Kimberly Snyder (00:00:00):
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast, the weekly podcast where Dr. G. gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.
Dr. Gundry (00:00:13):
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Kimberly Snyder (00:01:39):
Welcome to the feel-good podcast with Kimberly Snyder. My goal is to help you develop a holistic lifestyle based on our four cornerstone philosophy; food, body, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth. This holistic approach will help you feel good, which I define as being connected to your most authentic highest self. And this is the place from which your energy, confidence, creativity, true power, and true beauty will start to explode.
Every week, we provide you with interviews from top experts in their field, or a solo cast from yours truly, to support you in living your most beautiful, healthy, and joyful life. I’m your host, Kimberly Snyder, founder of Solluna, York Times best-selling author and holistic wellness, nutrition, and meditation teacher. Let’s get started.
Dr. Gundry (00:02:34):
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. So, does healthy look different during the summer than, say the fall, winter, or spring? Well, according to my guests today, the answer is yes. And I got to admit, I agree with him. So stay tuned on that. And by making tweaks to your diet and routine, based on the time of year, you might able to become more in tune with your body and enjoy better health as a result.
So in a moment, I’m going to be speaking with the acclaimed health expert, Dallas Hartwig. And you probably recognize that last name. Dallas is the co-founder of the Whole30, a popular diet program that stresses eating whole foods. In his newest book, The Four Seasons Solution, he shares why and how to bring your body into harmony with your surroundings. Today, we’ll talk about how to sync up with your environment and feel like the best, most healthy version of yourself. Dallas, welcome to the program.
Dallas Hartwig (00:03:41):
Thank you so much for having me.
Dr. Gundry (00:03:42):
So you’ve become an authority on healthy, balanced living. Can you tell me what attracted you to this area in the first place?
Dallas Hartwig (00:03:53):
Sure. It was certainly by no genius plan. There was no master scheme at the beginning of my life or in university or anything. It was more a function of personal experience in the sense that I grew up in a family where my parents always valued health and taking care of our bodies. And then also professional background. My undergraduate degree is anatomy and physiology. I went on to grad school for physical therapy, always kind of cared about the rehabilitative aspects of things, as well as the athletic performance side of things.
And so it has always sort of woven into my structure all the way along. And back in 2006 and 2007 when I started doing more reading on nutrition specifically, and then ultimately what became a seminar series and three books, I started writing and speaking more on nutrition because I recognize its foundational impact on our quality of life. But it was sort of… I sort of described myself as an accidental author more than anything.
Dr. Gundry (00:04:54):
Were you the chef and cook of the dynamic duo?
Dallas Hartwig (00:05:04):
I think we were probably fairly equally matched in that realm. For the first Whole30 book, we got a friend of ours, Richard Bradford, actually, create all new recipes. So he was the actual chef, but both Melissa and I really enjoyed cooking as well.
Dr. Gundry (00:05:19):
So you would dirty your hands in the kitchen?
Dallas Hartwig (00:05:24):
For sure. Yeah. I was very fortunate to grow up in a family that my mom always experimented with different kinds of cooking and different ingredients. And was very much into whole foods. And I spent a good portion of my childhood as a vegetarian. And we had a huge vegetable garden. We preserved a lot of our own food. So food and where it came from and what to do with it has always been near and dear for me.
Dr. Gundry (00:05:48):
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, my mother was the cook in the family. And actually at a young age, I was in the kitchen cooking with her from day one. My father, just as a hilarious story, could not cook, didn’t need to because my mother was so good at it. But one of the funny stories my mother was babysitting our young children in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and my parents at that time lived in Omaha. And she left my father some Kraft Macaroni and Cheese boxes to cook. And the first night he called her and he says, “There’s something terribly wrong. This is like macaroni and cheese soup. It’s just pure water.” And she said, “You didn’t drain the water, you moron? So that’s my father sum total of experience in cooking and he killed it
Dallas Hartwig (00:06:44):
Fare enough. It seems like he had a good teammate then.
Dr. Gundry (00:06:50):
So what inspired you to write The Four Seasons Solution which is definitely different than where you’ve been before with your books?
Dallas Hartwig (00:07:01):
For sure. It’s the same, but different. It’s different in the sense that it’s not a function or a focus primarily on food, although it does address that. I describe The Four Seasons Solution as the prequel to, It Starts With Food, to my first book. I think it’s kind of evident that the title, It Starts With Food, is kind of a good statement about the centrality and the influence of nutrition on our overall health. But it’s just the starting point. It’s just one foundational piece.
And so my attempts with The Four Seasons Solution is to give people a larger perspective, a more integrated perspective, a more holistic approach to putting different lifestyle components. And in the book, I detail about food, about movement, about sleep, but not quite just sleep, more about the light, dark cycle, more broadly, and about connection. And we often think about connection as connection to other people, but it’s also connection to ourselves, connection to a place, a sense of belonging and a connection to the earth. And then also a connection to a sense of purpose, something greater than ourselves.
