TVAD_Transcript_Ep 402_Dr Dan Kalish JJ Virgin: [00:00:00] This is fun. I have an old, old, old, he's not that old, but an old friend coming on the show with me today, it was kind of one of those things where all of a sudden I went, why aren't you on the show at the heck? And we were actually talking about a. Topic mitochondria. And I was like, who could do a really good job on that? And I said “I know” my buddy, Dr. Dan Kalish is the perfect guy for that. Dan's one of those super geniuses that can take complicated stuff, break it on down and make it easy to understand and actionable. So I met Dan. Who is a chiropractor from life college. And I met him years ago. I was working with Dr. Diana Schwartzmine in Santa Barbara, and we were putting on these workshops, teaching people how to follow what's called the Schwartzmine principle. And it was really about adrenal exhaustion. And resistance and how you needed to eat balanced meals and [00:01:00] what you needed to do. Exercise wise. And Dan came in and he was our third trainer. So it was me, Dr. Diana Schwartzstein, Dr. Dan Kalish, super fun. And then we kind of lost touch for a while. And then we ran into each other at a conference. So I'm really excited to have him here with us. He is kind of a trippy dude here because not only is he a chiropractor and he has this very cool Kalish Institute. He is teaching functional medicine practices mainly to MDs. He's taught over a thousand practitioners worldwide, but you know, just what you'd assume, just along with that, he also studied it as Zen monastery. Snapchat. Perfect progression. It's so interesting. He's like this perfect blend of east meets west. So he spent two years in formal monastic training in Asia. He studied at a zen monastery in Japan, under Zen master Haridi Roshi. And then he lived in a forest monastery in Thailand, practicing [00:02:00] mindfulness, meditation techniques and transcribing Buddhist texts for Vipassana master Acan Buddha Buddhist. I don't think I did that well at all. Anyway, you get the idea. Very cool, super blend and just also an awesome human. So we are going to be talking about how to boost energy and burn fat and how to really understand what the heck mitochondria is and why it matters and how to fix them. So before I dive into this fabulous interview, I want. Fabulous review my favorite podcast. So spin me and eat clean from USA gave me a five-star review on apple podcasts. It says this podcast is amazing. JJ has gets right to the point of the podcast where some other podcasters take a good five to 10 minutes. She always gives valuable information in a short amount of time, which happens to be my commute time. So thank you, JJ. She is consistent about podcasting weekly, and I always look forward to sharing. My date was such a. Aw, [00:03:00] thank you. So here's the deal. That is exactly what we intended to do was we wanted to make a podcast. That's a DriveTime podcast and I actually now do it twice a week and here's, what's even cooler. What's even cooler was three years of my podcast disappeared. 2000 14, 15, 16. I was looking at my iTunes there. Damn like wait a minute. I know that I've done more podcasts than this. And so if you are all caught up on. Guess what? There's a whole bunch more waiting for you over there. So we've got a ton more around, so that was kind of fun. So anyway, be sure to jump in on those. And if you haven't left a review yet, I would love to love to love you, blow you up on my podcast and shout out. So go ahead and leave a review subscribe while you're there and share it with other pals who want to. Take responsibility for their health and need simple, actionable advice to do so here's a great favorite for you. And then I'll be back to dive into the podcast.[00:04:00] Dr. Dan Kalish. Welcome to the show. Super excited to have you here. Dr. Dan Kalish: Yeah. Thank you. JJ Virgin: I'm glad to be here. I know, man. It's been a long time. Like we go back what, it's 15 years Dr. Dan Kalish: before my son was born. That's 20. He's 20. Now if you leave that. JJ Virgin: Wow. Wow. Yeah, I kind of knew you then before you like, kind of blew up and became the big thing. I mean, I knew you were a big thing. You know, not everybody else did yet. I Dr. Dan Kalish: was, I was in my own mind for a long time, and now I've gotten some JJ Virgin: well we're diving into kind of a complicated topic. And I just know that you'll be able to take the complicated topic and make it simple, easy to understand actionable. Dr. Dan Kalish: That is my goal. And it's the thing I'm the most passionate about these days too. So I love to educate people about it. JJ Virgin: Very good, because we got to start.