The Ancient Path to Healing Your Body with Alberto Villoldo

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1:16 The views, opinions, and statements expressed by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or positions of Next Level Soul, its host, or any of the companies they represent. Now let's dive into today's episode. I'd like to welcome to the show Alberto Villaldo. How are you doing, Alberto?

1:35 Hey, very good, Alex. Really good to be with you.

1:38 It's a pleasure to have a fellow Cuban on the show talking about spirituality and all the other amazing things that we're going to be talking about in this conversation. And as I was telling you before, I'm super excited to talk to you because We're going to go down a road in this conversation that I generally don't go down in the show. Not because I just, it's not something I've gone focusing my energy on, but there's been a lot of stuff that's happened in my own life.

2:05 And I think the universe has brought you into my path to have this conversation to hopefully help a lot of people along the way. So the first question I want to ask you is, you know, you've mentioned many times that the West treats the body differently. very differently than the ancients do. And you worked with a lot of ancient healers and shamans, and also come from a world of science as well. So you bridge those two worlds so beautifully. And that we are here in the sense, specifically in America, we don't have healthcare. We do truly have disease care. What's broken about how we treat the body from your perspective here in the West?

2:50 Yeah, you know, Alex, I began my journey as a medical anthropologist, and I was actually funded by Big Swiss Pharma to go into the Amazon and help them discover the next cure for cancer. And, you know, at that time, there were not too many anthropologists in the jungle in Peru. It was a shining path. There were gorillas, Maoist gorillas.

3:11 So I had the whole jungle to myself, basically. And... But my sponsors were totally disappointed because I came back empty-handed because there's no cancer in the Amazon. There's no Alzheimer's, there's no cancer, there's no heart disease. These are the illnesses of civilization of the West, of our diet, of our stress levels, of holding a phone to our heads.

3:38 This is the, our disconnection from nature is so great that we have these, we call them the illnesses of aging. You know, the dementia, the cancer you get towards the end. They're the illnesses of our Western lifestyle and of our disconnection from nature. And nature is spirituality. Spirituality is in the head. It's not out there. It's in the woods.

4:02 And the woods will take you up there and down there also. Into the earth and into the heavens. But you've got to start with the forest. You've got to start with your own body, with your gut biome, the colony that we have in our gut. And which in the West, we don't know how to treat. You know, this is doctors, if they're lucky, they get one week of nutrition in their whole training. And it's crazy. And so today we have to become our own doctors, our own chief scientists, and we can do it. We know how to do that. And particularly when it comes to, my most recent book is called Grow a New Brain.

4:41 And And my previous book was called Grow a New Body because we grow a new body every seven years, but we grow a new brain every 22 days.

4:50 That's amazing. Yeah, because I know everything is dying and rebuilding itself in the body constantly, which always fascinates.

4:57 But not in the brain. The neurons you were born with, you're going to die with.

5:03 So what's the new brain then?

5:05 Well, the new brain is they change all the component parts. Like somebody says, you cannot have the 2026 Mercedes, but you have the 2000, the year 2000, where we're going to change all the parts. Got new wheels, new carbon, everything. The brain cells need, they renew, they regenerate, but they don't reproduce like the rest of the body cells do.

5:27 And this is what the shamans were masters at doing because they had no writing. All the wisdom in the village was stored in the minds of the elders. and so they had to protect their brains the brains and the minds of the elder imagine if you forgot how to make fire or where or how to hunt so this is really my you know my interest is the interface between the brain and spirituality and how we can create psychosomatic.

5:56 Health now alberto i've been on a journey uh recently and a lot of Yeah, and I think I want to tell you this story because I think it's a great illustration of a lot of the work that you've done and a couple of things I discovered along the way in regards to healing the body. So many people have noticed in recent interviews that I've lost a good amount of weight. And people are like, Alex, you look great. Oh, my God, what are you doing? This and that. And I haven't really talked about it too much yet. But if you look at an episode from four months ago and you look at an episode now, you can obviously see the difference in my body. So the story goes that for the last couple of years, I've been in

6:40 a tremendous amount of pain, physical pain, ankles, inflammation everywhere. My gut biome was all over the place. And then I went on vacation last year and everything got intensified because of pain medication that I was taking, over-the-counter stuff, but still pain medication, ripped my stomach lining apart, ripped my gut lining apart. My microbiome was in the, no pun intended, in the toilet. And I was waking up and moving with constant pain all over the place. So I got to a point, and to be honest with you, I truly don't even know how it was working. doing the show and everything. Cause it was in literally so much pain. And I really thought like, Oh my God, I hit 50 and the wheels fell off the wagon.

7:30 And I'm like, is this what happens? Like it's, you know, is this, is this, and then I started looking at other 50 year olds and 60 year olds and 70 year olds that are not in pain constantly. And I'm like, well, I'm, there's something wrong with me. I need, I need to do something about this. So I decided to do a six week fast and, a lot of people would go, what do you mean? I drank nothing but juice for six weeks. Now, I've been a vegetarian for about 15 years.

8:00 And the reason I became a vegetarian is I did a two-week fast, a juice fast 15 years ago that reset my everything. And then I just kind of lost my taste for meat. You and I are both Cuban, so we've probably eaten a flank steak at one point or another in our lives.

8:15 Or two, yeah.

8:17 Or two, you know, a little picadillo, a little....

8:21 You know, let me just... Please, chime in. I don't think you did a juice fast in a classical sense because you were not taking orange juice and apple juice. You were juicing veggies, probably.

8:34 No, yeah, I was doing... So the way I did it, and I did it a little bit differently than a normal... Because a lot of people think juice fast are like, oh, I'm just going to go buy apple juice and orange juice and drink that. You're drinking sugar water at that point.

8:47 That's a sugar fast. Deadly, it'll kill you.

8:51 Exactly.

8:52 You take a couple avocados and a hamburger, put it in your blender. You did a veggie fast, which is fantastic because it's giving your body the chance to regenerate.

9:06 Correct. So what I did is I loaded up, I did a lot of green juices and I did some beet juices. But I mixed in like turmeric and ginger and kale and spinach and celery and parsley. And I mixed it all in. And the sweetness factor was always apples. So I put apples in it to sweeten it up a little bit. And then occasionally I would do like a watermelon juice once a day or something like that just to get something of a taste in my mouth.

