Why Good Stress Might Save Your Life | Jeff Krasno

Jeff Krasno: [00:00:00] Stress in the modern world is chronic and not in the right dosage. And so when you have chronic stress, what you'll get is imbalances in your physiology and imbalances are basically the signature of disease. Along that march of human history, we developed all of these adaptive mechanisms, and that is muscle height hypertrophy, and that is probably the most obvious example of good stress.

Dr. Brighten: You talk about also eating stressed plants in your book. Define what that is for us and what does the science say about that? 

Narrator 1: Jeff Raow is the co-founder and CEO of Commune, a platform focused on personal and societal wellbeing. 

Narrator 2: As the host of the Commune podcast, he's interviewed icons like Andrew Huberman, Marianne Williamsons, GABA mate.

And even Matthew McConaughey 

Narrator 1: sparking meaningful conversations on wellness, spirituality, and culture. 

Narrator 2: His popular weekly essay amusing reaches over a [00:01:00] million subscribers 

Narrator 1: and his latest book, good Stress shares the protocols that helped him reverse diabetes lose 60 pounds, and reclaim his health. At age 50, a true pioneer in the wellness space.

Jeff also co-created Wanderlust, 

Narrator 2: the world's largest yoga and wellness festival, and was handpicked by Oprah Winfrey for the Super Soul. 100 

Jeff Krasno: stress at its core actually confers a benefit to the body when it is. 

Dr. Brighten: In your book, you have 10 science backed protocols, so good stress lists out these 10 protocols.

Which one were you most surprised had the biggest impact on your life? 

Jeff Krasno: I will say that the most actual surprising protocol was. 

Dr. Brighten: Welcome back to the Dr. Brighton Show. I'm your host, Dr. Jolene Brighton. I'm board certified in Naturopathic endocrinology, a nutrition scientist, a certified sex counselor, and a certified menopause specialist.

As always, I'm [00:02:00] bringing you the latest, most UpToDate information to help you take charge of your health and take back your hormones. If you enjoy this kind of information, I invite you to visit my website, dr brighton.com, where I have a ton of free resources for you, including a news. Letter that brings you some of the best information, including updates on this podcast.

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Stress is aging our skin [00:03:00] faster, aging our cardiovascular system faster. It is killing our brain cells and the thing leading to chronic disease. But you are saying good stress exists. So tell us about it. 

Jeff Krasno: Yeah. I feel like I'm the PR agent for stress. Right. Um, 

Dr. Brighten: getting a rebrand. Yeah. 

Jeff Krasno: Because we have a justifiably negative association with stress because stress in the modern world, I.

Is chronic and not in the right dosage. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: Okay. And so when you have chronic stress in the wrong dosage, what you'll get is imbalances in your physiology and imbalances are basically the signature of disease. Pick your disease, cardiovascular disease like lipid imbalances, blood sugar imbalances, hormonal imbalances, neurotransmitter imbalances.

Chronic stress will lead to all of those in some ways, and we can break down those [00:04:00] mechanisms if you'd like. But what I discovered through studying my own physiology and interviewing about 400 doctors is that stress at its core actually confers a benefit to the body. Mm-hmm. When it is short term.

Mm-hmm. And when it is now deliberate and also in the right dosage. Mm-hmm. So we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years as homo sapiens and millions of years as hominids before that in relationship to our environment, you can't really separate. The behavior and function of the human organism from the behavior and function of the environment.

This is what evolution is. Over time, there are mutations and we adapt. Nature selects for the best of these mutations, and we become iterative humans. Mm-hmm. And push ourselves forward. And along that march of human history, we developed all of these adaptive mechanisms in response [00:05:00] to stress. So this is sometimes known under the great Nietzche adage, or if you're cultural anchoring as Kelly Clarkson, um, for some of your listeners, probably what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right?

Mm-hmm. We might, we might remember that song. Um. And we, we know this at it in its simplest form through muscle hypertrophy, right? Mm-hmm. So we stress a biceps right through, overloading it in the gym through either heavy weight or repu repetition. And what happens? So we micro tear those fibers in that bicep.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And there is. An immune response, there's like an inflammatory response to that. So there's an injury, right? There's an insult if you will. Mm-hmm. And then the body summons these structural proteins, myosin and actin, right? And you give that biceps enough rest and you're having enough protein in your diet, particularly leucine.

You're eating your non-fat Greek yogurt, however you wanna get [00:06:00] it, you know, your lean chicken. Um. And what happens, that muscle grows back bigger. Mm-hmm. And stronger. That is muscle height hypertrophy. And that is probably the most obvious example of good stress sometimes called eustress. But once you kind of start to unpack the body, you realize we are riddled.

With those mechanisms and we can actually leverage stress for our benefit. And, um, that is really the, the thesis of the book that I wrote called Good Stress. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. You had some of your own health issues come up. What was the moment you realized like, I can actually leverage stress in a positive way rather than always being at odds with it?

Jeff Krasno: Yeah, well, in this sense, I will be not your most extraordinary guest. I will be your most ordinary guest you've ever had because I was suffering from [00:07:00] the most ordinary symptoms. And you know, your listeners may be able to, you know, relate to some of these. So, brain fog check, right? Mm-hmm. Chronic fatigue, insomnia, irritability.