[00:05:00] The very beginning, because now there's all this talk about mitochondria. My, my bestie, Dave Asprey wrote his whole book around mitochondria and I'm like, yeah, but no one knows what they are like, no one knows what, what is, what is mitochondria? Why does it matter? So what that's where we got to start. Dr. Dan Kalish: Yeah. So I think the best way to think about it is the mitochondria or the. The controlling aspects of your metabolism right there, the area in the body, in the cells where you're actually burning fat for fuel. And so if they're not working well, you're going to have a hard time burning fat, which means you're going to be tired because you're not able to get into a great source of energy, which is stored in fat tissue. And you're going to have weight issues because you know, fat skin have not be burned properly, so going to have to burn other substrates for energy. And so they. Play a role, which is important to almost every single person I work with because almost everybody wants to lose a few pounds and get more energy. JJ Virgin: I know I was just going to say, and you just have everybody's attention [00:06:00] now. Dr. Dan Kalish: And there were things about them, right? They're kind of like the unsung heroes, these mitochondria know they've been neglected for a lot of years. They JJ Virgin: have been neglected, but we're going to fix this right now. So, so people aren't burning fat. Well, they're tired. What's happened to their mitochondria. Dr. Dan Kalish: So the, the mitochondria or it's a, it's called an organelle. It's a little, it's a little chunk of stuff inside your cell. It's like an engine in a car. Right. And the problem is that they're very delicate structures and they're easily damaged by what we call oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is basically. Anything bad that can happen to you, whether you are over exercising or under exercising, JJ Virgin: all that, all that aerobic exercise going out crazy on it can cause this, Dr. Dan Kalish: you know what I was, I was out on a bike ride last weekend and there are so many 50 year olds on bikes getting fatter and fatter every year. They're just pounding on the cardio. Isn't it. JJ Virgin: I used to, I had this gym I worked out at, in Palm desert and it was so funny [00:07:00] because I would walk down this hallway, and on one side, and there was a hallway on either side were windows into both sides of the gym. And one side of the gym was weights. And the other side of the gym was all the cardio equipment. And this is in Palm desert. So the average age in there was 50 plus most of the people were 60 and 70 and the people on the cardio side looked like hell, they were overweight. They looked, they looked tired, crappy the people on the other side. By the way, same age. So it wasn't like you said, oh, they looked old over there. Cause they were old, no, everyone was about the same age, but the people in the wait side looked amazing. And over the couple years I belong there, the people on the cardio side, I'm like, are they not noticing that they're at the gym every day, getting worse? Like what is making them continue to go? Because the other side was looking better and better and better. Dr. Dan Kalish: And a lot of that centers around how we use oxygen. Right? So. When you, and this is why I think this is the easiest way to understand how important your mitochondria are, is just take a deep breath in and hold it. [00:08:00] And how long can you do that for the reason why we breathe. Right is because we need to get oxygen to our mitochondria for energy production. So if you're breathing in constantly on a 26 mile run, you think how much oxygen you're cramming through your lungs and through your mitochondria and that oxygen causes oxidative stress. Cause as you're burning up the fuel, right? You're generating all these free radicals, which then damage the very mitochondria that you're trying to get to work better. So that's the kind of death nail of cardio. Now I ride a bicycle every day. I'm not against cardio, but you got to figure out how to balance it with the strength training or you're in trouble. JJ Virgin: Yes. And so. Oxidative stress from endurance training is one thing that can cause problems with your mitochondria. What, what else? Dr. Dan Kalish: Yeah, the leading one and the saddest one and the one that's escalating to levels that are incomprehensible would be environmental toxin exposure. And that could be benzene, Tallinn, lead mercury DDT from the old days, whatever. [00:09:00] Those 80 plus thousand chemicals are the environment and the dozen or so toxic metals, because any kind of environmental toxicant is going to get right into the cell, hit the mitochondria and destroy it. JJ Virgin: And I love that. You're saying that because we just, one of the things we do in our community is we do