Think Differently. Solve the Impossible.

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About the Host

Daniel Stih is an aerospace engineer, software engineer, indoor environmental consultant, and author of 12 books. Through engineering, environmental investigations, and interdisciplinary research, he explores how people define problems, interpret evidence, and make decisions under uncertainty. Learn more in Why I Think This Way.

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Show Notes

Healthy to 120
https://www.healthyto120.com

Daily Medical Discoveries
https://www.dailymedicaldiscoveries.com

Healthy to 120, the book on Amazon: 
https://www.amazon.com/Healthy-120-secret-healthy-beyond/dp/1981284362/

Men's Mayhem
https://www.youtube.com/@mensmayhem

Matt Cook's Partners for Life
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz1gpIVn5rKGDEWo_Q9iH8

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Transcript

My guest today is Matt Cook.

Matt Cook is the co-founder and editor of Daily Medical Discoveries.

Medical Discoveries, he says, that are being covered up or ignored by conventional medicine.

As a child, Matt had terrible allergies and asthma.

He later developed prostate problems, blood sugar issues, and high blood pressure.

In 2005, working with a health coach, he discovered a solution and was able to stop taking his medications.

He became a certified coach and began researching additional health methods.

He says the health problems he had were the greatest gift that he ever had.

They led him to where he is now.

He has courses, for example, that show men how to raise their testosterone naturally in order to recover from health issues such as ED without the need for medications.

Matt has been married for decades and has two children.

Welcome to my show, Matt.

Hey, thank you so much, Daniel.

I really appreciate it.

Did I do that right for introduction?

That sounds perfect.

I had to think about who you were talking about.

Then I go, oh, that's me.

So your website, two main things I want to talk about, health in general, and then we'll get to the sex and the dating and the men in particular that you coach.

What do you feel whether men or women or both, is one of the big things health-wise that people should know about that you think you can help them with?

Yeah.

This is a tough one to answer.

It's obvious, but I have to be careful with how I answer it.

People who state, who are very old, and I studied a lot of people that are over a hundred or even 110 or even older.

I've flown all around the world.

I spent years studying them.

I wrote a book about it, Healthy to 120.

But those people, they generally sort of stay out of the medical rattle.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't go to a doctor.

Of course you should.

But the people that are very successful, they're healthy and aging, generally are looking at alternative remedies.

And they're working with their doctor.

And they're working on things that avoid treatment and medication as much as possible.

Does that make sense?

Not that they don't do it, but that they minimize it if they can.

Actually, I know two categories of people, those who are never sick and that would fit them.

And those who, when they are, all they do is want to pill and go to the doctor.

The older they get, I see people just go to the doctor, I want to pill.

Yeah, polypharmacy is what they call it.

And that's a great name for it.

There are 40 percent of people, something like that, that are at a certain age, that are on 12, 15, 18 medications.

And sometimes we'll have several doctors, we'll have a neurologist, a urologist, this and an internist.

And that neither, none of them will know what the other is doing.

It's common to see prescriptions that overlap or that are contraindicated when they're on another drug.

It's really a mess.

But there was a study where they actually, and I don't know how they did this, but they absolutely took these people and got them to agree to go off all their medications.

These are people on 12 to 20 medications.

By the way, real quick, we're not encouraging people to do that without seeing a doctor.

Oh, no, no, no.

We're just letting them know there are thousands of people who do, and there's another way to do things.

Well, I think you should work with your doctor on all this.

But so this was a sanctioned study.

It was in a medical journal.

And the people that, basically, they were healthier when this was done.

So the researchers said, what we should do is encourage people to start rebuilding their stack of medications with a doctor, because chances are they're not really benefiting from a lot of the drugs that they're taking.

Oh, I love that.

Rebuild the stack.

Yes.

We're not saying get rid of your medications, but I've observed that I'm looking at when I worked in a hospital, actually, you know, he looked as a nursing assistant.

I'd go through the program of care, what they call it, your daily, your care plan.

These are contraindicated, even in the physician's desk reference.

You shouldn't be taking these together.

And doctors don't want to contradict other doctors, so they just stack stuff up.

So I like the way you framed it, rebuild it.

I did something myself that I don't want anyone else to do, but I did it.

In 2005, I had been, I was in my 40s, and I had been very sick my whole life with autoimmune condition I was born with.

I was in and out of emergency rooms and on many medications for over the years.

And in 2005, I was able to, with a very simple method that I learned from a Soviet professor, I literally stopped taking all my medications one day.

It was a bit of a struggle for about six months, but I never went back to any of them and never needed them ever again, because I used a simple breathing method that I had learned from, from Professor Konstantin Buteyko, Buteyko method.

And it's amazing how breathing and those carbon dioxide levels in our body can determine our overall health to such a great degree that over 200 conditions, he said, were attributed to breathing and low carbon dioxide levels in our body.

So, so they say carbon dioxide is a waste product.

That's what I learned in school.

You exhale, you get rid of carbon dioxide.

It turns out that carbon dioxide is precious, and that people who are sick have low carbon dioxide levels.

People who are healthy have high carbon dioxide levels.

And you can tell by your health, by how much you breathe.

Healthy people breathe less, sick people breathe more.

And so, I'm processing that.

Sick people, healthy, I breathe less.

Healthy breathe less, sick breathe more.

What comes to mind is I'm breathing less oxygen, but you're saying I'm exhaling, I'm holding the oxygen in longer.

There's a relationship between not just the carbon dioxide, but the oxygen.

Is it because I'm holding the oxygen longer?

Yeah, there was something studied by Bohr, B-O-H-R, he was the nephew of Niels Bohr, he's a famous physicist called the Bohr Effect, which you can look up on Wikipedia.

And basically, the more carbon dioxide that you retain, the better your cells get oxygenated.

So higher carbon dioxide to a point, oxygenates your cells better.

And this is why when you run fast, you're running a huge oxygen deficit because your muscles can't possibly get enough oxygen for the expenditure of energy that you're doing.

But because of the Bohr Effect, your carbon dioxide levels rise, so the oxygen is actually more efficiently reaching your cells and letting you run fast and sprint or run for long distances.

