Episode 210 Thomas Hemingway Prevention Over Prescription Transcript

This transcript is from episode 210 with guest, Thomas Hemingway.

[00:00:00] Scott DeLuzio: Thanks for tuning into the Drive On Podcast where we’re focused on giving hope and strength to the entire military community. Whether you’re a veteran active duty guard reserve or family member, this podcast will share inspirational stories and resources that are useful to you. I’m your host, Scott DeLuzio.

[00:00:18] Scott DeLuzio: And now let’s get on with the show.

[00:00:21] Scott DeLuzio: Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Drive On Podcast Today, my guest is Dr. Thomas Hemmingway. Dr. Hemingway is a holistic and integrative medical doctor who lives in shares his personal and professional philosophy of prevention over prescription, and is passionate about sharing the message of natural health and healing through powerful practices, which are simple, doable, and can be lifesaving.

[00:00:49] Scott DeLuzio: So welcome to the show. I’m glad to have

[00:00:51] Thomas Hemingway: you on thanks, Scott. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:00:55] Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, absolutely. So for the listeners who might not be familiar with [00:01:00] you and your background, could tell us a little bit about yourself?

[00:01:03] Thomas Hemingway: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been in medicine for over 20 years and I am a board certified physician.

[00:01:11] Thomas Hemingway: I trained actually originally in the emergency room, you know? So if you guys ever watched like the George Clooney show from back in the day, ER, you know, that’s kinda how I got my start and I did. For a couple of decades. And what I noticed was that, here, especially in the U S that’s where I’ve had my medical practice was in the U S and I think it’s the same for most sort of Western countries.

[00:01:36] Thomas Hemingway: And the developed world is that we, at least in the U S we have an excellent emergency care system. If you sustain an injury or you’re having a heart attack, something that just happened that you really need help with. We’re really good at emergency care. But for all of those other conditions that are more kind of chronic or long-term, in other words, [00:02:00] if you look at say the most common causes of death in the world, seven out of 10 of those are.

[00:02:06] Thomas Hemingway: Almost entirely preventable. The number one being heart disease, heart disease is the number one killer worldwide, pretty much in every country, every people. And we, unfortunately, especially me and my colleagues in medicine. I feel like we’re not doing enough about that because there is so much that can be done to prevent.

[00:02:26] Thomas Hemingway: Heart disease to prevent diabetes, stroke, even cancer. And a lot of people just don’t know about it. In fact, most physicians don’t really know, the tools to how to get people healthy. Naturally, they’re really good with the prescription pad, as am I, but I try to not use that as the first line and try to approach things from a routine.

[00:02:48] Thomas Hemingway: Cause, analysis. And I know you with your military background. I think if you look at some of the issues you guys face, I mean, if you can actually go down to what’s the root cause of it, I think it makes a lot more sense in the end [00:03:00] to really come to a real solution. And I feel like a lot of times in medicine, we kind of skip over the root cause and we go straight to the prescription pad because for a couple of reasons, one is just kind of easier.

[00:03:10] Thomas Hemingway: And two, I think a lot of times we feel like that’s what people want. They just want a quick fix, so to speak, they just want, Hey, give me this thing to fix this problem. And maybe they don’t want to go to the roots or maybe we, I feel like it’s more our issue as physicians. We don’t take the time.

[00:03:27] Thomas Hemingway: To actually get to the root, what caused the thing in the first place. So that’s where I’m coming from, with 20 years in medicine in general and really my whole life I’ve been interested in more of this kind of holistic or integrative kind of get to the root cause get to what’s really behind.

[00:03:43] Thomas Hemingway: You know the issue and try to, solve it from the ground up. I just really feel like not only is that the best way, but in the end, it’s going to have a bigger effect and truly we can prevent these kinds of things. And that’s my goal and mission is to save a bunch of lives with the prevention [00:04:00] over prescription approach.

[00:04:01] Thomas Hemingway: So thanks so much for that.

[00:04:03] Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, absolutely. And that approach just seems like it makes a ton of sense to prevent things before they come up. I think the problem that a lot of people have with that type of mindset is when we think of going to the doctor, it’s usually. Something happened, something hurts, something is there’s this new, funny looking lump that I don’t know where that came from or something is wrong and.

[00:04:33] Scott DeLuzio: Now I’m going to the doctor to get this fixed. We don’t typically think of going to the doctors as a preventative type of thing. We might go to our annual checkup to just go in and say, oh yeah, everything’s fine. And the doctor’s going to say, okay if everything’s fine, you don’t have anything that you’re worried about or concerned about.

[00:04:52] Scott DeLuzio: Then there’s my job’s done. There’s nothing for me to do here. Right. But I think it really takes. Us to [00:05:00] have a good deep look in at ourselves and our behaviors, but the foods that we eat, the medicines that we’re taking and the, just the daily activities that we participate in to say, okay, Could I change to help future me 20 years from now, right?

[00:05:19] Scott DeLuzio: When my health starts declining and things like that, but that’s a tough thing to do. How do we get people to switch that mindset from thinking of going to the doctor as a as a reactionary type of thing versus a preventative

[00:05:32] Thomas Hemingway: type thing? I like to use the analogy of. We’re both dudes here.

[00:05:36] Thomas Hemingway: I’m sure we have a favorite sports car, for example, that we’d really either love. To drive at some point or that, that kind of thing. I feel like we as humans, like we are a finely tuned or should be a finely tuned high performance machine. Like we literally have the capability to do so many things.

[00:05:55] Thomas Hemingway: I mean, just look at, we just got to witness a few months ago, the winter Olympics. The things that these kids [00:06:00] are doing at 20 years old, like it’s just mind blowing, like how does the human body even do like. Five or six flips in a row on a snowboard. Like how do they do that? You know, like we, as humans have so much capability, we can do so many things.

