Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Chef AJ: Anger and Bipolar Disorder and More | QA with Dr Doug Lisle
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


[Music] one more second hey everybody and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about today's guest is one of our very favorites none other than dr doug lyle he's here to do a q a based on the questions that you sent in we will try to answer the live questions but we always give preferential treatment to those who took the time to write the questions in advance please welcome all the way from the aloha state doctor doug lyle it's always great to see you dr lyle hey aj great to see you too oh i can't wait so let's get started with the very very first question and this one is from nick and he says i'm not he writes he goes i i ask this question in earnest i'm not trying to be funny i don't know where else to look up the answer and i thought dr lyle would know dear dr lyle every time i do laundry there's always a sock missing where does it go well it turns out that some people are real friendly and as a result of that little elves come and live around your property and you don't know it and they they need those socks i'm not sure exactly what they do with those socks but they do need them and they will get them out of your dryer so that's how you wanted to know and that's what it is but that happens to me too and you know even when i've moved like i've lived in the same apartment for like 30 years and even when i moved they didn't turn up you know there was a there was a really neat mad magazine uh uh you know uh cartoon once yeah i must have read 50 years ago when i was a kid and it was about this guy he was complaining that he always missed he's always losing stuff so he only has one of everything and then he said then he ran into a friend of his that had the same problem so he said so i went over there and we're going to put our stuff together you know and and and the guy said well what happened he says well on the way over i lost the bundle that's funny so there you go that is funny okay on to the next question this is from ann dear dr lyle with the family on lockdown we've been getting on each other's nerves yelling swearing and name calling this is not our normal way of how we speak to each other after my third day of anger building up i ate a chocolate candy bar i went for a three hour walk not an exaggeration and still bought and ate the chocolate bar i didn't spiral out of control this time but this is my worry i don't want to give in to the chocolate or other foods i have used for comfort please make a recommendation for anger control well there is no recommendation for anger control anger comes about uh as a result of this very specific set of circumstances uh and those circumstances are the perception or the evaluation actually that that we are being treated unfairly okay so anger does not spontaneously arise out of the system as a result of being in too close quarters uh or anything other of the kind uh it is a highly specific uh uh emotional response that access a signal to other people to signal to them that you believe that they are treating you unfairly okay so there is no quote anger management process or control mechanism uh all such attempts for the criminal justice system have failed the uh so so really the issue is uh you know what specifically is it in a relationship with a specific other individual where you believe you're being treated unfairly and then we have to get that clear and negotiated okay so and so the the keys to renegotiating things that feel unfair some very important keys are to um to make sure that any attempted negotiations that we both understand that they're temporary so in other words they are experiments and how it is that we're going to do things differently so if you're on your dealer's nerves i don't know how that would be or why but it would be then hey listen i uh what i'd really prefer is that you know there's no tv between i don't know four and eight o'clock because that's just i finally had enough uh whatever whatever the specific issue is and the the notion should be hey let's experiment with that for a week let's make a deal so that we can uh so that we can uh see whether or not that works better that's how it is that we do things so we the anger is not coming out of nowhere it's coming out of a highly specific inference that someone else is being insensitive or aggressive that they are treating us unfairly we address whatever that is uh as clearly and you know as clearly and reasonably as possible and we say listen i'm irritated and let me tell you why i'm irritated it seems to me that this is how would be fair and this is what's going on and so let's hear what it is that they have to say about it because they may be retaliating against some other grievance that they have against you at which point it's like okay that's fine let's let's talk about all of it and then let's talk about how we can negotiate whatever the conflicts are remember uh at the source of of uh human struggles whether they are wars between nations political parties or uh or between two people uh what you have is conflicts of interest okay uh conflicts of interests are inherent in life in other words uh it it's like huh this doesn't seem like it can't we all just get along and the answer is we'll tell that to the lions and the gazelles that are on the african savannah they have the ultimate conflict of interest okay so people have conflicts of interest you know uh two two people love each other and they're riding in the car one of them wants it three degrees warmer the other one doesn't we've got a conflict of interest okay if that happens consistently we have to plan for it somebody needs to wear a sweater or have a blanket in the car so that both can be as comfortable as just reasonable so yeah your the anger isn't something that visits us from on high this was actually a freudian notion which turns out to be wrong like most freudian notions it's the notion that anger built up in what's known as a homeostatic drive so homeostatic drive is a tension system that builds up like the hunger drive does so does thirst so to sleep the longer you go without sleep the more demanding your nervous system is that you sleep okay the uh that's a homeostatic drive it naturally builds up freud believed that that was true um of people's anger that he was mistaken anger is not part of homeostatic drive neither is laughter okay so if you haven't laughed in a while it isn't because you're building up a laugh chip but if the comedian says something dumb you're going to laugh at it because you haven't laughed in two weeks no and the truth is is that if they're really funny if it's rodney dangerfield and they tell 400 jokes in an hour and 200 of them are good you're going to be laughing every minute of that performance i never runs out okay so same thing is true with your anger you you could you could go in principle a month without feeling an impulsive anger if nobody did anything that was unreasonable now if you're me you've got enough disagreeable in you i'm getting a little anger every day okay it's uh there's there's it doesn't does it take much for me to have a little irritation and a and a uh hey i i'm a pussycat compared to alan you gotta tour around without for a couple hours it's not like he's in a rage but he's got this irritation because he's he's irritated an employee in a restaurant that doesn't seem to be hustling enough for him not that he feels like he deserves better service he's actually feeling like the employer deserves a better employee to very interesting uh to get