9:36 Maybe a pineapple juice because it has a lot of tremendous enzymes and things like that. But it was all mixed in. About three weeks in, then I would do a veggie broth. So I started doing broths towards week four, five, and six just to get a warm flavor in my mouth because it's psychological more than anything else. And that's what I realized in this fast, which is the longest fast I've ever done, is that my brain would go, hey, you're hungry. And then I'd go, am I though? Am I hungry? And then it started to retrain the brain to go, you're not going to die if you don't eat.

10:12 And what I discovered within myself is my energy level went through the roof. I was, my mind got clear, eyesight got better, and everything started to feel better. The inflammation dropped dramatically. So a lot of the pain started to go away. And it was, it was honestly magical for me. Now I'm not suggesting, and I want to make sure everyone knows, I'm not suggesting someone go out and do a six week cleanse or a fast. You really need to understand what you're doing and educate yourself along the process. Would you agree with that?

10:43 Yeah, I think what you did was magnificent. And, you know, I've, Everybody's on GLP-1 drugs these days. Osempic, on the weight loss drug. And they have amazing benefits. No doubt about it. They'll bring down your risk for stroke by 40%. They'll help reset the immune system in your brain. The brain has its own immune system. But the problem is that we've destroyed our guts from antibiotics, from the food we eat, from the colonies of candida. that most people have. You know, I've got a patient of mine who has been sober for 20 years, but he has so much candida and he had fatty liver disease. And he said, how can I have an alcoholic liver if I don't drink alcohol?

11:35 And it's because all of the candida, the yeast in his gut was manufacturing alcohol. He had a brewery inside his gut. So this is the, what we have to, you know, we have to understand the biology and to me, biology is the most spiritual thing in the world. But what happens with the ozempics is that they're giving you something that your gut lining used to produce naturally. And when you do the kind of detox you did or the kind of juice fast that you did, you restore the natural production of the GLP-1 and it really begins to restore your colony and the colony, you know, one of the, When people take antibiotics, you hear, say, hey, take probiotics because you're destroying. You don't want to take

12:19 probiotics if you take antibiotics because there's enough of your colony left that it'll restore itself with 200 varieties. But if you're loading up with probiotics that only have five varieties, that's the ones that are going to grow. And you're going to miss the other 150. So what you did is you restored the integrity of the body. You recalibrated.

12:41 You did a... did a massive biological re-regulation.

12:46 For me, honestly, I didn't lose the, I kind of enjoyed not eating. It's very, a lot less stress. I didn't have to think about anything. I just had to make sure I had juice. And I didn't drink that much juice. At a certain point, I had to remind myself to drink juice on a daily basis because I was like, I need to drink, I wanted to do something.

13:05 But the other thing I did in my protocol that I, again, this is just me. No one told me to do this. I did a lot of supplementation. So I made sure to take my vitamin Ds, which I'm not sure I needed, but I still took it. I took amino acids. So I set EAS, amino acids to hold onto as much muscle as I could. I didn't want to lose as much muscle on this fast, which- It was a tremendous amount.

13:33 It wasn't a tremendous amount. And I also took creatine. But this is my L-glutamine as well. But that's the supplementation I took and the vitamins I took essentially. Everything else was covered by the juices.

13:46 You want my opinion on it? I think you did great. I mean, I wrote a book about this called Grow a New Body because the body will go from detox if you stop eating the toxins to If you get rid of the junk, the body will go into repair. If you do an extreme get rid of the junk and give it the nutrients, the pure nutrients, like the greens that you were having and the supplements, it'll go into regeneration, into growing a new body. And we know that we do that. We know we do that because we did. We're the evidence that we could grow a body, except that this is now in password-protected regions in your DNA.

14:29 And the codes for getting into those regions in your DNA are certain molecules that are found particularly in green plants and particularly in broccoli. If you've heard about broccoli and this will begin to switch on more than 2000 genes to grow a new body, to regenerate, which is where we want to get to. And that slows down aging and you begin then to burn fat for fuel.

14:54 You know, if you go to the spa, you go to an expensive detox clinic, Most people just lose water weight. They put it back on drinking, but you were beginning to combust fat for fuel to go on to autophagy. And autophagy is what allows you then to burn, to get rid not only of your belly fat, but the inter-organ fat that's really deadly. That's the stuff you want to.

15:23 The visceral, that's visceral fat, right? Is that visceral fat? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

15:26 Absolutely.

15:28 We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

15:38 So yeah, good job, man. Great job. Now the problem is if your diet is pizza and hamburgers, you can't do what you did because you get really sick.

15:46 And that's something I want to let people know. Like for me, this was the thing that was really mind-blowing to me. And I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. Is that Like I said, I've been basically a vegan vegetarian. I'm now vegetarian, but I was vegan for a long time. And then I went to vegetarian because traveling was very difficult to find vegan food everywhere. So we've gone more to a balanced diet of vegetarianism. And I ate fairly clean. Now, I did have processed, you know, vegan meats and vegan things like that or vegetarian things. So there was definitely process.

16:27 I definitely had bread. I had a lot of different rices and starches, but I was baffled because I'm like, why do I feel this way? And I'm not eating, you know, fast food every day. And I'm not sticking my body with obscene amounts of like, I don't drink, I don't smoke. It was mind boggling to me. Like I've been eating so well. So what I came up with is like, there's something in that diet. There was something I was eating that was either it was gluten or the bread or the starches or something that was not, it was causing this massive amount of inflammation and it was massive amounts. I got blood work done and the inflammation markers were off the charts. So it was, it was like, so what's your thought of that?

17:08 Well, you know, this is the ailment of the West is inflammation. Everything that, that ends in itis, like colitis and itis means inflammation in Latin. So anything that you hear that's colitis, gastritis, and it's all inflammatory. And, inflammation in the gut is one thing. Inflammation in the brain is deadly, will kill you. So the task is how do we have an anti-inflammatory diet? This is the Mediterranean diet.

17:38 But one of the best anti-inflammatories in the world is cultivating inner peace, is meditation, is stillness. If you can Have a diet that supports your inner peace so that you don't get triggered into fight or flight. Remember, fight or flight is what we saved from when we saw the jungle and the lion in the bush. And now we're triggered into fight or flight constantly by our feeds that we're getting into our phones, by the urgent email that we got to respond to. So we live in a state of inflammation, which is fight or flight, survival.

