Episode 10

Increasing Your Healthspan with Northwest watersports Legend Bruce Barry

Today I'm talking with the legendary Bruce Barry about how to increase your healthspan and age well. If you want to learn the secrets of feeling your best at every stage of life, you'll be inspired by this 72 year old water sports athlete and local legend.

Professionally Bruce has a degree in Food Technology and is a 50 year veteran of the food industry with leadership positions in food safety, product development, and labeling where he also performed a leadership role in industry trade associations and academics. During his career, Bruce has authored multiple food safety studies and publications, has interfaced with regulatory agencies, and has been a frequent speaker at industry events.

Personally, Bruce is a 72-year-old endurance athlete with decades of experience in surfing, sailing, windsurfing, and standup paddle where he is a frequent podium winner for both age group and open events. His professional and personal interests have given him a unique ability to blend science with the art of performance related living and he writes, speaks, and teaches on holistic and ancestral health with the goal of improving the understanding of the difference between lifespan and healthspan.

Connect with Bruce:

You can contact Bruce by email at: bbarry6186@aol.com

Products Mentioned:

Primal Kitchen

Cronometer (this is Jeannie’s affiliate link)


Also mentioned:

Darin Olien, Fatal Conveniences

Vitamin D – If you’d like a recommendation for a high quality Vit. D3 supplement, DM me and I can send you one. Dosage should be determined depending on your levels, so I recommend asking your doctor to test your Vit. D level.


References:

Adipose Tissue as a Site of Toxin Accumulation 

Is early-onset cancer an emerging global epidemic? Current evidence and future implications

Disclaimer:

This podcast and website represents the opinions of Jeannie Oliver and her guests to the show and website. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and because you are unique, please consult your healthcare professional with any medical questions.

This website or podcast should not be used in any legal capacity whatsoever, including but not limited to establishing “standard of care” in a legal sense or as a basis for expert witness testimony.  No guarantee is given regarding the accuracy of any statements or opinions made on the podcast or website.

In no way does listening, reading, emailing or interacting on social media with our content establish a doctor-patient relationship.

Privacy is of utmost importance to us. All people, places, and scenarios mentioned in the podcast have been changed to protect patient/client confidentiality.

Views and opinions expressed in this podcast are our own and do not represent that of our employers. While we make every effort to ensure that the information we are sharing is accurate, we welcome any comments, suggestions, or correction of errors.

 

Interested in working with Jeannie? Schedule a 30-minute Coffee Talk here.

Connect with me on Instagram @joliverwellness and check out the options for my more affordable self-study programs here: https://www.joliverwellness.com/diy-programs

Music credit: Funk’d Up by Reaktor Productions

A Podcast Launch Bestie production

Transcript
Jeannie Oliver:

Okay, so welcome back to the Nutrition Edit everyone.

Jeannie Oliver:

I am super excited about my guest here with me today.

Jeannie Oliver:

We have Bruce Berry, the legendary Bruce Berry with us.

Jeannie Oliver:

Bruce is actually a legend here in the water sports community in the Pacific

Jeannie Oliver:

Northwest and further afield as well.

Jeannie Oliver:

so Bruce, welcome.

Jeannie Oliver:

I'm so happy to have you with us.

Bruce Barry:

Oh, it's just great.

Bruce Barry:

It's, it's exciting to be here.

Bruce Barry:

And Jeannie, I've, I've been all over your website.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, I've, I've gone through your blog, I've gone through the other podcasts,

Bruce Barry:

and you've just got awesome stuff and being invited on to contribute

Bruce Barry:

is, is really exciting for me.

Bruce Barry:

And hopefully I'll be able to add something of value because you sure

Bruce Barry:

have a lot of value in there for folks.

Jeannie Oliver:

Oh, that means a lot to me.

Jeannie Oliver:

I appreciate that, Bruce.

Jeannie Oliver:

Thank you.

Jeannie Oliver:

And I really appreciate your time and I know that this is gonna

Jeannie Oliver:

be so inspirational and exciting and educational for people too.

Jeannie Oliver:

I'd love to start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and

Jeannie Oliver:

your background and how you came to be this amazing sort of water sports icon.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah, well, like you, I, I grew up in Southern

Bruce Barry:

California, and I am not a big guy.

Bruce Barry:

I'm 142 pounds right now, five seven.

Bruce Barry:

And, I think I was a tri for my parents because they put me in

Bruce Barry:

school when I was four years old.

Bruce Barry:

So not only was I the littlest guy in there, but I was the youngest guy.

Bruce Barry:

And so I went through, all of my school stuff into college, you know,

Bruce Barry:

kind of being the, the wimpy kid, you know, and a add into my small stature.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, but I'm also, I was also really nearsighted with 2,400 vision.

Bruce Barry:

So, you know, the, the last guy chosen for the sports team and you

Bruce Barry:

know, the guy that, the bigger kids always picked on and, but we lived

Bruce Barry:

by the beach and the first time I got a surfboard in my hand, it clicked.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, so I started surfing when I was 10.

Bruce Barry:

And, uh, by the time I was a junior in high school, things began to change

Bruce Barry:

because I began to physically fill out.

Bruce Barry:

I still wasn't very big, but I certainly wasn't a wimpy kid.

Bruce Barry:

I was a short,

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

wimpy kid.

Bruce Barry:

In fact, in, in college they used to call me the missing link.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, I mean, I was surfing five days a week and, I weigh 142 now.

Bruce Barry:

I weighed 160 back then.

Bruce Barry:

It was all upper body, solid muscle.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah, it was, it was, it was pretty interesting.

Bruce Barry:

So, yes, I mean, I, grew up in southern California.

Bruce Barry:

Went to college in San Luis Obispo, which is Central California.

Bruce Barry:

Continued to surf in much rougher, much colder water.

Jeannie Oliver:

Very sharky water.

Bruce Barry:

a little sharky.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Um, met my wife to be at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where I was going to school and.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, next month though will be our 50th wedding anniversary.

Jeannie Oliver:

Awesome.

Bruce Barry:

Um, yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Thank you.

Bruce Barry:

And, and so, you know, we had three daughters and my oldest is

Bruce Barry:

43 and my twin daughters are 41.

Bruce Barry:

So I, I know that most of your clientele is, is female.

Bruce Barry:

so with me being the solitary male in a house full of four females, and,

Jeannie Oliver:

I can imagine.

Bruce Barry:

trust me, they, they all, they all cycled at the same time.

Bruce Barry:

so, you know, I, I'm completely housebroken.

Jeannie Oliver:

I love it.

Bruce Barry:

you know, finally even, I was trained of the unforgivable

Bruce Barry:

sin of leaving the toilet lit up.

Bruce Barry:

I just got to the point where I'd sit down and life was good.

Bruce Barry:

So, continue to surf.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, we started, uh, sailing and I, we raced sailboats up and down the

Bruce Barry:

coast and, I'm not really good with math, but I've got a scientific mind

Bruce Barry:

and, and so if I could memorize stuff,

Bruce Barry:

as opposed to physics or something like that, I found I was Okay.

Bruce Barry:

So biology, microbiology, human biology, all of that stuff really resonated

Bruce Barry:

with me and I became, a microbiologist.

Bruce Barry:

and so I've got, you know, at this point, again, 50 years

Bruce Barry:

experience in the food industry.

Bruce Barry:

I did, product development and food safety for every company that I worked for.

Bruce Barry:

when we talk about, you know, food and food labeling and, and how all

Bruce Barry:

that works, I mean, I was, I was the guy that did all this stuff.

Bruce Barry:

and I keep trying to retire and, you know, I'll, I'll say, this is, this is my date.

Bruce Barry:

And then a week before I walk in and say, Hey, you know what, if we cut

Bruce Barry:

this out, what if we cut that out?

Bruce Barry:

So, you know, I, I still kind of work.

Bruce Barry:

I do about an hour a day, largely remote.

Bruce Barry:

but I get called on nearly a daily basis and I'm on site, you know,

Bruce Barry:

a couple of half days a month.

Bruce Barry:

Of course, those are all days where nothing's going on weather-wise, because

Bruce Barry:

I still surf whenever the coast calls and wind surf whenever there's wind here.

Bruce Barry:

and paddle pretty much stand up, paddle, every day.

Bruce Barry:

I've had a couple of off days this year.

Bruce Barry:

I've, I've been off the water three days so

Jeannie Oliver:

Wow.

Jeannie Oliver:

I haven't been on the water three days yet this year.

Jeannie Oliver:

I am an unabashedly fair weather paddler, unlike my husband who

Jeannie Oliver:

will be out there in 20 degrees,

Bruce Barry:

no matter what and, and.

Bruce Barry:

Christian, your husband, he's just an animal on the water.

Bruce Barry:

and it was, it was fun.

Bruce Barry:

And I, I've had, I've been racing standup now for about 10 years.

Bruce Barry:

And, and so for a lot of the top guys it's, it's been fun as, they've started

Bruce Barry:

because I've, I've always had a little bit more experience with them and, I can

Bruce Barry:

tell the guys that are gonna be really fast, and they're getting closer to

Bruce Barry:

me and closer to me and closer to me.

Bruce Barry:

And, and finally there's the day that they beat me in a race.

Bruce Barry:

Then there's this big fist bump and stuff.

Bruce Barry:

cause you know, sometime around my late fifties, I kind of got to the point

Bruce Barry:

where, you know, to me, you know, if I can help other people achieve their

Bruce Barry:

goals, That's really the key to life.

Bruce Barry:

And so when I see these guys and if I can give 'em a couple of hints and

Bruce Barry:

help 'em develop paddling and they get better to me, you know what?

Bruce Barry:

That's just great.

Bruce Barry:

The other thing is, is, uh, again, from a a size standpoint, if you see standing

Bruce Barry:

next to, your husband Christian, it looks like a dwarf standing next to a giant.

Bruce Barry:

Right?

Bruce Barry:

So, yeah.

Bruce Barry:

I mean I, I'm 72 and I'm still out there and I'm still pretty fast.

Bruce Barry:

But the real issue for me racing isn't, you'd think the age, it's my size.

Bruce Barry:

So the same thing's going on with me racing, standup as it would be if I were

Bruce Barry:

to, to play basketball against Christian.

Bruce Barry:

I might be like an an okay guard outside, but if I go in and try to shoot.

Bruce Barry:

I'm not gonna be able to shoot because I'm gonna have this guy up here that's just

Bruce Barry:

stuffing it right back down my throat.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

But I would argue too, that you're probably a better surfer than he is

Jeannie Oliver:

because your center, gravity's different.

Jeannie Oliver:

Being able to pop up on the board faster is

Jeannie Oliver:

different, whereas he just has a whole different, and he's so,

Jeannie Oliver:

upper body dominant, I would say.

Jeannie Oliver:

So the lower body stuff isn't as easy for him.

Jeannie Oliver:

So, you know, if he's having to navigate waves in the same way that

Jeannie Oliver:

you are with that quad strength and all those things, it's, I don't, I think

Jeannie Oliver:

that you would have him well beat.

Jeannie Oliver:

So you're 72 now, Ruth, and you said you started sub racing 10, just 10 years ago.

Jeannie Oliver:

So you started when you were in your early sixties.

Bruce Barry:

Right, right.

Jeannie Oliver:

That's fantastic.

Jeannie Oliver:

I think a lot of people, and that's something that I'd love for you to speak

Jeannie Oliver:

into a little bit, and you mentioned this before we started recording too,

Jeannie Oliver:

that it's never too late to get started.

Jeannie Oliver:

So, you know, having done all these other sports and been, you

Jeannie Oliver:

know, successful with surfing and everything, I mean, what possessed

Jeannie Oliver:

you at 62 to be like, well, why not?

Jeannie Oliver:

Why not race standup paddleboards?

Bruce Barry:

Yeah, well, what happened is, I, I surfed in southern California, for

Bruce Barry:

the first 10 years of my surfing career.

Bruce Barry:

And then, you know, then we moved north, then we moved to the Bay Area.

Bruce Barry:

I didn't surf as much then, but I raced sailboats and then we moved up here, to

Bruce Barry:

the Seattle area and I raced sailboats and even further from the coast.

Bruce Barry:

And then I started windsurfing.

Bruce Barry:

So I've, I've wind surfed for over 30 years.

Jeannie Oliver:

Cool.

Bruce Barry:

and I, I got to the point where, you know, I'd be down in the

Bruce Barry:

Columbia River Gorge and, wind surfing in this, this really heavy, big air, and it's

Bruce Barry:

pretty much like, surfing on steroids.

Bruce Barry:

so, you know, you, you can only do that so long, before you begin racking up

Bruce Barry:

injuries and sometimes pretty big ones.

Bruce Barry:

so at, at this point, I mean, it's gonna sound crazy to say this,

Bruce Barry:

but I, I've literally strained or broken every part of my body

Jeannie Oliver:

Wow.

Bruce Barry:

I just got to the point where my wife said, are you ever going to learn?

Bruce Barry:

And that was about the time that the standup paddling came about.

Bruce Barry:

And I thought, well, okay, so here we go.

Bruce Barry:

So this is, a little bit, uh, less intense.

Bruce Barry:

this is another way to do it.

Bruce Barry:

I was running a lot, and any runner knows that you, you can run and you can do

Bruce Barry:

3, 4, 5, 6 miles a day for a long time, but eventually it catches up to you.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

and the standup, I actually found was a, a better full body workout.

Bruce Barry:

and it wasn't just the aerobic, it's everything.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

Core

Jeannie Oliver:

asymmetric.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

isometric everything you get going, you know,

Bruce Barry:

seems to work with standup.

Bruce Barry:

And, you know, for me, I don't do, anything half speed.

Bruce Barry:

Typically my, my daily, my daily thing.

Bruce Barry:

I live on Lake Sam Amish.

Bruce Barry:

I've got fixed buoys, and so I, I kind of, I'm racing myself every day.