a to take a walk through allen's mind and ask him what's going on all the time so uh but that's not a draw it just it's not a buildup he walked in the restaurant not angry at all and 15 minutes later he's irritated uh and it's because he believes uh in this case it's not him so much that's being treated unfairly but somebody else aj is that way so aj a lot of times uh doesn't doesn't care about how people are treating her she cares about how they're treating the animals or somebody else's defense wasn't it then let me tell you folks look out batten down the hatches okay so anger is a natural mechanism that comes about out of the perception of unfairness so if you're having that process go on in your house with somebody that's in the house not surprising uh that that happens that there's going to be natural conflicts of interest that will emerge and uh let's negotiate them let's be clear we're not fighting we're not we're not arguing it may sound like an argument as you make your case but what we're trying to do is resolve the conflicts so that they're reduced that's what we do and then there's no excuse for the chocolate then and we have to come up with some other excuse all right okay well thank you this is from susan and you know you talk a little bit about this in the pleasure trap and i never quite understood this whole thing about stretch receptors so maybe you can expound on it she says dear dr lyle do we experience satiety via the stomach stretch receptors or is it affected by sufficient nutrients in the food also and why does starch help with satiety ah the issue is is that both of them contribute to a sense of satiety so it's not one or the other and so in fact so you can imagine for example let's suppose that you sat down and started eating heads of uh iceberg lettuce nice dense heads of iceberg lettuce sooner or later by the time you eat three large heads of lettuce your stomach would be the stretch receptors would be screaming and you wouldn't want to eat another bite you'd feel like you couldn't eat another bite in fact you might not be able to eat another bite you might start regurgitating some of that food up in the esophagus and start burning your throat okay so the um so that would be stretch reception but notice that you wouldn't actually be satiated even though that you could need another bite because your stomach would be stretched out so we can see that the feeling of satiety is actually an integrated experience uh between stretch reception and nutrient reception so it uh so for example if you eat a chocolate bar you can feel you might have been hungry before you ate a chocolate bar let's make it two so eat two snickers bars or two clip bars or something you can feel slightly ill okay and in fact not really hungry even though you can tell that there's been very little stretch reception that's because you just dose the system with the tremendous amount of concentrated nutrition and there are nutrient receptors in your stomach that can tell that you just ate a hell of a lot of cow roots okay so what the system is designed for is it's designed for intermediate level caloric density uh it's actually designed to try to hit it about right and somewhere about right is is going to be uh based on you know probably very typically somewhere between three and 700 calories a pound for whatever foodstuffs are in your stomach so that's going to be typical uh say if we picked a number like 500 calories a pound that would be typical of the of the food that someone would eat at a given meal in our natural history and so therefore we would expect that the nutrient receptors and the stretch receptors would basically more or less agree about what time it is to stop now we can look a little further in this and see how this works so for example let's suppose we eat very low calorie density foods so let's suppose that we're eating um oh just steamed vegetables and steamed potatoes so the steamed potatoes are 375 and the steamed vegetables are 200 so we average say call it 300 calories a pound now we can imagine that by the time we've eaten a pound of these we've got a decent amount of stretch reception but let's suppose we eat you know a pound and a half now normally that pound and a half would have resulted in 750 calories but today it results in 450 because we're averaging 300. so now you can have a situation where the stretch receptors are telling you wow i'm really pretty darn full but i still feel some hunger drive and so very often people that eat very low calorie density food what they'll do is they'll eat more so they will eat until they're really stuffed so they may wind up eating two pounds of food so they need 600 calories which is still less you know 600 calories a food that that would be the equivalent of 1.2 pounds of 500 calorie pound food but they need two pounds so uh now finally they reach satiation uh but but they but the satiation is being more more uh more impacted by stress reception than by nutrient reception so we don't have the weird feeling of the iceberg lettuce which feels like we're still hungry and we're going to starve to death even though we've eaten two pounds or three pounds of ice per lettuce that we're not having that sensation we have sufficient detection of nutrients i.e calories that we are not hungry anymore but it took a long time to get there took two pounds of eating to do it which would be not typical for humans so you can eat such a diet aj eats a low calorie dense diet many people do many people uh are very satisfied eating that way rather than eating greater degrees of concentration but so the answer to the question both of these processes there are there are different types of neurons and so those neurons integrate in a way to give an overall picture the same thing is true for example of your eyesight so your eyesight is going to use both rods and cones it's going to use both black and white reception that's going to be incidentally by far the most sensitive so you can you can see a tiny photon you know just the smallest amount of light energy against a black field but if we put it in color you wouldn't be able to see it so the the rods are extremely sensitive to light that's a very basic part of the nervous system the cones which are the ability for us to see color that's a later innovation uh in primate color vision and so that's uh they're not as sensitive to light specifically so but your your experience is actually the experience of both of those types of neurons integrated together when you open your eyes so both uh you you don't realize that it's actually being done piecemeal by two different kinds of neurons but it is and the same thing is true of your uh your satiety mechanisms they also are an integrated experience of two different types of reception in fact it's just as with the rods and their cones themselves have different ways that they come up with different colors the same way that you also appear to have nutrient reception of different macronutrients so the same thing that causes a fat receptor to go off in your stomach is different than what causes a carbohydrate receptor so so in other words it's it's actually quite a complex process to cause the creature to reach satiety at a reasonably appropriate time so that's how that works who discovered the stretch receptors and nutrient receptors can you see them with a microscope um i actually don't know that's a good question i know that they they were discovered uh i can remember one researcher all the way possibly back to the 1960s a um a a guy by the name of j anthony deutsch so there there's a phys these were discovered uh predominantly by psychologists a specific