Yeah, so Dr.

Bottego in World War II worked as a medical student, and he observed that people who were close to death, people who eventually would die in a hospital, were breathing like 30 or 40 liters of air per minute, whereas people who were well, were breathing 8 to 10 liters of air per minute.

And that he found he could tell that somebody was sicker and sicker by the fact that they breathed more.

And so I fixed my autoimmune disorder simply by raising my carbon dioxide levels in my body.

And so what is real quick the breathing, the basics of that breathing technique?

Well, if you breathe slowly, let's say, a little slowly, let's say you're walking and you breathe out slowly, you kind of feel like you want more air, you feel like inhaling.

So that's called air hunger.

Air hunger means you kind of want to inhale.

But if you just maintain a mild air hunger deficit, then you're actually building up the carbon dioxide levels of your body.

And it works a lot like weight lifting.

At first, it's hard, then you lift heavier and heavier weights, your muscles grow, you get used to it.

Same thing with, let's say, you're walking and you're breathing.

If you breathe out, let's say, five steps, and then you take a sniff of air in, then you breathe out five more steps.

The next step, you breathe in, you're exhaling a long time, you're inhaling only one of those steps.

You're actually going to build and maintain air hunger.

And that's going to start training your brain where there's a center that monitors carbon dioxide.

You're training your brain to be used to higher levels of carbon dioxide.

And you'll actually breathe less 24 hours a day, just by doing that simple exercise every day.

And it also sounds like going for a walk, that's also a good thing to do.

It is, of course.

And exercise is very important that you have your mouth closed.

Nose breathing is essential for health.

I don't know of any person that is healthy that mouth breathes.

We even have this derogatory expressions in our language, you know, mouth breathers are sort of bad people.

It's not their fault, but if you have low carbon dioxide levels in your mouth breathing, you're making it worse.

And I find that people have huge improvements in their health by just one thing, just one, nose breathing.

I agree with that.

When as a climber, you know, when I'm doing the approach to steep hike, carrying a heavy backpack, one thing I learned when I was a teenager early, they taught me, don't breathe through your mouth, Dan.

But then I can't breathe, like you'll get it, it's going to take a minute, but it'll work itself out, you'll see it will be better off in the long run.

Don't breathe through your mouth.

Wow, that really controls your breathing and forces you to get things under control.

And so you are maintaining air hunger when you were doing that.

And that's exactly what you should do.

And here's another thing that's interesting about altitude.

If you want to be healthier, you want to spend time at high altitude because it also helps retrain your body to increase carbon dioxide levels.

And that's been known for over 100 years.

And in fact, if you spend a month at altitude, you don't have to be at 11,000 or 12,000 feet.

You could be at 5,000 or 6,000 feet for like a month out of the year.

It can make you healthier the whole year.

One of the things that I did was I went to Bolivia and studied people in Bolivia, where in La Paz, which is the capital, and near La Paz, they're at about 11,000 feet.

This is like the highest altitude capital in the world.

And the people are extremely healthy.

And you'll see people routinely running five miles uphill at that altitude from La Paz to El Alto, which is another town, and they're doing just fine.

And it's because they've gotten, their bodies are used to high carbon dioxide levels.

So altitude itself is a very good way of improving health.

So let's talk about food.

You're healthy to 120, 120 years old, like how to live to be 120 website.

It says you can get a free book, and it'll reveal the one unhealthy food that may be the fountain of youth.

Can you, the link to your free book will be in the show notes.

Can you tell me what the food that's the fountain of youth is, or something about food that's good?

Well, you're gonna get a lot of pushback on this one.

So, there's really two primary energy sources that our body can use.

There's fat and there's carbohydrates.

The three macros, fat, carbohydrates and protein.

But you can't get a lot of calories from protein.

So you're really gonna have to get your calories from either fat or carbohydrates.

And carbohydrates are basically starch or sugar.

Starch is nothing but a long chain of glucose, sugar molecules.

So when you have starch, let's say I have cereal, something like porridge, whatever, my body is going to convert those long chains of sugar molecules into sugar, okay?

So basically eating sugar.

And sugar is actually the fountain of youth.

People don't want to hear it.

The truth is that all of the old people that I've ever worked with were very healthy.

Their diet is largely consists of carbohydrate.

And if you look at long life people all over the world.

I was waiting for, I'm worried because I probably eat horribly.

So in terms of what I do in the climbing and the big hikes and whatnot, I told my sister-in-law because she's a runner, ask her for advice as a marathon runner.

Like, you know, when like the power bars don't do it for me, these, these energy bars, I like bagels.

And she explained it like you did.

She's like, it's the sugar Dan.

Really?

I mean, I just think it's bread.

No, it's the sugar.

She's like basically white bread too.

That's what you need, the sugar.

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, precisely.

Yeah, precisely.

It could be, you can have whole wheat if you enjoy it.

But sugar is demonized today.

We have so many people in the low carb, ketogenic.

The worst would be the total, the meat, the carnivore diet, and sugar is vilified.

But if you look at the truth, which I get from observing people who are very old and are healthy, they're all on primarily carbohydrates.

But you're not speaking of a tablespoon of sugar in your coffee kind of sugar.

You're speaking of the glucose of sugar that comes from the food you eat, right?

Well, let's talk about that.

If you consume, like I have, do you know what masa harina is?

You know, the Mexican corn that's been processed according to ancient.

You can buy it at a supermarket now.

It's basically like corn browned up, like polenta or brits in the south, but it's processed according to ancient methods.

So I have that most mornings.

So that's going to be mostly carbohydrates.

That's going to turn into glucose, but there's a lot of other things in it.

If I consume a tablespoon of sugar in my coffee, there are no micronutrients, there's no minerals.

That's not the best thing.

It's okay to have a tablespoon or two of white sugar.

But let's say you have honey, which has a lot of other things in it, that's a lot better.

I don't suggest that people should consume 10 or 15 ounces of sugar every day.

I suggest that they consume carbohydrates in the form of fruits and grains, especially those that are prepared according to the ancient methods that turn into sugar in the body.