[00:06:15] Thomas Hemingway: And I think often we don’t give ourselves the credit that we have, that kind of potential. And like you said, I think it’s more common that we wait until something goes wrong. For example, I’m going to be 50 next year. So I’m getting into the, middle part of my life. And I want to feel as good as I did when I was 20.

[00:06:34] Thomas Hemingway: And I know that’s possible because I do, in fact I got three teenage boys now soon to be four teenage boys, and I can keep up with them any day of the week, and I know a lot of guys, my age that have teenagers or kids, even a little older, they can’t keep up with them anymore. And it’s just, it bums me out to see that.

[00:06:52] Thomas Hemingway: And so I think the, like you said, the path of least resistance as we wait for something to go wrong, or we get into our thirties or later in her forties. And [00:07:00] we’re like, ah, I guess I’m just getting old. I’m slowing down like B S let’s just call it. You don’t have to slow down. Like most of those things that happen are, something that we actually can do something about.

[00:07:12] Thomas Hemingway: So if we consider ourselves this sort of high powered high performance, Maserati, Lamborghini, you name whatever is your favorite sports car. Like we, if we own one of those things, we wouldn’t wait for something to go wrong. We’d be getting. Monthly, or maybe at least semi-annual checkups to make sure everything’s running real smooth.

[00:07:29] Thomas Hemingway: We would put the best quality, fuel, best quality oil, all that kind of stuff. We wouldn’t be buying the cheap crap, in the package. That’s super inexpensive that, that has a off trip, off name or whatever. We’d be getting like the highest quality stuff. And if we treat our bodies the same way, Like we literally can be performing at our best well into our sixties, seventies, maybe even eighties and beyond.

[00:07:52] Thomas Hemingway: There are a couple of guys out there, like if any of your audience knows of dudes like mark Sisson, he’s about 70 years old and he’s this big [00:08:00] burly fit guy, that’s been doing triathlons for 30 years or something. And it’s like, I looked at this guy and go, dude, when I’m 70, I want to be like that.

[00:08:08] Thomas Hemingway: Or I want to at least stay as active as I am right now at almost 50, why slow down, you don’t have to. So I think it’s just a little bit of a mindset thing and treating our bodies like that high performance, sports car that we really are.

[00:08:22] Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. And when you think about. Just your average car, right?

[00:08:29] Scott DeLuzio: A lot of us are thinking of ourselves as the average person, right? We’re not the height, elite Olympic athlete that, that you might be talking about, but we’re not a slouchy there that, we’re on the low end either. We’re somewhere in the middle. But when you think about that, the average car.

[00:08:43] Scott DeLuzio: You typically wait until the check engine light comes on until you discover that there’s a problem or there’s a clunking sound going on. Right. And so that tends to be what we do with our own bodies too, is it seems like we’re treating ourselves as if we’re just that average, nothing special.

[00:08:59] Scott DeLuzio: We’re [00:09:00] just here to, perform a function and get you from a to B and where wherever it happens to be in life. What you’re saying is we all have that potential of being that high-end sports car. So let’s start treating ourselves like that high-end sports car. And so what are some of the more preventative measures that we can do to get ourselves to that point where we are thinking about ourselves more like that high end sports.

[00:09:29] Thomas Hemingway: Yeah, there’s a couple of things that are really simple and free. I love to, share the things that we all have access to that don’t cost money. Sure. There are a million things out there that we could buy either some fancy watch that tells us, how good we slept last night or some kind of tracker that tells us how many quote, unquote calories we’re burning, things like that.

[00:09:49] Thomas Hemingway: To be honest, I don’t really use any of those. I’ve tried lots of them. But what I’ve found is that not only are they potentially inaccurate, but you can literally have [00:10:00] on one arm, one kind of a watch and on the other arm had the other one, and they’re going to give you two totally different readings.

[00:10:05] Thomas Hemingway: And they’re both supposedly reputably, high quality instruments. And so, number one, it doesn’t have to be expensive. So just want all you guys to know out there that all these things that I’m going to share with you are basically. They don’t cost any, anything you don’t have to buy this, super techie, watch your sleep tracker or whatever it is, and they can all be done simply.

[00:10:27] Thomas Hemingway: And the first thing I would say is it all starts with what’s at the end of our fork. So what we put in our body, our fuel, like number one first and foremost, that is the most important, not only for our daily like energy. And how we feel on a day-to-day basis, but also in that sort of preventative lens that you mentioned, that’s going to be the biggest bang for your buck is just paying attention to what you put into your body and to really summarize.

[00:10:54] Thomas Hemingway: If we eat real food, like the stuff that you recognize that [00:11:00] does not come in a package with a barcode or whatnot, I like to say to people avoid the three BS, the food that comes in a box that comes in a bag or with a barcode, if you can avoid that and primarily just eat real food, whether it be a grass fed steak or.

[00:11:18] Thomas Hemingway: You know, well caught, wild raised fish, that you can catch out in the wild, like either, you catch it or somebody else, like I don’t do hardly any of my own fishing, even though I live in Hawaii, the majority of the year, there’s amazing fish available to me. I just so far haven’t figured out the time to go catch it myself, but I buy wild caught fish for example.

[00:11:37] Thomas Hemingway: Or if you’re buying, fruits and vegetables and things like that, try to buy, the ones that haven’t been sitting on a shelf for six or eight months, the ones from your local farmer’s market are almost always going to be better than what you find at Costco. That’s been in a refrigerator for six to 12 months.

[00:11:52] Thomas Hemingway: You know what I mean? But the most important thing is just a. Real food because no matter how much, we exercise, no [00:12:00] matter how much we pay attention to our calorie intake or whatever, we can literally never outrun what ends on the tip of our fork. That is the most important thing that we could pay attention to on a daily basis.