a group detox twice a year, just so that we can continue to deepen our detox strategies, not to say, Hey, once a year, for twice a year for. Detox. You're cool. No, no, that's not the case. It's like to get these strategy in place because we need to be doing it every day. But, you know, as I start to go into this every six months, people are like, oh, but I, you know, like, you know, you just mentioned DDT, which I know we still find in like the cord blood of infants and it's like, wait a minute where the hex is coming from. So can you just like hit that one a little bit harder about like, where are we get, where all these things coming from and how big a problem they are? Dr. Dan Kalish: I test all of my patients extensively with lab work and just in the last 24 hours, [00:10:00] I've had. Three patients with arsenic toxicity, someone with mercury and someone with a pretty bad chemical toxicity problem. So this is rampant pretty much everyone in the United States has had exposure for their entire lifetime to heavy metals and chemicals. It could be flame retardants from furniture. It could be your dental fillings, leaching out mercury. Worst exposure actually comes from air. So you don't, even if you're eating organic and you're trying to juice every day, just the fact that you're outside, breathing in the current atmosphere is going to cause a large amount of these chemicals and heavy metals to enter into your system. And it's, I think it's the biggest health problem that we face in integrative medicine because. Conventional medicine is ignoring it. It's ubiquitous, it's happening to everybody. And because it damages mitochondria, we then end up with this whole cascade. And as you know, everything from, you know metabolic syndrome on down to thyroid problems, right? That's a direct result of [00:11:00] these toxins hitting our very sensitive tissues. JJ Virgin: Is there a way to tell how much mitochondrial damage. Dr. Dan Kalish: Oh, yeah. Well, that's the new breakthrough work I'm doing with Richard Lord. Now who's the scientist that I love Richard JJ Virgin: Lord. I love, love him. He's like, he's so great. Yeah, because he can explain the most, I would always call him when I was on freaky eaters and I was doing a bunch of Metametrics testing and using it on freaky eaters. I had to explain this to, you know, they always say on TV, talk to the fifth grader. So I'd call I'd call Dr. Richard Lord. And I go, all right. How do I explain this? And he, he could just rattle out to me that sign of true genius is taking complicated things and be able to explain them to, Dr. Dan Kalish: yeah. And he and I worked together every Monday now for the last two and a half years. And so we've actually produced a couple of books together about this very subject as well. And it's. The, I mean the, so there's an, this is a little technical, but I'll just mentioned it briefly. There's a way that you can analyze organic [00:12:00] acids tests, where you see underactive, mitochondrial markers showing up when the energy production mitochondrial markers are low. So if you see a physician who's been trained by me recently or who works directly with Richard Lord, you can glance at one of these profiles, like a neutral vowel or an organic acids profile, and boom, it just jumps out at you and you see what are, what Richards is now calling a hypo metabolic state, meaning that there's not enough mitochondria left in that person's body to make these responses. And you just see low levels across the board. And those are the people that are struggling with. weight gain, fatigue, no matter how much they exercise or how sparsely they eat their metabolism is basically shut down and there's not enough mitochondria left. And then we need to rebuild the mitochondria, which of course, you know, all about that's getting in the gym, getting on the amino acids and those kinds of things. So, yeah, JJ Virgin: let's go through that. I want to talk about first of all, how to protect them, but before we go to protect them, let's let's, since you brought it up [00:13:00] and everyone's now thinking. I got bad mitochondria. So what, what can we do to rebuild those mitochondria? Dr. Dan Kalish: Yeah. So I've got to think of non-doctor solutions. Like in my world, I run, I would run a lab and fix them for you. But if you're not going to see a doctor and they're not going to do this for you, JJ Virgin: but we'll put some in that, cause we do a lot of referring out to functional medicine, doctors and testing. So we will put that in the show notes. And Dan as I talked about in the intro, has the Kalish Institute. And so we will have this in the show notes. So you can find doctors trained in this, but what are some things someone listening right now can go, all right, I'm