kind of psychologist called the physiological psychologist and so today the the field of physiological psychology and neuroscience are effectively well psychology in principle is nothing other than a than a subset of a broader uh a broader set of problems that we call neuroscience so a physiological psychologist at this at this point might as well be called a neuroscientist and so they're studying the way the nerves work with respect to different kinds of stimuli and but those are the individuals and that was the science that was done it was done in animal experiments this is how they did it so they they put little balloons inside of animals stomachs and then they would blow them up and they would see what what would happen to their feeding behavior they did all kinds of things to try to figure out uh what must be in there and how it is that they worked and then since that time they've become increasingly sophisticated i wonder what happens to people that have gastric bypass because they're cutting out their stomachs so they're losing some of this reception right they are and so it makes it so that what happens is that if you can imagine it's kind of like a um uh if you if you make it much much smaller then of course part of the nervous system is still seeking satiety at say for example um you know a pound of food and 600 calories but if you've cut the stomach down to the where it's very very small then you can't put a pound of food in there and so when you put a half a pound of food in there you are stretching that thing very very hard and so it screams to the nervous system that we're full so it's a bizarre experience because there hasn't been that much nutrient reception and there isn't an although it's kind of like having you know like a 50 of your vision blocked uh in other words now you can only see parts of the picture and uh and so it it basically what will happen is essentially what's happened is as if the person has experienced a gunshot they it's as if somebody shot up shot away half your stomach or 70 of your stomach uh and so essentially there's been a catastrophic injury to the system and the the the the genes are smart enough to know that's true so they are not fooled for very long by this tiny tragic little stomach that the person has and that they're that they're filling it uh they're gonna they're gonna wind up wanting to fill it with very rich food so that they can get enough food so they get enough food in there to survive that's what's gonna happen now for a while the system will not adapt to that for a while so what happens is the small amounts of food will cause satiety to happen and these people can eat a lot less for a long period of time and they'll lose 100 pounds check them out five years later five years later the nervous system has had time to repair the damage of this catastrophic injury and now it's attempting as best it can to signal honestly to what the person thinks it needs and so if they are re eating those rich foods again uh because they were always the rich foods they were eating because they never changed their diet because they never addressed the underlying problem which is the over-richness of the food so they tried desperately to do something which is uh to cause a catastrophic injury uh to to the digestive system the digestive system ingeniously will often worm its way around the injury and five years later you see the person they look just like they did the day they went into the bypass surgery so that's so it works for a while while the system is essentially healing and the system may take a long time to heal a catastrophic injury of that nature uh but usually you know i have it's been uh uh it's it's been a it's it's been a odd experience for me to be in sitting in the chair that i do to watch people come in who have had a surgery and they are elated it's five months later and they're down 80 pounds and the uh everything's working fine and they take their supplements because they have to have that because they don't have adequate nutrition otherwise and i'm thinking i don't think this is going to work i mean it looks like a winning hand it looks like a winning poker hand but i think you're going to get crushed by by the realities of your ability to recuperate that you don't know and sure enough i've seen these people three years later they they maybe maybe they lost 50 pounds out of the 200 that they had to lose in other words they lost 150 and they gained 100 back and and it's it's like watching the tide come in you know so yeah anyway that's the that's the story is that a lot of damage is done the system is then forced to deal with trying to get the data out of a very tiny data set of what cells are left to them and and ingeniously the system will ultimately heal and the person will wind up in the same boat that they started with only now they have a catastrophically limited digestive system which is so you know never cut out an organ or anything else on your body that you might be able to use this is precious material that that cannot be you know cannot be mimicked by all the ingenuity of human science so um i'm impressed by some things that we can do you know you can put a pacemaker in and really save somebody in the cardio cardiovascular crisis i mean we can do some things that are spectacular someday they'll have artificial hearts you know i mean that will be able to work pretty well uh but hey listen there's nothing like the original equipment and uh so if we're having problems it's usually because we're not treating the equipment properly he's familiar with joshua johnny dr lau what's that are you familiar with josh lejani he's a plant-based motivational speaker and runner and he used to weigh over 400 pounds and he was considering gastric bypass and then he learned about calorie density and he said instead he decided to make the food larger instead of making his stomach smaller oh beautifully said yeah and he and he's he's kept the weight off and he's a real real inspiration and he's uh amazing so uh someone joe watching live said she googled it and it said stephen liberly's at harvard medical school discovered two types of stretch receptors when that was joe joe google it again so i can tell dr lyle and i'll answer it after i'll tell him after i ask the next question from kyle and it's dear dr lyle can you please explain what the placebo effect is and is it real i read the book you recommended anatomy of an epidemic and it talked about how in clinical trials placebos were as effective as prozac if that's true why not just give patients placebos yeah um that gets a little it gets a little complicated um the reason why uh the the placebo none of them are effective so what they the the effect that they would see in the antidepressant trials had to do with a specific question on the depression inventories so they ask you a lot of things so they'll ask you about suicidal ideation they'll ask you about how hopeless you feel we'll ask you about a bunch of stuff and once again what they're going to do is they're going to integrate your score from these questions into a single index uh so on the vector principal inventory they might your score might need to be 18 or whatever it is on the on the score sheet the um the the one thing that that both of the prozac and the placebo impact is uh one on energy so it's of course considered that what's one of the so-called vegetative signs of depression uh as if depression is some kind of bizarre mythical state when all really is the signaling mechanism to tell you that you're having failure feedback from biological challenges that's what depression is okay but they don't see it that way