[00:12:11] Thomas Hemingway: And if we just avoid most of the pre-packaged processed type foods which a lot of us have no idea of how many garbage ingredients are in these things, like they’re literally full of. Toxins and food additives, either sweeteners or flavors or colors or whatever it may be like if you look at a label and you see more than five ingredients, this is what I like to call the five ingredient rule, like consider just leaving that thing on the shelf of the grocery store.

[00:12:37] Thomas Hemingway: Because if you’re buying food that has more than five ingredients, chances of. Many of those ingredients are going to be super, highly processed things that you don’t want to be eating anyway, because they’re not healthy. And they’re going to ruin so many things in your body, from your metabolism, which we all should care about.

[00:12:54] Thomas Hemingway: Right. Because that’s how we stay fit and active and maintain a good level of energy throughout the day. So even. [00:13:00] That, for some of us seems a little bit woo, like our so-called gut health, which, is a new and up and coming topic in both, medicine as well as health and wellness, but it literally boils down to what we put into our mouth.

[00:13:12] Thomas Hemingway: And the more that we can eat, just real food stuff that doesn’t have a laundry list of ingredient. The better off we’ll be. So what I tell people is just shop on the perimeter of the grocery store. You know, what’s on the outside of all grocery stores is all the fresh fruit, vegetables, your meats, whatever it is that you’re getting for protein, all that stuff is on the perimeter.

[00:13:32] Thomas Hemingway: Once you dive into the inside of the grocery store and you’re getting like, Whatever cereals or, processed grains and flours. And even if they’re so-called healthy, granola bar, snack bars, protein bars, most of that stuff has way more than five ingredients. Many of the, which are not going to be healthy for you.

[00:13:50] Thomas Hemingway: And actually, I know it seems a little weird to even say this, but at the end of the day, oftentimes, and the studies show this. If we spend most of our time there in the center of the store, not only do we get crappier food, but it [00:14:00] tends to cost more. Let me give you an example. Like I live in Hawaii and if I go out.

[00:14:04] Thomas Hemingway: One box of cereal for my kids. That’s going to be between five and $8 for one box of whatever cold cereal you like. And not only is this expensive. I mean, I got six kids. I would literally be buying boxes and boxes and boxes of cereal, but that’s one of the least healthy things we could ever eat.

[00:14:23] Thomas Hemingway: If I go to Costco and buy a flat of a. That ends up being way cheaper than buying box cereal and it’s way healthier at the end of the day. So my first rule is just food first, real food first try to avoid most of the processed foods out there. And then the second one would just be, move your body every day and it doesn’t have to be going to the gym.

[00:14:41] Thomas Hemingway: You don’t have to have a full. Membership in any kind of fancy gym, like you can literally in your own home do enough body weight exercises to stay fit and healthy. Things like squats and lunges and planks. If you can do a plank for a minute or two, like you are crushing it. Like even if you can [00:15:00] do a plank for 30 seconds, that’s solid, do that a few times a day.

[00:15:03] Thomas Hemingway: What I like to do is I literally, and I know it sounds goofy. But I take a cardboard box and I put it on top of my desk. And then I put my laptop on top of that. And then I have a standing desk. So most of the day, if I’m at home working from home on a computer, I am standing up right now, talking to you. I am standing up because it’s healthier to be beyond your feet and moving your body.

[00:15:26] Thomas Hemingway: And a lot of people are saying now in both health and fitness industry, that sitting is the new smoking. And the reason they say that is because. It’s directly correlated to our health. The more hours we sit in one day, the less healthy we will be. And so this is not saying that you shouldn’t sit ever, but I’m saying as much as you can just move your body throughout the day, it is super helpful and it can be that easy.

[00:15:48] Thomas Hemingway: I also put some free weights at the base of my desk. I can just tell you, this is not just for this podcast. I literally have weights that I can grab at any point in time and just lift them for literally 30 to 60 [00:16:00] seconds. Like it could be that simple, the studies show that if you have like a desk job or you have.

[00:16:04] Thomas Hemingway: Working on a computer. If you take a two to three minute break every hour to just do something, to move your body, whether it be to just walk out to the restroom. If you’re in an office building go up and down two or three flights of stairs, or pick up a couple of your free weights that are.

[00:16:21] Thomas Hemingway: Desk or do you know, a couple of planks or lunges or air squats? If you can do something like that, that only takes maybe two, three minutes of time. Every one hour, not only will you be healthier, but your mind will be sharpened. You’ll actually have the focus and the energy to even bore the more productive at the work you are doing.

[00:16:39] Thomas Hemingway: So those are my. Simplest tips. It’s just eat real food, move your body every day. The next one is sleep. I’m the biggest offender of this one. I used to say, I don’t know if any of you guys are cure fans, but they have a song called sleep when you’re dead. It was from an album that came out, I think in the early two thousands, maybe 2006, 2008, something like that.

[00:16:59] Thomas Hemingway: And [00:17:00] I always used to kind of poo poo guys that slept eight hours a night. I’m like, ah, you guys are wusses, What are you doing? Sleeping eight hours a night. I can get by on four or five or six hours of sleep. Just fine. And I did that for 20, almost 30 years. And it, wasn’t just fine.

[00:17:14] Thomas Hemingway: My wife would always tell me that I was crankier when I did that. Enough. And I, I about 10 years ago realized that yeah, sleep is important. You can’t wait to sleep when you’re dead. And everybody has a little bit of a different, requirements. Some people at six hours, some has seven.