So I put all those pieces together into a system to give people an opportunity to put foundational health behaviors into place in a way that works, in a way that’s sane, and that doesn’t require them to spend their entire bandwidth of their sort of disposable time, so to speak, on getting progressively more granular with health and lifestyle choices, because I think that really ultimately erodes the other opportunities to have more interesting, diverse, rich, human experiences.
Dr. Gundry (00:08:46):
This book talks all about how your behaviors should change depending upon the time of the year. We become so disconnected and kind of above our environment and we control everything. Help us walk back and try to convince me and my listeners, you don’t have to convince me, why it’s so important to be in tune with circadian rhythms time of year?
Dallas Hartwig (00:09:20):
Sure.
Dr. Gundry (00:09:20):
Go ahead.
Dallas Hartwig (00:09:22):
Yeah, I think there’s a fundamental idea here called evolutionary mismatch. And really, the idea there is that the world that we evolved in, for the vast majority of human history, is the world that our current bodies are the majority of our current genetic makeup expects and is most adapted to. And of course, evolution is an ongoing process and we have ongoing adaptations to a more modern environment, but it happens relatively slowly relative to the short span of time since the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, and then later the sort of technological and digital ages.
So we found ourselves in a world that looks very much unlike what our bodies are adapted for. And in the realm of food, it’s quite obvious. When you go into the corner store and you see the food packaged in foil packets, that it has an indefinite shelf life that is in fluorescent colors, it’s quite easy to understand that that is not the food we are well adapted to nourish us and to kind of live an optimal life on.
And the principle that is kind of… I can extrapolate that principle to a larger picture and say the entire modern world is constructed in a very different way than the natural world. It is binary, right? The light switches on, the light switches off. We are at work, we are off work. We are awake, we are asleep. And it has become very digitized and binary. And that is not the way biology works. When we think about the amount of light that’s present outside throughout the course of the day, it is a gradual moving from very dark to a little bit lighter, to a little bit lighter, to lighter, lighter, lighter, and then a gradual fade away.
And all of our systems are like that. So whether we’re talking about digestive function, or detoxification, or the synthesis of neurotransmitters, or any of those things, they all happen in sort of progressively gradated ways rather than binary ways. And the mistake we’ve made in the modern world is trying to fit a very dynamic oscillating organism into a very linear and binary world. And it simply doesn’t work. We are not computerized machines.
And my argument that central in the book is that in introducing, or re-introducing rather, some of those oscillations into our everyday lives, we are then able to undo some of the harmful evolutionary we’ve created with this modern world. So that looks like addressing our movement patterns, what we need, when we eat. It looks at addressing the light and dark cycles. It looks at addressing even the way that we connect with other people or are more withdrawn introspective. And I think that’s a piece that isn’t discussed enough in the world right now.
Dr. Gundry (00:12:13):
So let’s take me through… Give me something that I can change that I have control over in this crazy environment. Okay. It’s spring for most of us, although, I guess, there’s snow some places. You’re in Salt Lake City still, snow on the mountains, I know.
Dallas Hartwig (00:12:39):
For sure.
Dr. Gundry (00:12:40):
So give me some changes in spring that you talk about in the book and that we’re not doing, perhaps?
Dallas Hartwig (00:12:47):
Right. I’ll kind of describe what the sensation of spring is like in general. And we’re already very familiar with it. It’s probably the most palpable of the seasons. It is excitement, and energy, and anticipation. It is spontaneous activity, whether that is cleaning out the garage, or putting the garden in, or doing work on the yard, or going for a run that you haven’t done in months. Starting a new exercise program, starting a new hobby. It’s the initiation.
And so much of that is driven by the hormone rather the neurotransmitter dopamine. It’s the neurotransmitter of motivation and drawing us towards new things and exploration and novelty. And that’s what spring is all about. So that energy of spring carries over into, let’s talk about movement. Over the course of a deep, dark, cold winter, we may have had the downturn in mood and motivation. We have maybe have not exercised as often, or maybe we’ve simply done it in shorter, more intense bursts. Something like downhill skiing. Something like going to the gym and doing weight training.
But we are less likely to be outside for eight hours doing a long snow shoe or a long bike ride because in most places with temporary climates, that’s just simply less agreeable from a physical activity standpoint. So spring is the emergence out of the semi-hibernated state of winter. And it’s such such an energizing experience. And I think most people think of spring as like, it’s fun, it’s new, it’s exciting. And spring is a really fun season to be in.
The great thing about spring also is that the food availability, again, in places that have different seasons really changes, right? So in the winter time, if we’re eating locally and seasonally, we’re doing a lot of meat and fat and easily-preserved root vegetables and squashes and those types of things. But in the spring, we’ve got this whole new crop of early-spring greens and perhaps strawberries, and there’s things that are coming up fairly early. And so we have new opportunities for varied foods there as well.
And one of the sort of simple heuristics I write into the book about food is, “Eat the foods that are available locally and seasonally in your area. And if you move to a different place, that means you eat different foods.” And that is in part because I love simple heuristics and simple ways of kind of thinking about this stuff. But also, it’s simple, but it’s also perfectly in line with what our bodies would expect when we are more in sync with our local light and dark cycles as well. Right? None of these things exist in isolation.
