Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Everybody is missing something in life. I felt prisoner to my own success. Change is hard. Change is hard. I get it. Change or die.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: I'm gonna change things.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: So what the hell can we change? If we can see things differently, we can have some different results. Only on NOW Media Television networks.
Welcome to Be the Giraffe. I'm your host and guide, Chris Jarvis. If you are looking for ways to stand out and reach higher in business, with money, and in life, then you're in the right place. On Be the Giraffe, we meet the innovators who dared to be different and stick their necks out. We learned how they broke free from the herd and used their long necks to discover better paths.
Today we have a fantastic show. My guest is Reagan Archibald. Reagan is one of the leading peptide functional medicine and longevity specialists in the nation.
His award winning center, East West Health, has performed nearly 10,000 labs, reviewing over 100 important markers to help patients not just treat symptoms, but to understand and address the root cause of health issues.
Reagan is an international speaker and is the author of nine books, including the Peptide Blueprint and Ageless Future. His podcast, Unreasonable Health has featured countless thought leaders from across the from across the globe.
Today we have the honor of featuring him as our thought leader. It's time for you to elevate your perspective and see your better path to health and longevity. Reagan Archibald, welcome to Be the Giraffe.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Great to be here, Chris.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: So you have we met through Mike Kinnings and Charles Byrd, two of my favorite people, and through your brother Cade, and also one of our favorite people. And you started in healthcare. So my career started with doctors and you started on that same path.
So you grew up, you wanted to be a doctor. Yep. So tell us about that because it does take a little left turn at Albuquerque.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I had an uncle who was a doctor, and growing up I worked on the cattle ranch with my dad, my uncles, my grandpa. And I always said, I want to be anything but a rancher when I grow up. And he had the soft hands. His clothes didn't have cow manure on it. I was like, he's got the good life. But it was really, When I was 13, I had surgery on both of my feet. So I used to run a lot in cowboy boots and just grew up in cowboy boots. Not good for the feet. And especially when you're running. I calculate I was running about 10 miles a day, you know, running around the farm and doing various things like irrigation and so this surgery, I grabbed this book called Inner Athlete. My dad Gave it to me.
And I read that book by Dan Millman, and I learned the power of visualization and how the mind could help the body heal. So I was like, well, I got nothing else to do, so I'm going to learn how to meditate and access this deeper part of my healing wisdom. And when I went back to the podiatrist, the podiatrist was like, I've never seen anyone heal this fast. And my mom's like, well, he's young. And the podiatrist is like, you have no idea. This is like lightning speed. And so, you know, and I was asking the podiatrist, will I be able to run faster when I get the surgery? That was my big criteria because I had to make the football team, the track team, the basketball team to get out of farm work. And so I was very motivated to have the surgery be positive as far as the outcome goes. So that was really my first introduction to human biology and the way that the body can heal.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: So I have a dear friend, Doug Hosteller. He grew up Mennonite on the farm, and he talks about growing up. And they played football. And he said, again, we all made the team because that was a chance to get out of a chore or two.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: This is it.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: And he said, I hated hunting season because it meant I had to get up, go hunting, then do chores, then go to school.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: So there's this whole. There's this very hard working, this work ethic that comes from the farm. And like you, he's not a farmer either. So there's a whole pay attention in school. And like, when you have some adversity when you're young, you realize, I'm going to do something different. Okay, so you had this thing, you healed with your mind. And I can remember. Well, in 2017, I had back surgery and I can remember going to the. Going to my appointment after a microdiscectomy. So it wasn't that serious. But let's say it was the two week checkup. And there's a two week checkup and then there's like a six week or an eight week checkup. And I was at the first one. And I got in a fight with the nurse who kept saying, this is your eight week. He said, no, it's my two week. It's got to be your eight week. It's your two week.
And I asked, why does this matter to you and why are you so upset? Because it's my appointment. I know when the surgery was.
And she said, because Nobody heals like this. You're either a vampire or you have the date wrong.
And I said, I have a Chinese acupuncturist who trained as a medical doctor in China, and he was a medical doctor in Japan. And then he comes to the US and can't practice medicine in the traditional sense.
So he said, I don't want you to get surgery, but if you do, you have to come to me every day.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: And I went every day for two weeks. So much so that a nurse who'd been doing this for 35 years argued with me that I had the date wrong because you shouldn't heal that fast. So it took me a lot longer. I was in my 40s when I finally. In my mid-40s when I finally had that awakening of, ooh, there's something else.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: And so you had this magical moment when you were young. What did you do with that? So you went on to med school, right? Yep.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: I was University of Utah, and that's where things kind of took a turn, because I got sick there, and I really appreciated great health when I was a kid. My mom followed the food pyramid, though. And the food pyramid, as you remember, in the 90s, was, you know, pretty much whole grains. And then the healthy stuff. It should have been reversed. Right. It should have been flipped and, you know, skim milk. Even though we had access to really good food, she was just trying to help us with our health.
And I was also exposed to a lot of chemicals. And when I was in school, I started noticing brain fog would set in. And I was like, man, this is not good. I mean, I had pretty severe ADHD as a class clown and stuff like that, as most entrepreneurs are.
And then I, like, finally, after going to five doctors, I was frustrated because all they told me is, I think you're too stressed. And I was like, look at my skin. I had psoriasis.