18:17 And the body's trying to survive. So what you would The kind of reset that you did, I think is essential and is missing in all of the longevity noise that's happening in the world today. You've got to get back to that inner peace, that inner stillness, which is at the root of inflammation. It's not only the foods you eat and the gluten. Forget about the gluten. Most of us are gluten sensitive. And also the dairy, most of us are dairy sensitive and we overload the system so we don't feel it. But the minute you get off of it, you begin to see how much better you begin to feel. And then the result, particularly inflammation in the brain equals Alzheimer's.

19:03 What I found so fascinating about this process and I'm still going through the process is how powerful the body is. to heal itself if you give it the proper, not only nutrition, but you do certain things. Like I was so far gone that, I mean, I didn't know how much longer I could, honestly, I was in so much pain.

19:28 And I couldn't, so that was the other thing. I couldn't take pain medication because my gut was so tore up. So I was in pain and couldn't even take an Advil. I couldn't take anything. So it was this constant being down.

19:42 An alveolus is going to be medicating the symptom, but not the cause of the root. We medicate the inflammation. It's like taking off the oil light in your car so you don't have to be bothered by not having it.

19:55 And then the car, all of a sudden, steam comes out.

19:58 I mentioned to you that I'm in Europe right now. I'm calling from Europe, and I'm in Warsaw in Poland. And in this part of the world, scientists are looking at cancer... and dissecting it, and it turns, you know, when we have cancer in the West, we want to cut it, kill it, or burn it, you know, get rid of it. And they're finding out that many of the tumors that they're taking out of women, particularly, that are maybe even non-cancerous, that they're the body's attempt to eliminate so many of the toxins we have, because they're loaded with heavy metals and loaded with toxins. So the symptom and the disease is frequently the body's attempt at healing itself, maybe a misdirected attempt, but it's the best

20:44 that the body's able to do given that it's under assault by microplastics, by poisons in the water, poisons in the air. So we need to kind of reimagine our approach to health, each one of us, because the medical system is not doing it.

21:00 Yeah, absolutely. Again, the other aspect, well, you were saying something about broccoli and broccoli sprouts specifically. So what I've been doing, and people ask me like, okay, well, you juiced for six weeks. When you come back, you're going to gain all that weight back because you're just going to go back to eating the way you were. But what I decided to do is really prioritize because I'm trying to rebuild my body a bit because of all the pains and other issues rehabbing that I had to deal with. So I prioritized protein, healthy fats, and obviously, vegetable vegetables are all in there as well, and healthy starches.

21:46 That's basically what I've been focusing on tremendously. One of the things I started to do is I started growing my own broccoli sprouts. It's the simplest, easiest thing you can do organic.

21:56 Broccoli sprouts, but you got to be careful that you don't take them more than four days.

22:02 What do you mean take what? Broccoli sprouts?

22:04 Broccoli sprouts. If you want to use them for the detoxifying effects, in fact, broccoli sprouts are the most potent detoxifier at a cellular level that you can have. Amazing. And they'll switch on all the genes that create health and begin to silence the genes that create breast cancer and all kinds of cancer. But if you take them for more than four days in a row, the body will recognize it and shut it down. So it's called a hormetic effect. So you got to take three days off and then four days on, three days off, cycle it.

22:40 Because the body is called hormesis. It's that powerful that the body will begin to not respond to it. So if you cycle the broccoli, it's an incredible, not only detoxifier, but triggering regeneration in every cell in the body. But you've got to cycle it. If you do it all the time, it'll saturate the system.

23:05 Interesting. So that's how, because I heard it's a little bunch, literally like a little bunch like this, is about a hundred times more potent than this much broccoli, full grown broccoli.

23:16 And the broccoli, yeah, totally, totally. So that's the, and it's, you know, it's loaded. It's actually a pesticide that the plant produces so that when a rabbit is gnawing on it, it'll mix these two components, myrosinase and glucoferrin, and it'll drive the rabbit away because it tastes so bad for the rabbit. So you've got to chew it. And the chewing of the sprouts, your little rabbit that's chewing on the sprout, and it'll combine to produce this amazing detoxifier.

23:53 And again, but it's so powerful that you can only do it four days a week. Otherwise, it'll neutralize. You just get the you get the nutritional content, but not the healing content.

24:05 And how about like alfalfa sprouts, buckwheat sprouts, all these other kinds of sprouts? What's your take on those?

24:11 Nutritionally, they're incredible, but they don't have the particular molecule that's such an amazing detoxifier in broccoli sprouts.

24:23 And then coming back off of this, what would you recommend for people? What I'm doing right now is like, I'm focusing, a man of my age, I'm trying to maintain muscle, grow a bit of more muscle, not for ego, but for strength and stability.

24:37 Yeah, okay. Let me tell you the caution. We need the protein. You know, the reason that meat is everywhere is because you protein from meat, as soon as it leaves the stomach, it's absorbed. And it goes immediately into the bloodstream. But to turn broccoli into you, into Alex, that broccoli's got to travel 15 feet through your GI tract.

25:05 And then you've got to have a good flora that can break the broccoli down so you can get the protein from it. So if your gut is wrecked, like I have a mother in Miami, my Cuban mother, 103 years old. Oh, my God. But she's been taking, you know, when she had a headache, she'd take an antibiotic. So her gut was broken.

25:28 Wait a minute, when she had a headache, she took an antibiotic?

25:32 You know, this is the old, the old. Oh, I know. You know, you don't feel good, take an antibiotic. So it destroyed her gut. So she has to eat meat. So my work with her, and she was living in pain in her 80s, is I put her on primarily a plant-based diet and restored her gut so she can breathe. take protein out of vegetables because they're loaded. You know, I was in the airport in Miami and I ordered a big salad and the woman comes and says, do you want to add some protein to it? I said, yeah, give me a side of asparagus. She said, no, I mean protein. Do you want to add some protein to it? Yeah, give me some. Asparagus is full of protein, but you need to have a gut flora to get the protein out.

26:18 She wanted me to add chicken or shrimp or steak on it.