Inability to concentrate the needless need to check my phone every two seconds, right? Oh yeah. 

Dr. Brighten: That's one that a lot of people get conditioned. It's so insidious and they're conditioned to do it, and then they realize like. My life is being spent on social and not actually being social. 

Jeff Krasno: That's right. Yeah.

I think on average we're checking our phone, you know, somewhere between 350 to 400 times per day. Ooh. Is there a map 

Dr. Brighten: that counts that? 

Jeff Krasno: I don't know. I just read a study, but yeah. Yeah, you should 

Dr. Brighten: make that app because I'm like, someone needs to put me in check if I'm doing that. I know. 

Jeff Krasno: So those were some of the.

Kind of psychological presentations. And then there were, you know, a lot of insults to my [00:08:00] personal vanity. Let's say I had dad bod. Mm-hmm. So I had that extra kind of layer of inner tube adiposity around the middle. Right. Yeah. I had what my three daughters love to call the boobs of man. Um, 

Dr. Brighten: teenage girls are so ruthless.

It's so cruel, right? 

Jeff Krasno: I was like, that's kind of Kasia kids. They're like, shut up dad. Those are man boobs. Um, so. And then I started, um, Bryce might have noticed this, your husband, as I was getting into the cold punch today, um, he, he might have noticed that I started growing these strange little ghastly brown perturb RINs mm-hmm.

In my armpits and I, and not on the back of my neck. Like, I didn't know what those were. He's 

Dr. Brighten: not that observant. So I think you're safe. 

Jeff Krasno: Good. Um, because they're not particularly attractive. But I later learned that those were presentations of insulin resistance. Mm-hmm. I didn't know that at the time. 

Dr. Brighten: Yeah, 

Jeff Krasno: so that was kind of, my psychology was [00:09:00] compromised, my physiology was compromised, but in ways that are so normalized.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: But everything I just described was, is totally abnormal. Yeah. Like on the Serengeti, nobody had. Brain fog. Yeah. Right. Or skin tags. Or Or skin tags, yeah. And certainly heart disease was basically non-existent. Diabetes and obesity, basically non-existent. A little bit of cancer. Um, but all, you know, these chronic diseases were just not, you know, on display mm-hmm.

For most of human history. So, you know, but society has essentially normalized the abnormal. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: So. Obviously now we know we have statistics that show us that 60% of Americans have a chronic disease. Yeah, 40% have two chronic diseases. I mean, you know, God bless if you make it to 70 or 80, you generally have five and you're treating the symptoms of those [00:10:00] diseases generally with a cocktail of pharmaceutical drugs.

Never the root cause, et cetera. Mm-hmm. And we're limping through the last 20 to 30 years of our life with this distension of morbidity. Yeah. And I found out much to my great surprise that I was well inside of that American nightmare because I got a diabetes diagnosis. Hmm. To be clear, a type two adult onset diabetes diagnosis.

And that started kind of right in the. ALP and Glow of Covid. So I know you got sick during Covid. I also got very sick during Covid. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And um. You know, I started to look at the data also around people that were getting the most sick like me, and there tended to be, uh, you know, a high, a disproportionate amount of people with comorbidities, with diabetes and obesity, et cetera.

I just described my conditions and lo and behold, I put a. A continuous glucose monitor. Mm-hmm. [00:11:00] This little disc that I wear on my triceps, um, that is a proxy for your metabolic health through sharing on an app. Mm-hmm. Your glucose levels moment to moment, and I peered into that app and lo and behold. My fasting blood glucose was around 125 to 130 milligrams per deciliter.

Yeah. So the very, very highest end of pre-diabetes, kind of lowest end of diabetes. Mm-hmm. And then I went to my primary care physician, of course, like I had probably canceled like typical man, like the last three appointments was this 

Dr. Brighten: Skyler who was like, you gotta get in there. Yeah. He 

Jeff Krasno: was like, go in.

And then they did a, like a real blood panel and hemoglobin A one T and all the other, you know, markers. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And they're like, yeah, okay. And that was, uh, that was a bucket of ice water over my head before That was a protocol. Yeah. That was like a wake up call. You know, you have got to, um, you've gotta make some changes in your life.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And that really propelled [00:12:00] me on this quest to understand why I was so sick. But by extension, why. As Americans and as Westerners why we are so sick in general. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And, um, you know, that that inquest was part intellectual curiosity, but then became very much physical necessity. Yeah. For me to figure that out.

Dr. Brighten: In your book, you have 10 science backed protocols, so good stress. List out these 10 protocols, which one were you most surprised had the biggest impact on your life? 

Jeff Krasno: Yeah, it's really interesting. They all had a lot of impact in different ways, um, both psychologically and physically and even socially.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: Um, I will say, because my main issue initially was metabolic. I would have to categorize the. Like fasting and cold water [00:13:00] therapy and kind of some resistance training and the stacking of those 

Dr. Brighten: Yeah. 

Jeff Krasno: Were really, really key. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: To essentially a lot of positive weight management, a lot of pos positive, like muscle management by, but also by extension, I basically tamed the wild tiger of my blood glucose.

