’s uniquely different is we put cold on the head. So we keep the head very cold. So the if the head gets hot, then the whole body gets hot.

John Douillard [01:03:55]:
But if you actually put and they’ve they’ve got these, like, different, you know, hats you can put you can put them in your freezer, put a hat on, put on, and go in the sauna. And what then the body’s getting steamed a 70 degrees, it’s starting to sweat. It sends a message to the brain, and the brain is bathed in this ice cloth saying, wow. It’s pretty cool up here. And the body’s going, no. No. It’s really hot down here. We need to do something.

John Douillard [01:04:14]:
And the brain’s going, these guys need to relax. And it sends a message of parasympathetic activation to disarm the body so the body can detoxify even more. But if the head gets hot and creates a emergency fight or flight response to the heat, then the whole body is gonna create an emergency fight or fight or flight response to the heat, and the whole body will not detoxify as efficiently. So, historically, everybody should put ice on their head when they’re in a sauna and allow the body to really detoxify without that alarm bell going off because I’m overheating in my brain because your brain can get hot and that’s a problem. But the pivot types need to do that even more so. And then maybe after they get out of the sauna, you know, an ice bath probably or at least a cold plunge of some sort, or a cold shower, I think, you know, might even be the better way to go. I think that, sometimes I think what we do in our culture these days is we take one stressor, like a stressful life that we live in, and then we add hot, and then we add super cold, and then we add a steer or a steer diet that’s really restrictive. And we think that hormesis is great, but there’s a limit to how much stress that we can endure.

John Douillard [01:05:25]:
And we don’t wanna overstrain the body in the effort of making ourselves stronger. We want to kind of find that comfort. It’s a matter of dose kind of approach, which means it can change seasonally. You could do ice baths in the summer, and you can do more saunas in the winter. That might be a more logical approach to doing that.

Nick Urban [01:05:47]:
Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And I when I was researching saunas to begin with, I saw the wear the places that are they’re traditionally used, the sauna goers wear the hats. And I looked into it a little bit and realized it’s probably a good idea to keep the head cool. And now when I go into the sauna, if people ask why I’m wearing it, I’m just gonna send them this clip because you described it beautifully.

John Douillard [01:06:06]:
And don’t forget, where do saunas where do they originate? In Finland and Sweden and places where it’s pretty freaking cold. And and that in in the wintertime, what could feel better? Because I’m sure the houses weren’t wonderfully heated, so it was probably a drafty life in in this cold winter. So to get into a hot sun, it was like, oh my god. Let’s live in here. You know? And and and now we’re seeing the benefits of that. And there are benefits, but I think it can be adjusted to your constitution, to your needs, to the seasons, and that would make maybe a little bit more sense.

Nick Urban [01:06:39]:
Doctor John, we will start to wind this one down. I still have so many questions and topics to discuss with you, such as your Colorado cleanse because that’s one of, like, the premier cleanses out there in my view, and it gets really good results from what I’ve heard. But before we start winding this down and perhaps hopefully, get another episode on the books, what are some of the biggest mistakes or dumb things, as you said earlier, that you see people doing as it relates to either misunderstanding Ayurveda or things that fly totally in the face of Ayurveda that we haven’t already discussed?

John Douillard [01:07:11]:
Well, I think that when you talk about cleansing, for example, you know, most people do a detox, but they never ask the question, why do we get toxic in the first place? And that’s the question that is first and foremost asked in Ayurveda. You know, if you are exposed to all these environmental pollutants and chemicals and which are the number one health threat on the planet according to the World Health Organization and United Nations, their report is air pollution. And we’re nobody talks about it, but it’s an actual massive concern. I get news feed every morning with all the research studies. I’m always looking for ancient and modern science connections. And the one thing that comes out at least two, three studies a day, air pollution. You know, of of every everything else that’s coming through the feed is always the problem with air. So we are exposed to all these toxins, and that ability to to detoxify is linked to your ability to digest.

John Douillard [01:08:04]:
And like the Colorado cleanse that we do in Ayurveda is we first reboot the digestive strength before we detoxify the body. And then after the cleanse, we do another digestive reboot to reboot digestive stomach acid, bile flow, pancreatic enzymes, heal and repair the lining of your intestinal tract, replenish a healthy microbiome, detoxify the entire lymphatic system, decongest your liver, all these things first before we do a detox, which Ayurveda did for thousands of years called lipophilic mediated detox, where you take ghee at higher doses every single day while you’re eating a completely no fat diet. So you take the ghee in the morning and a no fat diet during the day. And what that has been shown to do is, number one, the ghee, more dose will increase your your butyric acid. It’ll help change your microbiome. It’ll flush your liver gallbladder, but it also the ghee gets into your tissues and actually attaches to bad fats like heavy metals and detoxify them. And studies show that if you do a seven day cleanse like that, with just the ghee and a no fat diet, studies show that you actually detoxify compared to folks who didn’t do the cleanse, detoxify their PCBs, which are toxic chemicals in the environment by 46%, and pesticides by 56% compared to the folks who didn’t do the cleanse, and that’s hard science. So they and they developed that thousands of years ago.