26:22 Yeah, yeah.

26:24 So the problem is that we're overdoing the protein. Protein, I can give you the science behind it. The science behind it is called mTOR, letter M-T-O-R, which is the radar system for protein. So back a few billion years ago when we were all bacteria, We developed this radar system so when there was food around, mTOR would wake up the bacteria and say, hey, let's eat. And if there was no food around, it would go into hibernation.

26:59 That system is still active, like bears, they'll go hibernate. And it's still active in us humans. So mTOR is what will turn the body into getting buff, muscular, strong, and making babies. or quieting down and living a long life or waiting until the next spring. Maybe there'll be enough food and then mTOR will trigger repair and regeneration so you can make it to the next mating season.

27:30 We're overdoing the protein. You know, they're protein bars. You go on a hike, you don't want to take protein. You're crazy. You don't need protein on that. So we got to cut back on the protein, restore the gut, get it from our plants, And because this radar system works on three amino acids. Remember, amino acids make up proteins.

27:54 And they are called the branched chain amino acids. This is what bodybuilders will put in their smoothies so they can build their body and die young. And this is predominant in red meat. Not so much in fish, less in the white meats. which provide you the protein without elevating your mTOR, because mTOR is what switches the cancer program on itself. So excess animal protein, particularly red meat, is going to lead to early death and disease.

28:33 Let me ask you in regards to the microbiome, can you explain to people, because that's a it started to come into the zeitgeist a few years ago where like the gut, the gut, everyone needs to know about the gut and the microbiome. Can you explain to people how powerful and how important that gut biome is to your entire health, your immune system, everything functioning? Because I found out the hard way that when the gut is not, and again, I was eating fairly clean for the most part, but there was something about my diet that wasn't not working with my microbiome, that it only, it regulates everything in your body. And if you have a good, healthy microbiome, everything else starts to work better. So can you explain

29:22 to the people about that?

29:24 Well, you know, we have about a hundred million cells in our body and about 85 million of them belong to our gut flora. to these creatures that live within us. You know, imagine in the forest, or if you go to Africa on a safari, all the game is around the ponds and around the pools, where the other animals go to drink. Well, the game in the forest is going to be where the food is, and these animals bacteria that are very friendly bacteria and make vitamins and nutrients for us because we don't digest stuff. They do.

30:02 There are 10 layers of bacteria in your gut.

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30:16 And the upper layers break down due to heavy lifting. And so they feed, they eat, and then they poop. Or they produce metabolites. We call it poo. And then the next layer eats that. And then they produce metabolites. Finally, when it gets right down to the 10th layer, that's when we eat. That's when the food goes through the gut barrier and into the bloodstream. And if you get leaky gut, it means that you have bacteria leaking into your bloodstream where they're not supposed to be. And it causes a huge immune reaction. Inflammation. Inflammation is good if it's localized. It's bad if it's systemic because it's a healing response. And if you get leaky gut, after a few months, you'll get leaky brain, bacteria getting into your

31:06 brain also.

31:07 And that's not good.

31:09 That's not good. No, that's not good at all. So they are the ones that process food for you. And they're getting all the information about the environment constantly because what you eat is, you don't read the environment through your skin, you read it through your gut flora. And they're the ones that keep you healthy. 85% of your immune system is in your gut. And if your gut is broken because of antibiotic use or excessive sugar, because then you have candida, which is a yeast and very invasive, will take over your gut. And if you remember, our grandparents would have these toenails that were all kind of swollen and inflamed.

31:57 Oh, oh.

31:58 Yeah. That was candida, and it's systemic. And the purpose of candida, everybody's supposed to have a little bit of this candida albicans. The purpose of it is to ferment you after you die. It's nature's garbage disposal system. But you don't want that to happen a day too soon, you know? And if you take an antibiotics that destroyed bacteria, but they don't destroy yeast, antibiotics will not affect the yeast.

32:29 That's antifungals. What happens is you eliminate, you'll nuke your gut flora, but your yeast will now begin, they have no competition, they'll begin to take over the gut. And that's when we start getting sick. So the important thing is to, and they feed on sugar. The sugar cravings that we have, you don't have sugar cravings. You know, that chocolate chip cookie at Starbucks, you don't want it.

32:56 It's your gut that wants it. It's your candida. It's your yeast that wants the sugar.

33:04 The other thing that helps the microbiome, I discovered, is fermented foods. Can you explain the power of fermented foods? Because I eat fermented foods every day, whether in a yogurt or in a tempeh or in sauerkraut or... pickled onions that we do at home or something along those lines, to add a little bit different kind of strands of bacteria.

33:28 Is it bacteria?

33:30 These are bacteria. You're adding strains of good bacteria. Now, you've got to be careful because beer is a fermented....

33:40 It has yeast too that's a lot of yeast there's.

33:45 Yeast but that's the candida it's the same family as candida so you don't want to be feeding alcohol to your gut it kills them but the fermented foods are the best thing for your gut i mean this is an asia an asia everything the ginger and anything that is fermented is again it's that is well fermented that has good bacteria in it It is a miracle food for your gut flora. And that's at the basis of everything.

34:17 Your mood, you're depressed, you don't take antidepressants, restore your gut depression, it'll go away. You'll begin producing the bliss molecules in your brain, but they got to come from your gut. And that's serotonin.

34:30 Now, can you talk a little bit about the power of fasting? Because we've talked about fasting, but there is, I forgot the doctor, I think he's a Japanese doctor who won the Nobel Prize for discovering what actually happens to the body and the different stages of how many hours that you don't eat and what the body's actually doing.

34:51 Because I always thought to myself as a layman, I'm like, you know what? We've been programmed into this three meals a day thing. Breakfast is the most important meal and you have to eat three times a day. I go, well, you know what? Even in the 1800s, people didn't eat three meals a day. That's a 1900s plus- So how did, and if you go farther back, let's say back to our ancestors, well, they would eat every two or three days if they were lucky, if they were able to get a kill of an animal to feed the village.

35:23 And then the rest of the time they were fasting. So if they were fasting during that time, they're not wasting away to nothing. They have to maintain muscle. They have to maintain energy in order to hunt or in order to cultivate food.

35:35 Correct?

35:35 Correct.