they see it as a they've conveniently um conveniently reconceptualized it as a chemical imbalance of your brain in a mysterious disease process that visits you okay some something like anger okay so the um so what happens uh in clinical trials is that the ssris have an agitating characteristic to them uh an amphetamine-like characteristic so what happens is is that if you start to take them and we we test your score on a depression inventory a couple weeks later we're gonna find that the question that says i feel um no like i don't have any energy oh no suddenly you have energy and so your overall depression score is dropping because that specific question is looking better so that was a that was an advantage that's a way that they put their their uh they put their thumb on the scale of the depression inventories so they could say oh look you know our our our prozac is working because we can see the depression scores have dropped well then some people got smart that we're wanting to know the truth and they said wait a second uh it's all about the energy question so we need to have a placebo that's what's known as an active placebo an active placebo is slightly agitating it's not meant to deal with any depressant symptoms at all it's just a maybe a little bit caffeinated i don't know how they do it but anyway when they use an active placebo that's not meant and has no fancy theoretical chemistry to to rebalance your brain along depressive processes that active placebo will have the same impact as the antidepressant on that score and therefore the scores look the same so neither one of them has actually impacted what you and i would call depression both of them wind up impacting the depression score as they target the variable that they can get to so uh the answer is is that the placebo effects placebo effects are uh essentially zero they are short-term and they are tricky so they're tricky that if you ask the questions in the right way and you lead people it's like a leading question by a prosecutor so prosecutor that's really clever can get you to admit all kinds of things okay the uh and that that's uh how the placebo effect will work that people if they are if they're looking for and feeling like something is happening which is what happens uh when they start to take uh many of these psychiatric medications there's some kind of little side effect that's coming along with it uh that causes them to know that they are having something happen and if they've been told that something good is going to happen and that they're going to feel it then they start feeling like oh what do you know that little pill is actually working for me and that of course what that can do is that can cause a short-term optimism uh whether it's in an active placebo group or not uh or within when it's in a treatment group or not so there can be a short-term optimism but no long-term positive effect okay so placebo effects are short term they're very transient and they're minor so there is no magic of putting putting placebo in the water and then having everybody happier now the reason why people are depressed uh is because of natural failure feedback signals the same reason they're angry same reason they're lonely the same reason they're tired uh and the same reason they're happy you're you feel uh any feeling whether it's a physical sensation or an emotional experience you're feeling those because of uh deep uh deeply embedded algorithms in the system or responding to your life circumstances and giving you a thing called a feeling and that feeling is a very sophisticated creation that is not easily changed it's it's changed when circumstances change you know i always wanted to ask you this i hope you don't mind you could just answer it quickly it i had an experience i'm a torn rotator cuff and it's been hurting a while and when i went to the doctor he gave me pain medicine and i i didn't feel it but just once i got the prescription it just started to feel better yeah yeah that that was probably coincidence interestingly enough so and of course you can imagine if you were to track the pain in your rotator cuff from day to day very very carefully let's suppose we had done that for three months we would find there would be uh vicissitudes of that pain in other words that that would definitely all days would not be the same but you if you then do something like somebody hands you a pill bottle or god forbid you start taking some orange pill you are going to have date you're going to now notice uh when there's a a reduction of the pin and you're going to attribute it to the pill rather than the natural background variation so that's likely what actually occurred there aj i think it's super common yeah super common thank you okay so lisa said uh dear dr lyle you when you spoke the last time in aj's group you mentioned about some of your clients that suffer from binging you mention salt to them as something that they may want to omit i've never heard this before could you please expound on that i don't suffer from binging but i don't eat salt and when i do eat other people's food or at restaurants i do notice that it does have an effect on my appetite and i eat much more food than i intended yeah yeah well you're designed by nature to seek out sodium and you need it it's essential nutrient and so you've got we can tell how important it is because we are extremely sensitive to that on the tongue there are very specific mechanisms essentially neurons built into built into your tongue to be extremely sensitive to sodium so sodium is critical for your survival and therefore you're designed by nature to like the taste of it uh in the same way that you like the the feel which i'm gonna do right now because i'm slightly thirsty because i've been talking so i just drank probably a third of an ounce of water and that feels good okay it's a tiny little relief that goes on there so you're being pushed and pulled around by automated mechanisms that are telling you when you're doing the right thing and when you're doing the wrong thing and that's how that works so sodium is one of those things so you're designed uh sodium is a not just an essential nutrient it's also um you wouldn't have such a a um a system if it wasn't also sort of scarce and difficult and important so of course in the same way that fat is scarce and difficult to get and super important so it's no surprise that if you get a concentrated source you should be extremely motivated to exploit it okay and you are and so as a result what's going to happen is if you start sprinkling salt on your potatoes you are going to be highly motivated to keep eating those potatoes because that signal is telling you that you are solving an important potential nutrient deficiency issue okay so that's the problem with salting up food salting up food is uh in unnatural concentrations of salt which is basically a salt shaker on anything it's going to give you in a natural concentration of sodium that's going to cause you to be more aggressive about eating more of that food your brain doesn't know that the salt is on top of the food and it's not part of the food your brain just says hey there's salt in the food okay so the entire integrated experience it's just like your your vision if we pulled all the reds out of your vision it wouldn't be as an exciting world to look at if you lost your ability to see red it would be like wow you know something about this landscape seems really bland i don't i don't know what it is i can't put my finger on it if we put the red back in you're like wow now that's a lot richer that's what's going on we spice up your experience or we enrich your