So in the springtime, it also means we might start getting up a little bit earlier, we might start staying up a little bit later, although asterisk there depends on how late we’ve been staying up in the wintertime anyway. So a lot of the success of each successive phase or each success of season depends on how much we sort of immersed ourselves in the preceding season from a hormonal standpoint, from a recovery standpoint, because I think it’s easy to imagine not having that spontaneous energy of spring if we run ourselves ragged all winter, and stayed up late, and not gotten enough sleep, and been under chronic stress, and eaten an inflammatory low-nutrient diet, et cetera. We’re not going to emerge into spring feeling spontaneously energetic.
And all of those things are true for each of the seasons. So there’s sort of a sequence that needs to be laid out there. And spring just happens to be the season that we’re in right now for the Northern Hemisphere. And it’s the most fun, but it’s also only part of the story.
Dr. Gundry (00:16:38):
You mentioned hibernation, so we’re just coming out of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and you talked about, for instance, I have many friends in Seattle and Portland who consume eight cups of coffee a day in the winter because they’re so depressed and it’s gray. I trained in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the University of Michigan. And quite frankly, it is gray for nine months out of the year.
Dallas Hartwig (00:17:15):
For sure.
Dr. Gundry (00:17:17):
So let’s back up into winter. Do we fight against that kind of, we really need to hibernate, we really need to shorten our days? Or do we embrace that? And if we embrace it, how do we do that?
Dallas Hartwig (00:17:32):
Well, that’s the challenge, right? Because winter is the sort of archetype or the symbolic season that is most at odds with our modern world. So I talk about the idea of a chronic summer in the book. And I use the word chronic to designate the sort of long-term nature of it, but I also use it because chronic summer is directly connected with chronic disease. So there is that direct tie in there because the features of summer, of excessive stress, long days, short nights, under recovery, effectively lack of adequate sleep and recovery, a relatively high carbohydrate and perhaps lower nutrient food supply. Again, sort of asterisk, depending on which food choices you’re making. And huge amounts of physical activity emphasizing duration rather than intensity. And so the sort of that component there.
And in the winter time, it’s the opposite of that. And that’s really hard to do when we have a work or school schedules that tell us to be up at a certain time to be at the office a certain time. So the fixed scheduling of the modern world is one of the biggest problems when it comes into integrating some of my recommendations, because there’s only so much flexibility that a lot of us have.
So to your point, conceptually, I think I would say that the best way to implement my recommendations here is to make as many changes as you can to be as in sync and lined up with a current season as it is outside in your natural environment as practically possible. And that’s going to be very personal. So for some people, it’s going to be, if they are self-employed with a flexible schedule and they work from home, they will sleep in a lot later in the winter and start dimming the lights and getting ready for bed a lot earlier in the winter. But for other people who have less flexibility in that particular arena, what it underscores is the importance of really getting on track with the things you can control and the things you can change.
So, ideally, yes, we go into a down cycle of energy in a sort of withdrawn restorative state in the winter that looks a little bit like a hibernation. And in some cases, I think that there’s even a certain aspect of a mildly depressive feature of winter behavior that’s actually physical, actually normal, that does prompt us to withdraw and rest and heal from the chronic stress of summertime.
And so it’s no wonder then that so many of us have that same lethargic depressive kind of symptom, because really, what our bodies are saying is you need some restorative time to recover from your chronic stress. So that can be applied to any of the seasons, because for most of us, we have lived so far out of sync with any of the natural seasons that we need to really do a therapeutic intervention. And it’s sort of an offset for that chronic imbalance.
Dr. Gundry (00:20:32):
So, I think you’ve alluded to this, where does control of our lighting factor into this? Because it is partially under our control.
Dallas Hartwig (00:20:46):
Absolutely. It’s under our control, fortunately. Again, exceptions to this would be people who are on call or who do shift work. But for most of us, it’s largely within our control. And that’s a really beautiful thing because the presence of bright light, particularly the blue wavelengths, really has a significant alerting effect to our neurophysiology.
I view it simply as blue light. Meaning either light that’s actually blue or bright white kind of cool temperature light that contains a lot of those blue wavelengths. That’s the message to our brains, that it is blue sky, midday, we should be alert, we should be ready to go, there is a potential threat, we need to kind of be alert to what’s around us. And studies show that bright lights contain the blue wave links have a comparable alerting effect to a small amount of caffeine.
So there is this very alerting awakening effect there. And we can really use that to our advantage, but I think more importantly, we can use the removal of that bright light, especially that blue light at times when it doesn’t belong, also to our advantage. So that looks like in the winter, specifically, because it’s getting dark so much earlier. It looks like dimming the lights significantly and staying away from sources of blue light.
And I’m very glad to see that there’s a lot of conversation now around healthy sleep habits, around sleep hygiene, around avoiding blue light in the hours before bed, et cetera. And that’s really important. So I underscore the importance of all of that. And, I think there’s a little more to it than just avoiding blue light. And here’s why.
What the research seems to show is that there’s a comparable influence on our circadian rhythms, of the presence of bright, natural light early in the day in a way to anchor and synchronize all of our different body systems. That has just as much, if not more impact on our circadian biology than the inappropriate presence of blue light after dark. So said another way, getting enough natural light early in the day is really important and perhaps even more important than avoiding blue light in the evenings.