[00:17:29] Thomas Hemingway: I would say the average is somewhere between seven and eight. So I personally shoot for seven hours on, I tend to be a little bit of a shorter sleeper. So if I get seven hours every night, I am feeling great. But if I only get six or five or four on rare cases, I notice it, even though in my mind, I’m like, ah, I can still crush it.

[00:17:48] Thomas Hemingway: I don’t need that sleep. It does take its toll. And so getting, your optimal level of sleep, which for most of us is seven to eight hours and really prioritizing that is also another free hack that has tremendous. [00:18:00] Benefits, I mean, tremendous benefits. The other would be just simply paying attention to our stress.

[00:18:06] Thomas Hemingway: All of us have stress in our life. And the last couple of years of the pandemic, our stress levels have been through the roof. You guys who have to go out and be deployed, every year, every couple of years, I mean, that adds to your stress. Like we’re having tremendous levels of stress in life.

[00:18:19] Thomas Hemingway: And if we don’t learn to how to optimize that, that can greatly affect this as well. I have a couple of techniques on that. I don’t know if we have the time to talk about it, but managing stress is super important as well.

[00:18:31] Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. I’d love to talk about that as well. I think that’s an important topic because stress leads to so many different issues.

[00:18:41] Scott DeLuzio: It could even it affects your mental health. It eventually affects your physical health. It just affects so many things overall that I think. Again, with the preventative measures in mind. It just makes sense that stress is one of those things that we want to manage as well as everything

[00:18:58] Thomas Hemingway: else.

[00:18:59] Thomas Hemingway: [00:19:00] Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. And I think now it is no longer that proverbial elephant in the room. I think now, especially the last two years that we’ve had all these changes. Both worldwide and our own local environments, even in our home with the pandemic and such, I think we’re all experiencing more stress than we used to.

[00:19:18] Thomas Hemingway: There is actually a pretty monumental study done in 2012, well, before the pandemic that said that on the average. 80% of us had at least one significant stressful event, whatever that was. We either lost a job or a family member or loved one, or had a breakup, or, you name it. There’s lots of things in life that caused us significant stress.

[00:19:40] Thomas Hemingway: But on average, this study looked at like 180,000 people. So it was a huge study and they found that about 80% of us at that time were having at least a significant stress. Annually now with the pandemic and all the things we’ve gone through lately, that number is closer to 100% of us are having some [00:20:00] significant stressor at least every year, if not more often than that.

[00:20:03] Thomas Hemingway: And what was so interesting about this study is they took, these hundred 80,000 people and they said, okay, first we just want you to rate how stressful is your life? Is it mild? Is it moderate? Is it severe? Like what level of stress do you have? After they did that be divided, all the folks into three groups, the mild stress level, the moderate level, and then the high level of stress and everybody thought that those people in that high level of stress group would have the worst outcomes.

[00:20:33] Thomas Hemingway: In other words, the worst health outcomes that it would affect. Poorly, because we all know that stress has the potential to cause any number of health problems from mental health issues, with anxiety and depression and mood issues and even PTSD and things like that, but are all generally caused by stress.

[00:20:52] Thomas Hemingway: It can also have lots of downstream sort of body effects where we can, have issues. Our sleep. [00:21:00] We can have issues with our overall health. Just stress alone can make us more likely to get things like heart disease, diabetes, all kinds of other, even cancer. All these things play in from a stress point of view.

[00:21:11] Thomas Hemingway: But what was so interesting about this study is that third group of people that had the highest level of stress. It was only the fraction of them who believed that stress was harmful to them that had negative health outcomes and other. If you experienced high stress on a regular basis, say it was with either your work or with your family or whatever.

[00:21:35] Thomas Hemingway: And you believed that stress actually could be beneficial to you, that you could grow from it, that it would give you the opportunity to, Hey, I’m going to. I’m going to do something a little different, say, even recently with the pandemic, a lot of us that had regular sort of brick and mortar businesses had to close down for a period of time.

[00:21:52] Thomas Hemingway: One group would say, oh my gosh, that just crushed, my business. I’ll never have it the same again. And then there was another group that said, Hey, this is a [00:22:00] chance that I can. I can reassess. I can change. I can decide, Hey, maybe I can do my business online or do it another way. And they use that same stressful event that the other group just let him get down and out.

[00:22:13] Thomas Hemingway: They use that same event to propel them towards, I’m going to do things a little differently. I’m going to pivot. I’m going to have it be a positive effect in my life. Like I’m going to make this a positive thing. So it was only out of those people who rated their stress as high that belief.

[00:22:29] Thomas Hemingway: That it was bad for them that they had a negative health outcome. In fact, they had a 43% risk of dying sooner. However, the other group inside that high stress category, who did not believe that the stress was bad for them, not only did it not negatively affect their health, but it was actually protective.

[00:22:51] Thomas Hemingway: In other words, they even lived longer. So it was just what they decided right up here. It was the meaningful. That day attached to [00:23:00] this stress. It was the meaning that they gave us. So it’s, I think that is so profound. Like we literally can decide at the end of the day, how we want this stress to affect us, we can use it as an opportunity.

[00:23:13] Thomas Hemingway: To grow or to challenge us, or we can let it get us down and out. I know it sounds a little bit woo. Cause it’s not as tangible, but this is what the data shows like you can’t argue with this study of 180,000 people. Like this is pretty solid data. And I think that any of us that take a moment to reflect in our lives when we have the attitude that like, oh, we’re just going to let this thing get us down.

[00:23:35] Thomas Hemingway: Or we take the other approach where we say life doesn’t happen to us. Life happens for us and what can we, build or how can we grow or how can we, do things a little differently to propel us into the future. So that I found that aspect just so interesting because it proves what some of us have experienced on the day-to-day.

[00:23:56] Thomas Hemingway: It’s how we approach the stress that literally could [00:24:00] make all of the difference. So I hope that might be helpful for your audience.