experience by enhancing uh by enhancing it and now you're going to be an awful lot more motivated so that's what's going on there and that is a that's a a real additional it's not just with overeating it's also with the maintenance of a binge process so you it's very insightful that this uh questioner noticed that she herself doesn't have a binge eating problem but noticed essentially it isn't that you're either a binge eater or not a dingy eater folks it's not it's not you know you're not either agreeable or disagreeable you're not either you know tall or short you're always on a continuum and so uh we can see that bingy behavior is going to take place an awful lot more often you know believe me i've binged on vegan pizzas why because they were salty if you pulled the salt off those vegan pizzas and it had no more salt in it than a bunch of rice and vegetables i wouldn't have been nearly as motivated to eat that pizza so that's a very very astute to notice that all of us are going to be reacted to that and uh and of course much much more problematically when we have an inherent underlying characteristic yeah that makes a lot of sense i i i missed a very funny comment from leslie who's watching live from the earlier questions she says my socks disappear and resurface as tupperware lids that don't fit anything because that's the other thing that i i always lose lids too i don't i don't know where these where do things go it's crazy anyway we have one more question one more question that was submitted live and then we can get to i mean that was submitted in advance and then we can get any live questions if there's time this is from ryan he says dr lyle when the pandemic began i believe you said it was no more than a bad flu and things would look better by summer have you changed your position yeah i have um yeah it's certainly a lot worse than many of us thought and um i i i certainly believed that um that the receding that we saw all over europe uh in the summer so there was two couple months or more in europe where there's basically no cases so you saw all these major countries spain france italy and the uk go through a process where they they lost uh whatever it is six people for ten thousand are right about that level and um and uh essentially less than one in a thousand and then they were done and if you go look at the data on world of media you're going to see that there was nothing it was essentially they hadn't done anything different some of them were locked down some of them hadn't the lockdowns appear to be pretty well unrelated uh in those countries at least if you do draconian lockdowns uh then you can i believe all that those countries are doing is they're essentially uh it's essentially like holding a beach ball under the water uh if anybody's ever done that in a swimming pool you know that sooner or later that beach ball is coming up uh there's no there's no stopping it and so i i don't think that the lockdown strategy is gonna will in the final analysis have proved to be useful uh you see in sweden for example they are they are uh they have not locked down and they have a lower fatality rate per capita than you're going to see in the uk and spain and france and italy and the united states so why that's true is an important scientific question but the most uh in others we're not sure why they have been so successful uh but we we understand why germany's been successful because germany uh has locked down just with incredible uh uh discipline so we we understand that germany uh has not beat this thing what they've done is they've hold it they've held it they're holding the beach ball into the water okay and essentially they're holding it under there they were counting on a vaccine uh and by god the geniuses of the medical world looks like they've figured it out so a country countries like that uh will will have will show a winning hand where they they saved you know 30 or 40 000 elderly people from this being their last year so uh this what we're seeing now is interesting we're seeing a resurgence uh the case ratios that you're seeing are spectacularly high but that's not uh that's not relevant uh particularly the only thing that counts folks is how many deaths you're saying so you although you see uh headlines showing record numbers of daily cases in the united states it's very clear that five or six months ago there was two to three times as many cases per day than you're saying now okay so there's no question that that's true uh there would be no other explanation for why you could lose 2700 people in a day four months from now and today you might lose a thousand okay so the what's happening is is that the virus is uh is is not swept its way through the population as it looked like it had all through europe and it looked like it was headed that way in the united states so this fall i was very hopeful that we were about done with this thing by october and november turns out i was mistaken and many of us were it looks like it it's finding its way into more nooks and crannies into areas of the population that have not yet reached uh i don't even want to say hurt immunity because sweden who was suspected and thinking that maybe they had reached hurt immunity are seeing a lot of new cases but if you look uh so the case amount it looks like it's spectacularly escalating but if you actually look at the fatalities in sweden right now it's almost nobody so they are they are seeing five or ten people a day this is in a country that's a 30th the size of the united states so it would be the equivalent of us going from the thousand a day we're seeing now down to 100 or 150 in other words it would be virtual victory so uh the the answer is yes it's worse than than we bought um it it is it is hitting exactly the same people that we identified early but it's it's working its way into the places where it had not yet been so this is this is nasty business if you are over particularly over 70 but particularly over 80. it still remains the case that the majority of people that die of covet are over 80 years old okay that uh and the vast majority of people who die of covet are over 75 with health problems okay so uh this is with for the rest of us for for example people under 60 this is very akin to the flu in terms of its uh of its lethality uh uh with one exception being pregnant females so pregnant females this is this is nasty business for them uh but for for everybody else uh for you know 75 percent of the population this is actually not any major health threat uh that we can identify as of yet you've got pretty good evidence that that's true at this point uh we don't know about the long-term consequences of having had a covet case and whether or not there's going to be complications later in life um we wouldn't necessarily expect that that would be true what we see is that this is nasty business you know if you're over 80 and you catch covet they're say whatever it is maybe three percent chance you'll die from it uh maybe five percent that's a lot you know that's scary but keep in mind that's what it is so if you're 83 and in good health if you get coveted your odds of survival are probably 97 but those percentages of one or two or three percent is enough we've got enough people in those ages in the united states that that as it works its way through the population and there doesn't seem to be a very effective way to stop that from happening no matter how much care people have about transmission it work you know this is a tiny tiny little microscopic entity and it winds up getting everywhere it's kind of like radiation you know uh if anybody ever saw silk wood back in the day