Okay.

You also have some websites that seem like when I was doing my research on you, do you work more with, you're doing all this health research.

Is it more for men and there seem to be a key theme on raising your testosterone levels to have good health overalls?

That, am I on the right track?

Yeah, I've coached 80,000 men over the years, 80,000.

I've coached maybe 100 women.

I certainly work with women, but I primarily direct our research to men.

And for men, testosterone levels and sexual function is the chief indicator of overall health.

It's pretty easy to see if a man is healthy.

He'll have a healthy libido, he'll have good erections, he'll have a healthy testosterone level, and a man who's not healthy won't have those things.

So what comes to mind?

I'm not one of them yet, fortunately.

Maybe I'm not old enough.

But, you know, I read, I just hear about it.

People get old, they lose their sex drive, men have erectile dysfunction, not their fault.

You know, they blame it on, I don't know what to blame it on, age or male metapause.

So is what you're saying is the root causes the health, the poor health leading up to that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a good study that was done of men, several actually, that was done of men to social levels from teenage to 95 or 100 years old.

And basically, the correlation is that if you're healthy and you're 80 or 90 years old, you have the same testosterone levels you always did.

So the people that say there's male, they call it andropause.

Like they say men always go through this decline.

It's normal.

It's not normal.

What's normal is that men should be active, healthy, walking, having fun into their 80s and 90s.

And their testosterone levels will be the same as it always was.

If it's dropping, that means that they're in poor health.

And then, how would they, what would be the first step, like a simple thing without overwhelming people, men, that they could do going for a walk and breathing comes to mind?

I think that's an excellent one, Daniel.

I think going for a walk and just doing, and it's called the STEPS, S-T-E-P-S.

I forget what it stands for, but just try to like go for a walk with your mouth closed as much as you can.

That itself is going to help you improve your health.

At night, most men are going to be mouth-breathing at night, which is very dangerous to health.

So what I did, and you might speak to your doctor about this if you're in doubt, but what I've always done is I put tape over my mouth at first for a year or two.

My wife said that I slept with a hostage because I had tape on my mouth at night, and that kept me from mouth-breathing.

And I've never seen anybody come to any harm with that because the body will allow you to breathe through your nose.

And that's what prevents hyperventilation during the night, and that will raise your CO2 levels, and you're going to wake up more refreshed, happier, and better health.

So just that alone is probably the most traumatic thing somebody can do by just focusing on closing their mouth and breathing through their nose.

When you mentioned sleeping, snoring came to mind.

Does snoring have anything to fit in there anywhere?

There's really a couple of things about it, and this is not really controversial, but it's something that you probably haven't heard put this way before.

Snoring itself doesn't have to be harmful.

It can be caused by a collapse of the uvula during sleep.

It's not necessarily a harmful thing.

When people get sleep apnea, that's when their brain says, your brain says, I want you, you've got to increase your carmatoid levels.

How do you do that?

Stop breathing.

So sleep apnea is actually the fence mechanism where the brain makes you stop breathing periodically in order to increase your carmatoid levels so that they're not at dangerously low levels.

Now, studies have shown that moderate or heavy sleep apnea is harmful and can be harmful to health.

And there's certainly a lot of people that have said, I sleep so much better now that I have a CPAP machine.

I feel better.

I'm not taking anything away from that.

You should go for your sleep study, talk to your doctor.

But you want to look at some of the stuff on Daily Medical Discoveries about sleep apnea, because milder and even near moderate forms of sleep apnea actually can be protective of health, it turns out.

And so if it's a sort of a mild thing, it can actually be a good thing.

It's your body just adjusting its own carbon dioxide levels during sleep to get higher and more healthful levels.

And what about the snoring?

Sleep apnea, is that snoring or related to snoring?

Not necessarily.

There's a lot of snoring that has no sleep apnea at all.

The only way you can do sleep apnea, now there's apps you can run on your phone and they'll listen to your breathing and they'll tell you how many episodes of breathing stoppage that you've had.

That's the way you can tell if you have sleep apnea.

The other way is that if you're sleeping poorly and you have fairly severe sleep apnea, you'll be tired during the day.

You'll fall asleep during the day when you really shouldn't be falling asleep.

And that's an indication of poor sleep through most likely sleep apnea.

And there's a solution to this.

If it's mild, it'll let you know.

I'm not suggesting you shouldn't go to a doctor for this.

I'm just saying, this is something you can use with your doctor.

And that is, there's certain, it was found that certain drugs, in fact, you talked about altitude, certain drugs can increase your carbon dioxide levels and make it easier to be at high altitude.

I don't know if you've ever taken acetazolamide or ever heard of that.

I don't like drugs, even ibuprofen.

Excellent.

Well, yeah, it can be dangerous.

Yeah, acetazolamide is used for people who are going to altitude.

If you tell your doctor, I'm going to Bolivia, they'll say, Oh, I'll give you a prescription to help you for your first few days so you can adjust better.

It increases your carbon dioxide levels.

And there's a vitamin, thiamine, which is a very, you know, the vitamin, it's a B vitamin, the B vitamin, thiamine.

Some of the canyoneers, I don't know if I've done this.

Some of my stuff is pretty extreme.

The mountains, just to get to them, where I have to go through cold water, like swim, I don't like to swim.

I don't let me imagine getting yourself wet when it's already cold and on purpose.

And you got to go climb and everything's wet.

The extreme ones were saying dose up on this, what you're speaking of and it'll help you, I think, stay warmer or breathe through the cold.

I just explored it.

Again, I try not to take anything because I feel if I do, then when I stop doing the drugs, my body is going to have to go back to normal anyhow.

So let's just keep it normal to begin with.

But that's what you're speaking of, the vitamin.

So you don't take vitamins at all.

Is that correct?

You don't believe in vitamins or don't take them?

I'm not at the moment.

Periodically, I will.

But honestly, probably like a lot of people, well, is this really do anything?

Well, I should because I mean, what do I eat?

Do I get enough in my food?

Once in a while, every couple of years, I'll buy a bottle or two.

Otherwise, no.

Well, okay.