freaking out. What can I do? Dr. Dan Kalish: Yeah. So number one is you increase your antioxidants and that could be with antioxidant supplements, with vegetable juices, with, you know, doubling your fruit and vegetable intake. Well, shouldn't, they JJ Virgin: just drink celery juice. Isn't that? The answer? Are you just getting drive us, like going, could someone stop asking like, [00:14:00] Single time. I go on social media now , it's the celery juice thing. I'm like, geez, I know it's like, it's the medical medium gone wild anyway. Okay. So increased antioxidants fruits and all the, all the great color of the rainbow of fruits and vegetables and great antioxidant supplements. Dr. Dan Kalish: And if you are doing excessive cardio back it off and go into the gym and get more into strength, training, and yoga and those kinds of things. So you're not running too much oxygen through your lungs and you're not too chronically stressed. And then, you know, as Richard says, there's always three things that you want to do to really fix these mitochondria on a nutritional level. And there are three key nutrients, right? Oxygen cocuten and magnesium. So oxygen comes from breathing, not excessive breathing, but deep, relaxed breathing. So if you're a couch potato, when you're not getting enough activity, you want to do some meditation exercises or breathing exercises. You need that oxygen to feed the mitochondria, not like Wim Hoff level. [00:15:00] Yeah. Not too much talking about too much is gonna whcak you out. Right. And then magnesium is easy enough to get as a supplement. Just don't take too much of it. You get diarrhea or loose stool and JJ Virgin: You can only do that once. Yeah. Dr. Dan Kalish: Those three. Those are the three biggies. Yep. All right. JJ Virgin: Perfect. Are those the same types of things? Like I would imagine if you're going to try to do some lifestyle stuff to help protect your mitochondria. Some of it would be changing up that exercise routine and some would be ating more deep green leafies and stuff, but I'm, I'm assuming there's some stuff in there with like really being aware of toxic exposure. Dr. Dan Kalish: Yeah. Well, I mean, if you're, I guess you have to meet people where they are. Right. So trying to get away from putting, you know, chemicals and sprays on the food that you're eating. So you're trying to be more on the organic food air is a big issue, right? So depending on the type of home you're living in, seeing if you can get air filter, So you can keep the exposure to toxicants in your home, down to minimum, and then other basics for women, [00:16:00] especially in terms of avoiding makeup that is full of lead or other kind of chemical compounds. You don't want to rub that stuff on your skin or use lipstick, that's full of something that's potentially toxic. And then you can kind of get into the home care products, like the cleaning agents and the deodorants and those kinds of things as well, you know, where you're really kind of leaning towards this sort of greener lifestyle. Right. And just. Not spraying and, you know, polluting yourself in a purposeful way that you could avoid. Oh, and then the other thing is the magic bullet, right? Which no one ever wants to do. And it's free is basically drink enough water that you're flushing out all the water soluble toxins. That's kind of a no brainer. Well, JJ Virgin: I mean, let's talk about water because this is like, not only is it great for detox, it's like great for your metabolism. It's like, this is, this is like, you know, when you look at a lot of the things that you can do to get healthy, they're free. Drinking more water, you know, it's like, these are, these are not, they're just the things we tend to avoid. So [00:17:00] one of the things I always like to get people to do is focus on one thing at a time. So if you take anything away from today and you will, there's a lot of steps that's going to hear as action steps. My gosh, just starting to drink more water. And how much do you recommend? Dr. Dan Kalish: Well, you know, most of the time people lose their natural thirst. The natural sense of thirst when they're chronically dehydrated. So most people that are dehydrated find water repulsive. I know. And that thirst signal is replaced with a hunger signal. Yeah. So I know every morning at 11, when I get hungry in every afternoon at four, when I get hungry, I just go out and pound a quart water and mysteriously. My hunger is gone. Even knowing all this, I still get the hunger signal. Boom drink the water, the hunger signal is gone. So, you know, the, I mean the water consumption rates vary depending on the person's overall health, but you want to have a minimum of one completely clear urination a day where the urine looks just like water. If you're not doing that, then you're in serious trouble. And then, you know, the other kind of basic formula is half your body weight in [00:18:00] ounces. But for most people that's too much in that they just won't do it. It's just not practical, you know? I try to get people to meet people where they are. And most of the people that I'm working with are drinking like a court at the best or a liter at the best. And at least I have them double that. JJ Virgin: Yeah. Yeah. And what I find is with anything, what you measure you can improve. So I know I like have to carry something around where I have, how much water I'm drinking. Otherwise I just forget. Dr. Dan Kalish: So absolutely. You got to keep track of it. You're right, because JJ Virgin: we do need to talk about this. Cause we talked about toxins. Like the last thing you want them to do is grab a plastic water bottle. And drink water from Dr. Dan Kalish: those. And you do not want to drink tap water. That's full of chemicals, like chlorine, et cetera. Yeah. JJ Virgin: So what should they be Dr. Dan Kalish: doing? Well, you know, you can buy a really great water filter for a hundred, $200. You don't have to spend a huge amount of money on a really fancy one. I mean the fancy ones are nice, but I think you look at it over the course of a year or two. Good. [00:19:00] Triple filter underwater under counter system, you can get fresh water from that, and you only have to change the filters maybe every six months or every year, an extra 20, 30 bucks. So I think that's the most affordable way to get yourself into the fresh water. And then that in and of itself is going to clear. All the water soluble toxins out of your tissue. That's half the battle right there. And now you're just left with the fat-soluble ones. JJ Virgin: Yeah. And what is your strategy for the fat-soluble ones, which are obviously the difficult ones, Dr. Dan Kalish: not eating ice cream. I'm sorry, that's my personal weakness, so, JJ Virgin: okay. Well, there we go. That's so simple. I thought you're going to say sauna, Dr. Dan Kalish: and it's like, I'm only half joking butter pecan, just don't get in the butter pecan section… You know JJ Virgin: what so delicious dairy free that has one gram of sugar. Butter pecan. Is that right? Dr. Dan Kalish: Yep. JJ Virgin: There you go. So you can have at that. You're welcome. Dr. Dan Kalish: All right. And then I do, actually I have an infrared sauna and I do a [00:20:00] 20 minutes or more. JJ Virgin: Every time you eat ice cream in your infrared Dr. Dan Kalish: sauna, never. Although that would be an ironic thing that I'd have to eat really fast. Right. Because it would be melting detox, JJ Virgin: detox, detox. Dr. Dan Kalish: Yeah. So yeah, the sauna thing, the sweating thing, the exercise. You know, I mean, it's all comes back to these basic fundamental concepts that we know, but I, I think, like you said, if people can just start with one area that they know their weekend and focus on that for a couple months, until you master it and get that level of mastery, then you can go on to the next thing. I mean, I think especially, you know, in the new year, everybody's, you know, trying to go on a correct my entire life thing, and then, you know, falling apart, we really try to do things one at a time, wherever the. Yeah, it was gained can come from, you know? JJ Virgin: Yeah. I love that. I think it's called the freedom journal that has a hundred day sprint and you just do one thing and just that, and then you look at it over [00:21:00] time and you realize how big of a shift you make, because anytime I've tried to do too much, it's always a fail. So everything I do, all the programs, it's like just one. That's all you get to do. Nope. We're not adding in the rest of this stuff yet. So if you've been listening to this, cause I am just guessing that most people listening to this are probably not getting enough water in such a simple, like, talk about a simple health hack. Just add that in, just to add in, add in water and take out ice cream. That's the big takeaway from this. Dr. Dan Kalish: It's just five pounds is gone right JJ Virgin: there. Wow. Wow. That was magic. So I know you've got like this, this was very superficial scratch the surface of mitochondria. As you can see, mitochondria is everything. So you're going to want to learn more and Dan has put together his mitochondria masterclass, a deep dive into all of this that you were getting for free. Thank you so much for that, Dan. I appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. So you can go to [00:22:00] JJvirgin.com/Mito, M I T O. I was going to put the whole thing and then I thought it's hard to spell. So it's JJvirgin.com/Mito. We'll also have information in there on the Kalish