And so I’d like to kind of shift the conversation a little bit around light instead of saying, okay, I can just put on these blue-blocking glasses and continue watching Netflix at 10:00 PM right before I fall into bed. I think that’s a little bit missing the point. Because it’s not just the blue light and the way it affects our physiology, but there’s also the idea that if we are on our computers answering work emails, or watching a psychological thriller on Netflix, there’s also a lot of other psycho-emotional stimuli that are going on there that can also bring up our cortisol levels, blunt the release of melatonin, and basically make it difficult for us to ease into that deep restorative sleep mode.
So the great thing about light is that we can, to your point, largely control it. And I think that’s a really wonderful thing, because we can both add in natural light with five or 10 or 15 minutes of faces in the sun. Not staring at the sun, obviously, but in the bright, natural light. Even if it’s overcast outside, it still dwarfs the amount of light we would get inside even with bright artificial light.
And in the book, I write about the measurement of brightness, the measurement of light there in Lux. And if we are outside on a cloudy day, it’s going to be around 10,000 Lux, plus or minus. And to give you a sense of scale, if we are inside in a department store or a grocery store that feels really brightly lit, the amount of light there’s only about 400 or 500 Lux. So it’s a tiny fraction of the actual amount of light that we would get if we are outside, even on an overcast day. So people will say, “But it’s not that sunny in Ann Arbor.” And I say, “It’s okay, 10 minutes of being outside, even an overcast day, really helps to anchor and synchronize your circadian rhythms, even more than bright light in an artificial sense. Which is surprising to a lot of people and was to me when I first came upon this research.
Dr. Gundry (00:25:08):
Hmm. So, an interesting anecdote. When I moved to California years ago, and particularly in the Southern California area, I would go back to the University of Michigan or spent a lot of time over in Europe, particularly in the winter lecturing and attending conferences and operating in numerous hospitals. And I was struck that something I hadn’t ever noticed that the University of Michigan hospital was dim compared to what I was used to in Southern California. And the same way it was in Europe, I’m going, “Why don’t they have any bright lights? What’s the deal?”
Well, of course, in the winter in Southern California, particularly in Palm Springs, it’s pretty bright. And our hospital was very bright, and it never occurred to me until I went back to winter climbs that people, whether they knew it or not, and this was fairly universal, had adjusted their light level down for winter. And it turns out was probably a really good idea.
Dallas Hartwig (00:26:16):
I think so. I think so. I think the thing that we sometimes miss the opportunity to do is to introduce more oscillation across the course of our day. So in the book I talk about this idea of dark days and bright nights. Sort of an inversion of what the natural light pattern would be. Because when we’re inside, even in a brightly-lit hospital, it might… Unless there’s enormous huge windows and tons of skylights, it’s still only going to be several hundred Lux as compared to up to 100,000 Lux at midday, full sun on a clear day.
So again, it feels bright when we’re inside, but the amount of light we’re actually getting is still quite small. So I do encourage people to really make sure they get some time in natural light every single day. Ideally within an hour of waking to really coordinate those circadian clocks, because, we are of course familiar with the concept of jet lag, of changing our circadian rhythms by some number of hours by flying to a different time zone to a different part of the earth.
But really, that’s what happens if we have either a lack of bright, natural light to anchor our circadian rhythms, to synchronize all of our body systems, or if we have different going to bed and different wake times at different days of the week. We’re effectively experiencing jet lag all the time and kind of an ongoing basis. So that circadian rhythm disruption is increasingly recognized as a risk for all manner of chronic disease, certainly cardiovascular disease and many others.
Dr. Gundry (00:27:44):
So what about, why don’t I just buy a full spectrum of light bulb and stare at it for 15 minutes in the morning? Will that work?
Dallas Hartwig (00:27:58):
It will help. It will help. And that’s actually one of the recommendations I make to people who live in urban environments where going outside, still because of tall buildings, still doesn’t give them direct access to the sun. Or for people who, for work or school or childcare reasons, have to wake way before the sun actually rises, particularly in the winter time. So yeah, a full spectrum light bulb that includes those blue lights and LEDs are a great option here.
You can get what’s basically a little light box often used to treat seasonal effective disorder. And you can get those at about as bright as about 10,000 Lux. So you’re getting pretty much what you would get outside on a cloudy day. And you can use that for 10 or 15 minutes to synchronize your circadian rhythms. And that can be putting on your makeup in the morning, or reading a book, or drinking your coffee, or whatever. That’s good. It’s acceptable to good. It’s not great because it’s not as bright as it could be if it was full sun outside. And, I think also, it’s a little bit like the blue-blocking glasses where, yes, it’s helpful, but it’s only kind of part of that equation.
Because I think if you can imagine the difference between sitting in front of a bright light that’s 12 inches from your face for 10 or 15 minutes in the morning, no matter what you’re doing inside in getting ready for your day, it’s a very different experience than stepping outside, sitting in a chair or walking for 10 minutes, in bright natural light while breathing fresh air and moving your body. Even if it’s in a very casual way, it’s a very different organism-level experience.