[00:24:07] Scott DeLuzio: Of taking that stress, that, that negative experience that you’re talking about and looking at it as an opportunity that does make sense because when you see opportunities in front of you, you have hope you’re looking at things in a much more positive light. So. Yeah, you might have a difficult situation.

[00:24:27] Scott DeLuzio: Like if you’re a small business owner and during COVID, you have to shut down that brick and mortar business because Nope, nobody’s coming into your business when there’s this virus that’s out there that people are afraid of. Yeah. You’re going to have to shut it down. But if you look at that as an opportunity to say, Hey, you know what, I’ve been meaning to set up my online presence and yeah.

[00:24:50] Scott DeLuzio: Yeah. A pivot in my business and expand that way. It just never really had the opportunity to do it. Now is a perfect opportunity. So let’s focus on that [00:25:00] and do what we can with what we have to work with. That just makes perfect sense. But there’s. Tons of other things too. I think that is just an example that many people can relate to, but there’s plenty of other negative situations that people encounter high stress situations again, in their family life, in their jobs, in their, just their normal day-to-day life that, you know, With their mindset, just changing the outlook in saying, Hey, this is an opportunity.

[00:25:33] Scott DeLuzio: Maybe it’s a relationship that ended, if that relationship ended, it probably ended for a reason, but this is also now an opportunity to, for you to go out and find that other person who is maybe better suited for you. That. That relationship wasn’t working. So it’s like trying to fit a square peg through a round hole.

[00:25:52] Scott DeLuzio: Why are you trying to do that? But let’s move on and try to find that next person. And I think that’s just a different way of looking [00:26:00] at it in a different approach than a lot of people pay can, and that can definitely help with your mindset and you might need help to figure out how to look at certain negative situations in a positive.

[00:26:11] Scott DeLuzio: In your day-to-day life. I know I was guilty of this too, just over the last summer when the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan having served in Afghanistan, myself, it, it felt like that whole thing went sideways and it was a slap in the face. It was my initial reaction. But then I stopped and I thought that.

[00:26:32] Scott DeLuzio: What our job was over there. And for the listeners, our job was to. Protect American citizens. And for the length of time that we were over there, those 20 years that we had troops in Afghanistan, there weren’t any more planes dropping out of the sky, crashing into our buildings here in America.

[00:26:51] Scott DeLuzio: So I’m talking about as a win, did it end up the way that we all ideally would like it to, with the Taliban gone forever and everything like that? No, [00:27:00] but. For the length of time that we were over there we did our job and we did it well. So that was just a slight mind set shift that I had to take that negative situation.

[00:27:11] Scott DeLuzio: That thing that was causing me some stress and anxiety over, what’s going to happen next. But it made me think about it like, okay, this was a good thing while we had it, we might’ve lost some soldiers over there. But we. Did our job and we did it well, and we kept Americans safe at home.

[00:27:29] Scott DeLuzio: So, again, just another mindset shift. But I want to actually want to circle back to something you said a little bit earlier And another kind of personal story, but you were saying something about the whole gut health and probiotics and all that kind of stuff is a new, newer whew kinda kind of thing that goes on.

[00:27:46] Scott DeLuzio: People are talking about that now, but personally I had experienced with this myself where. When I was a teenager, I suffered with a lot of acne. And so the doc, again, [00:28:00] something’s wrong. I go to the doctor and the doctor would prescribe a lot of antibiotics, which temporarily helped. But as soon as I stopped taking them, boom, they flare back up and it was just like a never ending cycle.

[00:28:12] Scott DeLuzio: I was constantly taking antibiotics all over place. And it eventually got to the point where I was having such severe heartburn and stomach issues that it was to the point where I was in college. And I remember going to get some breakfast and I couldn’t even eat just a piece of plain toast without.

[00:28:32] Scott DeLuzio: Without having some sort of heartburn reaction to it. And it was just that bad and it would come and go, it would get better and then it would get worse. And, it was one of those kinds of things. I never could eat spicy foods, even though I loved eating spicy foods, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t handle it.

[00:28:46] Scott DeLuzio: But it wasn’t until years later. And this was I was in my thirties at this point. I realized that all those antibiotics killed all the. Bacteria that was in my stomach. It totally wrecks that. And so my [00:29:00] stomach couldn’t do the things that it needed to do. So I went on a probiotic regimen and build up that good bacteria back up in my stomach.

[00:29:08] Scott DeLuzio: And I haven’t had hardly. Since then, like I haven’t had a single and this was something that was all the time. It was like almost a daily, if not a few times a week situation for me. And I certainly, I haven’t had any sort of heartburn for the last few years and it’s. Completely completely life-changing for me, because I, it was such a different experience.

[00:29:33] Scott DeLuzio: I couldn’t eat certain things. I couldn’t drink certain things. Certain times I’d be up in the middle of the night because I couldn’t sleep because of this heartburn. And it’s just such a different life. Now that I figured that out. I’m sure there are so many other things that just paying attention to your body’s responses will have that kind of reaction where you can make things better just by changing the things that you put in your body, right?

[00:29:57] Thomas Hemingway: Yeah, no, that’s, I thank you for sharing that. [00:30:00] That’s, one of many examples with how, if you get your gut healthy, your. It can be so much better. Let me just put this in perspective. So a lot of people may not know this, we talk about quote unquote gut health or the microbiome or the microbiota or whatever, but when you actually just step back for a second and you look at the numbers, if you take the numbers of bacterial cells, virus, and fun guy that.

[00:30:25] Thomas Hemingway: In us, usually in the gut, the GI tract from your stomach to your butt, all the colon and small intestine. If you take all of those guys and add them up, there are literally more of them, numbers of cells than there are human cells that we have. So, number one, we’re outnumbered by these guys. And beyond that, they’re.