Bruce Barry:

and I go out and, uh, if I'm not windsurfing or surfing, uh, I'll go out

Bruce Barry:

and I'll, I'll do like a quarter mile warmup and a quarter mile cool down.

Bruce Barry:

But then I'll go flat out for a little bit over two miles.

Bruce Barry:

And, you know, my, my race pace, my, my cadence is about 72 strokes a minute.

Bruce Barry:

So when, when, when you think about how that works.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

I'm taking more than stroke a second.

Bruce Barry:

So, yeah, I just, I just found it to be this, this just great

Bruce Barry:

workout plus, you know, it gets you outside and it's a break in the day

Bruce Barry:

and it's a break in the routine.

Bruce Barry:

And, you know, most of the time, uh, I paddle here on Lake Sam Amish, where

Bruce Barry:

I live, but I'll, I'll go other places and I race up and down the coast.

Bruce Barry:

I mean, I've raced in the big ones in California and the big ones in Hood

Bruce Barry:

River and the big ones in Oregon.

Bruce Barry:

so that's just, it's just a kick.

Bruce Barry:

And the, the community is awesome as well.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yes.

Jeannie Oliver:

That is so true.

Jeannie Oliver:

There's something about standup paddle, and I don't know if it's just the sup

Jeannie Oliver:

or if, because I feel like all the.

Jeannie Oliver:

Wing foiling community here too is really wonderful.

Jeannie Oliver:

But all the water sports people in this area, I am always impressed and blown

Jeannie Oliver:

away by how down to earth and welcoming and kind, and they all have integrity.

Jeannie Oliver:

I mean it's, and they're just fun, cool people.

Jeannie Oliver:

And there's none of that sort of douche baggery, if you will, that

Jeannie Oliver:

you see in other sports communities.

Jeannie Oliver:

at least in my experience.

Jeannie Oliver:

I mean, I grew up snowboarding and there's just a lot of nonsense and ego and I don't

Jeannie Oliver:

see that in the water sports community

Bruce Barry:

it really isn't now.

Bruce Barry:

Then you go and, and hit the coast and the douche bag on steroids.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yes.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

I mean, it doesn't really much matter, you know, where you go and

Bruce Barry:

you'd think that, you know, going out to Westport on the coast here, people

Bruce Barry:

would be a little bit more mellow.

Bruce Barry:

No, uh, it's, it's not, they're, they're kind of used to me at this point.

Bruce Barry:

I've been going out there for 25 or 30 years.

Bruce Barry:

But, there's still moments and, you know, I'm just, just to the point where

Bruce Barry:

I, I just come in thinking, guys, you know, I just really don't need this.

Bruce Barry:

What's wrong with you?

Jeannie Oliver:

Right.

Bruce Barry:

And, and realize it isn't, it isn't gonna change

Jeannie Oliver:

yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

That's too bad.

Jeannie Oliver:

But at least we have our amazing group

Jeannie Oliver:

here within this To lean into.

Jeannie Oliver:

so you said that you're getting out paddling every day.

Jeannie Oliver:

Do you do other training outside of your actual sports?

Jeannie Oliver:

Like, are you in the gym lifting or, on the bike?

Jeannie Oliver:

Like, tell me a little bit more about that.

Jeannie Oliver:

Have you ever sort of deviated from that thing, or, or, you know, of.

Jeannie Oliver:

Just being in the water all the time.

Jeannie Oliver:

Do you augment it?

Jeannie Oliver:

What does your actual training schedule look like?

Jeannie Oliver:

And has it shifted over the years?

Bruce Barry:

Yeah, it, it has, one of my injuries about 10 years

Bruce Barry:

ago, I rearranged my left knee

Jeannie Oliver:

Rearranged.

Jeannie Oliver:

That's a nice way of putting it.

Bruce Barry:

I, I could have had surgery for it.

Bruce Barry:

and they said, yeah, you know, you'll be off the water for six months

Bruce Barry:

and it, it'll probably be better.

Bruce Barry:

It'll probably be okay.

Bruce Barry:

Well, I'm not gonna wait six months for a probable.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, so I, I really can't run much anymore.

Bruce Barry:

You know, I, I can do a day where I can do three miles, but I, I can't go

Bruce Barry:

out and do five or six and I can't do three miles, a day or three in a row.

Bruce Barry:

cause my knee just doesn't line up, right.

Bruce Barry:

I mean, all you have to do is look at it and it's obviously at an off angle.

Bruce Barry:

So when I surf again, that's, that's a little bit different.

Bruce Barry:

that's a little bit more upper body and a different musculature than, than standup.

Bruce Barry:

And in fact, when you look at, at pro surfers, if you don't think about it,

Bruce Barry:

you, you expect to see these guys that are just, you know, massively built, you

Bruce Barry:

know, kinda like the rock or whatever, but they're, they're not, I mean, you,

Bruce Barry:

you look at, at Kelly Slater who's, you know, the greatest of all time, right?

Bruce Barry:

Surfing and, and Kelly looks like a swimmer.

Bruce Barry:

it's not that he, he isn't muscular.

Bruce Barry:

It, it's just that he doesn't have high definition all over where you

Bruce Barry:

look at, at a lot of really good standup paddlers and they're ripped.

Bruce Barry:

Okay?

Bruce Barry:

So I, I've got that going on and, and that kind of does different

Bruce Barry:

muscles than paddling and then the wind surfing and wind foiling.

Bruce Barry:

Definitely does different muscles, and when I surf and or wind foil,

Bruce Barry:

I'm usually out for, you know, two or three hours at a time.

Bruce Barry:

I don't do any more than that because what I've found is that if I go too

Bruce Barry:

long in any given day, then I really do need to take a bit of a break

Bruce Barry:

and I don't like to take breaks.

Bruce Barry:

So I kind limit it to about two hours now,

Jeannie Oliver:

just just the two, two to

Jeannie Oliver:

three hours.

Jeannie Oliver:

That's,

Bruce Barry:

the two.

Jeannie Oliver:

I'm being kinda sarcastic thinking of my like 30 to 60 minutes

Jeannie Oliver:

that I'm putting in a few days a week.

Bruce Barry:

yeah.

Bruce Barry:

And, and then, you know, when I'm, when I paddle, so, you know,

Bruce Barry:

I, I paddle for about 30 minutes with my warmup and cool downs.

Bruce Barry:

but then every other day I'll come in and I'll do, uh, curls

Bruce Barry:

and, and they're not heavy.

Bruce Barry:

It's, it's 20 pounds, but I'll do 10 sets of 40, which is, you know, 400 curls.

Bruce Barry:

And then I'll do two four minute plank sets.

Bruce Barry:

I do a minute and a half of regular plank and then a minute of, of forearm plank,

Bruce Barry:

and then another minute and a half of regular, and then I give it a little bit

Bruce Barry:

of a break, and then five minutes later I come back and, and do it all over again.

Bruce Barry:

And, and what I've found is, is that as I've gotten, as I continue

Bruce Barry:

to get stronger, I, I used to have to give it like an hour or an hour

Bruce Barry:

and a half after I paddled, before I went in and, and did those things.

Bruce Barry:

Now I, I come in, take my wet, soaking wet bandana off and

Bruce Barry:

just go and lay right into it.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, and it just, just doesn't matter.

Bruce Barry:

So, uh, the reason I don't do really heavy stuff is because I've been

Bruce Barry:

broken a lot and, and when I do the heavy stuff, It flares everything up.

Bruce Barry:

Just like I can't run heavily

Bruce Barry:

anymore.

Bruce Barry:

I can't, I can't lift heavily.

Bruce Barry:

I mean, literally, for me, something as, as crazy as, as opening a

Bruce Barry:

twist top jar will literally throw a tendon in my right elbow off.

Bruce Barry:

And it, it takes me, you know, a bit of time to recover from that.

Bruce Barry:

So when we talk about aging and, and think about aging, I mean, what, what happens

Bruce Barry:

is, you know, people get these injuries and, and I've, I've had 'em all, you,

Bruce Barry:

you, you get 'em and then you think, oh man, that, that just, that really bites.

Bruce Barry:

I need to back off.

Bruce Barry:

And you back off.

Bruce Barry:

And

Bruce Barry:

then your muscle atrophies and

Jeannie Oliver:

Yes.

Jeannie Oliver:

And

Bruce Barry:

you

Bruce Barry:

used to

Bruce Barry:

do and then you, you back off again.

Bruce Barry:

So it's this, this wicked, wicked cycle you get into, I mean, I, I literally

Bruce Barry:

about 15 years ago, uh, thought that I was gonna have to, to stop.

Bruce Barry:

Windsurfing and probably stopped surfing because I was in, in chronic pain.

Bruce Barry:

And if you take, you know, pain at a level of 10 being maximum, I was at a,

Bruce Barry:

a four to five every day, in my back and my shoulders, unless I tweaked it,

Bruce Barry:

which would put me into a higher level.

Bruce Barry:

I found a chiropractor who did something called biomechanics, and the first

Bruce Barry:

thing he wanted to do was take X-rays.

Jeannie Oliver:

Mm.

Bruce Barry:

And this is, is going to sound impossible, but I guarantee you it's

Bruce Barry:

true because it showed up on the x-rays.

Bruce Barry:

if you take a line between my shoulders, a straight line across my spine

Bruce Barry:

was pushed one inch to the right.

Jeannie Oliver:

Wow,

Jeannie Oliver:

that's, that's,

Jeannie Oliver:

so significant.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

it's no

Bruce Barry:

wonder my right shoulder didn't, didn't work really well.

Bruce Barry:

it's gonna happen.

Bruce Barry:

I mean, stuff happens as you age, right?

Bruce Barry:

And so you've, gotta find a way to not, not work through the pain,

Bruce Barry:

but try to identify the root cause of the pain,

Bruce Barry:

and try and find a way to solve it.

Bruce Barry:

Drugs are not the answer.

Bruce Barry:

Um, you know, PT is quite often the answer.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, I mean, you may need to take drugs for a limited period

Bruce Barry:

of time because something, you know, can't happen otherwise.

Bruce Barry:

Surgeries are, are always risky.

Bruce Barry:

I mean, I've, I have had, you know, two, they were Unavoidable,

Bruce Barry:

I've got a bionic groin.

Bruce Barry:

I've got 18 square inches of mesh in my groin.

Bruce Barry:

when you fall out of the sky wrong on a sail board for from 15 or 20 feet up,

Bruce Barry:

uh, and land on one foot, unbalanced it, it tends to put a strain on

Bruce Barry:

places that like don't

Jeannie Oliver:

Unnatural.

Bruce Barry:

Yikes.

Jeannie Oliver:

My gosh.

Jeannie Oliver:

Well, that brings me a question because I've dealt with chronic pain before.

Jeannie Oliver:

you know, I kind of beat on my body growing up.

Jeannie Oliver:

I grew up.

Jeannie Oliver:

Riding horses, doing hunter jumpers.

Jeannie Oliver:

I've been thrown off horses.

Jeannie Oliver:

I've, you know, fallen off, over jumps, whatever it landed on my head, landed

Jeannie Oliver:

on my neck, um, broke a million things, snowboarding again, landing on my neck,

Jeannie Oliver:

breaking collarbones, all kinds of things.

Jeannie Oliver:

and at the time I think I was, I kept going because I was young and stupid.

Jeannie Oliver:

I think that when we get older and we are a little wiser or we are

Jeannie Oliver:

more cautious, and like you say, you know, you don't wanna lose that

Jeannie Oliver:

time, but I think that you're right.

Jeannie Oliver:

Like so many people just give up or because they've lost ground,

Jeannie Oliver:

they get to discouraged and then they don't start up again.

Jeannie Oliver:

What, what are the things that have kept you feeling excited?

Jeannie Oliver:

And I don't necessarily like to use the word motivated because I think that

Jeannie Oliver:

motivation ebbs and flows for all of us.

Jeannie Oliver:

Even those of us who are like, you can extremely consistent

Jeannie Oliver:

with your daily activity.

Jeannie Oliver:

But I would say, you know, driven to keep going.

Jeannie Oliver:

or that keep you, yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

Let's just say motivated to, to do the thing even if it's not the thing you love

Jeannie Oliver:

the most or you have to dial it back.

Jeannie Oliver:

share a little bit about that.

Bruce Barry:

it's going to be a personal journey for everyone.

Bruce Barry:

granted, I mean, right, right now, I, I don't work full time.

Bruce Barry:

I don't have kids at home.

Bruce Barry:

in theory I've got all the time in the world to, to rest and, and

Bruce Barry:

recuperate, and that's one of the reasons why I can push pretty hard.

Bruce Barry:

Every day.

Bruce Barry:

But again, one of, one of the keys is, is that you've gotta get to the root cause.

Bruce Barry:

And you know, with my back and shoulder problems, I knew

Bruce Barry:

that something was messed up.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, and I'd been to doctors and I didn't like what they

Bruce Barry:

had to say, and I kept looking.

Bruce Barry:

And, you know, finally, just by chance, I heard a presentation from this

Bruce Barry:

chiropractor who was a triathlete, and he'd done a little bit of surfing.

Bruce Barry:

and he talked about, you know, how he would do x-rays and stuff and, and

Bruce Barry:

actually, you know, really try to dial into what was going on wrong with people.

Bruce Barry:

And, you know, I, I had two discs that were only half the size of

Bruce Barry:

what they were supposed to be.

Bruce Barry:

And, and basically what he did is he, he, he put me on a series

Bruce Barry:

of torture devices and racks

Jeannie Oliver:

my God.

Jeannie Oliver:

I can picture them now.

Jeannie Oliver:

I know exactly which ones you're talking

Bruce Barry:

and, and he, he stretched me out.

Bruce Barry:

Because what happened is I got the injuries and then I pushed through

Bruce Barry:

the pain and the injuries healed with really tighten, uh, ligament.

Bruce Barry:

And so as ligament healed it, pulled everything out of alignment.