So yes, those are those kinds of tools are really helpful on it. I frequently recommend when we can’t control all of the factors, when there’s just simply no way to experience the more natural version, but if we can get to the place where we’re having a little bit of movement, a little bit of fresh air, a little bit of exposure to green spaces or blue spaces, kind of a little bit of a national environment, even if it’s just a small garden outside or a lawn at the city park, that definitely has a regulating effect on our stress levels in ways that sitting in front of a light box simply wouldn’t have.
So in general, the principal, the heuristic here continues to be the closer we can get to our truly natural environments, the better off we’re going to be, broadly speaking.
Dr. Gundry (00:30:23):
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So forest bathing, you kind of alluded to that. Come on. Is that a real thing or… ?
Dallas Hartwig (00:34:06):
It is a real thing. It’s not a thing that we’re very familiar with in North America, but other cultures, particularly in Japan, the idea of immersing ourselves into a very calming restorative natural environment has profound effects on our physiology, particularly of our nervous system. And the research is quite robust on the way that being in that kind of environment can settle, and ground, and balance our nervous systems reactivity.
So said another way, said the opposite, because I’ll remind listeners that the spending time in the forest or in any natural environment is effectively our organism level, our biological baseline. So even though it seems like a kind of a stretch or a weird thing to go and do, that’s actually our baseline. That’s what our bodies expect. And in the modern world, of course we’ve created an entirely different scenario.
So going back to the place where we are spending time in quietude, in stillness, perhaps alone, not necessarily, but perhaps alone, is a very healing, calming, stabilizing experience. And can really help us manage the chronic stress of the fast-paced, urbanized, digitized modern world. So it’s in the same way as eating an ancestrally-informed or sort of paleo type or evolutionary type diet, spending time in the national environment is profoundly healing. And the more I can do with it, and the more people can do with it in their own lives, the better off they’re going to be.
Dr. Gundry (00:35:45):
What does the dense city dweller do in those circumstances?
Dallas Hartwig (00:35:50):
That’s a good question. Because, again, a lot of the answers to these questions are damage control answers. There’s not a perfect answer, but we’ll get this closest we can. So in a very urbanized environment, a lot of it looks like getting up to city parks when you can, it looks like getting your feet in the grass, sitting… Even in a really busy place like New York City, there are parks and trees and areas that you can do that. There are flower beds. There are sort of mini-oasis of this experience. And really focusing on that part of it, I think can be more impactful and more restorative than we actually imagine.
One of the other things that’s interesting is that even looking at pictures of beautiful natural spaces can have a lesser degree of calming, soothing restorative experiences to it. So if you can’t actually get anywhere near plants, trees, water, that kind of thing, even looking at a coffee table book of beautiful photographs of natural environments, surprisingly, it sounds very trite and quaint and almost like a throwaway recommendation, but it can actually be really helpful.
And then when you can, on weekends, on vacations, really prioritize getting into those natural environments. Because, again, many of us have real restrictions in the things we can and can’t do. And so for things that we can’t easily do on an everyday basis, when we can on times when we have full control, really making sure that we prioritize those healing experiences.
Dr. Gundry (00:37:36):
Okay. We talked about light, we talked about outside. How should you… And you talked about this when you started, how should our food choices change with the season?
Dallas Hartwig (00:37:49):
Yeah. I’m actually really curious to hear your perspective on this because I’m certainly familiar with your work as well. The short heuristic is, eat the foods that are locally, seasonally available in your area. My general recommendations on food look like some omnivorous mix of meat, seafood, and eggs, wide range of nutrient dense whole, plant foods like vegetables and fruit and nuts and seeds. And the inclusion of large amounts of whole unprocessed non-natural fat sources, whether it’s from animals, or plants, or both.
So that can change across the course of the season. And what I find most interesting about the nutritional aspect of this paradigm is that it partly explains a lot of the very confusing and conflicting nutritional research. Because if you can delve into the research, you can find fairly good research on a Mediterranean diet, on paleo diet, on low-carb, high-fat, on a plant-based or vegan or vegetarian approaches, on a ketogenic approach.
And so there’s this real confusion amongst I think the kind of the average person. They’re like, “I don’t know which one of the things is true. This doctor says one thing, this doctor says something else, this nutritionists says something else.” And I think if we think about the amazing adaptations, the amazing versatility of the human organism, we can recognize that we are able to physiologically, metabolically adapt to a wide range of different nutritional inputs.
So if I could just structure this across the course of the seasons, a Mediterranean diet that is rich in things like poultry, or seafood, or eggs, and lots of vegetables and healthy fat sources, might look a lot like a springtime kind of diet. What’s available in the spring. A plant-based or vegetarian approach that is really rich in a wide range of seasonally-available plants both vegetables, and fruit with less emphasis on fat and protein, might look like a summertime diet.
The fall might look like a paleo type or low-carb, high-fat, a little more emphasis on protein and fat, a little less emphasis on fresh greens. And that might look like a fall diet. And then a really carb-restricted or even ketogenic diet might look like the winter because there’s just not the same availability of fresh plant matter, especially carbohydrate-rich fruits.