Like, my hair was falling out. I would run, and I was a good runner, and I would be sore. I couldn't run more than once a week. And I was like, something's wrong. And so finally, a friend of mine turned me on to a naturopathic doctor who was also an acupuncturist. And he ran the labs, and he said, oh, have you ever been exposed to chemicals? I was like, well, roundup. But it's safe. The rep told us I could drink it, it's so safe. And we took it at face value. Now I wish I would have just offered it to the rep.
And then I also had exposure to formaldehyde. And so we would dip the fence posts in it, so it preserved them longer when you'd build corrals. And then when I was in anatomy class at the U, that's when I was spraying the cadavers. That's what triggered a lot of these symptoms. And so it was that toxic burden in my brain that just turned things off. And then my immune system was wrecked because glyphosate, which is the chief ingredient in Roundup, I mean, it's a registered antibiotic. I mean, we're just destroying our guts. And we're still doing it today, unfortunately. But it was getting the right information by getting the right diagnostics that led me down a whole different pathway.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: But how long did you have this? Because there's a lot of people who tell people what you experience brain fog to be because it gets misdiagnosed a lot.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: Yeah, well, brain fog is essentially the. The absence of the ability to promote cognitive and executive function. So the cognitive function of the brain, you take in information at night, you go to sleep, it gets encoded in your hippocampus, and then the next day you can recall the memory. Very easy. If you have brain fog, there's no encoding and there's no executive function where you can't take that information and apply it. And so in school, it's pretty devastating because now I've got a final, I've got the midterms.
And the only time my brain would work was between seven and nine at night. I had like a two hour time period where I'd be lucid. And that saved me because I brought these little cassette tapes and I would just record the lecture. And then in the evening, I'd go back and listen to it, and I'd have my textbook, and then I could actually retain the information. So that got me through school, but I realized, like, the medical system was broken. I had a really cool professor, Dr. Bauman, and he looked at me and he said, reagan, you ask questions that most of the med students don't ask. Like, do you want to be a carpenter when you grow up, or do you want to really help people heal? And I was like, well, of course I don't want to be a carpenter. He's like, no, no. Well, you're on a program that would train you how to be a carpenter. What does a carpenter do? I'm like, well, they read blueprints, and then they follow the. The instructions on the blueprints and they build the house. And he's like, exactly. Medicine's not like that. Biology's not like that. And he said, there's a path for you that will yield a lot greater outcomes if you just go with what you're good at. And that was really insightful for me, because I trusted him. It was a history of medicine class, and so he exposed me to all these new theories and applications. He was big into acupuncture, big into Eastern medicine.
He thought at the time this was in the 90s. He said, there's going to be a tidal wave of new medicine coming out because chronic disease is the biggest threat to people in the United States.
And he said Western medicine is designed to treat crisis care. And so he helped me find a school in Hawaii where it was the founder of the pacemaker, Earl Bakken. He founded this school, this little school that was connected to the Northern Hawaii Community Hospital.
So I was able to study Eastern and Western medicine there and got exposure to, like, some of the best professors on the planet.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: I want to go back when you said for people in the audience, when they asked if you wanted to be a carpenter, they weren't talking about you going back to fence posts. They were talking about medicine is about cutting and repairing and attaching. And it's a very process, surgical cut.
So it's mechanical, it's not metaphysical.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: That's it. Well, and it's very prescriptive, for a lack of a better word. It's like, as long as you can identify the imbalances in the lab and you match it with symptoms, now you've got a diagnosis, and then here's the prescription. So no different than, okay, we've got to build this wall here, and we've got a window there, and we need to put a header here to support the load.
And. And that was a revelation to me.
[00:10:48] Speaker A: So that's. So today's medicine is the challenge in what? There's a lot of challenges in Western medicine, I'd say. But a big part of this was you had that moment of somebody who gave you the insight. Right.
Which a lot of people. And you are 20 years old, 25. Young.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: 21.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: 21. When you had this.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: 22. Yep.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: And so someone. So this whole brain fog thing, you weren't able to do what you used to be able to do. Right. And it wasn't just lack of focus. It wasn't about being a young boy. It wasn't about being distracted. It wasn't testosterone. It wasn't.
There was something really wrong with you.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: And so what should people. Before we go on the next one, I Want to get into the deeper stuff with the shift in Eastern and Western medicine.
But what can people look for to know that that might be something? What's a sign for someone who's young or maybe not young or someone who has kids that there might be something at. There might just be something to notice some signs that maybe there's something wrong that could easily be misdiagnosed.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: I think the biggest thing with kids is if you notice their behavior change is different when they eat fast food, for example, or when they go to the birthday party and they have too much ice cream. Or you may notice with yourself when you go into certain buildings and suddenly you have brain fog and you just suddenly your cognitive function is not what you're used to. You'll notice it if you're achy for no reason. And it's like, oh, I must be getting old. You know, I see people in their 30s like, oh, this is what getting old feels like. I'm like, no, Even if you're in your 50s or 60s, 70s, 80s, like, pain is, you know, I have a no pain policy.
But pain is one of those big kind of warning signals that you need to check the engine.
[00:12:32] Speaker A: That's great. So we, I want to get into. You had your experience with health and then you were exposed to a new kind of medicine. I want to go into after the break, I want to talk about what you've noticed in the shortfalls of the system and some of the things that people are missing out on and what they don't understand. Kind of like the man pull back the curtain to see what's really going on with the wizard. Because I think if you understand that, there'll be a greater appreciation for which is a lot of what RFK Jr is doing now.