Yeah. Through a. Kind of intelligent stacking of those protocols. Mm-hmm. And a lot of research and, and of one experimentation, a lot of interviewing smart people like yourself. Um, I will say that. The most actual surprising protocol was applying these physiological adversity mimetics mm-hmm. To my psychological and social life.

So we, we tend to think about good stress protocols like fasting and cold water therapy and sauna, et cetera, within the parentheses of what they can do to your physiology. But actually the most. Potent impacts of many of [00:14:00] those are actually psychological. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And, you know, as I began to, for example, develop a, uh, like a cold water therapy protocol.

And when I would get into the cold water, you know, I would have a normal, like bottom up involuntary response. Like, fuck, get me outta here. Right. You know, that, you know, very normal response. Yeah. Yeah. More clinically, um, understood through sort of an increase, an increase in respiratory and, and, and, and heart rate, you know, the kind of.

Release of, you know, epinephrine that would course through my veins. Mm-hmm. That would like come up into my, like carotid arteries and feel like I was gonna have like a, like a panic attack. And then right there I had a brief moment available to me. Yeah. To apply top down conscious pressure. On top of involuntary bottom up response.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: So how did I do that? Often it was through the leveraging of conscious breath. So, [00:15:00] uh, some kind of parasympathetic breath work that would essentially allow me to overlay conscious pressure mm-hmm. On this involuntary stress response in order to essentially emotionally regulate to bring myself back to center.

Dr. Brighten: Yeah. 

Jeff Krasno: And, you know, I also, you know, you can also use your prefrontal cortex in your neo mammalian brain to tell yourself like, oh, it's 58 degrees in here, I'm gonna be fine. Mm-hmm. Um, and yes, code therapy when done intelligently, and I'll asterisk that, is that. Everyone's a bio individual. Women have a different response to cold therapy, particularly in different cycles of their life than men do.

Mm-hmm. But just more broadly, I would say that getting in the cold for me. Yeah, it was helpful for my metabolic function, you know, my brown fat would jump into action and yeah. [00:16:00] Thermogenesis and, you know, um, to upregulate my, my body temperature into that little warm porridge around 98.6, it would release dopamine over a protracted period of time.

Mm-hmm. All these things that we know about cold therapy, but the biggest thing was like the emotional resilience. Yes. That it brought me and. What I began to find was the emotional resilience that came out of protocols, like cold therapy or fasting, began to then punctuate other aspects of my life.

Mm-hmm. Kind of spill into them. 

Dr. Brighten: Yeah. 

Jeff Krasno: Um, where I became. Honestly, a better parent and a better partner. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And a better business leader and a better friend, because I had enhanced my ability to emotionally regulate Yeah. And bring myself back to center and enter into situations with an arrow in my quiver.

And that arrow was [00:17:00] space. Mm-hmm. That I. Enhance this ability to find, and this is the great Viktor Frankl concept, to find space between stimulus and response. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And in that space, there's a choice. And in that choice is your freedom. That's the Frankl idea. But life will inevitably throw you stress balls.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: You know, in work, in traffic. Financial hardship, racism, neglect, abuse. I mean, we live in a world that is highly, that is essentially designed to trigger us at this point. Yeah. And so one of the most important things we can do is to be able to enhance those tools and find the modalities that essentially allow us to come back to center to emotionally regulate.

Mm-hmm. And so. Doing, finding those first within these [00:18:00] physiological practices, I began to really become very, very interested in how I could apply that same concept of chosen deliberate adversity to my social life. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And that really manifested in the form of. Stressful conversations. 

Dr. Brighten: Yeah. 

Jeff Krasno: And how to have them.

And I began to build a protocol around really stressful, thorny, hard conversations. Mm-hmm. And I ended up doing. 26 hour long Zoom calls in August and September of 2020 with people that didn't like me. 

Dr. Brighten: Oh, really? Yeah. How'd you find them? Oh, 

Jeff Krasno: like, I suspect there's a very large repository of them. Didn't you?

Like, I suspect 

Dr. Brighten: they don't like me, or they actually told you I don't like you. Yeah. Like, 

Jeff Krasno: well, I'm, I'm exaggerating a tiny bit. They disagreed with me about something. 

Dr. Brighten: Okay. Okay. 

Jeff Krasno: So when [00:19:00] Covid. Lockdown when we kind of anchored into that port lockdown. Mm-hmm. In March of 2020. Um, my, uh, my wonderful supportive partner, Jake, who I'll never forgive now, uh, urged me to start to write this weekly missive uhhuh to our burgeoning commune audience.

So this was this pretty significant list. It was about 1.2 million people at that juncture. And so I started to write 1500 to 2000 words of like. Quasi sense making. Mm-hmm. Every Sunday and deploy that out and connect my personal email to it. And of course, 2020 provided plenty of incendiary fodder to write about.

Right? Yeah. So what did we have? We had COVID and a lot of the fear and uncertainty around covid. We had the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent reckoning around social justice. Around that. We had an [00:20:00] election, we had the rise of Q anon. I mean, fill in the blank. There was so much to write about. 

Dr. Brighten: Yeah.