35:36 So what were we doing when we were having three meals a week and not three meals a day, right?

35:43 How did we survive?

35:44 We were not waiting for the kill. That's part of the myth today. Okay. So you think that you need to have animal protein in order to build protein in the body, but you don't. I mean, if you have a steak, that steak came from a cow and that cow was a vegan. Yes. You know, that cow only ate grass. It only ate greens, and it produced all of this amazing protein. We're wired the same way. We're absolutely wired the same way. And we were not hunters.

36:20 We were not hunters until about 50,000 years ago. Imagine hunting something with a rock or a stick. You need a bow and arrow, at least.

36:29 At least.

36:30 We were gatherers, and it was the women that provided. Because they were doing the gathering. So this kind of great white hunters is a guy macho story. They never existed. It was the gatherer. It was the women. You collected the nuts. You collected the herbs and the greens and the plants. 50,000 edible plants in the world until 10,000 years ago when with agriculture, we stopped eating the natural edible plants. And we began to eat only three plants.

37:03 and none of them are green. So it was corn, rice, and wheat. And you have, with the dawn of agriculture, you have three things happening. You have agriculture, these three plants, you have religion appearing, and you have warfare. And even in religion, you have these three grains that are deadly if they're over-processed. You know, in In Christianity, you have the Lord's Prayer that says, and give us this day our daily fats and proteins, right?

37:39 Daily bread, sir.

37:41 Our daily bread, which is, and this is what the Egyptians do. They knew that you could feed the pyramid slaves. They were fed bread because you get a lot of sugar energy and they die young. They die in their late 30s. But the pharaohs and the architects, they would be eating the good fats, the good proteins, the complete grains.

38:08 So your question is, what happens when we fast? What happens when we fast is that we begin, we recycle proteins in the body. Every cell has a garbage bin that when you have a big part of the cell, like a mitochondria, which are really big, and they get renewed all the time, they get put in the recycling bin.

38:31 And to be able to tap into that recycling, you need to fast. You need to start burning fat for fuel instead of sugar. You need to go on to what's known as autophagy. When you go into autophagy, you begin to recycle proteins. And if you can recycle proteins, you can get 300 to 400 grams of protein per day if you need it. And then you need to supplement very little protein. And that's what you were doing.

39:00 And you're juicing. You say, hey, I'm going to optimize. It's like I'm a twin fuel automobile. I got gas and I got electric. Why don't I use some of the electric that I've been saving? And then you get to recycle your protein. And that's where you're The brain gets really sharp. You get really clear. The brain fog goes away.

39:22 Is that the ketones? Is that ketones?

39:24 That's the ketones. Then the brain starts running on ketones. especially one ketone that's called beta-hydroxybutyrate. It's butyrate and it's the three ketones. This is a really good one. And then your brain is like jet fuel for the brain. Creativity, lucidity, clarity, your sleep cycles improve. This is all in my book, Grow a New Brain, by the way.

39:50 This is excellent. I want to dive into the spiritual aspect of this because fasting has been a long historic part of many religious and spiritual practices because they knew about it from Christianity to Judaism to obviously Islam. And then those are the three big religions, but also in Buddhism and all of these different... Yoga, the Vedic experiences. Yeah.

40:18 Fasting has been known by the ancients to be an amazing healer of the body, but also it connects you on a, I don't know if it's a frequency or vibrational level to a higher state of spirituality. It can and doesn't always, but it can do that. What's your experience working with the shamans in the Amazon and around the world and your own personal experiences on when you're in a fasting state or when you're eating the way we're talking about, what does the body do in order to evolve to a higher place? Because one thing I've noticed is, and I was one of them, is that you're like, oh, I meditate every day, but nothing's happening, or I'm not getting here. I really want to evolve spiritually.

41:04 But you're saying this while you're driving into a fast food joint, eating food that is vibrationally extremely heavy and toxic for your body. And your body is defending itself constantly. You're under attack, like you said. And when you finally don't attack your body, your body's allowed to do what it does, not only in a physical standpoint, but also helps you in the spiritual standpoint, at least from my understanding and my experience. What are your thoughts, sir?

41:32 I can tell you exactly how that works.

41:35 Please.

41:36 I told you I had a background in neuroscience. And I spent 25 years with the shamans in the Andes and in Tibet and in the Himalayas. But what happens when you fast is that you begin to recycle proteins. And the proteins that we recycle are rich in an amino acid called tryptophan. And tryptophan is a tryptamine. Tryptophan is one of 22 amino acids that go into the body.

42:03 They're particularly rich in this. So now we start getting a flood of tryptophan into the gut. And the gut turns tryptophan into serotonin. And serotonin is a neurotransmitter. And if we get enough tryptophan into the brain, the brain will begin to produce serotonin. And then if we are not producing a lot of the stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, then this pineal gland, the seventh chakra, The pineal gland, the sixth chakra is the pituitary, produces 300 different neurotransmitters. The pineal only does two. One of them is melatonin, so you can sleep. And if there's enough melatonin, the pineal gland will add a couple of methyl groups to serotonin. Remember, serotonin is a tryptamine. Add two methyl

43:00 groups to it, and you'd end up with dimethyltryptamine. Dimethyltryptamine is better known as ayahuasca. So you're manufacturing your own psychedelics inside your brain. And all the psychedelics bind to serotonin receptors. And serotonin is ubiquitous. It's everywhere in nature. It's what makes flowers blossom. It's a bliss molecule. And when we methylate it, We end up producing very minute amounts of psychedelics, particularly when we're dreaming. You know, when you're dreaming, you don't go, you have a nightmare. You don't go, I'm just dreaming. No, you're in it. When you're making love and when you're dying, so you can take your consciousness with you into the beyond. We need the substrate. We need the tryptophan, particularly when we're recycling

44:06 These molecules reach in tryptophan, proteins, and we need the substrate to be able to produce the brain chemistry to enter into the state of consciousness.

44:18 So when you're meditating, if you're going to a spiritual place, let's say, and you're trying to connect to the energy of that space, if you are on an empty stomach or in a fasting state, your ability... And I'm just trying to break this down.

44:38 Take 72 hours.

44:40 Right. It doesn't take long to do. Yeah, exactly. After 72 hours, you're there when you fast. Is it almost like turning on the antenna at a higher frequency so you can pick up what's already there? Does that make sense?