So thiamine, vitamin B1, if you take about 1,000 or 1,500 milligrams a day, which is pretty much harmless for most people, and you load up on four or five days, it works like acetylzolamide.

It will increase your carbon dioxide levels, and it can basically fix mild sleep apnea, and it'll help you breathe more comfortably all through the day.

That's an example of vitamin that really can be used like a medication, but it's a lot less harmful than a medication.

There's really no side effects to it, other than sometimes it has a little body odor for some people.

But acetylzolamide is a major medication, whereas thiamine you can buy on Amazon, and it's pretty harmless.

It's a vitamin that in larger amounts helps you deal with altitude, and helps you breathe better, and helps you avoid sleep apnea if it's just mild.

It is much better than going to the pharmacy, a doctor's prescription.

Well, let's say you got a sleep study, and you found you had some sleep apnea.

You talk to your doctor and say, let me try some thiamine for a few weeks.

Then you might try it, and then you get another study, or use your app, and maybe it'll be better.

Maybe you've avoided the need for a sleep apnea and all that.

So that's something.

Another vitamin that is very, very important is vitamin D.

And I agree with you.

I think what you were going to say, or what your philosophy is, is let me get all of my nutrients from food, right?

Well, moreover, let me know.

I don't like being dependent on something.

Right.

What if I couldn't buy it anymore?

What if the FDA said we're outlawing this because we don't like the word natural, we're going to make you see your doctor?

I don't like feeling like I must buy something, have something, take something.

I mean, my body should be able to do its own thing without having to go.

Right.

Well, so vitamin D would be an example.

We should get it from sunshine.

But a lot of people don't get much sunshine.

In fact, what's interesting is some of the sunniest climates, in the Middle East, for example, they have a vitamin D deficiency because they're covered up all the time.

In order to get vitamin D, you have to do naturally is you have to first take a shower in the morning and then go out in the sun.

Why is the shower important first?

Because if you go out in the sun, what happens is the sun transforms cholesterol chemicals on the surface of your skin into vitamin D precursors.

Now, when you go in to take a shower after you've been in the sun because you were sweaty, then you wash all that off.

You're washing off all the vitamin D precursors.

So you're not going to get benefit from the sun as much.

You get some, but not as much as if you shower first, then you go out in the sun and you let it there because it takes many hours for the body to convert those vitamin D precursors that the sun irradiated in the vitamin D.

So what you're saying is, when you go running in the morning, come home and don't worry about the smell of stinky for a while, wait a few hours before you shower.

Yeah, if you wait longer, it's better for vitamin D, in terms of vitamin D.

Of course, sun will have wonderful benefits from the irradiation of our cells since sunlight is one of the most curative things.

But in terms of vitamin D, you definitely want to have a shower before you have your sun exposure.

But vitamin D, if you don't get enough sun, if you're covered up, if you're working indoors, it's a vitamin that you're going to have to take supplementally because otherwise your levels are going to be very low.

Typical vitamin D level, terms of normal person, should be around 50 or 60.

But I've seen people who are 15 or 20, and they're usually suffering from a lot of health issues, many of which can resolve when they bring their vitamin D level up to normal levels.

But you're not going to get enough from the sun if you don't get enough sun exposure.

Do you do a blood test to assess this?

Yeah, it's a cheap blood test.

It tells you what level all your vitamins and things are.

Well, vitamin D is one that it can tell you.

Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, so it stays around your body a long time.

Vitamin B, for example, or vitamin C, the tests are pretty worthless because they disappear in your system so quickly, even a matter of minutes when you take them.

As I said, if you take large amounts of thiamine, it's going to have a long-term, four or five days of loading, it's going to have an effect increasing your CO2 levels, but there's no real blood test that's very useful for thiamine.

But those are some vitamins that are useful to take.

Another one is arguably vitamin C.

I take three grams of vitamin C a day.

That's about the normal amount that a person uses.

A man, man and woman, and I think guinea pigs are the only two organisms that do not make our own vitamin C.

Now, if you eat meat, you get a lot of vitamin C actually, because there's a lot of vitamin C in meat.

But if you don't eat that much meat, you don't get that much vitamin C, you're probably low.

And I find that if I get enough vitamin C, I can tell because my gums and my teeth are in better shape.

So it actually has an effect that I can feel and experience.

Do you take a multivitamin?

No.

Just the food you eat?

No, I take vitamins.

I don't take a multivitamin.

Multivitamins have a lot of bad forms of vitamins or the wrong ratios and things you don't need, and a lot of them have iron.

So I take a few vitamins that I know that I need.

And what's your bookshelf look like in terms of, I see people, did they get like 20, 30 bottles of vitamins?

Oh.

Is it more practical, like five or six or half dozen?

Oh, you're talking about my supplements.

Well, you know, I'm a health researcher, so I have to kind of experiment.

I would say I have several hundred supplements.

I don't take them most of the time, but I've tried them or used them or experienced them because I want to coach people and I want to have the experience of knowing that something works.

What I'm getting at is to be practical.

If you were to really optimize your health and someone wants to work with you or read your books or just their self-study, what should they expect to have to do to be healthy?

How many different vitamins or supplements should they expect they might need to take to be healthy?

Vitamins have a function of remediation, fixing things.

Sometimes people need vitamins to fix problems, or they need supplements to fix problems.

For example, if you take your oral temperature with a thermometer, I usually have one, you take it with an oral thermometer, you should be about 98.6 during the day or by the afternoon.

But a lot of people are in the 96s or 97s by the afternoon.

They're basically very, very low metabolic rate.

When your metabolic rate is low, you actually lose magnesium.

You can't hold on to magnesium.

And so I find almost everybody benefits from taking magnesium, the right form of magnesium.

It makes their bowel movements more frequent and regular, and it helps their energy levels.

And it's just one of the most important things.

And if you're really healthy, you don't need magnesium.

Your metabolic rate is high.

You're going to get enough from your food.

But a lot of people need that remediation.

They need to fix their problems with supplements.

And magnesium is probably one of the most common supplements that can fix an underlying issue and show real health results.