John Douillard [01:09:25]:
Now we have the science to back it up. But it’s more than just the detox part. It’s the reboot, the digestion, the lymph, the liver, you know, make sure the environment of the intestinal tract is critical. There was a really, I did a article recently, and I was looking at the 2,007 Microbiome Project report. I mean, the the 2,007 Microbiome Project was, like, the first report on the microbiome. And they gave us two warnings that nobody everybody ignored. And the first warning was eat, you know, eat foods that aren’t so clean. Like, don’t sterilize everything.

John Douillard [01:09:55]:
Get exposed to more foods, organic, dirt, that kind of stuff because that’s you know, pull the stuff out of your garden and eat it. And the second one was the most amazing one. It was the fact that that, there’s something called a horizontal transfer of genetic material. Right? So that means a a virus gets into your intestinal tract, and it sits up next to a a bug in your gut that has the genetic ability to go through your intestinal tract and infect the body potentially, but it’s a good bug. Well, the virus, through what’s called the horizontal transgenic material, can actually take that that genetic material from the bugs in your gut already and find get away now to transfer that genetic material into the virus so now it can penetrate and infect you. We pass our genes along vertically to our kids, but this is called horizontal transfer genetine. And they said this happens in your microbiome. And they said two more things that were so critical.

John Douillard [01:10:51]:
One, it comes mostly from animals like dogs and farm animals. That’s the bugs that you that have this tendency to transfer, like the bird flu would be a perfect example. And the second one was it wasn’t based on proximity. It wasn’t based on the fact that the virus happened to be an actual bug that had the genetic material that infect the body. It was based on ecology. It was based on the environment of equality, and that means the health and integrity of your intestinal microbiome, which is based on the quality integrity of the environment of the skin, the epithelium that lines your gut. And that’s what when I first went to India, it was really all about being kind and gentle to that intestinal lining, not clobber it with these antiicidal agents that are killing everything and ripping the guts to chest, you know, and killing you for a moment, but then making you worse down the road. And that’s what these cleansers in Ayurveda are all about is to say, hey.

John Douillard [01:11:47]:
You know what? Let’s reboot the upper digestion. Let’s heal the lining. Let’s create an environment for good bugs to proliferate. Change the bugs with the season so we get this really robust moving, you know, gut immunity that protects you from pretty much everything that was the original design, and how can we get back to that? And that’s the difference between so it’s sort of the Ayurvedic approach to health and cleansing versus the modern way, which you just go in there and pull out the cleanser, detox light, fast you, detox like crazy, strip it out, you know, kill everything that’s bad, and, even with natural things. Right? But the idea is to actually be a little more kind and gentle because that intestinal I don’t know if you ever tried to make your own kefir. I did. And it has to be, like, perfect, you know, to get those bugs to grow. And it’s sort of like, wow.

John Douillard [01:12:34]:
If I can’t even make the kefir on a countertop trying to be as precise as I can, how am I gonna create an environment for good bugs in my gut eating the stuff that America is trying to make me eat? You know? And it’s just sort of like, wow. You know?

Nick Urban [01:12:45]:
Mhmm. Yeah. That point about horizontal gene transfer is super interesting. I came across it when I was researching, like, the health of animals and feedlot operations, and when they have that extinction stress and they can sense epigenetically and through their environment what is going on, that that’s when, like, the horizontal gene transfer in their microbiomes is not at all conducive to health, and it’s scary to think about what that could potentially create in them and then if we eat their meat in humans as well.

John Douillard [01:13:17]:
It’s a little bit too scary to even think about it. You know, how how how off we really have become because we I guess, because we had to feed so many people, but then there was so much money to be made by feeding so many people, and that’s where I think the road went kinda wild.

Nick Urban [01:13:32]:
Doctor Zhanna, we can keep going for literally hours. I wanna be respectful of your time. If people want to either try the Colorado cleanse, I think it’s closed currently, but you do that every year, maybe more. And then you also have a website full of really informative articles. You have a podcast that I’ve listened to most episodes of. How do they get in contact with you or check out your work?