Jeff Krasno: And so I was writing articles. That I was trying to essentially take a rigorous approach, sort of a Buddhist aka middle path approach to these big social issues. Mm-hmm. And deploy them in with the hopes of, you know, providing a little, like these little buoys that people could attach to kind of, to navigate the, the rough, crazy seas of, of that time.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: But over 2000 words. And you know this right? You're bound to piss somebody off. Yeah. With one turn of phrase, and I'll give you an example. Like in August of 2020, there was enough data coming out to suggest that the people that got covid the most severely had multiple comorbidities. Mm-hmm.

Obesity, diabetes, et cetera. [00:21:00] So I wrote. The most rigorously researched article that I possibly could about that. But of course there was also a contemporaneous body positivity movement happening at the same time. Yeah, yeah. And I just. I remember that Monday morning waking up and there was a deluge of a program in the form of emails.

Mm-hmm. Like cresting the bow of my inbox and like hundreds upon, hundreds upon hundreds of mostly women that had taken a fence that I was connecting, you know, severe covid outcomes with. Obesity and metabolic dysfunction. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And, you know, there were as many of these emails, like, I didn't really know what to do with, 'cause they were just, uh, just full of ad hominem and recrimination.

But then there was like really dozens of very thoughtful ones. Yeah. And so I just vowed that I was gonna reply to them. And then after like two or [00:22:00] three, you know, email volleys, I was like, Hey, let's just jump on a Zoom 

Dr. Brighten: mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And talk about it. And um, and I'd ended up doing that 26 times, not with just that topic, with a whole variety of different topics.

Yes. Um, but, uh, I started to build this regimen, if you will, or practice around how to have. Profitable, stressful conversations. Mm-hmm. And they required actually a bunch of very, very clear kind of adversity steps. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. The other thing about having those kinds of conversations is that it really demonstrates your faith in the other individual to be able to meet you in that place.

And I think sometimes people think like, oh. We just avoid hard conversations all the time. 'cause we don't wanna feel a certain way. And I think there's also the, am I gonna be in a safe space? And it gives, it gives a lot of credit to the other individual that you're [00:23:00] like, I believe we can sit down and we can wade through all of this.

Mm-hmm. I wanna go back to the stack piece that you set, because I think that's really interesting because I think often when people think about wellness routines, they think like. You have to do, uh, you know, here's your meditation that you do and your exercise that you do, and everything is very separate and time consuming.

Certainly no individuals mm-hmm. Who like spend four hours every morning just to their health. And I'm like, I, I have kids. I don't have time for that. So. I think sometimes it's, it feels like there's this really big barrier and I think for women listening, it would be helpful to hear like, what happened?

So we've gotta define stack for people. Mm-hmm. What does that mean? And what happens when you actually integrate these things? Doing more than one thing at a time. 

Jeff Krasno: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I stack for me means essentially layering. Mm-hmm. Or CADing intelligently a variety of different protocols together. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm.

Jeff Krasno: For [00:24:00] maximum output or maximum impact, I would say. 

Dr. Brighten: Yeah. 

Jeff Krasno: And for me, and again, I want to asterisk this because, you know, fasting protocols and cold water therapy protocols really vary for individuals. Mm-hmm. And very much for women, but. Because my issues were largely metabolic and weight oriented. Mm-hmm.

You know, I found that this stack of essentially intermittent fasting a. Keto Arian approach to diet, because previously I had been like committing carbide, you know, so, um, so a, a low glycemic approach to diet in conjunction with an intermittent fasting protocol in which I consolidated my consumption of food, more or less in an eight hour window.

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: Um, and a cold water therapy. Stack, like, or, or, or, or therapy protocol. Those actually stacked together in a very specific way, [00:25:00] had massive impact on me. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And I'll just describe how, so I would. Like wake up in the morning and because I wouldn't have eaten for let's say 14 hours or 15 hours, my blood sugar at that juncture would be pretty low.

There would be a slight normal rise because cortisol is gonna rise in the morning. You're gonna get a little bit of a, a blood sugar spike. But you know, it was, I didn't have a lot of glucose around. Mm-hmm. And before I would break fast, essentially before I put a bite of food in my mouth. I would get into my cold plunge.

And what would happen? Well, my core body temperature would plummet, right? And then my body would jump into this process of thermogenesis to bring myself back into temperature homeostasis. Mm-hmm. And it would, at that juncture look around for an energy substrate to make heat. To warm me back up, [00:26:00] but because I was fasted and I, because I had adopted a relatively low glycemic diet, there wasn't a tremendous amount of glucose available mm-hmm.

As an energy substrate to make that required heat. So my body had no other choice but to opt for oxidizing. Fat. Yeah. Essentially breaking down triglycerides into free fatty acids for that energy substrate to essentially upregulate my body temperature. This is how I understood it. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And the results for me were quite astonishing.

I mean, I lost 60 pounds in a very, very short period of time. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: Um, so that little stack was very, very powerful. And then. I subsequently started to layer on like a resistance training, um, regimen, and that's when I kind of really saw the. The, the [00:27:00] complete regulation of blood sugar levels, uh, as I began to develop more skeletal muscle, you know, that skeletal muscle basically just served as a, as a vacuum 

Dr. Brighten: mm-hmm.