And I take it your book has a flowchart, take your temperature, and then step by step, kind of almost be like the doctor.

All my protocols are exactly in the book.

I didn't hold anything back.

Every protocol defined all these things, including your temperature, including my needs.

All these things are in the book.

They're in the show notes.

That's the Healthy to 120, Healthy to 120.

Yeah, the third edition is really rewrote it completely in the third edition.

So magnesium is something that most people are going to need, and it's very hard to get enough if you're deficient.

If you're very healthy, one of the things that you also want to do, let's talk about salt.

People are also demonizing salt.

Yeah, I got my own salt story.

What's your salt story?

So my feet, oh, this is actually a good one to bring up.

I'm just a theory of mine is I had really bad blisters.

By blisters, I mean golf ball size on my heels from climbing.

I didn't wear socks because it was hot and my feet got infected, probably a resistant bacteria of some kind.

Lucky I didn't lose my feet.

They blew up.

Ever since then, just randomly, they'll swell.

It hasn't happened in two years, but for like five or six years, all of a sudden I'd be sitting around visiting a family and they'd say, hey, your feet are swollen up.

I mean, I couldn't pin it on the blisters.

Seemed to me that was kind of related.

Anywho, after years of struggling with, you really should see a doctor, Daniel.

Maybe you got heart attack or diabetes.

They tried to blame it on diabetes.

I go through all these tests and the nurse calls me two weeks later.

She goes, yeah, nothing showed up.

We would recommend that you reduce your salt level, blah, blah, blah.

Like they always tell you for swollen feet or whatever.

I'm like, hello.

Last night, I had the biggest bowl of popcorn with salt, and today my feet for the first time in weeks are not swollen.

So it just didn't, just not, it's just not possible, in my opinion.

You know, the first thing they want to tell you is, oh, reduce your salt.

No.

Are you kidding me?

All those tests and this is, no, what do people know?

Do you even, what are you talking about?

Yeah, reducing salt, there's really no evidence for it.

In fact, when they have done salt reduction studies for people with hypertension, high blood pressure, it lowers their blood pressure a couple of points, which is nothing.

So if you're 165 or 100 or 175 or 100, now you're 173 over 100.

It's nothing, really.

There's no evidence for it.

And the problem is, if you don't get enough salt, it raises a hormone in your body that's related to cortisone called aldosterone.

And it's really bad for your kidneys and bad for your health.

And what you found, the edema, the swelling in your feet can be from insufficient salt.

So I think that we have a salt appetite that we just follow, as much salt as we feel like getting, basically.

And I don't think it's helpful to reduce salt.

However, most people have way too little potassium.

And potassium and sodium and salt, they kind of go together.

We're kind of designed probably to have five or six grams of potassium every day.

That's because every real food, every piece of fruit, every vegetable, meat is loaded with potassium.

So if we eat a diet of real foods, we're going to get plenty of potassium.

But most people have processed foods, and they're low in potassium and high in sodium.

So it's the ratios.

It's high sodium when you have low potassium.

And by processed foods, what do you mean?

Because people's definitions of, oh, I don't eat processed food.

Yeah, you do.

What is, tell us what processed food?

Well, let's just say most people don't prepare their own meals at home very much.

So they might start out in the morning with, I don't know, cereal and toast or whatever, which is, cereal is heavily processed food.

It's loaded with bad things, most cereal, unless you have really good cereal.

Then they go and they have, they go out to lunch at a restaurant.

The so-called chef has dumped two or three grams of salt into the food to make it taste better and more appealing.

And they kind of go from there.

So I define, I have a very good definition of processed foods actually.

If you eat real food, you have to throw away a lot of things, the seeds, the skin, the unenable part, the bones.

Whereas processed food, you eat the whole thing, you don't have to throw anything away.

It's already been thrown away for you.

That's processed.

Does that make sense?

That's what I'll use.

What you mentioned in terms of going to lunch or dinner, it's hard to find healthy food because they want you to love it, for it to taste good, they want you to come back and be like, that's the best meal ever.

And it's competitive.

Restaurants or lunches or wherever you go.

Yeah.

So even the healthy stuff can be challenging to all the extra stuff they had to make it taste better.

Well, I don't think salads are very healthy, which I can explain why I say that.

But the potassium idea, you can sort of fix that to a good degree.

There's a good food that you can use.

You can use coconut water that you buy.

Coconut water is very high in potassium.

It also has some magnesium and calcium in it.

So I drink about a liter of coconut water every day.

In bananas, right?

Bananas?

Well, all fruits.

Everyone says bananas, but actually all fruits are very high in potassium.

Bananas are nothing special.

I don't eat bananas.

It's a very industrialized food.

A lot of it's grown with a lot of pesticides, and I don't think bananas are a great food.

But any fruit, any vegetable, all of meat, milk, juice, all of it has tons of potassium, and that's all you need to do.

Whereas if you eat food that are prepared by restaurants, you're going to get very low potassium and high sodium.

That's the problem.

So what's one of the health problems that's common with men?

I'm pretty healthy, fortunately.

What are some people struggling out there with?

That if they were listening, that's me.

I'm going to get his book or let's talk some more about this.

I mean, diabetes is very, very common, and you're going to go down the medical rat hole with diabetes.

They put me down it.

I'm like, I'm not diabetic.

Sure, okay, I'll do the test.

I'm not.

They try to push you down it.

Yeah, they sure do.

Now they say everyone's pre-diabetic.

So if you're not diabetic, you're going to be diabetic.

And I say no to labels.

I will not put myself mentally in any.

That's the first path to destruction in my, because I am pre-diabetic.

That presupposes that you will be and that you are.

No, I don't even.

But I'm open minded to what can I do to fix it.

But they put me through the ring and the test.

That's not it.

Can we move on?

Well, you're smart.

You're smart because there's a good study that showed only around five percent of people who are pre-diabetic ever become diabetic.

So it's nonsense.

It just means you have higher blood sugar than what they want you to have.

But there's a lot of benefits of elevated blood sugar too.

They did a chicken study where they actually injected some glucose into the eggs when the chicken embryo was developing.