44:54 You know, the language we have for spirituality today is frequencies, vibration. It's just a language of radio. you know, a hundred years ago.

45:06 We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

45:16 And the language that you find among the shamans is a different language where you're connecting with the all, where you're becoming attuned, where you're being absorbed by the mother. The language of brain science is, is, and this is where they all come together, is that you need the neurotransmitters, you need to quiet down the stress hormones, and you need to produce the bliss molecules. The bliss molecule is serotonin.

45:45 The only serotonin is producing your gut and a little bit in your brain. You've got to repair the gut. You've got to re-autophagy. You've got to be in ketosis. You've Tryptophan is a tryptamine. Ayahuasca, psychedelic, is dimethyltryptamine. We manufacture it. And this is why when you are in ecstatic communion and bliss, you don't need to eat anymore.

46:17 You don't want to stop it.

46:18 Yeah. Yeah, I've never once been making love and all of a sudden I'm like, you know what? I need a burger right in the middle of the situation. That's not a thing that happens ever.

46:30 That old story about, okay, you finished having sex or making love and you roll over and have a cigarette. What it does is that it brings the neurotransmitter levels back up. So today we don't do that, of course, but this is what's fascinating to me about the brain science is is that it gives us the skills to understand these processes that are mystical, but they're also biological.

46:56 Then they're biochemical. And then we can eat foods that are rich in tryptamine or supplement with 5-HTP, for example, or in the morning with a little bit of L-tryptophan, which just a small amount, which helps which your gut flora loves, by the way, and it helps with the motility of your gut and provides the substrate to manufacture the meditation molecules. Because otherwise, you're just going to get pissed off if you're meditating and you don't have the right brain chemistry.

47:35 And I think that's one of the big lessons I'm trying to talk about in this conversation is that so many spiritual seekers are in truly earnest trying to find a deeper level of spirituality within their lives. And they don't understand that the body is the vehicle to find and connect with that spirituality. If the body is, like you're taking a trip, If the car doesn't have the right gas, it hasn't been taken care of, the oil is off, the antifreeze is out, you put diesel inside of an electric car. If things are not working, you can't get to your destination. And that's where a lot of frustration lies, where you can watch a show like this and then watch the news for an hour. And you're like, I wonder why I'm all stressed out.

48:30 Yeah, that's really, you know, not only are we eating junk food, we're eating junk brain food by focusing on, you know, the news is the most debilitating, disempowering version of reality that you can tap into. So you got to be careful where you feed your brain because it's hard to get it out of your head once you get it in. And that's the end, you know, the body that the Vedas and the old wisdom traditions speak about transcending is the animal body, the desperate body, the body that guides you through the I don't have enough body, I don't have enough food, I don't have enough love, I don't have enough sex, I don't have enough money.

49:19 The scarcity brain, and that's a part of the brain of an ancient brain called the Neanderthal or the limbic brain, which is the brain that needs 10 commandments. Don't covet your neighbor's horse or spouse and don't steal and don't kill. And That's the, because we have that in us too. And we need, that's the part that we need to heal and bring peace to so you can, so that the animal within us can put his weapons down.

49:50 It's so true. And so it's a beautiful way you stated that. And I hope people listening to this conversation really truly understand is, and again, this is from my experience going through this recently and still going through this, is being able to heal the body, how many more things, at least for me in my spiritual journey, I've started to connect deeper spiritually than I have before, purely because my body is starting to run, not at 100% just yet, at least I don't think so, but it is definitely a lot better than it was four months ago. And the thing that also was fascinating is how fast it changes.

50:34 Like I did an extreme thing, six weeks, no food. That's extreme. You know, that's hard work. But even if you do three days, like you said, you'll see changes. Like you'll start to feel changes.

50:49 Even if you don't do a single day and you get the right supplements and you stop eating some of the junk, it'll respond very quickly. And then if you can give it a 72-hour break, it's a 72-hour reset. You know, you get 80% of the benefit in the first 72 hours. And then the next five and a half weeks, you're trying to get the final 20%. But yeah, we're in a place that I remember 20 years ago, I knew maybe two or three people that were stressed out and anxious and on medication. Now, everybody I know is stressed out. I know two or three people that are not taking medication. psych meds or that are not stressed out or not breathing, you know, that are breathing regularly, taking a deep breath. And that mastery of our nervous

51:40 system is absolutely essential today because of the information overload we're exposed to, because of the tremendous contamination of electromagnetic signals, you know, 5G and television signals and I look at my internet and there are 20 different internets I could join. So we're deep into the... And we're taking part in a biology experiment. At the same time, a biological experiment that's incredible. You know that humans, there are only three species of mammals that don't have a death program in their DNA. Only three animals. Humans... dolphins, and whales are taking part in an experiment in longevity that Mother Nature is running with us. Because every other mammal has a death program in their DNA.

52:40 Yeah, what does that mean, a death program?

52:41 A death program, it means, for example, that in nature, there are no grandmothers. There's no menopause in nature. The minute you stop being able to have babies, you're eliminated. Among humans, you have the grandmothers. Orca grandmothers teach the young, the grandchildren, how to hunt and how to speak and how to communicate. These three species don't have a death program. Now, at the same time, we don't... So we have the opportunity to take part in an experiment in longevity. That's extraordinary.

53:17 And to do that, we need to, of course... be careful with what we put into our bodies because societies and big tech and pharma have an experiment that they're doing with us too of selling us every conceivable poison and telling us it's food or medicine. So to take part in this longevity experiment, we have to upgrade our genetic expression. It's what's called epigenetics. So how do You regulate your genetic expression through your food. You can express the genes for cancer or you can express the longevity genes. Broccoli, for example, will reactivate a system that we inherited. So we're taking part in the longevity experiment, right? No death program in the DNA, but the death program is still

54:12 operating because at the age of 35, you repair systems and your body shut down. because you're no longer reproductively viable. That system still hasn't been, but we know how to turn it on again through products like broccoli sprouts that will turn on the repair and regeneration systems in the body again. So we can take part of that experiment in health. So we can get our health span to equal our lifespan.