Jeff Krasno: For glucose. Um, and, you know, it was that little Rubik's cube for me that, um, that made a huge difference in my life. And like you say, it didn't require hours upon hours upon hours. You know, it required a relatively dedicated morning practice that could be done in a relatively short period of time, and then, you know, three or four.

Like significant resistance training sessions per week. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. You talk about also eating stressed plants mm-hmm. In your book. Yeah. Define what that is for us and what does the science say about that? 

Jeff Krasno: Yeah, so I think Jeffrey Bland was the. First person to introduce me to this concept of xeno hor mutans.

Mm-hmm. Or stress plants. Um, a lot of people may be familiar with resveratrol. [00:28:00] Um, yeah. 

Dr. Brighten: I was like, maybe the French were the first to introduce us. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. 

Jeff Krasno: Um, well, you say that because re resveratrol is found in the skins of, of grapes. Mm-hmm. Um, and really it was a defense mechanism that this fruit built.

In relation to insult, hostile, 

Dr. Brighten: mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: Um, in their case, fungi, right. So this was an antifungal, a natural occurring antifungal that exists in the skins of grapes. And, you know, vintners or winemakers, um, tend to purposefully stress their grapes. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: Not for the polyphenol content necessarily. That's like 

Dr. Brighten: the byproduct Yeah.

Of bonus. 

Jeff Krasno: Um, but for the taste. Yeah. And, uh, parenthetically the most stressed grape I learned was the pinot noir. Mm-hmm. Varietal. Um, and so, um, there was. You know, resveratrol, which was then [00:29:00] famously um, kind of studied by this Australian biologist named David Sinclair, where he was, I think started with yeast and then moved on to my studies and he was giving them resveratrol and he was singing, seeing like a great, um.

Extension of, of lifespan. Uh, now I think that that riss, I'm not actually very confident that resveratrol actually applies to humans and the ex and the extension of human lifespan because there's sirtuins, which is like the pathway that it addresses. It hasn't really been shown in humans to actually, that that resveratrol actually has that same impact.

But the basic concept is, is that plants. They don't really have immune systems like humans. Mm-hmm. But they build defense mechanisms in relation to their environment. And there are certain compounds and molecules in those plants that when we eat them, the benefits then are [00:30:00] conferred to humans. So we've heard about, we talked about resveratrol, and by the way.

Y you can't just get resveratrol from wine. Yeah. I think you have to drink like a thousand glasses per day to get the dosage or something. Yeah. All of our wine 

Dr. Brighten: makers, they had really good studies coming out in their favor. It turns out, wasn't so helpful. 

Jeff Krasno: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Not so helpful. But we've heard of other, um, compounds like quercetin.

Mm-hmm. Or lutein, or curcumin. Um, again, or ECGC, which is found in green tea. These. Um, Xeno who mutans, or we know them in many cases as polyphenols 

Dr. Brighten: mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: Tend, seem to confer a health benefit. So the stress, the plants do the stressing for us and then we get some of that benefit. And, you know, Jeffrey Bland introduced me to Putatively, the most dressed plant in the world, which he deems as Himalayan Tart buckwheat.

Mm-hmm. Which is this buckwheat that. [00:31:00] Evolved in the Himalayas. So if you think about what it would be like to be growing in Himalayan soil, it'd probably be very stressful, right? Yeah. There'd be a lot of adversity, a lot of fluctuation in temperature, rocky soil, wind shearing, et cetera. And quite, you know, miraculously over the course of evolution, this particular plant, you know, developed, I think it's actually a berry developed, um.

You know, a, a, a tremendous amount of compounds mm-hmm. That seem to confer benefits to humans. So this is the concept. I think there's a lot of, uh, data still to be amassed here, to be totally candid. Um, but I think you know, more and more it's showing that like our gut microbiome, uh, really profit. From polyphenols.

Mm-hmm. Um, and, you know, as a product of a polyphenol rich diet, our bacteria, our good gut bugs will produce these metabolites, kind of these, um, [00:32:00] postbiotics. Sometimes the most famous one is butyrate, but there's like acetate and. Propionate, I think are the other ones that's sort of like the three kings of, of Postbiotics.

And it's amazing how much we've outsourced to our bacteria. Mm-hmm. In terms of human function. So butyrate is just this unbelievable, uh, short chain fatty acid that helps kind of. Maintain the integrity of the gut lining. It uprights, upregulates, insulin sensitivity, et cetera. And, and there's all these other benefits that, that butyrate place.

So I would say that, you know, find your stressed plants, you generally, they generally, um, can be found in fruits that have rich, deep coloration. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: Um. And you know, in the book I have like a huge list of all of the different plants and all of the different compounds and their purported, um, benefits.

Dr. Brighten: So yeah, I appreciate you bringing up [00:33:00] butyrate because. I have a large audience who has a DHD or their children have a DHD, and there's been recent research coming out showing butyrate can actually help with executive function. So what does that come back to? The health of our gut's. Also, why I say like, like Ayurveda had it, right?

Like it's a great source of butyrate, but to look at how. Leveraging these stress plants. Yes, it helps in the world of longevity, yes, it helps in cardiometabolic health. It can help with hormones. But to even see the benefits of cognitive function, and it's something that I often say to people, like if research is saying it helps with the most dysregulated nerve systems, which are those who are neurodivergent, like what is it going to do for you?

It can have such positive impacts and benefits. Yeah. You have 10 protocols in the book. My audience. We've got a lot of chronically stressed people, a lot of people facing burnout. How does someone start to navigate this experimentation of n of one to understand like, [00:34:00] what is the stack that's gonna work for me?

Mm-hmm. Do I have to do all the 10 protocols? What is the starting place and how do I start to figure out is it working? Is this true for me? 

Jeff Krasno: Yeah. Well first I think you need to take a really on honest inventory of your own life. Mm-hmm. I mean, part of my thesis is that chronic disease, or the majority of chronic disease is the result of chronic ease.

Mm-hmm. Essentially, we've engineered our lives at. Every turn for comfort and convenience and that comfort and convenience really like hijacks our biology in many cases. Mm-hmm. Right. You know, we have this surf it of endless calories available to us at all times. You know, Bryce, by the end of this podcast, could order up any kind of food and we'd they, it would be raiding for us at the point gate.

Right. Totally. And that's, I wanna just 

Dr. Brighten: say that's the thing about being in LA is like Uber Eats, you can get very many plants. On there. But I was just thinking, I was thinking [00:35:00] that today as we, um, you know, it's our last day here, so people dunno, we've been living together for a few days. Mm. Thank you for having this.

The rumors will fly. Well, and let me just also say that you walk the talk, 'cause I saw you out there doing the, so doing the cold plunge, doing all the things. Like you're not one of those people that's like, I wrote this book, or maybe you didn't even write your book. 'cause some people don't do that. You actually wrote your book.

Yeah. 'cause you actually do these things and you continue to do them. Uh, but I digress. You know, my point was, is that. Uh, you like LA is so amazing in terms of like the variety of food that you can get, but what Uber Eats always shows me first is like, Hey, why don't you just order like the hash browns and the muffin and like all, and I'm like, wow, the can, even that convenience.

Like factory, you have to wade through that as well. Like all of the sponsored ones are like, here is the absolute metabolic obscenity to start your day with, right? Yeah. Um, and you know, this morning we did omelets and, and vegetables. Uh, but it's that convenience [00:36:00] factor. They, convenience isn't always bad, but sometimes you're faced with like, you know, yeah.

This sometimes the, I think having so many choices. Leads to this decision fatigue and also makes it difficult, which is why my point was like 10 protocols. Like yeah, that's gonna create decision fatigue in some people. Where do you start? Yeah. So digging the inventory. So as 

Jeff Krasno: you're taking the inventory, where have you essentially leaned into too much convenience in your 

Dr. Brighten: life?

Jeff Krasno: Mm-hmm. You know, because we know that even just cooking your own meals is almost always gonna be healthier. Yeah. Than DoorDash, almost always. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: Um. And so actually taking really honest inventory about like areas in which you need to improve. Like let's just look at exercise from a moment because there's this endless data around exercise, right?

Mm-hmm. And its benefits. So, you know, one of the things that I really try to recommend is people like really reformat their relationship with exercise. So [00:37:00] ask yourself this question like, how did I evolve? Right. Well, we evolved walking a tremendous amount. Right? We walked maybe seven to 10 miles a day.

Mm-hmm. That equates to about 14,000 or 20,000 steps depending on, on how far you're moving with each step. But we also lifted heavy things. We build structures, we. Gathered firewood, et cetera. And then every once in a while we were forced to probably sprint against our will being chased by like an ungulate or something.

So there's your protocols right there for your, for your movement protocols. It's like walk a lot. Lift heavy things from time to time and get your heart rate up. Mm-hmm. A couple times a week. That's pretty, you know, that's pretty simple. But then beyond that, what we did for hundreds of thousands of years is we just moved as an integrated part of our life.

You know, we didn't have [00:38:00] Google Cal with a little fluorescent box at the bottom of the day. That's at five 30 to six 15 Equinox. Chronic cardio on the ellipsis, on the elliptical or something. We just moved. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And so this is a place where I think, you know, people can really do a really easy inventory.

It's like, am I sitting all day? You know, am I leading that sedentary life that leads to cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, sarcopenia, et cetera? Yeah. Or. And I began to essentially reformat my relationship with movement. Mm-hmm. And just integrate it into the course of my day, you know, instead of booking like a 50 minute zoom ca or an hour long Zoom call book, a 50 minute zoom call and use those 10 minutes to take a walk or do some air squats or do some pushups.

Mm-hmm. I mean, I always do that, even between podcasts and stuff like that. You were doing pushups. 

Dr. Brighten: I hope somebody caught behind the scenes. You did pushups. Before you sat [00:39:00] down. Yeah, just 

Jeff Krasno: finding those areas now, like now we have like an acronym for that, I think it's called neat, which is non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis.

Mm-hmm. You don't need an acronym. Um, you just need to essentially start to integrate moving your body, like do the dishes in an animated way, like in my household, uh, here. I have pull up bars in a number of my doorways. Mm-hmm. You know, so when I'm walking by I can just like, okay, I'm a big pull up guy, you know, I'll just knock out like 10 or 12 pull-ups like really quickly.

Mm-hmm. You know, to constantly have that my body in a form, in a, within movement. I mean, we, since the early seventies, this is a crazy statistic, Jolene, like we built 45,000 gyms mm-hmm. In the United States. 45,000 places to grunt. Yeah. And sweat. Yet obesity rates have tripled, almost quadrupled in that same time period.

Something's [00:40:00] not working there. 

Dr. Brighten: We're on the track of Wally. 

Jeff Krasno: Yeah, that's totally, yeah. Like 

Dr. Brighten: to be in the chairs and just laying there like Yeah. 

Jeff Krasno: Yeah. It'll, and it'll take us a, a long time Evolutionarily. To, to adapt to Twinkies. Yeah. You know, it's like, that's just like evolution's very, very, very slow. Yeah.

Culture is very, very, very fast. Mm-hmm. And so that is, it creates all these evolutionary mismatches. Mm-hmm. Right? Where it's like that surface of that surface of endless calories, you know, temperature neutrality, most of us. Spend most of our lives in these temperature regulated environments. Mm-hmm. With a little digital box on the wall.

Well, guess what? We have an internal thermostat. It's like right back there, you know? You like zoom in? Yeah. Zoom in around our hypothalamus that, you know. Has built in mechanisms to deal with stress. We get very, very hot. What do we do? We [00:41:00] perspire. We get very, very cold. What do we do? We shiver, right? But now we're also discovering that there's more to actually getting very, very deliberately hot.

Very, very deliberately cold, like getting deliberately hot is also has cardiovascular benefits. Mm-hmm. There's tons of data. Uh, Rhonda, Patrick has done a really amazing job. Yeah. Like rounding up these meta-analyses from clinical studies from Finland right around sauna. Mm-hmm. So the cardiovascular benefits are.

Pretty much undeniable right now around sauna. And anyone that's ever been in a deliberately hot environment kind of knows that, you know, your, your heart rate starts to go up. It's sort of a zone. It sort of mimics exercise on a zone two basis. Mm-hmm. But then we're learning about all these other things, like you get hot and your brain.

Or your body starts to activate the production of all of these proteins like heat shock proteins. Mm-hmm. Right? That these proteins that maintain the three dimensional functionality [00:42:00] of other proteins, et cetera, three dimensional shape. Or BDNF. This is a molecule that's kind of in the zeitgeist these days, right?

Brain derived neurotrophic factor. When you get hot, you essentially create this molecule that essentially helps to maintain neuro function. And even some people say activates neuro biogenesis, like the creation of neuro new neurons. Mm-hmm. In your brain, even in later into life. Right? So there seems to be all of these other benefits to aligning the way we live with how we evolved.

Mm-hmm. Because when we lived on the Serengeti, we had to deal with massive fluctuations in temperature. We had to deal with being really hot. Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Brighten: Deal 

Jeff Krasno: with being really cold. I mean, and there's so many areas to, to probe at. I mean, our relationship with light. Right. We used to wake up more or less with the sun, you know, and set our circadian rhythm with getting the right amount of that band, of the electromagnetic wave spectrum known as blue light.

Mm-hmm. [00:43:00] In the inferior part of our retina for 20 minutes, which would essentially. Through a whole variety of mechanisms, signal the pineal gland to produce melatonin at the right time of day. Yeah. And about 14 hours later. But now of course, we love Larry David so much that we wanna binge curb your enthusiasm, you know, into the night.

Mm-hmm. But what does that do? That hijacks our own engineering. Mm-hmm. Because that blue light is essentially an endocrine disruption. Mm-hmm. It's disrupting the normal balance of the secretion of pro of hormones at the right time of day. Yeah. So this is like the, where I think, you know, people can just do a pretty honest inventory of how they're truly living.

Mm-hmm. And is it in alignment with how they evolved? 

Dr. Brighten: Yeah. And I think recognizing as well, just because it's been normalized in our society doesn't mean it's actually a normal thing for the human body. As you talk about light disruption, it was interesting because. As, [00:44:00] uh, the street lamps started to go into cities, very important.

Cut down crime makes it safer. We love that. But there was a study done that showed that it started to have an impact on women's menstrual cycles and shifting ovulation. Hmm. And very quickly, because I feel like the, um, masculine energy that tries to dominate women's health. Of women themselves to try to be like, we're not that different from men, and we can do anything they do.

Um, they refute these things very quickly to be like, no, no, no, no. We're not so weak that it impacts us. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What's really interesting, so you and I are both like rare book fans, um mm-hmm. And so I've spent a lot of time, I love going through like old medical textbooks and you see these texts written by midwives.

Talking about, they weren't even called midwives then. They were just the, the birth workers talking about women being, uh, in sync with the moon, which makes sense to be ovulating with the moon because what would we do evolutionarily speaking when the [00:45:00] bright light is disrupting our melatonin and waking us up?