And those chickens were much smarter than other chickens.

Let's say your blood sugar is not 80.

Let's say your blood sugar is 100.

There's a lot of benefits to that.

It's not a bad thing.

Really isn't.

Back to the men that come to you and are with those symptoms.

We won't call them diabetic, but they have those symptoms.

How do you treat them?

What do you recommend?

Well, there was a very, very interesting study about, there's been a number of them around so-called diabetes.

Diabetes is not, there's two kinds of diabetes, they're completely different.

The first kind is when you don't make enough insulin.

Now, that's a serious one.

That one, I will agree, you need your medicine.

Don't go down the rabbit hole that I went down.

You're different.

You're going to have to take insulin.

Yeah, you will.

That's different.

Yeah.

But there's a metabolic disease, which is type 2 diabetes.

And type 2 diabetes is preventable and fixable.

In my opinion, the way I would do it, when I was going down that path, I didn't use medication, I just changed my diet, became active, and everything became fine again.

And I know it is because I've worn a continuous glucose monitor and my blood sugar was fine.

But I'd say that the biggest problem that men have to your question, and women too, but we're talking mostly about men, is gut issues.

The gut contains two to three pounds of viruses, bacteria, and fungi, two to three pounds.

And those are part of our health and that microbiome.

And if you're not having really well, but here's a way to tell that you have a gut problem.

I'll be a little gross, but if you have to wipe and the toilet paper is soiled, when you have a bowel movement, you have probably have inflammation there, unless it's very occasional related.

I ate a lot of fruit last night or something.

But if you consistently have soil, your underwear or soil, toilet paper, that's a sign of gut inflammation.

And gut inflammation or what are called endotoxins.

Their bacterial byproducts that your body has to fight off.

And as we get older, we get worse at fighting those endotoxins off.

And it's probably the source of almost all of our health problems, probably all from the gut.

I know about endotoxins from my environmental testing.

Yeah.

And not all bacteria, just the bad bacteria.

The good bacteria don't make so much endo-

gram-negative bacteria.

Correct.

Yes.

I hadn't considered, though, that's literally in your body, because when we talk about it in your environment, in your house or your office, like literally in your gut, three pounds is a lot of...

It's pretty much the source of all of our issues.

There's so much stuff.

Yeah.

And what happens as we get older is, are the tight junctions that are supposed to keep that in the gut, they get looser and more inflamed.

And then we leak out endotoxins more into our body.

Our liver has to process those endotoxins, and our other organs are exposed to it.

And that's really one of the things that causes the symptoms of aging, this higher end.

So what do we do about the gut issues?

I talked about magnesium.

I'll tell you how that ties in.

A person is basically healthy if food is moving sort of quickly through their gut.

If it's too quickly, we have diarrhea.

If it's too slow, we have constipation.

A healthy person will have two or three bowel movements every day.

They will not soil the toilet paper, and they will not be constipated.

They will be kind of normal.

There's a scale, a Bristol scale.

You can look at a diagram to see what it should look like.

But that's the most important thing, really.

If you can do that, a lot of other problems can resolve themselves.

So also on a different website of yours or part of what you do, it seems you feel like part of this whole health thing, men should become more sexually healthier, active.

Tell me about the sex part of the equation.

Okay.

Yeah.

So now we go into politically incorrect stuff.

Men and women are both driven very, very much in their lives by their sex drive, but in different ways.

Women's sex drive tends to be oriented, and this is evolutionarily speaking.

Before I answer your question, just remember this, Daniel, we are all products of 100 percent successful parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, everyone through the line going in antiquity, were successfully having children for us to be here, right?

So we're a result of these very successful people.

And that meant that they had a strong enough sex drive to find a partner, have a romantic relationship or any partnership or relationship or whatever they did, and they had sex and they had children.

So the sex drive is 100 percent important for our survival, and we're here because of sex drive.

For women's sex drive, it tends to be more about having children and about having a home.

And a lot of times women's sex drive falls off after around 40, when they hit what's called perimenopause, when they start having irregular periods and eventually no periods at all, menopause.

Sometimes they still have a sex drive, but a lot of times they don't.

They can still enjoy sex, they have a wonderful sex life, by the way.

Men's sex drive is different.

Since men can impregnate a woman at any age, my grandfather was in his 90s and he was having sex, he told me.

Men, basically, sex drive should be pretty high throughout their entire lives.

And our sex drive is fundamentally what drives us men to achieve, to accomplish, to prove ourselves.

And in fact, you talked about a while back about races, marathon runners or whatever.

People that win races are just men, their testosterone levels rise.

When you win at something in life, your testosterone level goes up.

The reason you compete a lot of times with other men is because of testosterone levels.

Our sex drive is absolutely central to our success as a man.

Would it be correct in saying it, because some people, you know, oh, too much testosterone, he's high in testosterone, that it's basically a metric of your overall health.

It's not, it's not one or the other, you know, good or bad.

It's a, it's a basic measure of health.

Yeah, Dr.

Oz once called it.

I love this line.

I'll give him credit.

It's the dipstick of male health.

You know, you check your oil, it pull the dipstick of the engine.

It's exactly what it is.

And so it's not just higher testosterone levels, because you can have a very strong sex drive, even if your testosterone levels aren't really that high.

So testosterone levels go around, this is in nanograms, not moles, from about 300, which is 350, considered normal, around 1100, which is considered normal.

Could you have a low, could you have a not really low, a little bit, a lower sex drive and have a good dipstick level in terms of testosterone?

Well, I was going to say, I think a more normal testosterone level, and if you look at worldwide, is around 500 or 600.

It's not around 800 or 900.

There's no real answer to this, but it seems that men who are healthy in Western countries have a higher testosterone level normally than men who are healthy and have a good sex drive in most of the rest of the world.

So you can have a very wonderful life if your testosterone level is 500 or 600, and still have a strong sex drive.

So you don't need a 900 or 1000 testosterone level to have a high sex drive.

And let me ask you this, is the way to measure that with a test, a urine test or something, and not how much porn someone's watching, or how much to go into the bar to pick up women, or how much sex they have with their wife.