[00:30:44] Thomas Hemingway: DNA or their genetic material. This is what is referred to as the microbiome is just a collection of all the DNA of all these bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa that live in us or on us, within us. When you add all that up, it’s like [00:31:00] hundreds, even thousands of times, more than the genetic material that make us who we are as humans, they have way more DNA than we have, and they outnumber us.

[00:31:11] Thomas Hemingway: What do you think, should we pay attention? Absolutely. Like you learn the hard way. You have to wait several decades to figure this out, but at least now this information is more readily available that we can actually, this is stuff that we can quantify. Like I can actually test people and see what kinds of either good bacteria or bad bacteria they tend to have in their gut.

[00:31:32] Thomas Hemingway: And we can. Manipulate and try to figure out how to get those good guys to outnumber the bad guys, because at the end of the day, there’s so many things that affect them. Everything from what you had mentioned, like if you’re on a course of antibiotics, just one course, you can literally stomp the good guys for six months or more like it takes that long to recover, from one course of antibiotics.

[00:31:53] Thomas Hemingway: So now when you go to your doctor for a runny nose or a little bit of a cough, like if they just hand you the prescription for [00:32:00] antibiotics, say, Hey, Is this absolutely necessary. Do I really need this prescription? Obviously, as a physician, there are lots of cases where you do need antibiotics. If you’re dying of sepsis or blood in your back in bacteria, in your blood, bacteremia, sepsis, you have an overwhelming kidney infection, all these kinds of things.

[00:32:18] Thomas Hemingway: Absolutely. You need antibiotics. In the U S I’ll just speak because that’s my experience. We tend to over prescribe antibiotics. I think any of you guys probably, or gals have witnessed that you go into your doctor. Oh, I have a little bit of a cough or cold. And either they hand you the antibiotic prescription or you ask them for it because you just assume that’ll make you better.

[00:32:40] Thomas Hemingway: Well, most of the time, those illnesses. Viruses, right. Even COVID is a virus and antibiotics. If it’s just a virus, antibiotics, don’t make that better. So you got to discover that over your lifetime, because you had to be on antibiotics for so many years off and on for your acne. But now we’re finding that if you [00:33:00] just pay attention to your.

[00:33:02] Thomas Hemingway: Microbiome or microbiota your gut health. You can actually reverse most of those illnesses like acne, a lot of skin conditions people suffer from eczema or rosacea or lots of skin, inflammatory conditions. All of these rashes that pop up on your skin. Most of them have roots in your gut and.

[00:33:22] Thomas Hemingway: This wasn’t talked about when I was in medical school. Like literally, if you can imagine if you took your intestines and open them up and just looked at how much surface area that would cover, like there they’re folded not only amongst themselves on just a gross sort of macroscopic level, but if you were to take and look at how these guys look under the microscope and see all the little tiny folds, they call them roo gay and Villa and things like you could literally lay down.

[00:33:46] Thomas Hemingway: Gut out your stomach through your intestines. And that would occupy almost as much square, surface area as a tennis court. Like it’s huge. And every single day that we eat food or drink or whatever we put [00:34:00] into our bodies. That giant, nearly as big of a tennis court worth of surface area, it gets exposed to all kinds of things.

[00:34:08] Thomas Hemingway: They might be good things cause we’re eating clean and a good natural, healthy diet, or they might be not so good things, and what’s interesting is literally the space between that sort of protective lining of our gut. And our bloodstream is way less than thickness of a human hair. Like it’s literally one cell thick.

[00:34:29] Thomas Hemingway: Teeny tiny, super thin. And if that tight it’s called a tight junction, if that thing gets looser relaxed, because we’re either eating foods that are inflammatory, for some people that stuff like gluten or for most of us just as processed foods will tend to make these tight junctions, get a little loose and they’ll open up and they can allow all kinds of.

[00:34:50] Thomas Hemingway: Not only bacteria, but also toxins and food particles that can disrupt our immune system and give us lots of problems. Not only skin issues. You mentioned [00:35:00] things like, for example, all the

[00:35:07] Thomas Hemingway: IBS from, or what you may be flat burn. Easily as I can eat or because do. Antibiotics, obviously that’s a big cause of problems with the gut. Also other things that we eat that aren’t super healthy can do the same, or if we smoke or if we drink excess of alcohol, all these things can cause problems with our gut health, which can then be manifest in almost every area of the body.

[00:35:41] Thomas Hemingway: There’s this thing. I don’t know if. If your audience has heard of this, I think most people have, but it’s something called the sort of second brain or the gut brain or the gut brain access. So our brain and our gut are connected. Not only through the nervous system, we have this nerve called the vagus nerve.

[00:35:59] Thomas Hemingway: This [00:36:00] is one time where what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas. Like literally the communication between the brain and. That is like nonstop 24 7, billions and billions of messages are being sent from the brain to the gut. And so if our gut is inflamed and has issues, our brain often gets affected as well.

[00:36:18] Thomas Hemingway: There’s this term that has now been popularized people. Brain fog. If you’re not thinking as sharply as you might want to, or you don’t have quite that, acuity or the ability to, be the really sharp on your feet, that could be because your gut is not balanced because it will affect the brain.

[00:36:36] Thomas Hemingway: If your guts inflamed, your brain can be inflamed. And if the brain’s inflamed, your gut can be inflamed. And what was really cool is prior to us getting on today, I actually reviewed some of the. Stuff that’s available on the VA website. And it was really cool to find out that in the Ord or the office of research and development, there’s a lot of studies actually happening right now on gut health, on the microbiome, on these little guys that live in [00:37:00] us on us and within us.

[00:37:01] Thomas Hemingway: And it was really cool to see that they’re finally making this connection, that if we have problems with our gut, it can literally affect anything in our body, from our. To our brain, to our liver, like all these things are interconnected and there’s actually lots of research being done right now in the VA population on gut health.

[00:37:20] Thomas Hemingway: A lot of it’s already been done, but it’s still ongoing. And it was super exciting for me to see that because I think it’s so important. And until now we just haven’t given it the weight and the credence that it deserves, because like I said, at the outset, these guys outnumbered. There’s more of them than there are us and there’s way more information, genetic material with them.

[00:37:40] Thomas Hemingway: And then we have in our own DNA, so we really gotta pay attention to these things. And so in my book, that’s coming out in August. I did like several chapters on just gut health because it’s so dang important and all encompassing because it can affect literally any system of our body. So thanks so much for sharing that story.

[00:37:58] Thomas Hemingway: I think. Something that so many of us [00:38:00] experienced in one way or another. And when we get to the root cause like you finally did, and we’re like, Hey, this wasn’t really great for my gut, all these antibiotics. How do I get my gut back into a healthy state, either with probiotics in a supplement or probiotic, rich foods, all those.

[00:38:15] Thomas Hemingway: Fermented foods like me coming from Hawaii. Our favorite is kimchi. We stole that from the Koreans. We love that spicy cabbage. In fact, even now I’m in Utah. I bought a bottle of that stuff at Costco. It was amazing. My kids eat it. I eat it. We love it. It’s spicy. It’s yummy.

[00:38:31] Thomas Hemingway: And it also is great. For your gut health, or do you like yogurt or Keifer or aged cheeses or there’s so many different things if you’re into different, Tempe miso not, so these are all fermented soy products. There’s all of these great, fermented foods, in fact, thousands and thousands of them, many of which we’re not even familiar with because every culture has its own version of fermented foods and they can be super helpful as well.

[00:38:57] Thomas Hemingway: So I, I love to encourage people to just try new [00:39:00] things. New foods that they’ve never had fruits and vegetables, whether it be fresh or even fermented ones. And you’d be surprised like your palette as it changes and your gut gets healthy. You’ll be like, oh my gosh, this like kimchi never tasted so good or sauerkraut never tasted so good.

[00:39:16] Thomas Hemingway: Or any of these things, which maybe at one point in your life when you had what I like to call that the teenage boy. Pallet where, you know we basically lived off of things like Mac and cheese and hot dogs. Like now we really have this desire to eat all kinds of different food, which I think is part of the beauty of getting healthy, that all these different foods are out there at your disposal.

[00:39:36] Thomas Hemingway: There’s so many great ones that many of us haven’t tried, including me. I, haven’t tried, thousands and thousands of food that I want to. So I make it a goal every week to try to eat something new or buy something new at the supermarket. Cause it’s a lot of fun and it’s great for us. And great for our body and it’s fun, yeah,

[00:39:51] Scott DeLuzio: absolutely. And I’ve even found that with myself, that I can listen to my body and I start to feel like I’m [00:40:00] craving. Foods or whatever, when my body is needing some of that type of thing. So if I need, some of those fermented foods, if I’m craving that, I’m like, okay, maybe that’s my body’s way of saying, Hey, maybe you maybe you need to work on this gut health a little bit more or whatever, so.

[00:40:19] Scott DeLuzio: It’s just a different way of thinking about the foods that you put in your body and even the medicines. Right. And everything that, that you end up taking just question what is this really doing for me? Is this just satisfying a quick. With a bag of chips or Oreos or whatever, is this just satisfying, a quick craving or is this going to help me in some way down the line?

[00:40:39] Scott DeLuzio: And chances are like you were saying, if they’re packaged processed foods, they’re probably not going to be helping you too much in the long run. So, just really think about what it is that you’re putting in your body.

[00:40:48] Thomas Hemingway: Yeah, just to go along with that, just, I can just say one thing it’s not, if you’re craving those things, like don’t be like down on yourself.

[00:40:55] Thomas Hemingway: It’s not lack of willpower. It’s not that. Week or whatever, like that’s [00:41:00] normal. Like literally the people who make these, what I call the highly palatable foods, chips and cookies and snacks and granola bars and all these kinds of things that we all sort of love, fried foods I’ll throw in that category too.

[00:41:10] Thomas Hemingway: For the most part, they literally design these things so that we will want to have more and more and more and more. And when we eat them, what’s so interesting is that. Population of the bacteria that lives in our intestines that likes those foods, which are not the good ones, those actually proliferate and grow.

[00:41:29] Thomas Hemingway: And they will actually send signals. Yes, signals. These are like text messages to our brain that say, Hey, eat more of those or Oreos or Doritos or Cheetos. You can’t have this one eat the whole bag. This is literally a signal coming from. Those gut bacteria that proliferate or grow when we eat that crappy food.

[00:41:49] Thomas Hemingway: So it’s not you being weak. It’s not a lack of willpower. It’s science. It’s actually these guys that are telling you to eat that. And so when you stop, those kinds of processed [00:42:00] foods and you don’t eat them and you replace it with other real foods, then those. Bacteria go down and number and the good guys, so to speak, go up and then you’ll start craving differently.

[00:42:09] Thomas Hemingway: You’ll stop craving the sweets and the processed foods. And you’ll start creating, just all different fruits, vegetables, fermented foods, whatever it may be. And it’s a beautiful thing. So you’re not weak. It’s not lack of willpower. It’s literally science. That’s how interesting this whole gut health thing is.

[00:42:25] Thomas Hemingway: It’s super.

[00:42:26] Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned your book earlier. It’s coming out in August. Give the listeners a little background on the book what it’s called and where they’ll be able to find it when the book comes out.

[00:42:36] Thomas Hemingway: Absolutely. So the book is called preventable five powerful practices to avoid disease.

[00:42:44] Thomas Hemingway: And build unshakeable health. So I wrote this book because like I was mentioning at the outset of the podcast, my background, as a physician, I’ve seen so many people say two things, disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, all these illnesses that are super [00:43:00] common, the most proven, I just. We were both there to help those people out.

[00:43:11] Thomas Hemingway: I just weren’t the most and our full nation, all of us guys were like, literally right now in the year 2022, our obesity rates or being overweight in this country have skyrocketed right now. 70% of adults in the us are. And almost 50% can be classified as obese. Like this is nuts. This is crazy. I just took a trip to Europe last week.

[00:43:40] Thomas Hemingway: It was hard to find somebody who was overweight and yet these guys eat all day. They eat amazing, super rich, just, I mean, mouthwatering kind of food. It’s just incredible what these guys eat. And almost none of them are overweight and that’s, for two reasons, one, they eat real food, not processed stuff.

[00:43:56] Thomas Hemingway: I didn’t see anybody buying stuff that came in a package. Like they literally just buy the whole [00:44:00] food and they cook with it. And then the second thing is they move their body everyday. So I wrote this book because I really want us to not succumb. To these health conditions that can be prevented. In my own family, my wife lost her father in her, in his early sixties from type two diabetes.

[00:44:17] Thomas Hemingway: And that was basically entirely preventable. And although he was active, like this guy was a marathon runner, he loved to run, but he ate crappy food. He thought that he could outrun his crappy. Like literally, this guy ran races up until the last 10 years of his life. And he died of things that were a hundred percent preventable because he loved going to the fast food chains and just buying packaged foods.

[00:44:39] Thomas Hemingway: It was easier, and I get that. I understand that, but I really feel like these powerful messages need to get out there. So I wrote the book preventable. You can find out on my Instagram at Aloha surf doc or. Modern medicine movement, which is my podcast. And I’m sure that these will be in the show notes, but you can, if you can get in to those and just click on my link tree, I [00:45:00] have a link to both a newsletter that’s free that I send out every week on a Thursday that gives free health tips.

[00:45:06] Thomas Hemingway: That’s really fun. It’s called Thursdays to thrive. And so I have that I’ll soon have my website up for the book, which will be the preventable. Book.com and there’ll be a place there where you can sign up for alerts for when this book is available. So lots of cool stuff out there, but if you follow me at Aloha, which is just like Hawaii, say, a L O H a and then surf, S U R F and then doc, doc, that’s my Instagram in my link tree.

[00:45:31] Thomas Hemingway: You’ll find all that stuff. Or my podcast is called. Madison movement. And that’s what the Instagram hashtag is as well. So you can find me at those two places and be looking out for that preventable book, which will be out later this summer. Great.

[00:45:44] Scott DeLuzio: And again, I will have all those links in the show notes.

[00:45:47] Scott DeLuzio: So anyone who’s looking to check it out, I’ll have the links there. Definitely check it out, especially if you are. Questioning your own health and in your own things that you’re putting in your own body [00:46:00] and how it’s making you feel, how your body is responding to these things, check it out and see if there might be some things that you can make some changes in your own life.

[00:46:09] Scott DeLuzio: And. Improve your own health by making some of these small, simple changes. So thank you again. I really do appreciate you coming on and sharing with us some of these steps that we can take to improve our overall health and well.

[00:46:26] Thomas Hemingway: Yeah, thanks so much for having me on, I just want to reiterate that most of these things are free.

[00:46:31] Thomas Hemingway: They don’t cost money. They’re simple, and I’ve literally used them to help thousands of people. And it’s just one thing at a time. You don’t have to change everything at once. Just take one thing. It can be that simple and it could be that. Needle mover and your life. And so, yeah, please follow me. I forgot to mention, I have a free Facebook group.

[00:46:49] Thomas Hemingway: That’s a health and wellness group. It’s called modern medicine, movement, health and wellness group. If you follow me there, you join. You can join that free group. I also give little health tips and I’ll [00:47:00] do lives in there. And there’s also a link to a lot of the different things that I’m up to. As far as sharing this helpful information.

[00:47:06] Thomas Hemingway: I also just created a community called the thrive community, which I’d love for you guys to check out which is a VIP group, which is a really good. Option, if you want to get a little bit more in depth, like masterclass type of stuff is available as well. And that’s also I’m bound on my Instagram and my website and that website.

[00:47:24] Thomas Hemingway: I don’t think I mentioned it’s called modern medicine movement.com. So thanks so much for having me. Scott has been a real plus. I would love to connect with your audience if they want to reach out to me. Any of those platforms will be fantastic. Also check out my podcast, modern medicine movement. I love to do it.

[00:47:40] Thomas Hemingway: It’s obviously always free. Every, usually every Thursday I come out with a new episode this week. I just uploaded an episode called how you can eat healthy on a budget because I get it. Some people, go out and they look at the organic food prices and they’re like, holy crap. I could never afford.

[00:47:55] Thomas Hemingway: This is like twice as much as non-organic. A whole bunch of tips on how you can eat [00:48:00] healthy on a budget. And for guys like me that got six kids and nearly four teenagers, like it makes a difference. So thanks again for having me. So honored to be here and, yeah, thanks so much. Yeah. Thank you

[00:48:11] Scott DeLuzio: again.

[00:48:12] Scott DeLuzio: I really appreciate your time coming on the show.

[00:48:15] Thomas Hemingway: Absolutely Aloha.

[00:48:17] Scott DeLuzio: Thanks for listening to the Drive On Podcast. If you want to check out more episodes or learn more about the show, you can visit our website. DriveOnPodcast.com. We’re also on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube at drive on podcast.