uh the movie it's like by god you know get radiation loose and you can't find it uh you can be everywhere and so that that appears to be the problem and so it eventually even places where you protect it very well it eventually finds its way there uh through some person some individual and then suddenly we get an outbreak in that area and then we're going to have some fatalities in our elderly people so uh if you're i i would be worried if i was post 70 and ill or i would be worried just generally uh if i was an agent person uh you're going to want to stay away from it keep yourself healthy keep yourself rested uh first sign of trouble make sure we aren't getting exhausted uh but but i help is on the way and my uh a friend of mine a doctor or friend of mine is uh uh well connected in in in england and uh she tells me that this they're planning to roll out the vaccine uh december 1st and they're the very first place it's going is to the nursing homes okay that's that's the very first place it's going and then after that it goes to everybody over 80 and then after that it goes to everybody over 70. so i i expect that the united states of course will follow a very similar style we're a little more wide open we don't have a national health service so we're going to have everybody in their brother that wants one is going to be getting a vaccine but we will absolutely direct tremendous attention to the elderly and when we do so i think we're going to have this thing wrapped up in relatively short order so that's that's where i think we're going and this is one of those deals where the geniuses uh microbiology may have created this thing uh and the geniuses the other geniuses of microbiology may have fixed it and i think that that's that's probably a good guess as to uh what happened with this incredibly expensive tragedy thank you so those are all the questions that were sent in and we'll get into it get to as many as we can of the live viewers i'm going to put a link to be on my mailing list if you guys uh sign up you can submit the questions in advance so this one from the live viewer her name is mavis and she says if you eat in a way that you can't sustain forever then any weight you lose will come back correct or if i lose the weight and then have chocolate and alcohol with that matter yes it will matter your cur your the first way you put it was correct so what your weight is is your weight is a biological equilibrium so think of a boat uh that's sort of resting in a very very calm lake and then i want you to think about uh them coming up and and putting big old heavy barrels of of rock on that big old barrels of rock on the boat then the boat's gonna sink right and then when we move it over the next island we take the ball uh rocks off of it it goes back up to where it was in before on the water we could see the little mark in the water that's equilibrium so your your weight even though it may look like it's changing day to day which of course it is your fat content isn't changing day to day your your body composition is at an equilibrium as long as your behavior is in equilibrium so if you're eating about the same types of foods and you're exercising about the same way you do then your body composition is essentially in an equilibrium you're a boat sitting in a very calm lake and nothing is changing now if we change something so suddenly we improve the diet dramatically we get rid of a bunch of rich food now we've taken a bunch of stuff off the boat now the boat floats at a different level okay so let's suppose we lose 30 pounds so i have somebody that has lost an amazing amount of weight a bunch of it had to have been sodium related but uh in about the last six weeks i've had somebody lose 25 pounds uh that's you know 15 of that was probably that she was on a very high sodium diet and so therefore we probably dumped 15 pounds of sodium which was a great i mean 15 pounds of water which was spectacular for her heart um but the other 10 pounds or maybe 15 could have been uh were from leaning down okay now if she goes back and eats just what she was eating before that 25 pounds is coming back okay for sure just as sure as the sun will rise so that is that is the correct issue uh that's why i have no interest in people having this attitude of essentially like a doberman they're just gonna go after something uh like weight loss and try to get there as fast as they can like no or like a greyhound like no don't be in a rush make the changes that you are willing to make forever or that you may be willing to wait make forever in other words it's like okay boy if i could be 30 pounds lighter you know i would be willing to do this that and the other in order to get there good so do this that and the other to get there see what happens and let's find out let's put six months behind that and let's see what see what takes place and uh if it turns out that you're down 30 pounds to six months then all you have to do is keep doing what you're doing that brought you there uh you don't get to go then go back now that you've lost the weight you get to stay you get to look good and get slowly fatter for a while but sooner or later you're going to put it all back that's uh if you go back to your old habits your your weight is stable because your behavior is stable your weight is simply a reflection of your of any interaction between your behavior and your genetics okay the genetics we can't change they stay the same so when your weight is changing it's changing as a result of your behavior changing and so that's how that works i remember you saying it feel fabulous that there's no really no such thing as a plateau it's really a behavioral equilibrium we must do whatever we're willing to do forever so not to eat like on a diet to lose weight and then go back to the way you're eating that's what most people do though of course it's not a waste of time absolutely it's it's great for you know weight watchers and slim fast all those people they just keep people uh spinning around in a in a in a frustration circle now we're trying to solve the problem here and give you a deep understanding uh to do something that is very difficult to do which is to actually beat the problem at its source okay so like our friend that uh i'm delighted to hear about this guy that that uh that skipped the bypass surgery that's and did it right it's like what it what a beautiful outcome uh to hear about i love to hear about those outcomes it it tells us and reaffirms for all of us that uh that if we if we change for things to change for us we have to change yep absolutely devin who's watching live from australia says until my experience at true north i didn't realize my excess weight was a result of addiction having taken control over that addiction am i prone i am prone to other addictive behaviors how do i stop the cycle um at least i'm not sure exactly what he's asking okay so in other words your food addiction is normal that's not something specific to you or your personality so essentially 100 of all people are as addicted to the modern food supply so if you have suffered from that problem that means it is situation normal okay it is an exceedingly unusual and rare individual that's diet is not made up of concocted you know mediocre food so uh that so now i guess that i'm not sure if the second question is essentially that he's suggesting that he's gonna sub because in other words he's starting out by saying gee don't i have an addictive personality i was addicted to food if we pull the food addiction away isn't it gonna sprout up over here in cigarettes and alcohol now okay you're you are if you were you're not going