Jeannie Oliver:

Right.

Bruce Barry:

the more I pushed, the worse it got.

Bruce Barry:

And so what he did is he stretched everything to get it back into alignment.

Bruce Barry:

I mean, literally, as the discs in my back began to be relieved from the compression

Bruce Barry:

they were under, I'd get my wife's car every, every couple of weeks and I'd have

Bruce Barry:

to adjust the rear view mirror up because I was getting just a little bit taller.

Jeannie Oliver:

That's incredible.

Bruce Barry:

I gained half an inch.

Jeannie Oliver:

Nice.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

And I, I thought it was just age,

Jeannie Oliver:

That's

Jeannie Oliver:

incredible.

Jeannie Oliver:

the root cause thing is really what it comes down to, right?

Jeannie Oliver:

I mean, I, for years with all of my injuries that I'd had gone

Jeannie Oliver:

to, chiropractors, had body work, body, rolfing, you name it, but

Jeannie Oliver:

the structural issues weren't necessarily being addressed.

Jeannie Oliver:

So if you have those structural issues, it doesn't matter how many times you

Jeannie Oliver:

get cracked or massaged, everything's gonna get pulled back out of alignment.

Bruce Barry:

Exactly.

Bruce Barry:

and you know, so I was going to this, the chiropractor for about three

Bruce Barry:

years, and at, at that point, I.

Bruce Barry:

I was really pretty much out of pain on a normal day-to-day standpoint.

Bruce Barry:

my wife had been doing yoga for years, you know, three or four days

Bruce Barry:

a week and, you know, extensively.

Bruce Barry:

And she'd been trying to get me to do it for years and I kept going, nah.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, and she said, well, you know, Kelly Slater does it and Jerry Lopez

Bruce Barry:

does it, and all these, she's just throw out all these pro surfers

Bruce Barry:

that we're, we're doing yoga.

Bruce Barry:

And I go, Nat, well, so about five years ago for my birthday, she got

Bruce Barry:

me a, a one month pass and she said, I don't care if you go or not, but

Bruce Barry:

if, if you know me, you're probably too young to remember this, but

Bruce Barry:

remember on the, uh, the old nickels, they, they had the buffalo on 'em.

Bruce Barry:

They, yeah, well, I'm so tight with a nickel, I can squeeze,

Bruce Barry:

the shit out of the buffalo.

Bruce Barry:

So there was, there was no way.

Bruce Barry:

I was gonna let that pass go to

Bruce Barry:

waste.

Bruce Barry:

And,

Jeannie Oliver:

She was a smart woman.

Jeannie Oliver:

She knew that,

Bruce Barry:

well, she she did.

Bruce Barry:

So, you know, I've been doing it for about two weeks and, and then I went

Bruce Barry:

surfing and everybody has a good day or a great day once in a while.

Bruce Barry:

A a day that's just really different.

Bruce Barry:

And, and so I, I went and I, I blew up and I'm going, oh my gosh, what just happened?

Bruce Barry:

and then I went back again and, and I kept doing the yoga.

Bruce Barry:

And then I, I went back again and, you know, two weeks later

Bruce Barry:

I surfed again, the same thing.

Bruce Barry:

It's like I'm, I'm surfing 20 years younger.

Bruce Barry:

And, and the way I would describe it is that all of a sudden, Rather than

Bruce Barry:

my body being on a two foot spring that was completely compressed.

Bruce Barry:

My body was on a six foot spring.

Bruce Barry:

That was going fully up and fully down.

Bruce Barry:

Well, again, it's, it's this whole idea of the way the tendons and ligaments

Bruce Barry:

and bone and musculature all work.

Bruce Barry:

And what happened is this, this fairly gentle yoga, on top of the work that,

Bruce Barry:

that the chiropractor had done and actually relieved all of the, built

Bruce Barry:

up stresses throughout my whole, system of tendons and ligaments and,

Bruce Barry:

and the way all that stuff works.

Bruce Barry:

Which gets into another interesting part on aging that we'll cover.

Bruce Barry:

I.

Bruce Barry:

A little bit.

Bruce Barry:

So to make a really short story, long as I just did, you, you've

Bruce Barry:

gotta find the root cause and, you know, find a good physical therapist.

Bruce Barry:

if you're in pain or if, if you've got limited mobility,

Bruce Barry:

find something you can do.

Bruce Barry:

maybe it's walking.

Bruce Barry:

Walking is absolutely awesome.

Bruce Barry:

We were built to walk.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yes.

Jeannie Oliver:

I push that all the time.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

maybe you can't do that, because it, it's too much

Bruce Barry:

pain on your lower extremities.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, you can possibly get into a pool and do pool based exercise and

Bruce Barry:

it's still doing the same thing.

Bruce Barry:

It's, it's still working the muscle.

Bruce Barry:

And, and that's the really key thing because what we find as we get into

Bruce Barry:

aging is that within the muscle, there's something called mitochondria.

Bruce Barry:

And, and each one of our cells, Has mitochondria, forgiven,

Bruce Barry:

really healthy person for a muscle cell, a single muscle cell.

Bruce Barry:

You might to have, you might have one to 2000 of these little

Bruce Barry:

mitochondria buddies in there.

Bruce Barry:

A heart maybe three to 4,000.

Bruce Barry:

The brain has upwards of 5,000.

Bruce Barry:

And we used to think that the mitochondria did nothing more than just create energy.

Bruce Barry:

You know, they convert the glucose to energy.

Bruce Barry:

and off we go.

Bruce Barry:

Now what we know is that mitochondria are, hugely responsible for immune function.

Bruce Barry:

And so, if you have mitochondrial dysfunction or if you have a

Bruce Barry:

lack of mitochondria, you've got bad immune function

Jeannie Oliver:

Bad function overall, I would

Jeannie Oliver:

argue,

Bruce Barry:

overall to the extent where a really good thing to remember is that

Bruce Barry:

muscle is the currency of longevity.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yes.

Jeannie Oliver:

Amen.

Bruce Barry:

So, find a way to work through the pain, not work through it,

Bruce Barry:

that, I can deal with it, but find a way to get to the root cause, uh, and then

Bruce Barry:

find a way to be able to get moving again.

Bruce Barry:

you've done such a good job in your blogs and stuff on nutrition.

Bruce Barry:

we typically don't eat right.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, we certainly eat differently now than we did even when I was a kid growing

Bruce Barry:

up because of the way that that foods

Bruce Barry:

are

Bruce Barry:

available and, and, hey, I, I understand it.

Bruce Barry:

I mean, I, I was the guy, I mean, I did the labeling, I developed the

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

So you've seen this trajectory

Jeannie Oliver:

over the years

Jeannie Oliver:

of how things have

Bruce Barry:

I've seen it.

Bruce Barry:

I, I I followed the science.

Bruce Barry:

I work for a meat snack company.

Bruce Barry:

I specifically made meat snacks, that kept this, fat, bad carb good concept in mind.

Bruce Barry:

And that is absolutely catastrophic science for our

Bruce Barry:

society.

Bruce Barry:

you've seen the graphs, I've seen the graphs, I've, I've got presentations full

Bruce Barry:

of the graphs that show that in 1976, all of a sudden something absolutely grotesque

Bruce Barry:

began to happen to US health span,

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah,

Bruce Barry:

and now it's worldwide.

Bruce Barry:

It's not just us.

Bruce Barry:

We've imported this disaster everywhere.

Jeannie Oliver:

yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

It's true.

Jeannie Oliver:

And really quick, I wanna put a pin in that and let's,

Jeannie Oliver:

I love the word health span.

Jeannie Oliver:

Tell us what you.

Jeannie Oliver:

Mean by health span, because I think that people think of, you

Jeannie Oliver:

know, lifespan or longevity.

Jeannie Oliver:

But when we talk about health span, we're actually talking about aging well, right?

Jeannie Oliver:

Like enjoying each state of your life, feeling good and vibrant and being

Jeannie Oliver:

able to move in each stage of life.

Jeannie Oliver:

Is that how you see that term?

Bruce Barry:

E exactly.

Bruce Barry:

Perfectly stated.

Bruce Barry:

When, when we look at the data, uh, and it used to be us now, it's now it's

Bruce Barry:

worldwide, lifespan, you know, roughly in the US it's, it's, it was 78 years now.

Bruce Barry:

Now it's 76, uh, biggest drop in a century in the last two years.

Bruce Barry:

And it's not just covid, it's a combination of many things.

Bruce Barry:

We'll talk about some of that later.

Bruce Barry:

but basically if, if you take that 78 lifespan, Health span is a difference

Bruce Barry:

between great robust health, I'm feeling good and a downward spiral.

Bruce Barry:

And generally, you know, we're, we're thinking statistically it

Bruce Barry:

looks like that spiral is about 10 years before end of life.

Jeannie Oliver:

Hmm.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah, that makes for a not fun.

Jeannie Oliver:

10 years,

Jeannie Oliver:

last

Bruce Barry:

not so fun.

Bruce Barry:

10 years.

Bruce Barry:

So, yeah.

Bruce Barry:

So your age cohort, which is another really interesting thing.

Bruce Barry:

there was a study that came out just last year and it was

Bruce Barry:

called the birth Cohort Effect.

Bruce Barry:

what the study found, and it was a mata analysis, tens of thousands of people.

Bruce Barry:

And what it found is that cancer rates are statistically exploding with every

Bruce Barry:

10 year difference in birth cohort.

Bruce Barry:

An example, 30 to 40 year olds have statistically much higher rates of

Bruce Barry:

cancer than 40 to 50 year olds had when they were 10 years younger.

Bruce Barry:

And it's it's exponential

Bruce Barry:

and it's worse in the US but it's, it's a first world problem.

Bruce Barry:

you know, so what causes that?

Bruce Barry:

Well, I mean, what, what causes it is, is we begin to, think about how different,

Bruce Barry:

our lives are and our environment is.

Bruce Barry:

Then it was, 30 years ago when we were younger or our parents'

Bruce Barry:

age, or our grandparents' age.

Bruce Barry:

And, you know, at, at this point, I almost want to, to back up not

Bruce Barry:

30, 40, 50, 60 years old, but, but maybe go back about 2 billion years.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah, which is a ways, but I think it's a good thing to do

Jeannie Oliver:

because I think that we need to kind of look at the drastic difference between

Jeannie Oliver:

how our ancient ancestors would've, the environment, the terrain, so to speak,

Jeannie Oliver:

that they would have lived in what our bodies would've evolved to deal with,

Jeannie Oliver:

or the environment we would've been.

Jeannie Oliver:

Surviving in versus now with all the modern, conveniences.

Jeannie Oliver:

I love that Darren Lene calls 'em fatal conveniences.

Jeannie Oliver:

Um, but aspects of our modern world that make life easier, they're

Jeannie Oliver:

actually making us sicker and they're shortening our lifespans.

Jeannie Oliver:

And I love that you sent me an actual, timeline too, where you have mapped

Jeannie Oliver:

this all out, like basically like the history of Man on Earth and, and

Jeannie Oliver:

you know, how things have changed.

Jeannie Oliver:

so yeah, give us a little, you know, kind of encapsulated view of that.

Jeannie Oliver:

'cause I think it's really important for people to understand.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bruce Barry:

So if we, if we go back to the very beginnings of life, I mean, obviously

Bruce Barry:

we don't, we don't know exactly.

Bruce Barry:

We, we can't label a culprit, but it was a single celled organism that's called

Bruce Barry:

Luca last, universal common ancestor,

Bruce Barry:

Luca.

Bruce Barry:

Okay.

Bruce Barry:

So Luca was either r n a or d n a based.

Bruce Barry:

It, you know, nobody knows for sure.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, d n A is is what we think of as contending the genetic code.

Bruce Barry:

R n a is sort of the messenger boy, and a really good way to think of d n a and r n

Bruce Barry:

a is that d n a is like read only memory.

Bruce Barry:

R n A is random access memory.

Bruce Barry:

They're held on chromosomes.

Bruce Barry:

Chromosomes are like our hard drives and it's held within each cell.

Bruce Barry:

Well, the interesting thing is, is when you look at, at each cell and when you,

Bruce Barry:

when you think about life, you know, there's, there's really four definitions

Bruce Barry:

of, of life, of a living organism.

Bruce Barry:

One, it's got a uniform in tech body.

Bruce Barry:

Every single cell organism does two.

Bruce Barry:

It receives inputs and has metabolic processes that react to them.

Bruce Barry:

Three, based on those metabolic processes and the inputs it receives,

Bruce Barry:

it has outputs, it sends out signals, and four, it self replicates.

Bruce Barry:

So the difference between a bacteria and a virus is that a virus isn't

Bruce Barry:

alive because can't self-replicate.

Bruce Barry:

It's gotta invade one of our cells and use our cells as, as a pirate.

Bruce Barry:

So the reality, when you think about, you know what, we really are.

Bruce Barry:

Is again, each one of our cells is alive in sentient.

Bruce Barry:

We've got 30 trillion of them that's 30 with 12 zeros behind it to make that work.

Bruce Barry:

There's another 70 trillion microbial cells within us.

Bruce Barry:

We have more bacterial d n a in us than our own human.

Bruce Barry:

D n a.

Bruce Barry:

A really cute way to look at it that's not necessarily untrue is that we

Bruce Barry:

are nothing more than a nice walking habitat for a big pile of bacteria.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah, exactly.

Jeannie Oliver:

It's like those jellyfish that you see, they're not

Jeannie Oliver:

one jellyfish.

Jeannie Oliver:

They're actually a colony of

Jeannie Oliver:

different

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

So for, for me to just talk, or for me to stretch out my arm an exclamation,

Bruce Barry:

I've literally gotta activate somewhere in the area of a hundred trillion

Bruce Barry:

sentient organisms to do that.

Jeannie Oliver:

The mind boggles.

Bruce Barry:

We think we control it all.