So after the break, we want to talk about pulling back the curtain so you can actually see what's really going on in medicine so that you can make better decisions for yourself. So make sure you come back. We'll be here.
Hey, Chris Jarvis. This week on Be the Giraffe, I am with Regan Archibald, who is the author of the Peptide Blueprint and the founder of East West Health. He has some fantastic knowledge about health care, what you should know about the current healthcare system, how to avoid the pitfalls and how you can take control of your life, your health and your longevity. This is one you are not going to want to miss.
We are here with longevity expert Reagan Archibald. And in the first segment, you talked about your health and the fact that you had this, this gift of you Had a couple, but the gift of working on the farm or in the ranch, which was teaching you hard work, but also exposing you to chemicals, then you had the gift of getting sick, but getting sick early enough that somebody cared about you and could diagnose that this wasn't what medicine was telling you it was.
And so you're not the only person. There's a reason why you've done 10,000 labs, right?
The challenges with doing things for the masses, right? The whole. Right now we've got AI and people all have formulas for building funnels and doing things. And it's about everybody becoming a number.
And the truth is, bodies don't work like that.
So tell us a little bit about your revelation or your discovery into the difference between prescriptive and more diagnostic medicine and what you notice in the system and one of the holes that the audience need to understand how medicine as a business actually works and that maybe it doesn't do for them what. What they think it does.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Well, I think the biggest problem that we have is if you don't fit into the diagnostic box, then you're dismissed. And so many people, they're really excited to figure out what's going on with their labs. They're like, man, I'm sick. I'm tired, I'm overweight. I don't know what's going on with my body, but I feel like I'm in pain all the time.
And they go to their doctor and their doctor says, hey, good news. Everything looks normal, normal on your labs. And they're like, well, I don't feel normal. Something's wrong. And so what I learned in my training is if you go deeper and you look for the root cause and you don't stop, you know, you don't leave any stone unturned. There's not just blood work. You want to look at gut health. You want to look at a test called metabolomics, where you can look at the urine and see any of the upstream factors. So it's not just what's the cause, but it's what's the cause of the cause.
And that's where most doctors are stopped short, because the system doesn't allow that exploration to happen. And just like you said, biology is not. It's not like building a house. Like, there's not, like, a very specific set of blueprints. There's engineering, where everything has to be a certain way. But if I put one input into you and there's 10 other people here, and I do the same input, your biology is going to respond differently to that input. And so the biology, it's all systems, and I call it the body operation system. Just like you have an operating system on your computer, if you can understand the smallest level of input that yield the highest level of results, where that person starts to change, that's when you can really start seeing massive improvements in people's health. And it doesn't happen within this 7 to 15 minute visit because I have to understand not just what's on the paper, like, you can't AI yourself way out of a chronic disease is what I've learned. It's like there needs to be some intuitive process that goes on where I take your symptoms. Okay, Chris, what are your goals? What do you want your health to be like in 10 years from now? What are the things you'd love to do that you could do 10 years ago that you can't do today?
Tell me what it's like in the morning. What's your energy like? What are you eating? What do those foods do to you? Like, do you notice anything in your digestive system? You get acid reflux. But anyway, if we take the time to ask those questions, then I can apply it to what the data shows me on the labs, and then we can stack it together and get a more complete picture.
The problem is most doctors don't have time because the system has trained them with billable codes. And so there's not a billable code if you're, you know, yes, there's a comprehensive evaluation code, but that comprehensive evaluation is even more important afterwards, we apply input. So the second time I meet with you is far more valuable than the first time so that we can test our hypothesis.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: And when you're talking about the bodies are responding differently, you're not just talking about age, sex, race, like, you're going much deeper. This is a true individualistic reaction. Right. So it's not just.
Well, just because your sister or your brother or your parents have something doesn't mean that you do, that you're going to respond the same way.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Not at all. Yeah, yeah. Because genes are just a small fraction of the story. It's the epigenetics. It's the things that are expressing the genes or not expressing the genes. And that's where looking at the gut biome, for example, I mean, if you look at the innovations in just gut health, generally speaking, we know so little about it. There's so much that we're now uncovering, and that's where AI is really helpful because it can assimilate and aggregate large amounts of data and then we can apply what data is useful based on what your labs show. I mean we're seeing with for example, just doing microbiota transplants, we have a lab out of Canada and we can actually reinoculate the entire gut. For people who have autoimmune disease, neurological diseases, any kind of cognitive decline, we see massive improvements just by that, just, just by looking at the gut and saying, okay, what if instead of throwing some probiotics at things and some prebiotics, maybe we just need to completely plow the field and replant. And that's where we see massive changes.
[00:19:32] Speaker A: And the reason behind this when it comes to diet and food and general health around eating, which we'll get into RFK Jr and your relationship and interaction for sure, I hope today.
But this idea of food, it's cheaper to eat poor.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: Yeah, no doubt.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: Like eating, you know, called whole paycheck for a reason. Not whole foods. Right. It's a whole. It's a different. Eating healthy is expensive and eating poorly is cheap.
I think it's the same thing with medicine. Isn't, doesn't like the eat like money is a, is money is a reason for a lot of this, isn't it?