to cause one addiction from getting rid of another one now that that isn't how it works the um your you you may in other words the if you are if you are an individual you don't solve for example let's suppose we have a an alcoholic that's eating healthy uh what we don't say is okay i'll tell you what you're gonna do start eating crap so that you can give up the alcohol so you can get your dopamine that way from eating chocolate bars that isn't going to work okay so the um no the the problems that we have are essentially independent so you've got a if you have a susceptibility to alcohol you have a susceptibility to alcohol if you have a susceptibility to cigarettes you've got acceptability to cigarettes the uh if you have a susceptibility to gambling you have the susceptibility to gambling uh the the food susceptibility is widespread and natural um and so just about everybody is going to be in that trap to some degree or another if you get out of that trap you are not more susceptible to other addictions at all okay they are they are independent phenomena and the bummer is is that it's not going to necessarily help you with one of those so you can be uh if you've got a problem with with alcohol for example getting your eating clean is is not any any you know isn't it isn't the magic key to getting sober um it's not going to hurt uh but it's not going to be some magical big help that we think it might be it won't the big problem is we have to face down all the little angles and issues that come with alcohol and that's a complicated matrix somebody's asking if you're familiar with dr judd brewer's work on addiction no okay and then somebody's asking who is your favorite evolutionary psychologist oh i don't have a favorite they uh there's there's seven or eight there's half a dozen that are just beyond brilliant so uh john chibi and lita cosmetics are the original great geniuses of the field um jeffrey miller is one of the most exciting innovative thinkers in the field the uh stephen pinker is a is a polymathic a brilliant human being that that uh who's who's thinking in the blank slate is just literally odd me with uh a mind that that diverse and wide and uh and david buss is uh probably the most prolific relentless researcher in in the field uh and has produced more data and support has filled in more blanks in the field than any other single researcher so uh and there are there are other great minds but those are those are the ones that lead out to me and i can't forget people that aren't psychologists all of those people are formerly phd's and professors in psychology there are others who were extraordinarily important in the field richard dawkins edwardo wilson uh and william hamilton these are these are deep theoretical biologists and their work laid the foundation for the birth of evolutionary psychology robert trivers as well well you're our favorite and people are saying i love doug just so you know um eve says i am going sugar free for the umpteenth time i am four days into this and i'm finding that i'm getting extremely tired i don't remember experiencing this on previous attempts to kick sugar do you have any theories about why i'm getting exhausted nope nope just can't all right you're probably skipping some sleep thinking about the sugar who knows but uh no it's not uh it's not a result of any kind of sugar withdrawal process uh your all you have to do is make sure you're getting adequate calories and you probably are and if you're not you will because the hunger drive will tell you okay i don't know if this question is is one you can answer because i try to explain to people you're not a medical doctor although you definitely know a lot that jill says do you have any remedies for depression menopausal depression um uh not really i think that there there can be some pretty uh profound mood shifts that are that are entirely um let me let me explain what it is that i'm going to try to say there are uh those those kinds of changes can be can have things go along with them like mood volatility and frustration tolerance that those things can uh those aren't part of natural design those are just consequences of what's going on with the natural design of the organism so that's a sorry that's a pain in the neck and so you can try to ease that by by eating foods that are high in natural estrogens and uh and that can sometimes soothe over some of those processes other than that uh sleep exercise eat healthy and uh and be willing to uh get a little distance from people close to you when you're when you're particularly irritable that just at least for an hour nancy says do you have any idea how to get rid of ringing in the ears didn't you once say water fasting helped someone that you knew it did and so that is a if you have a a really irritating uh tinnitus that that i would consider that if you can afford it and it's reasonable for you and you're willing to face it uh i would i would consider the possibility of doing a you know relatively short relatively short i mean something like what might look like five to seven day water fast i'd do it under supervision um and just see what happens so if it's sufficiently frustrating for you you might want to give that a try uh we've seen that be successful more than once great no idea why louise says dr lyle la last you were you you were okay and this is you were i don't understand the way you're writing this but she's saying i guess you defined a narcissist as a very disagreeable person how do you define a bipolar person from an evolutionary psychology perspective yeah um what what you're looking at there is um suites of genes uh what so let me sort of describe personality and then we'll quickly move to bipolar disorder schizophrenia what's what are what are known as uh um so let me let me sort of cleave let me tell you about the history of psychology super briefly so in the history of psychology we sort of thought of there being two types of psychological problems one type of psychological problems uh we call personality problems and another type of problems we would call like major mental illness so we sort of thought that something as wacky uh as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder was some kind of bizarre brain dysfunction maybe a disease uh genetic defect something of that nature and we thought of personality problems as uh you know like dependent personality or antisocial personality or or borderline personality we thought of this as things that could have happened in the normal course of personality development that were difficult and traumatic and then this was a psychodynamic response to those things so if you grew up in a nice loving supportive home uh then you were unlikely to have any of those problems because you developed normal moral structure so you're not going to be an anti-social and you developed normal good boundaries with your mother because she didn't you know want you to sleep with her in her bed till you're 14 and so you develop nice boundaries and so therefore you didn't you didn't you weren't a dependent or a borderline etc etc so that was sort of the notion well it turns out all of that thinking is wrong amazingly enough you could just you just take a match to the underlying thinking of the dsm so the way to properly think of this is that all of these things that you're witnessing are genetic in origin and the the something like a bipolar disorder or a schizophrenia is not a specific genetic defect because it's not one gene or two genes or three little genes where something went wrong it's an entire host of genes by the thousands and the way your mind is put together is it's put together