Bruce Barry:

We don't,

Jeannie Oliver:

we Humans are arrogant, aren't we?

Bruce Barry:

yeah, we are.

Bruce Barry:

70% of our metabolism is done, autonomously.

Bruce Barry:

the reason it's done autonomously is because our cells don't trust us.

Bruce Barry:

They don't believe we'll do it.

Bruce Barry:

Right.

Bruce Barry:

And a really good trick to prove that to yourself is hold your breath

Bruce Barry:

and let me know how long that takes.

Bruce Barry:

Because at some point your cell is gonna take over and say, Hey, stupid.

Bruce Barry:

Knock, knock.

Bruce Barry:

Big breath.

Bruce Barry:

Okay, so, um, The other, the other thing about our, our cells and, life

Bruce Barry:

and aging and everything else is, is that again, this, this goes back,

Bruce Barry:

billions of years from a life standpoint, from the standpoint of, of homo

Bruce Barry:

sapiens, it's, it's one to 2 million depending upon how you look at it.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, so our cells have this, tremendous buildup of information on how to live.

Bruce Barry:

And when we think about aging, you know, there's a big difference

Bruce Barry:

between how we age and why we age.

Jeannie Oliver:

Mm.

Bruce Barry:

is

Bruce Barry:

really simple.

Bruce Barry:

We age because life past procreation a benefit to nature.

Bruce Barry:

Our cells literally are programmed to take us out because it is nature's

Bruce Barry:

first order of conservation to remove a population that can no longer

Bruce Barry:

propagate because gene pool propagation.

Bruce Barry:

Is the reason for all life.

Jeannie Oliver:

Mm-hmm.

Bruce Barry:

It's that brutally simple.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yep.

Bruce Barry:

So we're, we're programmed to self-destruct.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yep.

Bruce Barry:

we self-destructed at, at a different rate now than all

Bruce Barry:

other land-based mammals because of something called the grandmother effect.

Bruce Barry:

What happens is that grandmothers help their daughters have more progeny.

Bruce Barry:

And so if you think back about 50,000 years ago when this this first began

Bruce Barry:

to be noticed, what happens with, with natural selection as you have, you

Bruce Barry:

know, this, this nice older lady and her daughter has more kids and then

Bruce Barry:

they have more kids and her older lady, genes get passed on to the daughters.

Bruce Barry:

Then they get passed on to the sons and then they have more people

Bruce Barry:

that get older and they pass it on.

Bruce Barry:

So, so we developed, uh, disability to live longer, about 50,000 years ago.

Bruce Barry:

And we know this because there's a thing called Paleo pathology.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, and the interesting thing is, is that, you know, again, with this, this

Bruce Barry:

whole concept of getting older and how everything works is that during the

Bruce Barry:

Paleolithic period, stone Age, which ended about 10 to 12,000 years ago, and this

Bruce Barry:

is the whole again, the whole concept of, of paleo eating and, and paleo, this

Bruce Barry:

paleo that, uh, those people were bigger.

Jeannie Oliver:

Hmm.

Bruce Barry:

They were bigger than what came after in the Neolithic.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, in fact, on average in the Fertile Crescent in the Pacific, in the, um, in

Bruce Barry:

the ancient near East, uh, where most of these bones are found, it was only in

Bruce Barry:

the last 40 or 50 years when the average height regained that of the paleo years.

Jeannie Oliver:

Hmm.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah, they, yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Well, Everything was different about 'em, and they were hunter gatherers, you

Bruce Barry:

know, for them to be in a group of over a hundred, a 125 people was rare because

Bruce Barry:

that type of, of living couldn't support

Jeannie Oliver:

Right.

Bruce Barry:

So they, they ate on the fly, they ate berries, nuts.

Bruce Barry:

There really wasn't a whole lot of farming going on.

Bruce Barry:

The farming started with the neolithic period about 10,000 years ago, and

Bruce Barry:

what happened is, again, with the study of bones, what we found is that

Bruce Barry:

the cause of death began to change.

Bruce Barry:

So in the stone age, the typical cause of death was occupational.

Bruce Barry:

It was childbirth injury from accident or warfare.

Bruce Barry:

In the neolithic period, birth still was high, but it was disease.

Bruce Barry:

What happened is as we began farming and living in clustered

Bruce Barry:

communities, The disease started.

Bruce Barry:

That's literally the price of civilization.

Jeannie Oliver:

Wow.

Bruce Barry:

And that's the beginning of, of this change of,

Bruce Barry:

of how we got to where we are now.

Bruce Barry:

Because what's, what's happened is we've gone from a point where had an okay food

Bruce Barry:

source, but we had to work to get it to the point now where we don't have to work,

Bruce Barry:

we don't have to move to do anything.

Bruce Barry:

We can spend our whole lives doing what you and I are doing right now.

Bruce Barry:

We don't have to leave these screens.

Bruce Barry:

It is a totally, completely alien environment that our

Bruce Barry:

bodies were not designed for.

Bruce Barry:

a really interesting thing, and I was, looking it up, the other day is

Bruce Barry:

in rural Africa, the average woman still has to walk four miles a day.

Bruce Barry:

They walk two miles to get their water.

Bruce Barry:

They walk two miles back.

Bruce Barry:

When they walk back, they're carrying 40 pounds of water.

Bruce Barry:

Um,

Jeannie Oliver:

I mean, we can't even fathom that

Bruce Barry:

and everything we've done, and this goes back five minutes to,

Bruce Barry:

you know, when you began this kind of monologue, everything we've done to make

Bruce Barry:

life easier has made it more disruptive to our genes because none of this

Bruce Barry:

is the way we were designed to live.

Bruce Barry:

Screens not so bueno

Bruce Barry:

Light at night, not so bueno.

Jeannie Oliver:

Other than firelight, right.

Bruce Barry:

other than file, well, yeah.

Bruce Barry:

That's not

Bruce Barry:

really, you know.

Jeannie Oliver:

orange hue, it says all blue lights shining in her eyes.

Bruce Barry:

You've got good information on your blog, a about, circadian rhythms.

Bruce Barry:

Okay?

Bruce Barry:

And we're completely disrupting our ci circadian rhythms with all of this blue

Bruce Barry:

light at night.

Bruce Barry:

in fact, uh, a guy in 2017 got a Nobel Prize for discovering that almost every

Bruce Barry:

single one of our cells is governed by its own unique circadian rhythm.

Jeannie Oliver:

Isn't that so fascinating?

Bruce Barry:

So, you know, getting back to this idea of, bright blue light

Bruce Barry:

during the day, which, makes us secrete serotonin, which is our daily upper,

Bruce Barry:

and this, this amber firelight at night, which does melatonin, which is our downer.

Bruce Barry:

That's the way we're supposed to live.

Bruce Barry:

And oh, by the way, when you look at what melatonin really

Bruce Barry:

does, it's not just for sleep.

Bruce Barry:

It's massively impacting the immune function.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

Brain detoxification and Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

So much.

Bruce Barry:

So we, we've got that going on.

Bruce Barry:

We've, we've got the fact that we're not moving.

Bruce Barry:

We've got the fact that our food supply is corrupted.

Bruce Barry:

We've got the fact that we've screwed up our circadian rhythms.

Bruce Barry:

You've also got good information on detox.

Bruce Barry:

there was a landmark study done a couple of years ago where they tested 400 people

Bruce Barry:

for chemical toxins and found the average person had around a hundred different

Bruce Barry:

manmade toxins stored in their fat.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

Have you ever seen those shows like Dr.

Jeannie Oliver:

Pimple Popper, you know what I'm talking about, where they remove some

Jeannie Oliver:

like giant like cyst or something

Jeannie Oliver:

from these people's?

Jeannie Oliver:

And I always, Bruce am like so desperate for them to find some sort of toxicology

Jeannie Oliver:

lab where they could go in and test what's in that cyst, in that fat, because we

Jeannie Oliver:

do sequester toxins in our fat cells.

Jeannie Oliver:

And so always curious like what would they find, what would be there?

Jeannie Oliver:

But you're right, and, and because you're in food science, and you know, I've harped

Jeannie Oliver:

on this a lot, but I think it's always, it always bears repeating because, well,

Jeannie Oliver:

organic food is certainly not perfect.

Jeannie Oliver:

I do believe that minimizing our exposure to all of these man-made

Jeannie Oliver:

chemicals as much as we can is a crucial piece to, preserving that health span.

Jeannie Oliver:

And even just enjoying where we're at right now in whatever stage of life that

Jeannie Oliver:

is just taking good care of our bodies.

Jeannie Oliver:

so as someone with a food science, Mind and background, what are the biggest,

Jeannie Oliver:

most detrimental shifts that you've seen as far as what's being used in

Jeannie Oliver:

the food supply now that wasn't maybe, you know, even 20, 30 years ago?

Jeannie Oliver:

I mean, I talk a lot about, with my clients, especially in my, you know,

Jeannie Oliver:

detox programs and things about obesogens and endocrine disrupting chemicals.

Jeannie Oliver:

you know, there's a lot of lawsuits out there now against Monsanto over

Jeannie Oliver:

glyphosate or Roundup, which, you know, the World Health Organization

Jeannie Oliver:

has declared a probable carcinogen.

Jeannie Oliver:

I mean, there's so many of these things.

Jeannie Oliver:

So from your perspective, what do you think the biggest, most

Jeannie Oliver:

detrimental shifts have been there?

Bruce Barry:

Yeah, that's a tough one.

Bruce Barry:

Especially, I mean, even something as simple as, as drinking water,

Bruce Barry:

we don't, we really don't know what, what's in our water anymore.

Bruce Barry:

And, you know, the whole idea of is it fluoridated?

Bruce Barry:

You know, do we have that in there?

Bruce Barry:

And if it is, what does that cause?

Bruce Barry:

we all kind of have a basic understanding now that excess sugar is bad.

Bruce Barry:

and that's, that's pretty common knowledge.

Bruce Barry:

there's becoming greater knowledge about the fact that, fat isn't really bad.

Bruce Barry:

You know, fat's not this evil thing.

Bruce Barry:

We thought it was for a long time.

Bruce Barry:

I'll be honest, until 10 years ago, I wouldn't do butter.

Bruce Barry:

I'd be really careful about any saturated fat because I thought

Bruce Barry:

that saturated fat was the devil.

Jeannie Oliver:

Oh, and doctors will still tell you that if you have high

Jeannie Oliver:

cholesterol or you have anything, you know, heart disease related or concerns,

Jeannie Oliver:

that's the first thing that they tell you.

Jeannie Oliver:

Avoid the

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

fats.

Bruce Barry:

So, the problem with, with the fat is this sleeper

Bruce Barry:

idea of, essential fatty acids.

Bruce Barry:

Okay?

Bruce Barry:

So there are essential omega six fatty acids and there are

Bruce Barry:

essential omega three fatty acids.

Bruce Barry:

They do two different things.

Bruce Barry:

The omega six essentials, foster inflammation, supposed to,

Jeannie Oliver:

Yep.

Bruce Barry:

the omega threes are anti-inflammatory.

Bruce Barry:

They're supposed to be.

Bruce Barry:

The problem is, is is that with, again, this disastrous, you know,

Bruce Barry:

fat, bad carb, good thing, and let's eat heart healthy oils.

Bruce Barry:

What happened is we went from, a, an ancestral ratio of kind of like

Bruce Barry:

one part, omega three to maybe.

Bruce Barry:

Four parts.

Bruce Barry:

Omega four, which, which kind of kept inflammation, you know, pro-inflammatory

Bruce Barry:

stuff, anti-inflammatory stuff, imbalance to the standard American

Bruce Barry:

diet, which is upwards of one to 21 part omega, three to 20 parts, omega six.

Bruce Barry:

That causes masses massive, massive inflammation.

Bruce Barry:

And the problem is, is that you don't know it.

Bruce Barry:

you have no idea.

Bruce Barry:

everybody's got bank accounts.

Bruce Barry:

Everybody knows what it's like to draw down on their accounts.

Bruce Barry:

And you know, you, you look it up online, you think, oh, well I've

Bruce Barry:

got this, that, or the other.

Bruce Barry:

I'm cool that the problem with, this, inflammation from the omega sixes

Bruce Barry:

is you have no idea what's going on.

Bruce Barry:

You have no idea what's happening to you with it.

Bruce Barry:

And what most people are doing is they're massively drawing

Bruce Barry:

down again, immune function.

Bruce Barry:

on this overconsumption of omega sixes with her immune function

Bruce Barry:

already wiped out by dysfunction.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, and it, it's just again, this, this spiral that goes on and on.

Bruce Barry:

also, you know, one other thing going on with, with diet,

Bruce Barry:

and that is micronutrients.

Jeannie Oliver:

Mm-hmm.

Bruce Barry:

And, you know, what's a micronutrient?

Bruce Barry:

Well, we know that that vitamins are micronutrients and we need to take them.

Bruce Barry:

And, uh, some of us are aware that, you know, there's, there's all

Bruce Barry:

of these, um, minerals, you know, potassium, oh, the bad sodium, the bad

Bruce Barry:

chloride, uh, calcium, uh, magnesium.

Bruce Barry:

You know, what most people don't realize is, is that other than sodium

Bruce Barry:

and chloride, most of us are grossly deficient in all of these minerals and.

Bruce Barry:

Again, you, you don't run right?

Bruce Barry:

a really curious thing is, is that with sodium and potassium, it's

Bruce Barry:

not so much too much sodium, it's the absolute lack of potassium.

Jeannie Oliver:

Mm.

Jeannie Oliver:

Mm-hmm.

Bruce Barry:

One of the, you know, the nutrition labeling was, was a good thing.

Bruce Barry:

And I was, I was involved, uh, from the get go in that I was involved in, working

Bruce Barry:

with them on stuff that made sense and stuff that, that didn't make sense.