Yet predators are outside. Stay inside and have sex, like, wow, biology's really smart. So, uh, we see this pattern of, uh, women ovulating with the, um, full moon cycle, getting their period with the new moon cycle. It doesn't mean like, and actually wrote about this in beyond the pill. Like if you're flipped and, and just these ideas that are considered like archaic infringe and yet we see that light pollution even today can disrupt our cycles.

And I think you calling it basically this endocrine disruptor is absolutely on point. I know people are gonna argue against it and say like, oh no, it's not a plastic or things like that, but. All of these inputs, our, our body is super sensitive in the environment going through this to ask the question number one, how do I survive?

'cause that's goal number one. And number two is how do I reproduce? And for women, we have to be more sensitive to the [00:46:00] environment because that second question can be life threatening. Mm-hmm. So we have to know, is this environment safe for that now and. That is some of the earliest changes we see. Maybe it's not loss of ovulation, not loss of hormones, but the dysregulation of the hormones, the hormone shifting, that we've got too many negative stressors going on.

Yeah. Now my final question to you is about. You how you are doing this all as a CEO, as a father, right? You run commune, uh, you, you have so many hats you wear, but there was something you said to me early on that I found really interesting. You talked about this space in between and how you, you've kind of more arrived to embracing that.

If people don't know you ran Wonderlust, which was like the great yoga festivals of our time. Mm-hmm. I was a yoga instructor. We always talked about like the real practices in the space between the movements in the silence and the stillness. Mm. However, [00:47:00] despite having all of this time in the health and wellness.

Space. It seems like you, there was this evolution of arriving to really embody this awareness and why I wanna highlight this, and I think it's important is because often, especially as women, we feel like too late, I'm 40, too late, I'm 50 too late, I'm 60, too late. Why didn't I learn this sooner? I'm too late to all of this and life is too busy.

What do you say to that? 

Jeff Krasno: Yeah, this is great. Thank you for asking that question. Um. For five decades, I really inhabited a story about myself that I told myself. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: Which is that. Jeff is just the chubby kid that will never be liked. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: He'll do anything to please people in order to be liked. His self-worth is really based through the eyes of others and that's never gonna change.

Mm-hmm. My fate is written [00:48:00] in the stars of my genetics, and then I had to have an awakening. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And. The awakening was both mystical and medical. Candidly, I, I started to really study eastern religions, and one of the tenets of Buddhism, for example, is impermanence. Like the Buddha had this revelation, this awakening under the Bodhi tree 2,500 years ago without the luxury of an electron microscope or germ theory or anything like that.

That essentially everything in the universe. Was impermanent. It's subject to decay. Constructing, deconstructing, so clinging to anything or craving anything was futile. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: Because, and will only create suffering. I really resonated with that spiritual message. But then as I started to study human physiology, I also found that when you open the hood on my organism.

What you also find is impermanence. Mm-hmm. And this [00:49:00] really violated my sense of self because. Jeff wakes up in the morning and goes in front of the mirror and like does a little flex, and I'm like, Jeff, more or less is the same guy as he was yesterday, you know, because my sense of self is underwritten by this physical continuity.

But when you really, really look at what's happening in here, all there is. Is change. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. You know 

Jeff Krasno: I am. You are Bryce's seven octillion atoms experiencing 37 billion, billion chemical reactions per second. If I were to extend this monologue over a minute, I will have lost 40,000 skin cells during that time period.

Right. We are 30, we're about 70 trillion cells in our organism. 39 trillion. Last I counted more or less is bacterial. Right. Coming [00:50:00] and going every four minutes to 24 hours. Essentially, change is not only possible, it's all that's on offer. 

Dr. Brighten: Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: And this is what I really want people to take away. Like I changed my life.

When I was 50, I had a complete and utter transformation. Look, I am a million miles away from my best self still. It is a process. It is not a product. There's no terminus. You're never there. Yeah, yeah. Right. But that is my message is that change is available to you at any juncture in your life. Because when you understand your human organism as process and product, then you can take a degree of agency to shape your behaviors and shape your environment such that you actually change the trajectory.

Of your health journey on this spectrum? 

Dr. Brighten: [00:51:00] Mm-hmm. 

Jeff Krasno: Towards wholeness. That is the process of healing or. Towards disease and disconnection. That's the process of ailing. And what I want people to feel is a sense of empowerment over the trajectory of that journey. And that is the key that I learned that like I can tell myself a new story about myself because change is so available to us.

Dr. Brighten: Hmm. Beautifully said. Thank you so much for sharing your time. We will link to your book and make sure that it's available to everyone because I'm sure they're gonna wanna see these protocols and and hear more about this beautiful transformation that you went through. 

Jeff Krasno: Thanks so much, Jillian. I so appreciate being with you and just the opportunity to connect with really just the incredible community that you've built.

I, uh, I'm a community guy. Yeah. Hence commune. Hence Commune wanderlust. Um, and I, I deeply appreciate how you've cultivated and fostered a really [00:52:00] beautiful, healthy community that doesn't always need to agree on everything. Mm-hmm. But actually agrees on one thing, which is that we all share a deep common humanity.

So thanks you for doing what you do. 

 

Dr. Brighten: Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If this is the kind of content you're into, then I highly recommend checking out this.