by it's it's the most complicated soup that you can imagine imagine the ingredients of a soup where there are ten thousand different ingredients okay think about that it's like okay in order to make that soup a very specific pea soup you literally to get exactly this combination of flavor it takes 10 000 different ingredients to do it now you can imagine that if you take out one of those ingredients it's not going to make much difference and if you take out seven of those ingredients it's not going to make much difference and in fact if you took out 200 of those ingredients it's not going to make much difference if you change 200 of those ingredients to something very very similar it's going to be extremely similar soup okay now so that is what the brain is it's soup made out of 10 thousand different ingredients it's going to turn out that uh some people that are both either schizophrenic or bipolar they have a lot of of genes that are they have probably 2 000 of genes that you don't have that their genes are what they use the way genes work is they use very very similar proteins to do to do a task so the reason why somebody has so i don't know uh oh god i don't know uh let me think of something the that they grow their nails longer than you or quicker than you is because their genes are slightly different than your jeans as a result of that or a great example is ear wax some people have dry earwax some people have wet that's a genetic difference between people both of them work okay so when you start looking at what causes a person to be bipolar it isn't one gene and two genes of three genes it's a whole host of thousands of genes and they have just enough of them that they're we're gonna what they're gonna have some characteristics of their personality that are gonna make them very open in some ways and very unstable so uh and and so as a result at times when they are very unstable their thinking can be wild it can be damn it can be psychotic can be not touched with reality usually that's not true usually they're just very open and very excited extremely optimistic and very energized and unstable emotionally okay now you might say well okay so you know so can you be like right on the line and be almost bipolar and then one more gene happens and it tips you over and then you've got this disease now you're just on a velcro okay so you know at what point you know there there's some point where you say that a man is six feet tall but is he tall and somebody else short who's 5 11 and 15 16. the answer is no the guy that's 5 11 and 15 16 is essentially as tall as the guy that's six foot there's a sixteenth of an inch difference between those two people you'd look at them you couldn't even tell who which was the taller which was the shorter so if you get to be sufficiently unstable uh you will go through occasional periods rare in life for people to be diagnosed with bipolar well you will go through a period of of instability uh and and usually some fluoride you know sometimes in a in a major episode downright wacky thinking it's usually short-term so that that process might last for two or three weeks uh and in many many cases if they were never medicated you would never see that again and it turns out that when you start medicating that damage gets done to the system and then makes that more problematic in the future apparently so this is the the story of anatomy of an epidemic that if anybody has anybody close to them that suffers uh from quite a major mental illness which would be uh bipolar disorder or schizophrenia the uh understand that you know this isn't a disease this is a uh this is of the 10 000 ingredients they got enough of those ingredients that they're that they're over here sharing characteristics with people that we might diagnose with that in other words uh if it would require a thing to to at six foot five we start calling somebody a giant and so the person you're thinking of might be six four and a half okay and somebody's calling them giant uh or they might be six five and a half and they're being called giant but that's what it means to carry one of those diagnoses so this is why the history of diagnosis in psychology and psychiatry has been a real fiasco uh because i i i have to tell you i've been there i was a certified by the national institute of health to help with a major clinical trial at the university of texas and i had to undergo training in order to make me a quote reliable diagnostician okay and it turns out it's unreliable as hell okay so you have six experts in a room and they're quietly voting on is that a schizoid or is that a schizophreniform disorder or is that a schizophrenia or is that a brief reactive psychosis or is that it's like oh for crying out loud you got six different doctors all experts six different diagnoses okay so that tells you that the whole concept of categories is out the window and it turns out that what what is really is is gene individual gene differences and if you have enough height genes we call you tall but what does that really mean it just means that you're tall relative the population if we call you schizophrenic it means that you are that you are bizarrely open in your thinking you will entertain uh believe me there's a lot of people in hollywood including aj that have a lot of open thinking okay and they they think a lot of sort of wildly creative implausible things they're not crazy okay but guess what they might have a third cousin that's got a diagnosis because that third cousin got just 400 more of those kind of open wacky genes and it turns out that they go through periods where they're come not not right in other words they're thinking things that are completely wrong i have dealt with many people with major mental illness literally hundreds of them in my career uh many of them unmedicated many of them very functional and yet they've got some odd thinking in their head and they meet criteria for diagnosis of major mental illness they have some functional problems because some of the wacky ideas that they think but they can be very effective i've met a professional people uh with with graduate degrees that carry these diagnoses and are carrying around some strange thinking in their head and you'd never know it's so i hope that's a useful explanation that was great people by the way if you wanted to get a closer look at this explanation and to understand more fully what it is that i'm trying to explain uh you can read the the masterwork blueprint uh by robert plummen uh robert ploman is the pope uh personality he's the he is the the deepest and and wisest uh researcher and thinker that we have now having written his opus in his 70s uh the book is blueprint and it will tell the story of exactly that question yeah i got i got it on audible i'm listening to it it's not easy but it's it but it's rich all right well people are just thanking you saying you're an amazing teacher lots of questions now on adhd and whether we should they should take prozac but hopefully you'll come back next month and answer some of these questions anatomy of an epidemic read that first before you ever give anything like that to a child great thank you so much dr lyle all right thanks aj thanks for having me my pleasure thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live as you know we're late all week meaning we're doing the broadcast not at the usual 11 a.m pacific time because of the gi health summit which runs through november 22nd but our guest tomorrow at 2 p.m pacific time is dr pon steel and he will be giving a lecture on diabetes take care everyone and aloha
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist