592: The Hidden Cause of Brain Fog, Fatigue and Poor Metabolic Health | Will Cole, DC

Max Lugavere (0:00)

What up, everybody, it's episode 592 of The Genius Life. Let's rock.

What's going on, everybody, welcome back to The Genius Life, I'm your host, Max Lugavere. Today, I'm being joined by my good friend, Dr. Will Cole. He is a functional medicine practitioner, host of the lovely Art of Being Well podcast, and the co-author of the new book, Heal Your Cells. He's also, I might add, looking particularly jacked on this episode of the show. And so I was happy to welcome him to talk all things cellular health, what it actually means, why some people can do all the quote unquote right things and still struggle with fatigue, brain fog, gut issues, or poor metabolic health, and what we can do to improve the way our cells function today. We also get into mitochondrial health, gut resilience, fasting, hormesis, dietary diversity, environmental toxins, peptides, and why overnutrition may be an underappreciated driver of accelerated aging. We also talk about how to pursue better health without becoming obsessive or fearful about every possible choice that you make. And yes, somehow we also get into ozempic personality, spirituality, hunger, and the biomechanics of taking a good poop. Listen through all the way to the end. You're not going to want to miss a beat. And if you're enjoying the show, please make sure that you're subscribed wherever you listen, share this episode with somebody who could benefit, or at the very least be entertained by it, and consider heading over to maxlugavere.com to sign up for my free weekly newsletter where I dole out all my best health tips every Friday. About 120,000 people all around the world are already signed up and loving it, and you likely will as well. Now with all that out of the way, here's my conversation with Dr. Will Cole. Let's go.

Dr. Will Cole, welcome to the show. How are you?

Will Cole (1:56)

Oh my gosh, buddy. I am so happy to be here.

I'm ready. I'm good. How are you?

Max Lugavere (2:03)

I'm doing good. I just have to call out to my listeners that you are looking chiseled. You've got this and you've got the beard and you're wearing flannel. You've got the whole like, oops, I didn't know I was sexy look going on.

It's a good look. It's a look.

Will Cole (2:17)

Thanks, Ben.

You know what this unique clothe, shout out to the unique clothe. You know what a unique clothe?

Max Lugavere (2:23)

Goaded brand, of course.

Will Cole (2:24)

Affordable Japanese, I think. Basic jeans. Basic stuff. I'm a basic guy.

Max Lugavere (2:31)

Have you been lifting?

Will Cole (2:32)

Yeah, so dude, this is my... I have leaned down.

And yeah, lifting more heavier weights with good form and watching macros being more intentional with that, which I've heard you have these conversations, these nuanced conversations about calories matter, but they're not everything, but they still are a component to it.

Max Lugavere (2:53)

Okay, so we're talking about how to heal your cells. The subject of your new book that you've co-written with Josh Axe.

Very excited for it, I've perused it. You've got tons of great information in there. What does it actually mean biologically to heal your cells?

Will Cole (3:07)

Yeah, so a few reasons why I wanted to write this. One is that my dad died in 2023 suddenly in a car accident. He was going to pick up my mom. He had lost consciousness, passed out in the car. We're pacing together what the autopsy and police report and what people told us that were there.

Picking up my mom from the airport and passed out from some cardiovascular event and crashed into a tree full speed and died.

And it got me thinking about, OK, this is a guy that did more than most people did about health. Ate cleaner, moved his body, exercised, was always in the health space.

What, hindsight is 2020 and you can't control everything, right? So I, but I do, I see telehealth patients for a living. So I started thinking again, what was missing there? Well, a few things. One is that he was 63 years old. So he did what he all, what a lot of guys at that age that were more health conscious. I'll just do what I always do. I, I'll just eat. I know what to eat. I know what to work out. I'll just buckle down and do the, do the thing. It always worked for him before, but 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. It just wasn't, the bioaccumulation, the effect of time, he couldn't get away with what he used to get away with. He couldn't balance back like he could balance back at 63, than he could in his 20, you know, younger age. So, I have this long way, circuitous way of saying, like, what's cellular health? Why I'm saying this is that same year, there was a study published in, out of Stanford, but published in Nature, I believe, and found one in five adults over the age of 50 had one organ aging more rapidly than other organs. And the cells of that organ were aging more rapidly. And what that, why that mattered is because, and that equals, let me say this, about 22 million Americans. That's over 50, let alone, we can talk about the data of Gen Z and millennials. They're aging even faster than people over 50 So whatever the stats are for people over 50, it's even worse for people that are younger. That's what the data shows. If their brain cells were aging more rapidly, they were at an 80% increased risk of some neurodegenerative problem like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's. If their heart cells were aging more rapidly, they were at over a 200% increased risk of some heart failure, heart attack, stroke. So this uneven aging, but this rapidity of aging, we have to understand, and it took me down a rabbit hole. Is that the saying rabbit trail, rabbit hole? I always mess that up. Some little rabbit and a little hole, we walk down. So I just became obsessed, healthy obsession with mechanistically what's going on. Because clinically, I had always seen, we see a lot of autoimmune cases, and we know molecular mimicry exists. I mean, that's when the immune system is attacking certain parts of the body, the myelin sheath for MS, the gut, ulcerative cladocynchrones, the thyroid, Hashimoto's disease. Okay, but really, it's not an organ problem, it's the cells that make up that organ. It's actually a cellular dysfunction that's going on here.