So if you map things out that way, what you see is that there’s the opportunity for adaptation across the course of the season so that we can get the insulin-sensitizing effects of many of these different approaches. We can get the anti-inflammatory effects. We also don’t get stuck eating the same foods over and over and over. So this sort of a food cycling component to it there.
And we also have the opportunity to notice for ourselves, with cyclical experimentation, what approaches work best for us. And I’ll harken back to my work with the Whole30. Ultimately, the Whole30 is a short-term 30-day experiment on what foods work well for you. And we can continue to do that across the course of many seasons so we continue to learn more and more and more about our own individual immunological sensitivities and metabolic preferences.
So I think there’s an opportunity for us in the food realm to shift our dietary approaches. On one end, it’s incredibly simple, eat what’s available locally for you. On the other end, it can look very contrived and structured. And I’m going to do a ketogenic approach in the winter, and I’m going to do a plant-based lower fat approach in the summer. But really it’s all the same story. What’s underneath that is really all the same story. And I think there’s a way to think about food that is less complicated than many of us really do.
Dr. Gundry (00:41:57):
No, I think that’s a good description. I’ve tried to make people cycle their diets. I think this is now my 18th year of, from January through June during the week, I don’t eat any breakfast, I don’t eat lunch, and I eat all my calories in a two-hour window between six and eight o’clock at night. And so far… so I’m 18 years into that now. Why do I do such a stupid thing?
Well, number one, my research as an undergraduate at Yale was human evolutionary and social biology. And how do you take a great ape manipulate its food supply and manipulate its environment and get a human? So one of the things, great apes only gain weight in the summer. And they actually only fruit in the summer cause that’s when it’s available. And they gain about eight to 10 pounds. For instance, female orangutans don’t come into heat until they’ve gain eight pounds from eating fruit.
And most hibernating animals eat lots of carbohydrates or actually lots of protein. Bears will eat huge amounts of protein from salmon and carbohydrates from berries, and they become insulin-resistant so that they will tore fat. And then they don’t eat for five months. And look at modern hunter-gatherers like the Hadza, they follow a very cyclically eating pattern. And the really cool thing is their gut microbiome changes like a 180 between seasons. And I think that we were or designed to cyclically change our gut microbiome, literally totally changed the species.
And that communication of those different species with the organism they live in us, I talked about it in The Longevity Paradox, I think is paramount to long-term health. And as I talk about in my next book, The Energy Paradox, people are going to be blown away by the effect our microbiome have on our energy production. It is actually the scary how much dependence we have at every level on the health of our microbiome.
So yeah, I agree with you. We have different approaches. I’ve certainly in my practice… 70% of my practice is now auto-immune disease. I’ve certainly become wary of the effect of lectins on the average American whose gut microbiome has been decimated our protective ability. There’s a recent new paper that shows you can actually put in some really good bugs that eat gluten and break gluten into smaller particles that become harmless. And I just published a paper at the American Heart Association last month. Taking lectins away from gluten people and following them for six months. And they actually, in nine out of 10, out of a 50, became tolerant to gluten. We could re-introduce it to them.
Dallas Hartwig (00:45:43):
Interestingly
Dr. Gundry (00:45:43):
It’s because their gut microbiome change and it’s because they no longer had leaky gut. So their immune system was no longer on overload.
Dallas Hartwig (00:45:53):
Well, it’s interesting you should mention that because my very first foray into nutrition as a scientific approach really happened reading about auto-immunity and lectins. I read a paper by Loren Cordain back in 2005 or 2006. And at the time, I was playing national level of volleyball at a chronic shoulder tendinosis and couldn’t get the inflammation to subside, and hadn’t even occurred to me that my diet would be a part of that because I thought I was eating conventionally healthy and everything was good.
And based on that one particular paper, I started doing some personal experimentation. And all I did was eliminated legumes and grains from my diet for six weeks. That’s the only change I made. I didn’t do anything else. I just stopped doing those because they’re rich sources of lectins. And six weeks later, my shoulder that had been bothering me for over a year was completely pain-free and fully functional. And that utterly blew my mind, the fact that some simple dietary change like that.
Otherwise, healthy dietary approach could have that significant of effect on my ability to heal peripheral musculoskeletal tissue. That just totally blew my world open. And that was really the starting point from my whole foray into nutrition study. So lectins have something that have been kind of on my radar for a long, long time. And I think heard you say that with a healthy gut and an oscillating microbiome, intermittent exposure to certain dietary lectins is probably not a big problem.
Dr. Gundry (00:47:28):
Yeah, I think that’s… Do I think that the vast majority of Americans, because of our antibiotic use, because of our end acid use, because of glyphosate and everything, have probably the worst microbiome in the world and most of us have a leaky gut? Do I think, with regimented control, you can take control over this and restore your gut and your gut wall? Yes. And I’ve published papers about that.
And do I foray into trying these things? Yes, I do. But I usually regret it, quite frankly. I think I’m more tolerant to it than I used to be, certainly, but I have a number of my autoimmune patients. They can’t cheat. They just can’t. And when we can measure it or either, they’re going to tell me or we can see it in their blood work.
Dallas Hartwig (00:48:24):
Totally.
Dr. Gundry (00:48:26):
All right. So one thing we haven’t talked about is exercise. Should you change your exercise routine over the year?
Dallas Hartwig (00:48:37):
Well, of course, that’s a trick question because the obvious answer is yes. In the same way as all of these other things should change as your environment outside changes. So in the same way as your food supply changes in the same way as the light dark cycle changes, so does what’s going on outside and our natural sort of desires and drives to do things.
So it feels really normal to, in the first warm days of spring, want to get outside, to go to the park, to go on a bike ride, to work in the garden. That’s what we are drawn to do naturally. And the more we can notice and pay attention to and validate those intuitions that are in us, the better off we’re going to be big picture. And so we’ll take that very palpable dopamine-driven spring experience, and then we’ll move that forward through the seasons.
So here’s how it goes in the summertime, it looks like lots of time outside, going hiking, riding our bikes, swimming at the lake, playing catch, throwing the Frisbee for our dog, whatever. And that’s a really natural thing to do, to be outside for large amounts of time, to have many hours a day of relatively low-intensity general physical activity, and every now and then, pick up and move something heavy. So you’re maintaining the musculoskeletal structure.
And that might like look like wheelbarrowing or hauling bags of mulch in the yard, or digging with a shovel, or carrying wood for a construction project. It might look like going to the gym and doing some resistance training. But there’s this anchor, this consistent theme throughout all of the seasons of an anchor of real-world functional strength training. And that looks like picking things up, squatting, lifting, carrying, climbing things. Much like we did when we were children. We climbed trees, we scrambled up rock faces, we raised each other across the park.
And those are the kinds of things that are unstructured and really, really good for adult humans as well. Because we’ve become excessively contrived and overstructured even in our exercise programs. So I also call for more general movement, walking to the grocery store an extra mile to carry your groceries. Even though it’s more physical work, it’s also, I think, better from a physiological standpoint.
And there is this also this strange and subtle experience of foraging and bringing something home. In the same way, if you’ve ever had your own vegetable garden and you’ve picked your own greens out of the garden or carrots and brought them inside and wash the dirt off and eaten them for dinner, there’s a sense of satisfaction and connection that’s there that isn’t present when you have food shipped to your door, or you go to the grocery store and park right outside the door.
So the fall version then looks a lot like spring, it’s moving in the direction of contraction. It is less duration and more intensity in our activity. So it still looks like a wide mix of real-world activities, but it’s less of the many, many hours outside and somewhat contracted. And then the winter is the total opposite pole to summer. So winter is a lot less overall physical activity. And I’m not necessarily endorsing being sedentary, but what I’m saying is the four or eight hours outside on the weekends is not something you’re probably going want to do as much of in the winter. And that’s normal. And that’s totally okay.
And the anchor behavior, functional strength training remains. So, general movement… And there’s sort of an inverse relationship between intensity and duration across the course of the season. So summer is relatively low intensity with long duration. Winter is higher average intensity and shorter average duration. And within all of those parameters, you can choose a wide range of different, either exercise programs or just kind of real-life stuff. And I really encourage people to do more real-life stuff like going rock climbing, or going trail running, or things that are less linear and less binary and a little more oscillatory and three-dimensional
Dr. Gundry (00:52:56):
Okay. So what you’re saying is I can’t sit on the couch all winter? But, hey, I’m not eating. So it’s okay, right?
Dallas Hartwig (00:53:05):
Well, isn’t that an interesting thing, right? Because when we… This is how we get the cross linkages between these different systems. So in the wintertime, when you are having a wildly shortened feeding window, you’re probably taking in fewer calories because you’re emphasizing protein and fat, which have higher satiety signaling. So your total caloric expenditure, because you’re doing less physical activity, is lower. But that’s also okay because you’re, perhaps, taking in fewer calories overall.
And again, there’s lots of ways to slice and dice that, but that’s often what happens with people when they are doing less physical activity and they’re eating more satiety-inducing foods. So yeah. And it’s totally okay. And of course the carbohydrate restriction and the shortened feeding windows have an insulin-sensitizing effect, which partly mitigates the fact that you’re not doing as much activity.
So there’s these beautiful and elegant balancing systems where in the summertime, which is the opposite of that, where you’re eating more carbohydrate, you’re sleeping less, you’re basically under recovered for the period of summertime, you’re doing a lot of physical activity, you’re generating a lot of oxidative stress. And also what’s happening is you are eating a lot of nutrient-dense plant and animal foods that help to buffer some of that oxidative stress. And you’re improving insulin sensitivity through long duration, relatively low intensity physical activity. So you’re staying insulin sensitive across the course of the entire year using different mechanisms to do so but you’re never getting to a state where you are sedentary, chronically inflamed, and insulin resistant.
Dr. Gundry (00:54:41):
Yeah. I’ve told a number of my patients, very overweight patients, that I can put them on the grizzly bear diet and locked them in a room and have them not eat for five months. And I guarantee you it’s incredibly effective for weight loss.
Dallas Hartwig (00:54:55):
Absolutely.
Dr. Gundry (00:54:56):
And it actually protects a muscle mass. I don’t have a whole lot of takers on the grizzly bear diet.
Dallas Hartwig (00:55:05):
No, but you make an interesting point though, is that a lot of these same sort of physiological underpinnings, these echoes of our evolutionary past still exist in us today. And we can leverage some of those patterns and not necessarily have to lock ourselves in a room with nothing but meat and fat for five months. But we can leverage some of those same systems to our benefit while still enjoying nutritious, delicious food, and having a social life, and doing physical activity. Love that you gave that example because it’s a hundred percent true. And we can just extrapolate some of the same principles there for our own health optimization.
Dr. Gundry (00:55:45):
So before we go, what is one thing in the book that would surprise people?
Dallas Hartwig (00:55:51):
Hmm. So here’s one. It’s not necessarily a big one, but it’s one that I’ve said and people kind of look at me sideways sometimes. I am against new year’s resolutions. And the reason I’m against new year’s resolutions is because our bodies don’t know when January 1st is. They don’t know anything about the calendar year. And so declaring to ourselves and to people around us that on this certain day in winter, we are going to initiate some new behavior program, whether it’s an exercise program, or a diet, or whatever the commitment we’ve made to ourselves and other people is, I argue that mid-winter is the least opportune time to do that. Because winter is for rest and restoration, and thinking and retrospecting, and planning for the future.
And really, it’s preparing ourselves to go out into the world in the coming spring. And that’s true both in the literal spring and also the sort of figurative spring. And also true on the shortened timeline. It’s true of nighttime going into morning. And so if we don’t do each nighttime going into morning or winter going into spring actively, we are not going to be very energetic come springtime. So I actually argue that new year’s resolution is more properly placed in early spring, and is dreamed about, and planned for, and prepared for in the mid-winter. So I think that new year’s resolutions should be mid-March or something.
Dr. Gundry (00:57:18):
Perfect. All right. Very good. Well, Dallas, thanks so much for coming on today. Where can listeners find all about you and your work, and where can they get their hands on the book?
Dallas Hartwig (00:57:29):
So The Forest Season Solution is available pretty much everywhere books are sold. I encourage readers to support their local independent booksellers. Right now during pandemic time, That’s tough to do, but if you can find independent booksellers online, I encourage you to do that. It’s also available Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and many of the major booksellers as well. There’s also information available on my website, Dallashartwig.com. And I’m moderately active on Instagram as well.
Dr. Gundry (00:57:59):
All right. Very good. Well, take care of yourself and congratulations on the book. Great talking to you.
Dallas Hartwig (00:58:06):
Thanks so much.
Dr. Gundry (00:58:07):
All right. So we’ve got the audience question.
Speaker 4 (00:58:09):
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Dr. Gundry (00:58:35):
Ever since I quit my work as a heart surgeon and opened my two restorative medicine centers, my mission has been the same, to help transform the health of every single person on the planet. That may sound crazy, or even naive, but it really is my top priority. That’s why it’s 70 years old, I still see patients six days a week. It’s why I continue writing books and producing the Dr. Gundry Podcast. And it’s why I’m asking you today to do something really important. Because you can play a big role in transforming lives too, by leaving a quick review of the Dr. Gundry Podcast on iTunes.
And if you have any questions for me, drop one into your review, and I’ll be sure to answer it on a future episode of the podcast. The more ratings and reviews we get on iTunes, the more people we can reach with this powerful health message. And the best part is it only takes a moment. Hit pause right now and write us a short review on iTunes. By leaving a quick review today, you can help thousands more people discover their path to optimal health. So from a bottom of my heart, thank you. Together, I truly believe we can help everyone on this planet of ours achieve optimal health. And that’s a goal worth fighting for. Thank you, [inaudible 00:59:52]. Very Good.
Suzanne E. on YouTube wrote in and asked, “Does taking vitamin D in large doses affect your heart or arteries. There’s, every now and then, interesting studies that come up that vitamin D in large doses may affect your bones, may affect your arteries, but none of those studies have actually looked at the combination of vitamin D3 with vitamin K2. And you’ve heard me talk over. And over again that if you’re going to take generous doses of vitamin D3, which I do recommend you should absolutely take vitamin K2 as well.
And let me give you one extra little piece of advice. There is very good research showing that statin drugs actually increase calcification in coronary arteries. Which seems extraordinary because you should decrease calcification in coronary arteries if you believe in statins. But the literature shows that statins interfere with the effect of vitamin K2.
So here’s my tip for the day. If you’re taking a statin drug and you folks know who you are, please, please, please add vitamin K2 to your regimen. You don’t need much. You really only need a hundred micrograms or so of either MK4, or MK7, or both preferably. So great question.
Disclaimer. On the Dr. Gundry Podcast, we provide a venue for discussion. And the views expressed by my guests do not necessarily reflect my own.
Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to watch each episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast, you can always find me on YouTube, at youtube.com/dr.gundry. Because I’m Dr. Gundry and I’m always looking out for you.