Bruce Barry:

And with the updated nutrition labeling of about two or three years ago, uh,

Bruce Barry:

you'll see that vitamin D and potassium all of a sudden went on the label.

Bruce Barry:

And you'll notice that it's 0, 0 0 0 0 0 0.

Bruce Barry:

Well, if, if these are essential nutrients and it's always zero, how do you get 'em?

Bruce Barry:

so that, the problem with sodium and potassium again, is, is that

Bruce Barry:

the balance is, is all whacked out.

Bruce Barry:

Sodium's.

Bruce Barry:

Not necessarily bad.

Bruce Barry:

In fact, sodium's necessary.

Bruce Barry:

Guess what?

Bruce Barry:

Can cause high blood pressure?

Bruce Barry:

Low sodium.

Bruce Barry:

Shocker.

Bruce Barry:

But you told

Bruce Barry:

me that it was bad for me.

Jeannie Oliver:

it's the opposite.

Bruce Barry:

It's bad if you don't get potassium.

Bruce Barry:

Oh, well I got plenty of potassium.

Bruce Barry:

I eat a banana.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

How many do you eat?

Bruce Barry:

I had a banana a day.

Bruce Barry:

One 10th of the r d A is in that single banana.

Jeannie Oliver:

It's a fraction of what you need.

Jeannie Oliver:

I wanna back up just a little bit, Bruce.

Jeannie Oliver:

Hold, hold that thought.

Jeannie Oliver:

Where you're at.

Jeannie Oliver:

Let's, let's put a pin in that, 'cause I wanna come back to that, but, but I

Jeannie Oliver:

wanna go back 'cause you had mentioned that shift in 1976, and what I think you

Jeannie Oliver:

were getting at is, is that shift where, There was some bad science done that

Jeannie Oliver:

shifted kind of this focus onto fats as being the bad guy, the, the enemy when it

Jeannie Oliver:

came to cardiovascular health, et cetera.

Jeannie Oliver:

When that happened, we started to again, like you said, move away from these

Jeannie Oliver:

natural, like ancestral sources of fat, you know, cooking with tallow, which is

Jeannie Oliver:

beef fat or maybe, you know, rendered duck fat or bacon fat, pork fat, whatever.

Jeannie Oliver:

full fat cream, milk, yogurt, things like that.

Jeannie Oliver:

And instead we shifted to the canola oils.

Jeannie Oliver:

These heavily processed what we call industrialized quote

Jeannie Oliver:

unquote vegetable oils.

Jeannie Oliver:

Right?

Jeannie Oliver:

Which are those ultra high Omega six.

Jeannie Oliver:

And I bring this up because people should know, you know, one of the reasons that.

Jeannie Oliver:

We see dramatic shifts in our health when we start cooking at home, if we're

Jeannie Oliver:

using the right fats to cook with at home instead of eating out all the time.

Jeannie Oliver:

Is that in a restaurant setting or any kind of commercial setting?

Jeannie Oliver:

They're typically using, you know, vast quantities of these industrialized

Jeannie Oliver:

oils, vegetable oils, seed oils that are highly inflammatory.

Jeannie Oliver:

Is that, is that correct?

Jeannie Oliver:

And that's what's kind of throwing this ratio off of our omegas.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

And, read your food labels.

Bruce Barry:

Okay.

Bruce Barry:

and what you'll find is, is that on just about any processed foods,

Bruce Barry:

sometimes if, if you get something that's, that's organic, like we use,

Bruce Barry:

the organic avocado Mayo which is okay.

Bruce Barry:

forget the guy's name, but he is, he's, you know,

Bruce Barry:

famous and, yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Primal Kitchen.

Bruce Barry:

He's, he's famous and

Bruce Barry:

holistic.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

There you go.

Bruce Barry:

and what you'll see is, is that it's all these, as you said, industrial seed oils.

Bruce Barry:

Those are all omega six, Canola's got a little bit of omega three, but most of

Bruce Barry:

them have zero omega three, all omega six.

Bruce Barry:

And so where do the omega threes come from?

Bruce Barry:

Well, they come from cold water, fish, actually, you know, little

Bruce Barry:

bit of, you know, flax seed, a couple of seeds here and there.

Bruce Barry:

It's actually a little bit hard to find these days, so I recommend

Bruce Barry:

supplementing with omega threes

Bruce Barry:

just to make

Bruce Barry:

sure you're, just, to make sure you're getting 'em.

Bruce Barry:

There's also, and this one takes a lot of work and Jeannie, that's, it's something

Bruce Barry:

you probably do for your clients.

Bruce Barry:

There's also a calculator called the Chronometer,

Bruce Barry:

and

Jeannie Oliver:

what we use.

Jeannie Oliver:

All my clients get access to Chron meter.

Jeannie Oliver:

Mm-hmm.

Jeannie Oliver:

Or Chrome.

Bruce Barry:

Ex.

Bruce Barry:

Excellent.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

And it is, it's

Bruce Barry:

absolutely, it's stunning when, when you do that, my wife Pat

Bruce Barry:

and I, I mean, we pretty good.

Bruce Barry:

I'll do all the inputs and stuff and I'll, I'll look at it, uh, before I,

Bruce Barry:

I add the supplements and I mean, this is, this is crazy, but, I only get

Bruce Barry:

about 30% of the r d a for potassium, uh, a little bit of from my banana.

Bruce Barry:

I get it in my coffee and I get it in my merlott wine.

Bruce Barry:

And other than that, and you know, if you're, if you're active, I mean, if you

Bruce Barry:

sweat a lot and, and I do, you're just blowing those electrolytes out and, and

Bruce Barry:

that r d a, that doesn't mean squat.

Bruce Barry:

That's probably, you know, a.

Bruce Barry:

50% or more, less than what you really need.

Jeannie Oliver:

exactly.

Bruce Barry:

right now I take, about twice the r d A of magnesium,

Bruce Barry:

And, and I have to, because unless I supplement with magnesium and

Bruce Barry:

potassium and a little bit of sodium, I get massive cramping at night.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah, I think most of us don't get enough magnesium, and

Jeannie Oliver:

that is especially true for women.

Jeannie Oliver:

And I think that that is one of the problems with a lot of these, you

Jeannie Oliver:

know, chemicals that we're spraying crops with and things, and we're not

Jeannie Oliver:

doing regenerative farming, which means we're not resting soils in

Jeannie Oliver:

between crops or rotating crops the way that indigenous people typically do.

Jeannie Oliver:

So we're depleting our soils of all of these incredible minerals and

Jeannie Oliver:

micronutrients that are so crucial.

Jeannie Oliver:

For our optimal health.

Jeannie Oliver:

Right?

Jeannie Oliver:

And then if you include other chemicals that are disrupting, you

Jeannie Oliver:

know, enzymatic processes and things, it makes the problem even worse.

Jeannie Oliver:

And so I think that it can help to supplement, even if we are eating plenty

Jeannie Oliver:

of fresh, real foods, because you know, unless you're growing your own crops

Jeannie Oliver:

or your own vegetables and things in your yard with really rich soil and

Jeannie Oliver:

you're resting that soil and you know, rotating it or buying your food from a

Jeannie Oliver:

farm that does that, I mean, how many of those even exist in this country?

Jeannie Oliver:

We're just simply not getting the level of those micronutrients in our foods

Jeannie Oliver:

that should be naturally occurring.

Jeannie Oliver:

Would you agree with that?

Bruce Barry:

Absolutely correct.

Bruce Barry:

we're so as a society focused on, on body image, and for women it's so much, so

Bruce Barry:

much more difficult because again, from an ancestral standpoint, for a woman, I mean,

Bruce Barry:

your cells know that the guy is gonna go out and he is going, gonna go out on this

Bruce Barry:

bison hunt, but then, you know what, oh, hey, we, we found some barley beer or

Bruce Barry:

something, and we're about a week late.

Bruce Barry:

You know that you're stuck by yourself and, and so your cells.

Bruce Barry:

Look at starvation as being your primary threat, and you are

Bruce Barry:

absolutely programmed to protect your progeny and your childbearing

Bruce Barry:

organs, which is why, you know, women tend to be a little bit fatter.

Bruce Barry:

I never understood why my wife was so cold.

Bruce Barry:

She's got a jacket on when I'm running around without a shirt on.

Bruce Barry:

Well, what it is, is, is literally women are wired differently with

Bruce Barry:

the blood vessels, more internal to, again, protect the childbearing organs.

Jeannie Oliver:

Right.

Bruce Barry:

And, and so you get this, this situation where, you're

Bruce Barry:

just, you know, kind of built to lock on and store calories.

Jeannie Oliver:

Mm-hmm.

Bruce Barry:

you know, I'm, I'm, I'm looking this up and I thought,

Bruce Barry:

well, the National Bariatric Society, that would be, A good place to

Bruce Barry:

look and see what they have to say.

Bruce Barry:

And according to the National Bariatric Society, and I don't know

Bruce Barry:

who you can get that's more credible than that, regarding weight loss.

Bruce Barry:

They said one of the primary reasons for overeating and binge

Bruce Barry:

eating is a lack of micronutrients.

Bruce Barry:

Your body is starving for nutrition and all of these hunger pangs you have are

Bruce Barry:

to try to into you what you're missing.

Bruce Barry:

And not the empty

Jeannie Oliver:

I, and I tell people, that's one of the things I say over and

Jeannie Oliver:

over, probably more than anything else.

Jeannie Oliver:

Overeating is not your issue.

Jeannie Oliver:

You're not eating enough of the right foods.

Bruce Barry:

Yes,

Jeannie Oliver:

enough of the right foods that are stimulating

Jeannie Oliver:

that leptin, which tells your brain like, I'm full and satiated.

Jeannie Oliver:

that's stimulated by, by real food that's nutrient dense.

Jeannie Oliver:

All of this empty calorie food is stimulating or ghrelin if we wanna,

Jeannie Oliver:

you know, call it the hunger hormone, just for ease of explanation, you

Jeannie Oliver:

know, that's saying, no, I'm not getting what I really need here.

Jeannie Oliver:

Keep eating, keep feeding me.

Jeannie Oliver:

Give me something I really need.

Jeannie Oliver:

And you know, I always use the, the donut and chicken breast comparison because

Jeannie Oliver:

the calories are roughly the same as a, you know, standard glazed donut and a

Jeannie Oliver:

what, four to six ounce chicken breast,

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

roughly what?

Jeannie Oliver:

Two 50 calories.

Jeannie Oliver:

But the actual makeup of those foods is so drastically different.

Jeannie Oliver:

And the chemical reactions, everything that happens in your body when you ingest

Jeannie Oliver:

those foods is drastically different.

Jeannie Oliver:

I know plenty of people who could easily down four or five donuts.

Jeannie Oliver:

You couldn't eat four or five chicken breasts.

Jeannie Oliver:

Most people could not.

Jeannie Oliver:

Right.

Jeannie Oliver:

I certainly couldn't, eating more than like one and a half would

Jeannie Oliver:

be a serious challenge for me.

Jeannie Oliver:

But you could have several donuts before your brain would actually be like, whoa.

Jeannie Oliver:

You'd probably feel sick before you actually felt full and satiated.

Bruce Barry:

Well, you've outlined the addictive process and, and again,

Bruce Barry:

that that is literally by cellular design, uh, because the body expects

Bruce Barry:

to go through periods of starvation.

Bruce Barry:

it says, this is gonna keep me from starving, there it is.

Bruce Barry:

I'm gonna lock onto it.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

Our cells are hardwired for survival, not aesthetics,

Jeannie Oliver:

according to our modern standards.

Bruce Barry:

that's, that's absolutely correct.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

We, we have to keep thinking back to the fact that we're literally, paleo.

Bruce Barry:

We're, we're cave people that are living in an alien environment.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

but as you explained in your timeline, like our, you know, quote,

Jeannie Oliver:

modern society, like how many decades are we even really talking about that?

Jeannie Oliver:

It's, it's a tiny blip on the map when we're talking about the time

Jeannie Oliver:

of just humans being alive, right.

Jeannie Oliver:

In the, the grand scheme of things.

Jeannie Oliver:

This is all very new to us.

Jeannie Oliver:

we're just not adapted for it.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah, I mean we, we think of, of history and pre-history

Bruce Barry:

and, and the advent of writing to be this, this big dividing line.

Bruce Barry:

And it was so far back when, when we look at percentage wise, uh, what

Bruce Barry:

it is from the standpoint of just homo sapiens, not genus homo, but

Bruce Barry:

just homo sapiens, it's less than 2%

Bruce Barry:

of our

Bruce Barry:

time that we've been able to write.

Jeannie Oliver:

Wow.

Jeannie Oliver:

Less than 2%.

Jeannie Oliver:

That's

Jeannie Oliver:

staggering to think about.

Bruce Barry:

So, so that's how new all of this is.

Jeannie Oliver:

Which is incredible.

Jeannie Oliver:

I mean, I think it really puts things into perspective when we can kind of

Jeannie Oliver:

go, oh wait, and I, you know, I always try and think along those lines too,

Jeannie Oliver:

that, you know, do I think everyone has to eat really strictly paleo

Jeannie Oliver:

and never touch a grain or a legume?

Jeannie Oliver:

No.

Jeannie Oliver:

But I think that most of the time, in most ways, if we can kind of think

Jeannie Oliver:

back and go, wait a minute, let's just simplify this all and get back to.

Jeannie Oliver:

I think fasting, I think is a, is a good example of this.

Jeannie Oliver:

You know, everyone's into the intermittent fasting right now,

Jeannie Oliver:

and essentially all they're doing is skipping breakfast every day.

Jeannie Oliver:

Well, that's probably not how it would've gone with our paleolithic ancestors.

Jeannie Oliver:

It would've probably been much more truly intermittent.

Jeannie Oliver:

Meaning, kind of more random.

Jeannie Oliver:

You know, we would've had feast times when food was more available and

Jeannie Oliver:

then we would've had times of, yes, probably famine or just having, you

Jeannie Oliver:

know, less, or eating less frequently.

Jeannie Oliver:

There would be times when we'd eat more regularly and it would be a

Jeannie Oliver:

little bit more mixed up and random.

Jeannie Oliver:

It wouldn't just be like, well, I'm just not gonna eat breakfast every single day.

Jeannie Oliver:

Especially for women.

Jeannie Oliver:

Like, it's very different.

Jeannie Oliver:

so I always tell people, you know, kind of, and I try to think for myself,

Jeannie Oliver:

well, how would that have actually looked in that time, that environment?

Jeannie Oliver:

Like how would we have, have done this?

Jeannie Oliver:

There may have been times where like, Hey, dinner's not available,

Jeannie Oliver:

or maybe lunch wasn't at some point, or maybe for breakfast wasn't, maybe

Jeannie Oliver:

they didn't even have a three meal a day kinda standard like we do now.

Jeannie Oliver:

I think it's kind of comical when people get really dogmatic about these, you

Jeannie Oliver:

know, protocols and trends and fads.

Jeannie Oliver:

which is a theme that I come back to often, especially in this podcast, is

Jeannie Oliver:

like, try to be a critical thinker.

Jeannie Oliver:

and think of yourself, in this context that you and I are talking about, who

Jeannie Oliver:

you are as a homo sapien and what your body is actually, how it's designed,

Jeannie Oliver:

how it's supposed to interact with its environment, acknowledging the

Jeannie Oliver:

differences of our current environment, and then how can we actually best care

Jeannie Oliver:

for ourselves or behave, eat, move, et cetera, in the ways that our body

Jeannie Oliver:

is actually designed to do versus.

Jeannie Oliver:

what sort of the standards are for, for life right now.

Jeannie Oliver:

so what would you say to that, Bruce?

Jeannie Oliver:

As far as like, how can we use nutrition and movement specifically

Jeannie Oliver:

to sort of counteract all of these contradictions that we have in

Jeannie Oliver:

our, modern lifestyle and culture?

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

So, when we think about energy storage, we store energy as

Bruce Barry:

carbohydrate it's called glycogen.

Bruce Barry:

Glucose is turned into glycogen, and we store it as fat.

Bruce Barry:

and they really have two different functions in the body.

Bruce Barry:

they both are used to keep the body going, et cetera, et cetera.

Bruce Barry:

But, but the carbohydrate storage is really best for, for peak.

Bruce Barry:

So if you're gonna sprint, that's when you wanna be able to pull

Bruce Barry:

out the carbohydrate storage.

Bruce Barry:

If you're going from marathon, that's when you wanna be able to use the fat storage.

Bruce Barry:

a typical person can store maybe 1500 calories of glycogen.

Bruce Barry:

and you know, when I, when I paddle, I'm, I'm burning, you know, 10 to 15

Bruce Barry:

calories a minute, so I can go maybe, maybe a hundred, you know, hour and a

Bruce Barry:

half or so before I've literally burned all the sugar storage outta my body.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, I probably, well, I know I can't grow that far.

Bruce Barry:

And that's one of the problems with getting a little bit older is, is

Bruce Barry:

nothing works quite the same way it used to, but I'm, I'm 15 to 17% body fat.

Bruce Barry:

And when I calculate that out, so from a glycogen storage, I've got

Bruce Barry:

maybe a thousand to 1500 calories.

Bruce Barry:

If, if I convert my 15% body fat into the number of days, I can go based on fat.

Bruce Barry:

I can go for a month.

Jeannie Oliver:

Hmm.

Bruce Barry:

And if you look at me, you think that guy's

Bruce Barry:

got no fat on him whatsoever.

Bruce Barry:

so the problem we've got is that with our eating patterns, if we eat and

Bruce Barry:

two hours later we eat and two hours later we eat, well, first of all, the

Bruce Barry:

body thinks that's really good, okay?

Bruce Barry:

Because starvation is right around the corner and I'm gonna load up.

Bruce Barry:

But when you continue to do it day after day, week after week, month after

Bruce Barry:

month, what happens is the body says, well, something new going on here.

Bruce Barry:

And, and I think this is going to be really, really serious.

Bruce Barry:

So what it does is it turns off the fat burning switch and, and so you have to

Bruce Barry:

eat every 12 hours and you're, you're kind of beginning to balloon a little

Bruce Barry:

bit because you're, converting it to fat, but your body won't let you use it.

Bruce Barry:

So one of the key ways to get back into it is this idea of, of intermittent fasting

Bruce Barry:

and, and sort of the diet that you're on.

Bruce Barry:

I mean, we, we don't really do paleo.

Bruce Barry:

We do kind of Mediterranean,

Bruce Barry:

uh, frankly, we're, we're pretty careful about it, but, but not

Bruce Barry:

crazy about it.

Bruce Barry:

But from the standpoint of managing fat burning, we do intermittent fasting.

Bruce Barry:

We do it, you know, kind of twice a week maybe.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, I've got something going on this morning, so, yeah,

Bruce Barry:

I'm, I'm just gonna wait.

Bruce Barry:

You know, I finished dinner at six or seven o'clock at night, and.

Bruce Barry:

I'm gonna wait till noon to eat.

Bruce Barry:

It's, it's not a hard and fast thing.

Bruce Barry:

And, and the reality is, is if if I go 18 hours, I'm not hungry.

Bruce Barry:

and what that means is I've still got the ability to turn

Bruce Barry:

that switch on to burn fat,

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

That metabolic flexibility.

Bruce Barry:

metabolic flexibility.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

And, and so many of us have, have lost it.

Bruce Barry:

And, and again, the way you lose lose it is by feeding, feeding,

Bruce Barry:

feeding, feeding, feeding.

Bruce Barry:

So you, you've gotta, you've got to break the cycle and it's not pleasant.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

it's not hard to do.

Bruce Barry:

you just have to be willing to go a little bit hungry for a while.

Bruce Barry:

And again, it's, I don't recommend intermittent fasting

Bruce Barry:

exactly the same thing every day.

Bruce Barry:

I think that's absolutely wrong.

Bruce Barry:

but if you can't get it, your fat reserves, again, you've gotta,

Bruce Barry:

you've gotta find a way to break it.

Bruce Barry:

No diet.

Bruce Barry:

You try.

Bruce Barry:

Is ever gonna work?

Bruce Barry:

Yeah, you might shed a few pounds here and there, but it's gonna come right back.

Bruce Barry:

Same idea as, as you know, not only waiting for a while in the

Bruce Barry:

morning and, and having, you know, kinda like a, an 18 hour break,

Bruce Barry:

but eating dinner and then going to bed before your stomach is emptied.

Bruce Barry:

That again, that tells your body, this food needs to be stored.

Bruce Barry:

Baby.

Bruce Barry:

Don't, don't let any of this go, convert all this.

Bruce Barry:

So, so, gosh, at least two hours after you eat, before

Bruce Barry:

you go to bed, three is better.

Bruce Barry:

You know, let it, let it settle.

Bruce Barry:

Go to bed on an empty stinking stomach.

Jeannie Oliver:

I, I talk often about how your body is actually doing

Jeannie Oliver:

a lot of hard work during sleep.

Jeannie Oliver:

I mean, you're doing detoxification, your cell renewal, muscle repair and recovery.

Jeannie Oliver:

Like, there's so much going on and if your body's trying to digest and devoting all

Jeannie Oliver:

these resources to digestion, you just don't get the level of, of quality sleep.

Jeannie Oliver:

I mean, I can see it on my aura ring.

Jeannie Oliver:

If I eat too late in the evening, I can see that I'm not getting

Jeannie Oliver:

the same amount of deep sleep.

Jeannie Oliver:

you know, I don't wake, wake up feeling as refreshed and rested if I do that.

Jeannie Oliver:

And like you say, it's just the worst thing that you can do

Jeannie Oliver:

metabolically or, for fat storage.

Jeannie Oliver:

I, I don't know if this is true, but I've always heard that sumo wrestlers,

Jeannie Oliver:

that that's how they get to be an enormous size is they will, you know,

Jeannie Oliver:

eat these massive meals and then sleep.

Bruce Barry:

easy to believe.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

and you know, 10% of our daily calic burn is digestion.

Jeannie Oliver:

Right.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

I'm glad to hear you say that I feel gratified

Jeannie Oliver:

because I think a lot of people are just like, oh, no, no, no.

Jeannie Oliver:

Fasting's the way and there's so much science behind it.

Jeannie Oliver:

And it's like, well, yes, but you know, one of the things that I like

Jeannie Oliver:

to highlight in this show is the difference between men and women.

Jeannie Oliver:

And as you pointed out before, we have a very different machine.

Jeannie Oliver:

And what I see with many clients when they come in is that if they're doing

Jeannie Oliver:

that fasting period, they're skipping breakfast, they maybe don't eat till noon.

Jeannie Oliver:

They are so ravenously hungry.

Jeannie Oliver:

By the time that they do eat that they are overeating in those

Jeannie Oliver:

subsequent meals, which is another stressor on your body, right?

Jeannie Oliver:

Then they end up eating.

Jeannie Oliver:

Either too late or, or so much at dinner that it's just, you

Jeannie Oliver:

know, the body has this huge uphill climb to digest all of it.

Jeannie Oliver:

Um, and it's kind of working against them.

Jeannie Oliver:

they're not getting the sleep, and then when they're not getting good

Jeannie Oliver:

quality sleep, guess what the appetite and cravings are through the roof.

Jeannie Oliver:

I mean, it just doesn't, I've found that often women do better by, yeah, you

Jeannie Oliver:

can do a restricted feeding window, but doing it a little more randomly and maybe

Jeannie Oliver:

stopping eating earlier in the evening, but having something at, at breakfast,

Jeannie Oliver:

maybe within, you know, two hours or so of waking, versus just waiting till later

Jeannie Oliver:

and later in the day to eat something.

Jeannie Oliver:

And then they're often having, you know, coffee on the empty stomach,

Jeannie Oliver:

which is, again, so stressful.

Jeannie Oliver:

Um, hormonally for them.

Jeannie Oliver:

It's not great for the blood sugar regulation.

Jeannie Oliver:

It's all these things.

Jeannie Oliver:

So, yeah, I think that that's a, a good.

Jeannie Oliver:

Thing to point out.

Jeannie Oliver:

so we were talking about mitochondrial function and mitochondria like is sort

Jeannie Oliver:

of a new buzzword on the scene, but those of us who've worked in, health and for

Jeannie Oliver:

you, the scientific community, we've known for a long time how, you know, the

Jeannie Oliver:

crucial importance of these cool little, what we used to be told, or described

Jeannie Oliver:

as in science classes, the, the power, plant or the powerhouse of the cell?

Jeannie Oliver:

Um, yeah, the powerhouse of the cell.

Jeannie Oliver:

And like you said, so many people, especially women, are focused on

Jeannie Oliver:

just eating because they want to be thinner or lose weight versus eating

Jeannie Oliver:

for optimal mitochondrial function.

Jeannie Oliver:

and truly feeding our cells so that we're supporting our immune function.

Jeannie Oliver:

Circle back a little bit to the, the muscle piece, because obviously

Jeannie Oliver:

the mitochondria are in a pretty high concentration in muscle cells.

Jeannie Oliver:

And so when we're talking about not anti-aging, when we're talking about

Jeannie Oliver:

aging, well, when we're talking about maintaining, brain health, Physical

Jeannie Oliver:

functionality, vibrancy of life in every stage as we get older, as you're such

Jeannie Oliver:

a great example of how can we put our muscle to work for us versus, that kind

Jeannie Oliver:

of mindset of eat less, exercise more.

Jeannie Oliver:

well, how are we exercising?

Jeannie Oliver:

How are we nourishing ourselves?

Jeannie Oliver:

just talk a little bit about the, you know, kind of the function

Jeannie Oliver:

of increasing muscle, maintaining muscle mass as an important factor

Jeannie Oliver:

for caring for ourselves as we age.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

So the, the body as, we keep talking about is, is really sneaky, okay?

Bruce Barry:

it doesn't want to give up calories.

Bruce Barry:

if you stop using a muscle, uh, like you put somebody in a cast and,

Bruce Barry:

and they'll lose 25, 30% of that muscle size in three or four weeks.

Bruce Barry:

And the reason why is the body says, well, uh, it's not getting used.

Bruce Barry:

I'm gonna shut the calories off to that and save those calories.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah, it's efficiency.

Bruce Barry:

That's why the atrophy.

Bruce Barry:

But the same thing happens when you start using it again, it grows, but if

Bruce Barry:

you want it to grow and, and as muscle grows, you also get more mitochondria in

Bruce Barry:

that development for muscle to grow you, you've gotta give it the right stuff, you

Bruce Barry:

know, you've gotta water it correctly.

Bruce Barry:

And one of the things that many people, and I'm guessing many, many women

Bruce Barry:

are deficient in is protein intake.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yep.

Bruce Barry:

we tend to think, well it's, you know, I get a little bit here, a

Bruce Barry:

little bit there, you know, I'm a, a vegan and, and that's good and I'm not really

Bruce Barry:

wanting to go out and, and knock that.

Bruce Barry:

But the, the problem is, is, that, you've gotta get an

Bruce Barry:

appropriate amount of amino acids.

Bruce Barry:

To grow the muscle, you've gotta get an appropriate amount of amino acids

Bruce Barry:

to really keep everything together.

Bruce Barry:

our fascial system, which is the sort of, you know, weird little connective

Bruce Barry:

tissue that surrounds every muscle fiber and every muscle bundle.

Bruce Barry:

When we're three weeks of age, our body is more fascia than anything else.

Bruce Barry:

we develop underneath the fascia.

Bruce Barry:

And it's this, this collagen protein that, that's made of

Bruce Barry:

bone tendon, ligament fascia.

Bruce Barry:

It's, it's all collagen and yeah, it's true.

Bruce Barry:

You can, you can take amino acids and, and you can get enough glycine

Bruce Barry:

in particular to, to rebuild all of this, to help with that.

Bruce Barry:

But you've gotta get it.

Bruce Barry:

Okay.

Bruce Barry:

And if you're not eating appropriate protein, it's not gonna happen.

Bruce Barry:

Another, problem with, with aging.

Bruce Barry:

Is, statistically this is, this is correct, individually it isn't, but

Bruce Barry:

figure that you lose 70% of all your life abilities by the time you're 70.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Okay.

Bruce Barry:

So, and, and I've got, I've got graphs.

Bruce Barry:

I've got graphs that show all of that.

Bruce Barry:

you talk about sarcopenia, that's age related muscle loss.

Bruce Barry:

it happens for connective tissue muscle.

Bruce Barry:

It happens for heart muscle, it happens for collagen.

Bruce Barry:

the melatonin, 70% loss by the time you're 80 or 90 stem cells, by the time

Bruce Barry:

you're 80 stem cells, which are the general contractors of the body, which

Bruce Barry:

rebuild everything, which is why it takes us so long to recover from an injury.

Bruce Barry:

99.5% of the stem cells are gone by the time you're 80 years old.

Bruce Barry:

when you look at, at every facet, it, it kind of runs that way.

Bruce Barry:

Now it doesn't have.

Bruce Barry:

To happen quite like that.

Bruce Barry:

You can slow it down.

Bruce Barry:

And one of the things that, praise God I've been able to do and

Bruce Barry:

my wife has been able to do, is we've been able to slow that down.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, part of it is this, this cognition that we have to move.

Bruce Barry:

part of it is she's been very careful about her diet, which she feeds me.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, her mom is 92 living alone, still growing strong.

Bruce Barry:

we're afraid that she's gonna outlive us all.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, but she was always very, very careful about her diet and, really

Bruce Barry:

limited the processed foods.

Bruce Barry:

And, and now she's on a protein kick.

Bruce Barry:

Bruce, I, you know, I need more protein.

Bruce Barry:

What do I do?

Bruce Barry:

How do tell me what to take.

Bruce Barry:

How do we do this?

Bruce Barry:

So, you know, we're, we're kind of giving her ideas on, on how to up the protein.

Bruce Barry:

Whey protein is, is great.

Bruce Barry:

Whey protein has leucine in it.

Bruce Barry:

Leucine is probably the most essential amino acid for, uh, for muscle building.

Bruce Barry:

I take a little bit of leucine every day.

Bruce Barry:

My wife takes a little bit of leucine every day.

Bruce Barry:

And again, glycine for collagen and, and we take collagen supplements.

Bruce Barry:

the other problem with, with protein is, and again, if, if you're working with

Bruce Barry:

your, your clientele on chronometer, uh, you'll have a really good idea of

Bruce Barry:

this, but it's hard to spread it out.

Bruce Barry:

So what we've learned is that you're not going to assimilate much more than 30

Bruce Barry:

grams of protein at any one given sitting.

Bruce Barry:

Okay.

Bruce Barry:

And when I look at, at my protein needs, for me to be putting on muscle,

Bruce Barry:

I need about 150 grams of protein a day.

Jeannie Oliver:

It is per pound of body weight that you're

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Well, well, yeah.

Bruce Barry:

So, but if I can only assimilate 30 grams at any one sitting, I mean,

Bruce Barry:

how am I gonna get that much protein?

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

And I've heard some argument about that too, whether we can or we can't.

Jeannie Oliver:

It's interesting.

Jeannie Oliver:

Um, Dr.

Jeannie Oliver:

Gabrielle Lyon talks about that a lot.

Jeannie Oliver:

I'm curious to learn more along those lines of, protein

Jeannie Oliver:

utilization, assimilation.

Jeannie Oliver:

Um, but yeah, and, and I think too, one question I ask here is, you know, what

Jeannie Oliver:

are some really common myths about aging?

Jeannie Oliver:

And I think that one of them is that we don't need as much

Jeannie Oliver:

protein when in fact we need more.

Bruce Barry:

yes, absolutely.

Bruce Barry:

We absolutely need more protein when we age.

Bruce Barry:

And again, it's, it's because, our ability.

Bruce Barry:

to take all of these raw materials, you know, keeping in mind that, you know,

Bruce Barry:

you, you eat the cow, right, and you, you eat it, and it gets broken down into

Bruce Barry:

all these itty bitty little components.

Bruce Barry:

And then within each cell it, it reassembles it as needed.

Bruce Barry:

You know, we talked about our 30 trillion cells.

Bruce Barry:

You know what these things are little factories.

Bruce Barry:

our cells do somewhere between a hundred thousand and 1 million

Bruce Barry:

chemical reactions per second.

Jeannie Oliver:

incredible.

Bruce Barry:

know, we, we talked a little bit about, you know, d n a if, if you,

Bruce Barry:

if you take all of our d n a, uh, and stretch it out, the d n a in, in one cell,

Bruce Barry:

it's compressed by enzymatic activity.

Bruce Barry:

If you stretched out the D N A in one cell, it's, it's six feet.

Bruce Barry:

If you take the d n A in all of our cells, it goes around the solar system.

Jeannie Oliver:

It's incredible.

Bruce Barry:

but, you know, getting, getting back to, how

Bruce Barry:

we do this, has to be moved.

Bruce Barry:

If we don't move it, we lose it.

Bruce Barry:

And again, for somebody who's, who's just, you know, trying to

Bruce Barry:

start out, yeah, keep it easy.

Bruce Barry:

walking is awesome.

Bruce Barry:

You know, being in a pool and doing a little bit of

Bruce Barry:

movement that way is awesome.

Bruce Barry:

I've been invited to yoga classes where I went in and

Bruce Barry:

watched, and it was seated yoga.

Bruce Barry:

It was very specifically for folks who had limited mobility and, and

Bruce Barry:

there's lots of of ways to do it.

Bruce Barry:

But you know, when you move, that function alone begins to build muscle.

Bruce Barry:

And as you build muscle, it's going to staff it with mitochondria.

Bruce Barry:

And as it's staffed with mitochondria, all these processes

Bruce Barry:

are going to begin to improve.

Jeannie Oliver:

Right.

Jeannie Oliver:

And one of my favorite processes there, or pieces of that is insulin sensitivity.

Jeannie Oliver:

You know, especially because we are bombarded with so many of these, you know,

Jeannie Oliver:

and it's funny because like were talking about the sort of, you know, generational

Jeannie Oliver:

like cohort study and you know, I think back to growing up in the eighties and

Jeannie Oliver:

nineties, not only were we supposed to eat low fat, high carbohydrate and everything

Jeannie Oliver:

was, completely sugar laden, but we were supposed to eat every two hours.

Jeannie Oliver:

So it's like all of these messages and, misinformation that have

Jeannie Oliver:

been drilled into our brains.

Jeannie Oliver:

And so women, especially of my generation, anywhere from, you

Jeannie Oliver:

know, like late thirties into their fifties are steeped in this.

Jeannie Oliver:

Nonsense.

Jeannie Oliver:

Right.

Jeannie Oliver:

And so a lot of people in general, especially Americans now are dealing

Jeannie Oliver:

with insulin resistance on some level because of this sort of, you know, the

Jeannie Oliver:

constant eating, the, high glycemic foods, processed foods, things like that.

Jeannie Oliver:

And, when we have more muscle cells, more mitochondria firing off, we are more

Jeannie Oliver:

insulin sensitive or more, what I like to refer to as, you know, carbohydrate

Jeannie Oliver:

tolerant, like your body can get more into that metabolic flexibility.

Jeannie Oliver:

We can prevent things like diabetes more readily.

Jeannie Oliver:

you know, all of those things.

Jeannie Oliver:

And when we're, our blood sugar isn't all over the map, up and

Jeannie Oliver:

down, our energy is better.

Jeannie Oliver:

We are a little more motivated and more likely to move our

Jeannie Oliver:

bodies, but when we're sitting.

Jeannie Oliver:

And then we're eating processed foods.

Jeannie Oliver:

It's like this awful vicious cycle, and then it downregulates

Jeannie Oliver:

our energy and we don't feel like doing it, and then we don't sleep

Jeannie Oliver:

well, so we're even more tired.

Jeannie Oliver:

So what do we do?

Jeannie Oliver:

We stimulate with, you know, caffeine, we wind down with alcohol.

Jeannie Oliver:

Like it's just this awful sort of downward, a spiral of

Jeannie Oliver:

symptoms that we're creating.

Jeannie Oliver:

And I see someone like you who's doing exactly the opposite, and it's really

Jeannie Oliver:

exciting because I think that, going back to one of the sort of myths of aging,

Jeannie Oliver:

we're told like, oh, you know, menopause is gonna be horrible and just wait.

Jeannie Oliver:

And oh, you, you know, I mean, I've had young women, like in their early

Jeannie Oliver:

thirties be like, well, I think my metabolism's just slowing down.

Jeannie Oliver:

It's like, no, this is not, this is not what's going on.

Jeannie Oliver:

This doesn't have to happen.

Jeannie Oliver:

You can actually stay really active.

Jeannie Oliver:

I mean, yeah, we have to do the work to, to get into it, but I love that

Jeannie Oliver:

you're kind of highlighting like, Hey, it's never too late to start.

Jeannie Oliver:

You don't have to walk out and be, you know, doing what you're doing,

Jeannie Oliver:

training every day of the week and doing these amazing sports.

Jeannie Oliver:

Like you can just start with doing cheer yoga or something, whatever

Jeannie Oliver:

it is, just start moving your body.

Jeannie Oliver:

real food.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah, I mean the, the reality is, is if somebody who hasn't

Bruce Barry:

walked much, they're gonna get a lot more tired from a short walk than I do

Bruce Barry:

from furious paddling for two miles.

Jeannie Oliver:

That's a good point.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

get out there and do it,

Bruce Barry:

It'll be a lot better for 'em.

Jeannie Oliver:

right.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

Well, in the, um, just to be conscious about your time and everything here, I

Jeannie Oliver:

know we've, we've talked for a while, but I'd love for you to share with us what

Jeannie Oliver:

is your favorite thing, Bruce, about?

Jeannie Oliver:

Being your age, I mean, as someone who has taken good care of their body

Jeannie Oliver:

and you know, is still going strong, not slowing down much, if at all.

Jeannie Oliver:

what's your favorite thing about this stage of life?

Bruce Barry:

gratitude,

Jeannie Oliver:

Hmm.

Bruce Barry:

being at this stage of life with the, relationship I've had

Bruce Barry:

with my wife and my children and their husbands, and our eight grandchildren.

Bruce Barry:

and you know, the, the paddling and, and windsurfing communities.

Bruce Barry:

And my, my work community.

Bruce Barry:

I work because I love the work and I love the people.

Bruce Barry:

I don't have to work.

Bruce Barry:

and, you know, just knowing that you know, life is really a gift.

Bruce Barry:

And if you don't look at it as a gift, you're never going to open the present.

Bruce Barry:

I.

Jeannie Oliver:

That's beautiful.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yeah, it's a really a good thing to remember.

Jeannie Oliver:

I love that.

Jeannie Oliver:

I think it's really easy for us to think in that sort of someday mindset,

Jeannie Oliver:

I'll be happy or I'll feel good about myself, or I'll enjoy life when.

Jeannie Oliver:

especially when it comes to our physical bodies as women so often I hear, well,

Jeannie Oliver:

I'll be able to like myself, I'll feel good about myself when I'm excise or

Jeannie Oliver:

I can fit into such and such a pair of pants, or I look a certain way, or I,

Jeannie Oliver:

make more money, whatever it might be.

Jeannie Oliver:

So I think that that's a really good, IM important point and anchor for us to,

Jeannie Oliver:

to circle back to and I love too, just hearing you talk about, like for some

Jeannie Oliver:

people this may be crazy sciencey kind of information, but if we can start to

Jeannie Oliver:

just really appreciate how incredible an amazing machine our body is, we

Jeannie Oliver:

can start to sort of be in a place of sort of awe wonder and appreciation.

Jeannie Oliver:

Even if we don't love what we look like in that.

Jeannie Oliver:

Time and space, we can kind of go, oh, my body is only ever just trying

Jeannie Oliver:

to keep me alive and functioning.

Jeannie Oliver:

It's not working against me.

Jeannie Oliver:

I just need to work for it and with it, in partnership and just be

Jeannie Oliver:

really grateful all the things that I can do and people I can hug with

Jeannie Oliver:

this body, whatever it might be.

Jeannie Oliver:

And, and see movement as a, a birthright and a privilege and an, a joy to

Jeannie Oliver:

like, just be able to do these things and get out, whether it's walking

Jeannie Oliver:

or chair yoga or popping in a pool versus like, oh, I have to work out.

Jeannie Oliver:

I have to exercise.

Jeannie Oliver:

I think we see it as this weird sort of like obligation or just an

Jeannie Oliver:

additional stressor on our lives when it's actually, no, it's a stress

Jeannie Oliver:

relief, like your body's designed to do this, and if you just give it what

Jeannie Oliver:

it needs, you'll start to enjoy it.

Jeannie Oliver:

You'll feel better.

Jeannie Oliver:

All the things.

Jeannie Oliver:

so two more questions for you.

Jeannie Oliver:

one personal, if you could go back and tell your younger self

Jeannie Oliver:

something, what would that be?

Jeannie Oliver:

And is there anything that you would do differently than you've done when

Jeannie Oliver:

it comes to your health and fitness?

Jeannie Oliver:

I,

Bruce Barry:

not really.

Bruce Barry:

10 years ago, my wife was diagnosed with, a terminal incurable, cancer,

Bruce Barry:

and it, it absolutely rocked us.

Bruce Barry:

I've been doing a lot of research, uh, on health from an endurance

Bruce Barry:

health and sports related health.