54:44 In the spiritual literature and in all forms, whether in the East and the West, there is talk of human beings who've lived 234 500 800 900 years, you know, long, that they've been around, they were around forever. One specifically says that he's 2500 years old, Babaji. But that's it. That's, that's in the Bible in the Bible, you know, Moses was not wasn't wasn't Moses 900 years old when he died or something.

55:14 Yeah, but he didn't have internet.

55:16 He didn't, that's true. He didn't have internet, but he ate a lot of broccoli sprouts.

55:19 So there's that.

55:22 That's the experiment we're taking part in today. But it's so much of the noise and the longevity circus is around food only. And a lot of it around meat. You know, this is the Dr. Atkins diet, the meat, you know, bacon in the morning, a burger for lunch and a steak for dinner. And Dr. Atkins died of heart disease. Right? So, you know, it's got to be plant-based and you've got to monitor your protein intake. You've got to give the body the resources, the supplements that it needs to upgrade the brain, beginning with the brain, so we can get to the higher brain that can create psychosomatic health. Because if the show is being run by the lower brain that lives in fear and in scarcity, we're going to be creating the stress molecules and the...

56:14 and the stress-related illnesses. So we got to take part in the experiment. We got to become our chief scientist and learn about it because it's happening.

56:25 Now, you've referred to something called, well, what is a soul retrieval and how does it relate to physical healing?

56:34 Okay. So, you know, my work has been as a bridge between ancient wisdom and modern science. And soul retrieval is what the shamans say is loss of soul It's what we call in the West trauma. So when you have trauma, the lore is that the heel part leaves. The heel part leaves and what stays behind is the traumatized part. There's a split in the soul. And, for example, the Hopi say that before we're born, the Hopi Indians, that we have a twin soul. And that the twin looks out of the birth canal to see if the family is safe. And if it's a safe family, it says to the other half, come, we got to be born.

57:19 And if it's not a safe family, half of the soul stays back. And many of us were born into families that were not safe. Or into, you know, we're all the children and grandchildren of war. So soul loss is what the ancient peoples described both in the East and in the West and in the indigenous traditions, what happens when trauma occurs. And you've got to summon that part to come back, that innocent part, not the part that's been there and done that, but the part that is still innocent, that can take chances, that dares to love again, and that thinks there's hope. So you've got to summon it back, bring it back, but it has to be done energetically. It cannot be done psychologically only.

58:12 And obviously, and how does that work with the body as well and physical healing as well? Is that part of it?

58:19 Yeah, well, when your soul has come back to you, when you have an epiphany or spiritual experience or discovery, that's a form of soul retrieval. But the shamans will do a soul retrieval where they will summon your lost soul part and convince it to come back. And that lost soul part might say, but Alex, you've been promising me you're going to change your diet. You're going to have more fun. You're going to be doing more engaging things with the family, but you're just working, man. Why would I want to come back to you? So you've got to convince it that you're going to be making the changes that will lead you, your soul, to its fulfillment, to its destiny, to a sense of destiny.

59:03 It's interesting because if the destiny or the mission that you have in this lifetime as a soul that you sign up for, that if you don't give it what it needs here in this experience, this is the first I've heard of this split soul idea. And it doesn't, it makes sense. It does kind of make sense. Because if there's a part of you that you're like, well, like what? You're not doing what we're supposed to be doing.

59:26 You're You're going down a dark, you're either going down a dark path or you're just working yourself to death or you're, you're not taking care of like, why would I show up for that? There is a, there's still a part of you that's a soul, obviously that's experiencing this because the soul is, it wants to experience this, but to bring in the, the part of the soul that will allow you to truly go down the path of your mission or of your destiny. you need to do work in order to do that because this place is so intoxicating. You can go off and like, Ooh, I want to try that. Ooh, I want to do this. Ooh, I want to do that. Does that make sense?

1:00:03 Nope. Nope. But I think you're on the right track.

1:00:06 Okay. Tell me, tell me.

1:00:08 We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show.

1:00:19 It's so hard to have a sense of mission today when, um, when we're told that our goal is to be happy and to do that. And we forget that the path of mission is the hero's journey. It's not the victim's journey. You've got to go into, you've got to respond to the call. You've got to say yes to the call.

1:00:39 So that when the, when the Israelites got to the Red Sea and Moses would say, Hey, you know, guys, we got the Egyptian army behind us and the Red Sea in front of us. He's, you know, The Israelites had to wade into the water. The waters did not part until they were nose deep. But today, when we get to the Red Sea, we want to make sure there's somebody on the other side with a warm towel waiting for us before we get our feet wet. So the sense of mission requires embarking in a journey into the unknown and sometimes the uncomfortable. But it is so rewarding.

1:01:23 And that means looking at the parts of yourself that you're deeply uncomfortable with. The shadow side, those shadow sides that we project onto others and that we disown because we're spiritual beings. We're blinded by the light, of course. We're spiritual beings. And then we bump into... The shadow in our lovers, in our partners, in our children, in our bosses, we find it out in the world instead of healing it inside. It's the deep healing, the heroic journey that we're called to. And then the mission reveals itself to you.

1:01:58 I love that part. The mission reveals itself to you once you deal with all this stuff that you have to do. And that's what so many people say, the shadow work that you have to do. You literally have to do it. And also in the physical body, there is shadow work that needs to be done in many ways.

1:02:12 I've got this role around my belly that is really not me. You know, I've been trying to get rid of this damn thing. So it's not me. I disown it. That's shadow. Or that part of your body that, yeah. So you've got to reclaim that. Reclaim all parts of yourself and find the treasures that are buried in the deep, dark places where we were wounded. But at the same time, we got to be careful we don't get stuck in working ourselves forever. Because you are what you do. So you got to do good. Get out there and do good.

1:02:51 Do create beauty. So don't get paralyzed by your healing journey.

1:02:56 What does it mean to upgrade the body system instead of just repairing it?

1:03:01 The body has amazing repair systems. So you cut yourself. You know, I got a bandage on my... My thumb, I cut myself. And when you cut yourself, there's this tremendous healing process that's triggered. Huge cells begin to divide at 100 times their normal rate. And then it stops as soon as it gets to the surface of the skin.