Institute on testing so that if you want. Dive deeper into this. You can. I know back when I saw people one-on-one I always used organic acid testing because it was just such an easy way to see if something was wrong with people's engines. Okay. Right. Exactly. Dr. Dan Kalish: It measures it thoroughly from the top to the bottom. It's really quite remarkable. JJ Virgin: Yeah, I actually just did mine. Recently I just had a big surgery in December, so I decided it was perfect. Like three weeks after that, when everything was completely trashed to go and do it and see how bad it was. So I can fix that. So, That's what I am now. I'm now I'm in fixed process after that, but yeah, it's a really good functional way to do that. So we'll include that in there as well. So again, JJvirgin.com/Mito. Dan, thank you so much for your time. Super interesting. And you did a great job breaking down the complicated into simple. Thank you. [00:23:00] All right. Now, after the break, we'll be answering a listener's question. So stay with me. Welcome back. This is the time where we answer a listener's question. Now, if you've been listening to my podcast, you know, my favorite thing to do is grab questions from my viewers on my Facebook and Instagram live. So if you have not popped over there yet and hung out with me, jj.virgin on Instagram with the little blue check mark and JJ Virgin official. On Facebook and just subscribe, become a member of my community. And then you'll know when I go live and just let me know what you'd like to know more about or what pressing questions you have. This one's from Alicia says, alright, I've been running and running and running. What should I be doing for exercise? Now I will tell you full disclosure. I used to be a massive aerobics fiend. In fact, I used to teach gosh, anywhere from three to five aerobics classes a [00:24:00] day, I used to run. I remember running for two hours at a time. I used to ride my bike roller blade aerobics. I was just a, an aerobic, cardio exercising, endurance exercising. Fiend is what I did all weekend. etc. And then I learned about high-intensity interval training. What I learned was that cardiovascular training endurance training creates a lot of oxidative stress on the body, which is super aging. You heard about today from Dr. Dan and it's super aging, and it also is super damaging to your mitochondria. And also it takes a darn long time back when I did all of that aerobic, cardio exercise all the time, I did not have kids. Which changed the game. I was a personal trainer, so I was doing, working out with my clients and I was in grad school. That was kind of it. So all I did was go to grad school, work out my clients and workout. That was it. Oh. And ate a little bit and slept. [00:25:00] So then, you know, had kids got married, had kids started another business, and also I didn't have that much time. But at that time too, I also learned about high intensity interval training. And that while what happens when you do a lot of endurance training is you can actually break down muscle. You raise stress hormones, you lower anabolic hormones. And use aging and you makes you hungrier when you do high intensity interval training, you can do it in a quarter of the time. Like if most of the time you're doing cardio for an hour plus high intensity interval training is 15 to 20 minutes and we'll put a link in the show notes, JJvirgin.com/Mito. We'll put a link in the show notes about. Some of the different things that you can, you can do, but also I'll show my exiser training, but basically it's where you go all out for 30 to 60 seconds. So maybe that's sprinting running upstairs doing the Xciser jumping jacks, and then you recover actively for twice as long [00:26:00] to buffer lactic acid back down. And you repeat that to accumulate four to eight total minutes of bursting. And you're really going all out and hard. I tell people if you can do more than four to eight total minutes of bursting, Done in those tronches of three to eight, 30 to 60 seconds, and then you're not working out hard enough. So you do it in a short amount of time. It raises growth hormone. You have much less oxidative stress. It's not going to impact your immune system. Like the other stuff. Does it raises your anabolic hormones. It teaches your body how to handle stress better. And it's very time efficient as a better metabolic. So amen for all of that. Like, you know, it's all the good. All right. So that's what I want you to flip on over to Alicia high-intensity interval training. I call it bursting to blast fat. We'll put some resources at jjvirgin.com/Mito, M I T O. And I will see you next time. Oh, and remember if you haven't subscribed yet, be sure to do that and leave a review so I can shout you out.[00:27:00]