John Douillard [01:13:53]:
Yeah. Well, actually, we used to do the Colorado clans, you know, twice a year as a group altogether, and we picked days. But But now we’ve actually evergreened it where you get emails and videos every single morning and said, okay. This is day one, and here’s what you’re gonna do. Here’s day two. So we make it super easy for folks to do any time of the year that they want. So that’s something if people wanna do a cleanse or more of a digestive reset slash cleanse that’s open anytime called the Colorado Ayurvedic Cleanse. And my website is lifespa.com, and, you know, we have, like, over 1,500 articles.

John Douillard [01:14:23]:
Just type in your health concerns, and you can read up on all these articles and videos with the ancient wisdom and the modern science and see if there’s something from the past that’s got good science that might actually help you solve your problem on your own. And that’s that’s what we do at life’sbody.com. And I’m on all the social channels, so if you wanna follow me on all the social channels as well, that’d be great. And we have a newsletter which we put this knowledge out every week, three articles a week with more Ayurvedic wisdom and modern science. So become a member of our family, and, and we’ll we’d love to have you aboard.

Nick Urban [01:14:54]:
Absolutely. Do you have any training materials? I think I saw on your website that you have some kind of training program.

John Douillard [01:14:59]:
Training program for, for learning more about this. Yeah. We have numerous courses, long courses, short form courses. Also all the articles, we have ebooks that are free that are like, we have blood share ebooks and gut health ebooks, which are kinda collating of, like, ten, fifteen articles into, you know, more of a digestible bite size as opposed to reading every article on my site. So we really do our best to put our knowledge out all the knowledge out for free as we possibly can. And then we also have an Ayurvedic store where people can come and buy our Ayurvedic herbs, like, throw all the whole herbs with all the organic and all that stuff as well, and that’s, what we do.

Nick Urban [01:15:37]:
I’m glad that you guys use the whole herb, and you don’t just take one little isolate and focus on that and make it super powered. And you you preserve the integrity and the natural synergy of the substances the way they’ve been traditionally used.

John Douillard [01:15:51]:
Yeah. I wouldn’t say that that using an extract of an herb is necessarily bad. I just think it’s more doing the job for the body in a natural ish way, And that’s appropriate at times. But using the whole plant works with the body’s intelligence. You have the microbiome of the plant. You have the chemistry of the plant, and they work with just like we have a microbiome and we have chemistry, and we take out the bugs out of our gut. We’re different. You take the bugs out of the plant, it’s different.

John Douillard [01:16:19]:
Take the bugs out of the food, it’s different. So the idea of inoculating your gut or helping your body heal, helping the body do the job with obviously the intelligence of the microbiome, which is where all the real intelligence is, and the chemistry, which is what comes out of the ground naturally, is really the very in my mind, the first thing we should try. If that doesn’t work, yeah, let’s use extracts. If that doesn’t work, let’s use medicines, you know, pharmaceuticals so we help save our life if they have to. But but it’s a buffet, and I think starting at this part of the buffet is the right way to go.

Nick Urban [01:16:51]:
Yeah. Exactly. The different tiers, and you start the most powerful, you’re missing things that are possibly more synergistic and with fewer side effects that could move the needle more. But if that doesn’t work, then you can go to the next level. If that doesn’t work, go to the next level.

John Douillard [01:17:03]:
Right. Yeah. So we have every possible way to save your life and and more importantly, help you live a really healthy, vibrant, robust life and joyful life. That’s the beauty of Ayurveda. It was really about more than just the body. It was like this god body had to be helpful so we have the ability for our mind to feel calm, to feel to be willing to be more loving and kind and giving and caring to the world versus just me, me, me, me, me. You know? And that’s really maybe we could talk about that in our next episode where really dive into the to the psychology of irabitus. There’s massive there’s a huge understanding there as well.

Nick Urban [01:17:38]:
That’s definitely a whole another episode. Doctor John, what is one thing that the Lifespa tribe does not know about you?

John Douillard [01:17:44]:
Well, but but my Lifespa tribe, I get people that follow me. I I’m thinking that my wife that my staff just found out that I went to stunt school years ago. I ended up, living next to a when I was in Malibu, I was doing the school out there, and I ended up living next to a stunt coordinator. I went to stunt school for a little while. And also people don’t know that I’m a pilot as well. Lots of hidden things that so there’s lots of things people don’t know about me, but, that was my history way back when. Yeah.

Nick Urban [01:18:10]:
Wow. Very cool. Well, thank you again so much for joining the podcast. It’s been a pleasure following your work for years now and helping get it out there and share it with the world because this is one subject, I guess, the one intersection that I think is really fascinating and really can help the world in so many different ways.

John Douillard [01:18:26]:
Nick, I really appreciate you having me. I really, really do love your work, and I hope to have had do this again and take a deeper dive.

Nick Urban [01:18:33]:
Absolutely. Thanks for tuning in to High Performance Longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their health span. You can find all the episodes, show notes, and resources mentioned at outlier.com. Until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.