[00:20:14] Speaker B: Well, if you look behind the people with the most power in the country are usually the companies with the largest bank accounts. And so the agricultural company, they have influenced us for years. I mean you remember the commercial milk.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: It does a body good.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Like it's crazy. That's good marketing. Right. Like we both remember that. You remember the food pyramid? I talked about that. Your eyes lit up, you're like, oh yeah, I remember that damn thing. The problem is we subsidize a lot of the foods that are really toxic for the American population.
And yes, you have to say, well the pharmaceutical company is right there behind it because food is medicine. Food needs to be your first source of medicine.
And if you're eating food that has chemicals in it that are not good for your biome and we just don't. Every expression, every cellular expression is informed by the bacteria in your gut. You have more DNA for bacteria than you do human cells. And if you're eating foods that are destroying a lot of the healthy bacteria, you're losing that signaling. And then you bring in these chemical laden foods and we all know them, they're in boxes and we could talk about the companies and then the way that we treat it is not, hey, let's have you get rid of the processed foods or ultra processed foods. Which are so damaging because they're addictive.
I mean, you can't eat just one Dorito.
You go for the Dorito, it's in the back of your head, and you're like, okay, I need to go find some more. Next thing you know, you've downed a whole bag, or, you know, you drink a soda. And it's. It's got the perfect texture, it's got these little flavors that our body can't find in natural food because it's a chemical. But there's millions of dollars that are spent on getting us addicted to these foods. Same same thing with our phones. It's like, cool, let's get humans addicted to as many things that draw them away from their nature as possible. And then there's drugs that treat those things. And so with the pharmaceutical companies, for example, they make up about 1500 diagnostic criteria every single year. You can make up a condition like social anxiety. Do you get a little nervous when you go to a party where you don't know anybody or a business event?
I do. I mean, it's uncomfortable. Like, I'd never met you in person, and I was like, oh, this is a new environment. But I don't. I wouldn't call that social anxiety as anything pathological. But I could take a drug called Paxil, and that would have helped me today.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: So it's just kind of ironic what we've done. And that's where rfk, you know, for once, we have somebody who has the authority and has a position in the government that can actually stop the crisis. Because the healthcare crisis is far deeper than what people realize. I mean, your first 12 books were written for doctors. I mean, you helped doctors solve their financial burdens.
And what did you see in the field that was the most surprising thing?
[00:23:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that was our first niche market, was going after physicians, and we had 18,000 of them call our office.
So I got a decent sample size.
And the most unsurprisingly, the ones who want to save the most taxes are the ones who make the most money.
And the ones who made the most money owned surgery centers because they could collect facility fees.
They owned labs. They owned things that weren't about seeing the patient. They owned the businesses around medicine. That's where most of their money came from. It didn't come from the actual seeing of the patient. It came from the other thing.
And so there's so much overspending, because once you're in the job, you want to make money doing the thing that you do. So you said oh, I'm going to own the surgery center, I'm going to own the lab, I'm going to own the real estate, which is fine. I'm going to get into all the businesses around medicine that Ironically people with MBAs, fools like me or people with my training, we're allowed to own those businesses, but we're not allowed to own the medical practice. But most of the money goes to the other side. So it's the medical device companies, it's the surgery center, it's the drugs.
I think something like the last. I'm on the board of a medical school too. And it's 3% of the money in healthcare goes to the physician.
So where's the rest of it gone?
[00:24:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:21] Speaker A: Cause it's not actually going to the carpenter who's doing the finished work or who's your only point of contact. You don't know who owns your surgery center. You don't know who designed the medical device you have. You don't know the person who did all the research on the pharmaceuticals you're taking.
There's nothing there. So it's like you're only getting the one doctor, but they're not getting most of the money.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's the big problem because most of the doctors that I've worked with, they tell me, they said, I wish I would have taken the educational route. You did. Because having MD behind their name, they're handcuffed to it. Because the board can strip their license if they say the wrong thing, if they're not practicing medicine that the way that that state board wants them to. And it's devastating because the lack of innovation in our country. I mean, we have the data is so powerful, so many new research articles come out every day. And medicine tends to be about 20 to 25 years behind the science. I mean, some of the same drugs we're using for thyroid conditions like Synthroid came out in the 1950s. 75 year old medicine and more and more people have thyroid issues. And so my whole purpose has been how can we transform healthcare so that it's about getting the right data and doing the right thing for the patient at the right time and helping transform their health instead of just treating a symptom.
[00:25:40] Speaker A: That's great.
After the break, we're gonna talk to Reagan about how you can take steps to not be a number so you're not just one of the masses. It's one of our big things. Avoid the masses and the asses. And you want to definitely break free from the herd. And figure out how you can elevate your health and take steps to deal with your individual personal situation. So I'll also share a little bit about a story I had, which Reagan doesn't know, but he's about to find out and I'm sure he's going to give me some great advice. But come back after the break and we're going to learn how to elevate your health.
Hey, Chris Jarvis. This week on Be the Giraffe, I am with Regan Archibald, who is the author of the Peptide Blueprint and the founder of East West Health. He has some fantastic knowledge about healthcare, what you should know about the current healthcare system, how to avoid the pitfalls and how you can take control of your life, your health and your longevity. This is one you are not going to want to miss.
I am here with Reagan Archibald, who is helping people find longevity, improve their lives and disrupt health care system a little bit, which I, like you brought up on the last, which I haven't shared with this audience very much, that my first 18,000 clients were doctors and I was on a medical school board. I still am.