Do you have to use the activity to assess your level of testosterone, or do you need to measure it to assess it?

I think it's healthy.

It's useful to measure two things.

One of them would be testosterone levels.

Now there's free and total.

There's an argument about, I think, total is more important.

But the other thing that people don't consider is estrogen.

So everybody makes estrogen in their bodies.

Men make it, women make it.

And in fact, everyone says that estrogen is a female hormone.

It is not.

Men and women have just have estrogen.

And oftentimes, as men get older, their estrogen levels are going to be higher than their girlfriends' or wives' estrogen level.

So it's very important because if your estrogen is too high, that is what causes a lot of health issues, or indicates a lot of health issues.

So, and that's one reason why really high testosterone isn't that great, because it turns into estrogen through a process called aromatization.

So, and what I do is I suggest a test called Estrone, which is a type of estrogen.

If you go for a blood test, the doctors will sometimes you say, I want my estrogen tested.

They'll say, okay, here's your estradiol.

But estradiol is a form of estrogen that hides out in the cells.

And so your blood levels do not show how much estrogen is really in your body.

Estrone is a type of estrogen that does give an accurate, through a blood test, an accurate view of the estrogen in your body.

And the men who are having health issues inevitably have high estrogen.

And a lot of times bringing estrogen down a little bit can help health and sex drive a lot.

So, I get the picture going to the doctor now just for a health checkup.

Is there one that normally checks for all those things?

We mentioned vitamins, your magnesium, your potassium, your vitamins.

And now we're talking about estrogen and testosterone.

I also don't go to the doctor very much unless I'm really sick.

Well, smart.

I hope so.

Sometimes I wonder, I see my brothers go to the annual checkup, get everything done.

I'm like, am I missing something?

But I have that salt experience that turned out to be useless.

So, that's why I'm shy.

Well, you got the wrong people.

Should I be going to the doctor once a year and asking for this panel or whatever that would do all this?

I never go to the doctor unless I'm sick.

I don't go to the doctor unless I really need to go.

It's the last person I want to go to unless I need to.

I don't go for physicals, but we're in a wonderful world today.

We can get blood tests.

We can just go to Life Extension Foundation or the websites that the lab companies have.

You can actually get your own blood tests.

You can just order them and there'll be a doctor that will prescribe them, but you don't need to go to a doctor to get them.

You have to put a needle in yourself to?

No, you have to go to a lab and they'll do a blood draw.

Oh, right.

Of course.

Yeah.

There are some home tests.

There are some home tests, but they're not as good.

What I try to do, I would say, which blood test should you have?

We talked about vitamin D, another test that's pretty good.

How much inflammation do you have?

That determines your health or whether you should be concerned.

There's a test for C-reactive protein, CRP.

You can get a blood test, they'll do CRP, and they'll do something called high-sensitivity CRP.

And if that's over like one or two, you probably have something going on that you want to be concerned about and address.

Okay.

Another thing that, iron.

A lot of people, especially men, are high in iron.

And iron, we need to have iron.

It's necessary.

We can't live without iron.

But iron builds up in our system because in the ancient times, we were going out and fighting those saber-toothed tigers, and we're bleeding and getting cut, and we were losing iron through blood loss.

But most of us don't fight saber-toothed tigers anymore, so we don't lose blood.

What I do is every year or two, I go and give blood, a pint of blood once or twice a year.

Oh, okay.

Get rid of iron.

You can do a test of iron, which is usually a good ferritin or what they call an iron panel, which is useful.

And if it's high, you might want to consider giving blood, which is an easy way of getting healthier.

I think I'm the opposite.

I've been diagnosed with anemia, go figure, and I'm a mountain climber, and to which my natural path would prescribe the iron supplements you get at the health food store, the liquid ones, I can't remember what they're called.

Or the foods, too, you know, eat the foods high in iron.

Yeah, I personally would use the supplements ever.

I think iron supplements are quite dangerous.

I would eat liver.

I want more iron.

Liver is a very easily metabolizable good food.

I would worry about the toxins from the animal because isn't the liver the detoxification?

Well, it is, but you can do a lot better if you can find a source of veal liver, which is the calf liver.

And that liver doesn't have toxins.

Calf has been fed on mother's milk and it's very clean.

It's very tasty.

I don't like grown liver, but I like calf's liver.

It's so much better.

I will agree on, you know, I don't do it anymore because I don't like to be addicted to having to go to the store and buy the supplement, get it from your food or whatever you would normally.

Oysters.

You can get canned oysters.

Oysters are actually high in copper and iron, which is very good because you need copper when you have iron.

And so just eating one of the tins of smoked oysters once a week will get you plenty of iron over time.

So real quick on the sexual part of it, dating apps.

You're you're also kind of an expert on on the mean.

I would guess if you're trying to coach men with their lifestyle and to be healthy, you have single men who they need to find a partner, right?

Yeah, I have single men that need to find a partner.

I would say the majority of men today have given up, which is very sad and not necessary at all.

And then I have men that are in relationships.

And inevitably, everybody thinks that you get bored and they do feel bored.

And a lot of people's relationships fall apart today.

And they don't have to.

It's completely unnecessary.

And one of the reasons that I do these podcast appearances, I've been doing a lot of them over the past year, is to kind of share some of the things that really work to make you happier in a relationship, so that you can be thrilled and happy in your relationship, instead of bored and wanting something else that's never going to deliver happiness.

And what would one of those be?

Here's the simplest thing.

Now, it's been shown that if men have lots of sex, but they don't ejaculate each time, they're much happier, their sex life is much better, they feel thrilled with their partner, they're never bored with the sex, everything in their life gets better, and their sex drive is higher, and they generally accomplish and achieve a lot more in life, just by having frequent sex and less frequent ejaculation.

I suggest a schedule, like every four days, every seven days, every three days, depending on how healthy a man is.

And that's what I do.

I like to have sex twice a day.

I've been married almost 40 years.

But I only ejaculate about every four days.

And that's, it's just changed your whole life, man.

It just makes everything so much better.

It sounds like it would make things easier because instead of focused on just getting the sex over with, or, you know, I had mine, did you have yours?