Bruce Barry:

At that point, I was getting a little bit closer to, you know, kind

Bruce Barry:

of retirement from full-time work.

Bruce Barry:

we got pulled into the, you know, the whole medical thing with that.

Bruce Barry:

she had an unnecessary surgery.

Bruce Barry:

She was recommended,

Bruce Barry:

a treatment protocol that probably would've ended her life already

Bruce Barry:

with what we know about it now.

Bruce Barry:

and the reality is, that she's never had western medical treatment for

Bruce Barry:

it.

Bruce Barry:

for all intents and purposes, it no longer exists in her body.

Jeannie Oliver:

Wow.

Bruce Barry:

And so again, these, these weird things come up and to me, everything

Bruce Barry:

we've talked about today, everything I think of and do when I talk to people

Bruce Barry:

about health or how our bodies work, you know, kind of relates back to the

Bruce Barry:

fact that we, we went through trauma.

Bruce Barry:

I mean, we, we didn't know what was going on.

Bruce Barry:

We didn't, we knew this thing was, was really serious, but we

Bruce Barry:

were able to, slow the thing down, began to understand, uh, how the

Bruce Barry:

medical community, you know, works.

Bruce Barry:

And the fact that on top of the unnecessary surgery,

Bruce Barry:

we literally were read.

Bruce Barry:

A gross prescription based on the fact that I know now the doctor was

Bruce Barry:

walking from one appointment to the other and misread the lab results.

Bruce Barry:

so I mean, I, I, I'm saying this and it's, it's, you know, what I've, what

Bruce Barry:

I've learned, if I could go back and, and the learning has, has been, it

Bruce Barry:

isn't that I do anything differently.

Bruce Barry:

it's just that I realize that you've really gotta be an

Bruce Barry:

advocate for your own health.

Bruce Barry:

if you think you're going to have serious news given to you by a

Bruce Barry:

doctor or a practitioner, you should really have somebody there

Bruce Barry:

with you because, personally as, as somebody's saying, Hey, you need

Bruce Barry:

surgery for this, this has to happen.

Bruce Barry:

You know, if, if I've, if I've got a double hernia, I can deal with that.

Bruce Barry:

You know, it's not a big deal.

Bruce Barry:

But if somebody says, yeah, you know, I looked at the CT scans and your,

Bruce Barry:

your lymph nodes are lit up like a Christmas tree, and you don't have

Bruce Barry:

somebody there to help you understand what that might mean or ask the doctor

Bruce Barry:

more questions, you're just gonna freak.

Bruce Barry:

So you should really have an advocate there with you.

Bruce Barry:

By the same token, I I our medical practice, I mean, I've got, I've got

Bruce Barry:

a grandson who has down syndrome, and he was born with a heart that

Bruce Barry:

had two chambers and one valve.

Bruce Barry:

he just went through his third open heart surgery.

Bruce Barry:

He is absolutely thriving.

Bruce Barry:

But let's think about the fact that he was eight weeks old at his first surgery.

Bruce Barry:

With a heart that was a sizeable walnut.

Bruce Barry:

They built a couple of chambers and a couple of valves.

Bruce Barry:

Now some of it was mechanical and some of it's manmade and you'll probably

Bruce Barry:

have to have another open heart at some time because as he grows, not

Bruce Barry:

all of it, grows at the same rate.

Bruce Barry:

But he had an open heart, two months ago and four days after that we had

Bruce Barry:

to kind of calm him down to keep him from jumping up and down and

Bruce Barry:

playing jumping jacks 'cause he healed

Bruce Barry:

so quickly.

Bruce Barry:

So our, our medical practice is, absolutely amazing

Bruce Barry:

and can be absolutely

Bruce Barry:

frightening.

Bruce Barry:

So work with making sure that you've got an advocate for your health and that's

Bruce Barry:

one of the things that you and your practice is so valuable for other people.

Bruce Barry:

So I, I think all of us need to appreciate the folks that do

Bruce Barry:

what you and your brethren do.

Jeannie Oliver:

Well, I appreciate that and I think, it does really help.

Jeannie Oliver:

And I've had my own health challenges.

Jeannie Oliver:

I call it my health adventures.

Jeannie Oliver:

bad experiences, good experiences, and everything in between with, with

Jeannie Oliver:

mainstream medical and naturopathic or natural medicine, both of them, you

Jeannie Oliver:

know, there's, there's good and bad in every bunch, and I think that being

Jeannie Oliver:

your own advocate is, is necessary, in every aspect of life, but especially

Jeannie Oliver:

when we're talking about our health.

Jeannie Oliver:

And I think also learning to come from a place of empowerment

Jeannie Oliver:

versus seeking savior, right?

Jeannie Oliver:

Always seeking someone to do it for you, or to fix it for

Jeannie Oliver:

you, give you all the answers.

Jeannie Oliver:

coming from a place of empowerment instead says, okay, I can accept

Jeannie Oliver:

guidance and support along this journey, and there may be.

Jeannie Oliver:

Doctors and surgeries and different things that are the answer for me

Jeannie Oliver:

as an individual in my situation.

Jeannie Oliver:

But I think really stepping back and kind of coming from a place of empowerment

Jeannie Oliver:

and, learning what you can about these different things instead of just,

Jeannie Oliver:

being prostrate to whatever doctor as God is dictating you should do.

Jeannie Oliver:

Because I know that, you know, some of the older generation in

Jeannie Oliver:

my life, like if a doctor said it, They would never question it.

Jeannie Oliver:

Especially women too.

Jeannie Oliver:

I think that, you know, often they're not taken seriously or

Jeannie Oliver:

they're afraid to question doctors.

Jeannie Oliver:

Be they male or female doctors, but all of us, we need to just really go, okay, sure.

Jeannie Oliver:

It doesn't mean that we're writing off science or disagreeing with science.

Jeannie Oliver:

It means that as an individual, certain things may be right for

Jeannie Oliver:

you and certain things may not.

Jeannie Oliver:

And we need to be able to step back and figure out what those things are

Jeannie Oliver:

and come from a place of empowered choices and educated choices versus just

Jeannie Oliver:

waiting for somebody to fix it for us.

Jeannie Oliver:

which I think just circles back to everything that we've been talking today.

Jeannie Oliver:

Be proactive with your movement, moving your body, the food choices that you make.

Jeannie Oliver:

Don't assume that just because it's f d A approved it's good for you or

Jeannie Oliver:

safe or because something's a daily r d a, that that's the same as optimal.

Jeannie Oliver:

It's not.

Jeannie Oliver:

You may need more.

Jeannie Oliver:

we're all so different.

Jeannie Oliver:

And so thank you for sharing that story.

Jeannie Oliver:

I think that that's really, really powerful.

Jeannie Oliver:

Because again, it really drives home the point that whether it's a diagnosis

Jeannie Oliver:

or whether it's just aging, like that doesn't have to be a death sentence.

Jeannie Oliver:

It doesn't have to be a, a horrible uphill climb.

Jeannie Oliver:

Like we can grab the horse by the reins and at least do everything that we can

Jeannie Oliver:

to make it as good as possible, right?

Jeannie Oliver:

For the best possible outcome.

Bruce Barry:

Right.

Jeannie Oliver:

So if there's just one or two small steps, I know that you

Jeannie Oliver:

mentioned just kind of moving in whatever way that you can, but in addition to

Jeannie Oliver:

that, you know, for people that want to start taking some really simple steps,

Jeannie Oliver:

I always encourage people like, do what feels easy and doable for you at first.

Jeannie Oliver:

Don't try and, you know, choose some giant insurmountable task or goal.

Jeannie Oliver:

so if there's a couple small things that people can start to do or start

Jeannie Oliver:

thinking about to improve their health span, At whatever stage of life

Jeannie Oliver:

that they're in, what would you say?

Bruce Barry:

Oh, this is, this is gonna sound so wrong, uh,

Bruce Barry:

because every, everything I would say is Don't take the pill.

Bruce Barry:

Don't take the pill.

Bruce Barry:

But what I'm gonna say is take a vitamin D three supplement.

Jeannie Oliver:

Oh, yes,

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Okay.

Bruce Barry:

So,

Jeannie Oliver:

here in the Northwest.

Jeannie Oliver:

My

Bruce Barry:

yeah.

Bruce Barry:

So, um, we've got 20,000 genes, give or take.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, within those 20,000 genes, there's 4,000 binding sites for vitamin D.

Bruce Barry:

Without optimal vitamin D, there is no way you're gonna be in optimal health.

Bruce Barry:

It's not just bone function, it's, it's not just, you know, skin.

Bruce Barry:

It's, it's everything dealing with immune response and especially cancer response.

Bruce Barry:

vitamin D is very potent against cancers.

Bruce Barry:

take four to 5,000 IU a day.

Bruce Barry:

Uh, the older you are, the the more you need.

Bruce Barry:

I've got all sorts of studies that I can forward to you, Jeanie,

Bruce Barry:

showing that at, at 4,000 IU a day, you probably, probably get up to

Bruce Barry:

a satisfactory, blood serum level.

Bruce Barry:

you may need a little more than that.

Bruce Barry:

But even, even the studies on Vitamin D three and and Covid response are

Bruce Barry:

absolutely, absolutely phenomenal folks with inadequate vitamin D three, even if

Bruce Barry:

they're otherwise in pretty good health.

Bruce Barry:

Inadequate vitamin D three is almost a death sentence.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yep.

Bruce Barry:

it is absolutely impossible in the Pacific Northwest

Bruce Barry:

most times of the year to get enough.

Bruce Barry:

so D three and, and then, you know, we talk diet, we talk movement,

Bruce Barry:

you talk sleep a little bit.

Bruce Barry:

Sleep is, is tremendously important.

Bruce Barry:

And I, I know that, for most of my career, it's, Hey man, I can

Bruce Barry:

get by with five hours of sleep.

Bruce Barry:

You know, it made you a man.

Bruce Barry:

No, it's, it's absolutely, it's absolutely health destroying.

Bruce Barry:

And we could, we could talk for half an hour about what happens during

Bruce Barry:

sleep and sleep cycle, but, Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Circadian rhythms, vitamin D three, exercise, movement, and sleep.

Bruce Barry:

And, you might be a new person.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yes.

Jeannie Oliver:

Amen to that.

Jeannie Oliver:

I love it.

Jeannie Oliver:

I love it.

Jeannie Oliver:

Well, Bruce, this has just been awesome and I really appreciate

Jeannie Oliver:

your time and sharing all of your wisdom and experiences with us.

Jeannie Oliver:

And, I, I just noticed too that we match, we're both wearing sort of a

Bruce Barry:

Oh, yellow.

Jeannie Oliver:

yellow.

Bruce Barry:

I've got a, I've got a

Bruce Barry:

race jersey.

Bruce Barry:

I've

Jeannie Oliver:

Nice.

Bruce Barry:

full of them.

Jeannie Oliver:

Yes, we're embracing spring here in the

Jeannie Oliver:

Northwest.

Jeannie Oliver:

but I don't know if I've told you this, but we have a little saying at our house

Jeannie Oliver:

sometimes, and it's, you know, when we're kind of knowing that we should

Jeannie Oliver:

get out and do something or get that workout in, but we're not really feeling

Jeannie Oliver:

it, we'll go, uh, what would Bruce do?

Jeannie Oliver:

What would Bruce Berry

Jeannie Oliver:

do?

Bruce Barry:

oh, wow.

Bruce Barry:

Okay.

Jeannie Oliver:

Wwbd?

Jeannie Oliver:

And, um, and I'll ask that to Christian.

Jeannie Oliver:

Sometimes I go, he'll be debating, I'll go, what would Bruce do?

Jeannie Oliver:

And he's like, you're right.

Jeannie Oliver:

I gotta go.

Bruce Barry:

Wow.

Jeannie Oliver:

So,

Bruce Barry:

obviously had no idea.

Jeannie Oliver:

well now, you know.

Jeannie Oliver:

Now you know.

Jeannie Oliver:

So, yeah.

Jeannie Oliver:

Well, we appreciate you so much and thank you so much for sharing this.

Jeannie Oliver:

And, where can people find you if they wanna connect?

Bruce Barry:

yeah.

Bruce Barry:

Well, I, I don't actually have a, a business anymore.

Bruce Barry:

I mean, I, I had one, but, uh, I, I let that drop.

Bruce Barry:

I guess maybe I need to start something again.

Bruce Barry:

Yeah.

Bruce Barry:

My, my email, no caps, B as in boy, B as in boy, a r r y6186@aol.com.

Bruce Barry:

And I probably get three or four health related questions a week and

Bruce Barry:

it's just, just kind of the thing I do to film my time because I enjoy

Jeannie Oliver:

All.

Jeannie Oliver:

Okay.

Jeannie Oliver:

Awesome.

Jeannie Oliver:

I love that.

Jeannie Oliver:

Thank you.

Jeannie Oliver:

That's very generous for you to share that.

Jeannie Oliver:

Very cool.

Jeannie Oliver:

I'll put that in the show notes for everybody.

Bruce Barry:

yep.

Jeannie Oliver:

Well, thanks again for being here

Bruce Barry:

Really, my pleasure.

Jeannie Oliver:

yeah, this is a great conversation and we

Jeannie Oliver:

will, we'll have you on again,

Bruce Barry:

Okay.

Jeannie Oliver:

little deeper one of these

Jeannie Oliver:

days stays.

Bruce Barry:

Say hi to my buddy, Christian.

Jeannie Oliver:

I will.

Jeannie Oliver:

Thanks Bruce.

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About the Podcast

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The Nutrition Edit

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Jeannie Oliver

Jeannie is a Certified Nutrition Coach, NASM Personal Trainer and classically trained chef. She helps high performing women improve their overall health, optimize their energy and performance, and discover what it's like to feel good in their own skin - all while enjoying delicious food and creating sustainably healthy lifestyles.