But the challenge, I know a lot of doctors, so if I need surgery, I need help. There's no shortage of people that I can call because I've saved them or made them a lot of money, so they tend to return my call.
And when I had, I needed a microdiscectomy and I needed that on the heels, no pun intended, of tearing my Achilles playing basketball. One of those things I could do 10 years ago, I don't do now.
I called some doctors. I had surgery and then I had neuropathy, a bad response from my Achilles surgery that nobody could. All the tests said I was fine, but my foot was numb and varied between numb and pain. And I had back pain. And I went to a pain management doctor client of mine in town who made quite a bit of money. And I'd done a lot of work with him. And he was always happy to have me skip the line and move in and give me injections and give me epidurals and whatever else I needed whenever I needed it, which was fine. But there was a day when I was sitting in the waiting room and it took him five minutes or so to get me. And the room was full. And I looked around and it looked less like it looked more like the Star wars cantina, the waiting room than it did. There was nobody in that room that I wanted to look like.
There was a lot of sweatpants. There was a lot of Tupperware with drugs in it. There were a lot of walkers with tennis balls. There were a lot of really heavy people.
And I was like, I don't want to be like these people. So I was like, this is the last time I'm coming.
And you get your bill. And it says that my copay is 100 bucks or 200 bucks. But I realized that the procedure was thoroughly thousands and thousands of dollars.
But I could spend $100 or $50 to get a 2, 3, $5,000 procedure. But if I went to the acupuncturist, which was my next plan, and I went to The Chinese acupuncturist, Dr. Lee, who's been fantastic for me, that's going to cost me a hundred bucks out of pocket.
And so going to. That I can.
That's on me. So if I want Eastern medicine, it's going to be 100% on me. When there's no pharmaceutical company, no hospital involved, if I go get the thousands of dollars, then they're happy to just push that off on the healthcare system. Right.
I don't think my story is a unique one.
[00:29:41] Speaker B: No, not at all.
And the thing that you did differently, though, is you were proactive. And you said, I'm going to invest in my health. Because you probably looked at the waiting room of Dr. Lee and you said, okay, these are healthy people who are proactive.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: Yes. And that was the. I want to do something different because I don't. I don't want this result.
So trying to find something. And so we have people now. The difference today versus one of the challenges, challenge and opportunity today is that once upon a time, you had to go to the professional to get the advice because there was no advice.
[00:30:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:14] Speaker A: You could either go to the doctor or go to med school. Right. Those are your choices.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: And now we have the Internet. So I know you have a lot of great advice for people, but before we get into that, can you share your opinion on people seeing advice on the Internet and now all of a sudden they see something. I can't tell you the number of times that my teenagers and their friends will be over and say, oh, I saw this on TikTok, which is fine for a recipe, but hey, we should all be taking this.
And they found some magic supplement, or they bought some expensive tea, or they bought something because it had a million views or likes. Talk about what you're seeing on healthcare on that side and the good and the bad of that.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: Well, I think the big problem is things are taken out of Context. And so you and I, we see influencers on there and they have a really great practice, but then they're just getting like little tidbits of the conversation, like the conversation we've had. It could be blown out of proportion very easily because our attention spans are shrinking smaller and smaller and that's the big currency that people are fighting for.
And so if you have a solution that seems too good to be true, usually it is. And that's, I think it's the problem with social media and medicine, even AI in medicine, AI now can read your labs, it can give you very good data. Elon Musk has been very vocal about Barack and how powerful it is replacing all the doctors. But medicine is not, it's not a binary science. I mean, yes, we follow the laws of physics and there's laws of chemistry that we follow, but really your biology is so unique. And that cellular expression, just the energy resonance in your body is going to require somebody who's got a level of intuition above their level of intelligence and above just data. And so I think it goes deeper than that because the problem with people getting advice on social media is I've seen it be very damaging. I mean, I've seen people follow the celery juice diet, I won't say who's promoting it and suddenly they end up with gastroparesis. That's where your stomach just completely stops producing enzymes and you have bowel obstructive disorder. Like, I mean you can die from that.
Just because it's natural and just because it healed somebody's cancer doesn't mean it's for you.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: So I think that's the big thing is it's medicine for you. So medicine is a big business.
The big challenge is we have things called standard of care, which is if you have this problem, you will all get, you can all get access to this type of treatment. Like that's the standard and that's what's expected.
And so everybody goes toward, I want this thing to be standard of care, especially if it's your formulary, your medical device, your surgical procedure, your pharmaceutical. And so again it's everybody getting back to your, I guess, ranching days. You know, everybody's getting herded into this corral that these are the things that you can get. So whether it's the doctor who's 75 and you think is over the hill or it's the 17 year old TikToker, it doesn't matter either way. This is all general advice. And the danger of general advice is it's not specific to your particular. You talked about the. We're all unique in our bodies, in our body's thing. So our body's chemistry and our reactions to different things. So, for example, garlic.
Silly things. The audience doesn't need to know, but they're about to find out. People say, oh, garlic's great for you. And the lycopene in tomatoes is great, except I have an allergy to nightshade.
[00:33:35] Speaker B: Nightshades. Yeah.
[00:33:36] Speaker A: So there's no garlic, there's no onion, there's no.
But it's good for you, not for me.
[00:33:41] Speaker B: Right, yeah.
[00:33:42] Speaker A: So there is some danger to that.