Right.

You pre-establish, like your partner knows, this is just for what it is.

And we don't have any boundaries like, you know, this is when it ends because I, you know.

You climbed the mountain, you had your orgasm, you fell down the other side, we're done.

Instead, we're just going for a walk.

It's like, we're not climbing the mountain.

Here's what happened to me, and I've taught this to thousands of men, and they all have the same experience.

First, I didn't feel very much like, you know, I did it because I knew this was going to be a path that I wanted to take.

But over a few months, first of all, I became madly in love with my wife again, like more than I ever was.

And secondly, I began feeling more sensation and more pleasure.

And then it became like I could have 30 or 40 minutes of sex, like a whole full body orgasmic sensation, which has persisted this day.

It is so wonderful that I don't want to have a ejaculation slash orgasm and just end the whole thing.

Plus, for men, they don't realize it, but ejaculation drains us, not just for the next hour or two.

Of course, that's why the classic, take a nap at, men fall asleep after sex.

Right.

But also several days later, it has a long-term effect.

So if you don't ejaculate as often, your workouts are going to be better, they're going to be physically more capable, and you're always ready to have sex, which is a wonderful feeling.

But what do you do if we're talking, and your book is Healthy 2 120, 120 years old, if your partner is a woman going through menopause and she doesn't want to have sex?

My wife is way past beginning of menopause.

I'm in my 60s.

So here's the thing about women.

Women can enjoy sex quite a lot, even if they don't have a sex drive.

And they really do.

And so we have sex twice a day, but my wife has virtually no sex drive.

It doesn't matter.

She's very happy for the closeness and everything.

And this type of sex serves a person much, much better than the...

Because it's the type of sex that's the difference versus, oh, you know, you're past menopause, we can't have sex because they presuppose that means that you're having a climax, that it's going to be intense, that it's going to be this way.

Right.

All that fallout, post orgasmic fallout, it happens.

It's very normal, people don't realize it.

It affects your feelings for each other.

So when you go for sex with an orgasm, it actually affects your feelings for your partner for at least several days after this.

I'm just making this up real quick on the fly pretending because I don't have a partner who's metapausal.

But if I did and I have friends that do, or if I did, would we like maybe set a time and go, okay, honey, for 15 to 20 minutes?

I recommend it.

I'm not going to have an orgasm and then it's going to be done.

Yeah.

And there's no attachments to what we do as long as we're doing activity.

And there's no expectation.

Expectations.

Yeah.

It's a schedule.

I schedule.

We have sex in the morning, we wake up at night before we're going to sleep, basically, and it works wonderfully for everybody.

It's just the most amazing thing.

It probably is important too because if you're not staying connected in a relationship, yeah, then you're possibly drifting.

You're going to drift.

You're going to drift.

And why are we together if we're not a unit, like if we're not intimate.

We're not roommates.

We're not friends.

We're lovers.

Yeah.

And absolutely, all the people I know who don't do this, they all end up bored and in a dead bedroom by the time.

Or have an affairs.

And then they have an affair, and then it's horrible drama, it's horrible.

This is like a formula for a happy life.

And it also, as a man, increases your chances of great success.

I put out a book called Masculine Maximizer, which shows you exactly how to do this.

And I'm actually going to give away a copy of the book.

That's what we'll give away to your listeners if you'd like.

Masculine Maximizer shows men exact process of how they can raise their sex drive, raise their testosterone without taking any drugs or anything, and absolutely achieve so much in their lives and in their romantic relationships.

Plus, you mentioned porn.

You just mentioned it.

Do you mind if I talk about the proof?

I see it in the news all the time.

I didn't really get it.

I didn't know it was that big a problem.

I don't know if it is a problem, really, but it just seems like it shows up on.

And it is probably covered up a bit by people, by the whole thing.

So go for it.

Yeah.

It's an enormous problem for many men.

First of all, like for me, I would be using porn in my home office when my wife is sleeping and then I go to bed later.

So it made me sexually satisfied enough where I didn't make the changes in the relationship that I really should have made and eventually did make.

So it takes the place of the romantic bonds for most men.

If you stop using porn, which is very difficult, by the way, there's a withdrawal.

It's exactly like stopping drug addiction.

It's the same kinds of processes.

If you do stop, you will become driven to go out and meet people and date women, or to have a newly rejuvenated relationship with your girlfriend or your wife.

I'm trying to fill a void.

Yeah.

Well, it does.

It fills a void very well.

If you think about it, Daniel, social media takes the place of friends, and porn takes the place of lovers.

So we can be home.

It's not a happy life, but we can be satisfied and never go out and meet people, never make friends, never form a romantic bond.

That's what's happening.

You probably heard this.

I mean, the rate of people getting together and dating has been plummeting.

A lot of men, especially younger men, have not been on a date in the past year.

Not even one date in the past year.

Why is that?

Because they're using porn.

Yeah, or they're using an app instead of just talking to the girl at the grocery store, the guy at the grocery store, and, hey, my name is Dan, Daniel.

They're making it too difficult, and then they have bad experiences with the dating apps.

Yeah.

And the women, they're putting their best photo on there.

What do they expect?

They're attracting guys, and guys are the same way.

I'm going to show you pictures of my muscle, and it's all the sex driven.

You know, if you're one of the 3% of men that are muscles and money, you're fine on the dating app.

So if you're another 97%, you got to go out and meet women.

And the thing is, if you don't have a strong sex drive because you're using porn, you're not going to do that.

Is there anything, what's your, your book will be in the show notes and your masculine offer will be in the show notes?

Anything we haven't talked about real quick that closing thing you'd like listeners to know?

There's just a zillion things, but I think we could talk for a couple of hours.

Yeah, I'll have you on again.

That would be super.

Yeah.

For men, it's incredibly important to make sure you nurture and increase your sex drive.

That's the secret to having a very happy and successful life as a man.

That is the dipstick as we, as we say.

So Matt's website is healthy2120.com.

Links will be in the show notes.

Matt, thanks so much for being on my show.

Thank you so much.

It's been a pleasure.