1:03:22 You don't get a mushroom or a bump growing on your thumb because you cut it. So there's a field there that's informing the repair systems. But if you can turn on those repair systems just mildly without having to cause trauma to the body, then you go into regeneration. And this is where mild stress is so helpful to the body. Pro-stress, creative stress, whether it be physical, whether you're exercising, or mental, or even emotional stressors that trigger creativity.

1:03:59 That's where regeneration begins to happen. You don't want to create trauma in the body. For example, my 103-year-old mother had surgery last week. I almost had to fly back from Europe. And the body cannot tell the difference between the knife of the surgeon and the knife of the mugger. For the body, both of them are a violation. Even if you're not feeling anything, the body keeps score. It remembers.

1:04:35 So there's trauma. There's stories that are kept in scar tissue. There's stories that are kept in the parts of ourselves that have scars from when we were hurt, when we were wounded. That's why the soul needs to heal first. And then the mind will follow. And then the body will regenerate. But if you try to just deal with it physically or emotionally without bringing the body or the soul into play, it's not complete.

1:05:03 Is there one small doable practice for someone watching right now that they can start to help support their own body's natural healing if they're in pain or dealing with something that they want to kind of overdo? I mean, we've talked about a lot of things and there's the extreme of, hey, let's do a six-week juice cleanse. Let's go into the Andes, into the jungles of Amazon for a month or two.

1:05:27 I think that if your audience is interested, we could do a six-week detox online once a week. But it requires a little bit of preparation. The first thing, the most important thing is eliminate the white menace, sugar. You know what happened about 40 years ago when all the bad news was coming out about cigarette smoking? If you look at the early advertising, my doctor smokes Kent. Well, what happened is that the tobacco companies were the richest, wealthiest companies in America. And they began to divest and buy out the food companies. Because here you have a product that's as addictive as nicotine, but completely legal. And that's sugar, white sugar. Eliminate the white sugar out of your, and not only the white sugar, but the things that

1:06:28 turn into sugar in your system, the processed grains, the highly processed grains. Be careful, you know, the juice, if you have a glass of orange juice in the morning, basically you're drinking a glass of sugar. It has no pulp in it. So be sure you're having the fruit juices with the pulp. because that slows down the absorption of the sugar. Regulating sugar metabolism is absolutely essential. And then get the supplements you need. You're not going to detoxify unless you support first the liver, which is the detoxification organ. The liver needs zinc, B12, glutathione, and magnesium.

1:07:06 These four things, four supplements you should be taking. And then the body will begin to eliminate poisons naturally, including heavy metals. You know, the mercury poison from all the fillings we have in our teeth. Eventually, as we get smarter, we want to pull those mercury fillings out and replace them with natural. So creating a healthy lifestyle. Step number one, sugar.

1:07:31 Step number two, drink eight glasses of water a day. Be careful of the microplastics. Stay away from plastic bottles. And detoxify the mind. Be careful who you believe and who you listen to, even with yourself, to what stories you tell yourself that you think are true. So find truth, practice truth, create truth, and that creates health.

1:08:03 What does it mean to become fully at home in the body again?

1:08:07 Fully embodied. I remember one program, somebody would say, well, I want to listen. learn how to have an out-of-body experience. I said, well, why don't we start with having in-the-body experience and fully embodied? And with the body, this is your temple. This is the temple. Pray at that temple. When you meditate, when you become, don't try to Separate from your body. Don't try to disown your body. Don't try to say, I'm not my body. You're not your mind either. You're not the one that's saying I'm not.

1:08:48 So you are all of these things inclusively. So become embodied. And the way to do it is through the breath. Learn how to breathe.

1:08:58 You were mentioning stresses. on the body and on the mind for that matter. Things like a sauna is kind of like a kind of physical stress on the body that I heard is very good as opposed to going to Death Valley and hanging out there for two hours in the top of the summer. that's a trauma. So you have to kind of like stress the body, but not destroy the body kind of thing. Is that true?

1:09:26 You know, exercise is a way of stressing the body, positive stress. A sauna will do that. A way you can do at home without needing to buy a sauna is take a nice warm bath in the morning and then turn the shower all the way to cold.

1:09:40 But notice 20 seconds, like 20 seconds.

1:09:44 Not even that, count to 10. But notice what happens before you turn the shower to cold. Just put your hand on the faucet and notice how your body's already reacting. Anticipate how bad it's going to be. That's called suffering. When you turn it all the way to cold, that's pain. But suffering is what happens when the mind starts interpreting your experience. Yes. And you're not pressing for your experience.

1:10:17 There's so much I could talk to you about, my friend. I appreciate you taking the time to do this. Where can people find out more about you and the amazing work you're doing in the world?

1:10:25 Well, you know, what I do today is I train modern shamans, neuro shamans that are dancing on top of that equal sign in Einstein's equation, E energy equals MC squared. between energy and matter, and that are dreaming the world into being. So my work is to train modern shamans in the ancient healing traditions. You can learn about it through my books. I've written a number of books. And in terms of the body, grow a new body, or the brain, grow a new brain. We grow a new brain every 22 days. You want to detoxify the brain, get rid of the anxiety, recover sleep, You got to begin with the brain. And go visit our website, the4wins. com, the4wins. com.

1:11:17 Alberto, it has been an absolute pleasure meeting you, my friend. I hope one day we get to get you down here to Austin and hopefully we can meet in person and have another conversation.

1:11:26 You're in Austin. We'd love to meet you. I got lots of friends in Austin. I'm there regularly because I'm up in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

1:11:34 Oh, my friend, then we have to make a date for you to come down to the studio so we could do this in person, my friend. My friend, un gusto conocerte and un placer. Thank you for everything you're doing to help awaken this.

1:11:47 Thank you, Alex. Thank you for all the beauty you bring to all of us.

1:11:53 Thank you for spending this sacred time with us today. If you feel called to explore this conversation further, you'll find the show notes for this episode at nextlevelsoul.com forward slash nextlevelsoul. And if your soul is craving an even deeper journey, step into Next Level Soul TV, our streaming sanctuary for spiritual films, documentaries, original shows, guided meditations, channeling sessions, audiobooks, and transformative teachings. It's a space created to support your awakening, your healing, and your return to the truth of who you really are. Begin your journey at nextlevelsoul.tv. Until next time, keep expanding, keep seeking, and keep walking your path towards the next level of your soul.