So for people who are saying, okay, that's great. You've just told me that I can't, that my doctor's not doing what's necessarily best for me. Western medicine's not great. I live in the west and I have a phone. But my TikTok's not giving me good advice. What can people do?
What's the first step somebody should take who wants to be healthy and what mindset, what steps, what processes, what things can people do who want to take control of their health?
[00:34:08] Speaker B: I think the first thing is get your sleep on point. And so sleep is the foundational piece to all health. And if you don't believe me, just go without sleep for a few nights and see if you don't get grumpy and watch how your brain performs. I mean, they did. One study was done on shift workers, and they found that when the shift workers were on their night shifts, you know, they would do week on, week off, their cognitive function was 20% less.
And even going without a good night's sleep, you'll see that your blood sugar goes higher, your cortisol levels are out of balance, your body starts to develop what's called metabolic dysfunction. And metabolic disease is at the root of pretty much every disease that we see. And so if you don't get good sleep, then it's really hard to manage the metabolic function. And then your metabolic function is what regulates your energy levels. So the second thing you'd want to look at is, okay, if I'm sleeping well, how's your energy throughout the day? And then that goes to nutrition. So the one thing everybody can do on sleep is what we call the three, two, one method. And this, you can just take a clip of this and put it out there and it's accurate. But three hours before you go to bed, stop, stop eating. Just stop eating food. Two hours before you go to bed, that's a good Time to stop drinking fluids. Unless you love waking up to urinate at night, be my guest. And then an hour before you go to bed, get rid of the blue lights. Anything stimulating is not going to be good for you.
[00:35:30] Speaker A: That's what phone, computer, tv. What?
[00:35:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's it. Just make love with your spouse.
Grab a book, meditate, reflect on the day. Those are really helpful. Just having a positive outlook on your previous day that will add another seven years to your life. You'll feel a lot more connected, a lot less lonely. Loneliness. We're more connected than ever through our phones.
But before you go to bed is a really good time to get oxytocin so you actually will sleep better. And that's a good time to express gratitude to your family.
You know, even if you need to call a friend. Yes, you can have the phone away from your ear, put in some headphones that are plugged in. But you know, just have a deep conversation with somebody, read a deep book, you know, write reflections of your day that is the foundational to health.
[00:36:21] Speaker A: So it sounds like even for people who don't have money, you can do this, but it requires a little bit of planning.
You have to three hours before you want to go to bed. So if you want to be in bed by 10 o', clock, you've got to be done eating at seven.
[00:36:34] Speaker B: That's it.
[00:36:35] Speaker A: Right. Like you do have to work backwards. Discipline, discipline. With the whole. This is the time.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:36:39] Speaker A: I know for me, I started, I changed my thing and my kids make fun of me because I go to bed at 9 o', clock, but I get up at 4.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:45] Speaker A: So my day starts and I get a lot done long before anybody else. Magical time to work out, do things. And I've done my whole daily routine and it's not even seven o'. Clock.
[00:36:52] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:36:53] Speaker A: Like that helps, but it took me. But you have to work backwards. So this thing is you set a time, how much sleep do you need? Go to bed, work backwards, three hours for food, two hours for water, one hour for electronics, and then you plan your time and amazing what happens the next day.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: It's phenomenal. Yeah. And there's compounding. It's just like we talked about, fast food. It's easy to get fast food, it's easy to buy cheap food, but it's expensive in the long run because it starts to catch up. Same thing with sleep. If you don't change your habits around what you're doing, the sleep can cause massive problems in your future.
[00:37:26] Speaker A: So touch on that. So for People who don't think it's so simple.
What things do you find that sleep you've dealt with, you've worked with thousands of people. What kinds of things do you find that sleep has an extraordinary impact on?
[00:37:42] Speaker B: If you look at just the balance of dopamine and serotonin, so dopamine is the neurotransmitter, that's the reward system. So it helps us focus in the morning. It helps us get more done. Like you get a massive dopamine hit just by doing your workout in the morning.
You feel that sense of accomplishment if people are not getting good sleep. You don't feel that sense of reward. And then your testosterone starts to get down, regulated. So your hormones, your sex hormones aren't balanced. You don't hold on to muscle as well. The other thing sleep does is the glymphatic circulation in our brain. Like the human body can go longer without food than we can without sleep. You can go 60 days. If you stay hydrated, you can go 60 days roughly without food.
You can go approximately two weeks without sleep. They did a study on college students and they made them sleep deprived. And one thing that they noticed is these college students started having schizophrenia, depression, bipolar, after just seven days of no sleep. And you'll have a seizure if you go more than about three weeks.
[00:38:44] Speaker A: Crazy. So right now, simple things. Great knowledge from Reagan. If you sleep, get your sleep in order. Cheap things everybody can do. Get your sleep. Don't eat three hours before bed. So plan the time that you want to go to bed. Plan the time you want to get up. Work backwards on the amount of sleep you need. Three hours, no food. Two hours, no water. One hour. No electronics. Read, do something positive. Write that book you've been thinking about doing. Start there. And then in the next segment, we're going to get to some more advanced stuff for those of you who want to find the shortcut, get there faster, or overcome some bigger health issues. We'll be right back.
Hey, Chris Jarvis. This week on Be the Giraffe, I am with Regan Archibald, who is the author of the Peptide Blueprint and the founder of East West Health. He has some fantastic knowledge about healthcare, what you should know about the current healthcare system, how to avoid the pitfalls, and how you can take control of your life, your health and your longevity. This is one you are not going to want to miss.
I'm here with Reagan Archibald, who is a longevity expert who is also the author of the Peptide Blueprint.
You have tested 10,000 people over the years, more Than that, More than that. Okay, so it's a big one. So you did all these tests, you found that people were misdiagnosing things. But it wasn't just your existence is not just to sit here and talk about how terrible the healthcare system is.
You're here to actually help people.
And you found that with the pharmaceutical industry that couldn't be trusted for a variety of reasons. You found another path.
And this is what you do. I mean, you help people get healthy by trying something different.
That's.
I'll let you talk about peptides, why they're different from pharmaceuticals. What you're doing great.
[00:41:03] Speaker B: What I found is the pharmaceutical companies, the thing they do is they do really good science and there's really good scientists who are on the back end of things. Pharmaceutical companies spend roughly depends on the drug, but they'll spend almost $10 for every dollar they're spending on research.
And so it's really, what they've done is they've looked at novel solutions for really nuanced diseases. Like there's a peptide called ACE031 and ACE031, it works on the follistatin pathway. And follistatin is a gene. When expressed, your muscles will keep growing. Like if you. Myostatin is the break. You know, every system has a feedback loop. So if you can turn off myostatin, which that's what ACE031 does, then you get this better expression of follistatin. And so they took a group of boys with muscular dystrophy, Duchenne's muscular dystrophy. And they found that this peptide worked phenomenally well on these boys. They were able to walk better, they had better muscle gains, they just were able to participate in day to day life. But they stopped the study. And everyone says, why did you stop it? And they said, oh, one of the boys got a bloody nose. And if you look at the research, a lot of times really good science and really phenomenal molecules that it gets stopped short of ever making it to the market. Because at the end of the day, there's not a big enough segment of the population to justify the cost it would take to bring it to the marketplace and get an ROI.
So what we've done is we've said, okay, ACE031, that's a peptide that naturally exists in your body. Peptides are just protein structures that turn on genes. You have peptide, if your peptides stop signaling, you're going to get sick really fast.
And so what we've done is we've Just cherry picked the best science. And then I tried on myself. I talked to pharmacists. I'm at a group called Da Vinci 50. These are 50 of the leading researchers and longevity clinics in the world. And we bring the clinical knowledge to each other and we have this mastermind, this think tank. And that's how we can bring innovations quicker to humans who don't want to wait for the pharmaceutical companies to bring it to market. Because essentially that's what we've done with medicine is we've outsourced all the science where it needs to go through the FDA approval, the double blind clinical trials. And what we've said is that science is really important. You want to remove as many variables as you can and first make sure it's safe. And then we got to see is it safe and effective and is it more safer and more effective than anything else on the market?
But if there's not a subset of the population to support the funding, then it just gets put on the shelf and that's where we come in and we utilize these things. So I just had a client of mine, we looked at his quad strength. He's 62 and he's like, I'm stronger than I was. He played college football. I'm biking faster than I ever have and I want to see what muscle mass I've utilized in the last two months, what have I gained?
And he's an individual with single digit 9% body fat. He's got the six pack fitter than he's ever been. And what we discovered is he put on about 6% of muscle. Lean muscle in someone who's already lean just by Ace031. He doesn't want to do testosterone, he doesn't want to do any anabolics. But he wants to be the fittest version of himself. Because muscle, ultimately with longevity, it's your muscle, it's your cardiovascular system and your brain. Those three organ systems we call the age group.
If you can get those three systems lined up, that's where you win the game.
[00:44:34] Speaker A: So this is a real interesting thing. The peptides are natural and the FDA monitors artificial things. Correct. So people who are saying, well, do you have FDA approval? Have they done stuff? It doesn't even apply to natural stuff, does it?
[00:44:51] Speaker B: Well, if you're making claims, that's when it becomes a drug. So. So if I said, this water that we're drinking, Chris, it will heal your esophagitis. Let's just assume you had that condition. The FDA's gonna say, okay, cool, Reagan, where's your data? And we need to run it through all the FDA approvals in order for it to become a drug. So a drug's anything that treats a condition.
So peptides, you know, we're using it for health optimization. And that's why peptides are in this category called G ras, or generally recognized as safe. Like the FDA is like, well, it's not a supplement because it naturally occurs in the body, but these peptides, because it takes such acute awareness of how to sequence these proteins together, it has to be made by a compounding pharmacy. And these pharmacies that we use, they're all 501A, 501B compounding pharmacies. And so there is some science behind it, but a lot of peptides are FDA approved. These are natural. Like you've heard of Ozembic, you've heard of Manjaro, Wegovy.
These are natural peptides called the GLP1 GLP1 agonist. So it exists in your body, and when that gets expressed greater, you get full faster and it delays the time it takes the food to empty out of your body. The fda, that is now called a drug because what companies have done, what the farmers, pharmaceutical companies have done, is they put it through the rigors of the FDA approval and said, okay, we want to treat type 2 diabetes and we want to treat obesity with this. Obesity was really hard to get approval for type 2 diabetes. They got approval quickly, and then shortly thereafter, the FDA said, okay, we're going to approve it for obesity because it's so effective. But it's a peptide, so it's natural. But they can't patent something that's natural. They can patent the administration of it.
[00:46:41] Speaker A: Got it. But then if it gets approved, then it's something that healthcare can pay for.
[00:46:47] Speaker B: Then in some cases, healthcare can pay for it, but you're paying five to ten times greater through your healthcare system than you would from a compounding pharmacy. That we can make it for a few hundred dollars versus a treatment that's roughly $2,000 a month. And the pharmaceutical companies are dosing it at about 10 times higher than what we'd ever do dose it at.
[00:47:08] Speaker A: So interesting.
[00:47:09] Speaker B: It's a miraculous breakthrough. I mean, I think GLP1s this peptide class is probably the biggest breakthrough in medicine ever. I mean, you're more likely to die of obesity than you are of starvation.
And we didn't have any way to turn that off. Now we have a predictable mechanism where we know if we can express GLP1 a little bit More. Just give it a little pulse.
People's appetite training turns off, they stop craving cigarettes, they stop craving alcohol. And for us, that's the hardest thing, is getting momentum in the beginning of someone's healthcare journey. But once you see a win after the first couple of weeks, you're like, oh, I'm losing weight, I don't have the cravings. That food noise is turned off. That's where the miracles happen.
[00:47:50] Speaker A: So if you're.
I think this is going to be an important.
Well, the question's not important. The answer is important.
You mentioned earlier that the medical field tends to lag the science by 25 years. The practice. So you have doctors and I've had both my parents were cancer, were cancer patients and their doctors were chemists. Like they would run through stuff and they want to see everything. They'd ask, can I take colostrum? Can I do this? Whatever it was. And if they haven't seen a survey, they're like, I can't recommend that.
[00:48:21] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:48:21] Speaker A: And so they didn't, they didn't do a lot. My dad tried a lot of things. My mother didn't try a lot of things. But the.
So the medic. Your doctor is not going to tell you to do this right away.
Peptides without claims, you don't need to have FDA approval, nor do you need to be a medical doctor. So there's a lot of people and we talked about the danger of TikTok and Instagram and we'll call it meta medicine or whatever you want to call it, social media medicine.
So we have people who want better results. They want something faster than maybe they're not willing to wait 25 years for medicine to get catch up. So they're interested in what's going on, but they don't know who to go to because there's a lot of people out there. Right. Not everybody went to medical school. Not everybody studies the stuff. There's 50 people in your mastermind, but there's more than 50 people probably in people's feeds today, in everybody's feeds. So how do people find somebody, the right person or find somebody whose philosophy matches with them or know that somebody's credible versus just getting the stuff? They just, they got spring break coming up, so they want to get Ozempic and they find somebody who's willing to send it to them through the mail. Like, how do you help people navigate this system of being healthier without falling victim or, you know, into the trap of working with people who don't know what the hell they're talking about?
[00:49:32] Speaker B: Well, I saw a statistic where over 80% of people are buying research use only peptides. So if you're able to buy a peptide without a prescription through a medical facility, automatically, you don't know the safety or the efficacy of that molecule. We've actually studied, like, BPC157 is a very popular peptide. And you'll see it's usually just a fragment of that peptide. And a lot of times you'll see there's contamination, there's heavy metals, so you gotta be careful of where you source it. And even some of the medical facilities, they're like, my patients are asking for peptides. And if your doctor puts you on the same peptide structure continuously, then you need to hire somebody new. Because peptides, once the genes express and you've got the right lifestyle, then you want to cycle peptides. So every month you're on different peptide stacks. And even with Ozembic, you'd never want to take that alone. You'd want to have, like, BPC to protect your gut. You'd want to have a growth hormone peptide like Sermorelin or Tessamorelin, because you'll lose muscle mass when you're losing weight.
You want to consider some kind of myostatin inhibitor, like MOD science, and you'll get better expression of those muscle fibers and better cardiovascular fitness.
So it's really. I've trained about 1500 doctors in functional medicine and peptide therapy. But you want to have a doctor that will look at the labs and take your goals, your health goals, but get objective data so that they get you on the right peptide stack, and that's probably the most important. And then make sure that your doctor is actually using a licensed pharmacy, because the criteria for pharmacies to make these peptides, it's very nuanced. It's an art. I know three pharmacists that I trust in the United States. This is after vetting dozens of them that actually make peptides the right way. Because it's a matter of do you get the benefit out of that peptide or not based on the pharmacy that you get it from.
[00:51:26] Speaker A: That's great. So you can get the medicine from.
So this whole peptide revolution, which is fantastic, you can get it from almost anyone, but you probably shouldn't be getting it from nearly anyone.
[00:51:36] Speaker B: That's it.
[00:51:37] Speaker A: Yes. So that's the key. So this has been great. Reagan, thank you for the insights. I love the sleep, the food, the water, the thoughts, the psychology behind all of this, and the advice on how people can get this. How can people find you?
[00:51:49] Speaker B: They can go to agelessfuture.com and you'll see our website. You get a free healthspan assessment. And then for, for all the listeners on the show, you guys can get a discounted blood lab where we run 130 different markers. We'll look at liver function, cardiovascular function, brain function, all the hormones, your thyroid and your immune system.
[00:52:09] Speaker A: That's fantastic. I can't thank you enough. This is great. So if you want to elevate your perspective and your health, take advantage of the free offer, the discounted offer. And we'll try to help you get there. Figure out the peptide blueprint for you to get your life back better. We'll see you next weekend.
