The 3 Foods That are Worse Than Cocaine | Dr. Casey Means PT 2 (Fan Fave)

Lisa Bilyeu (0:00)

What up, my homie, this is Lisa Bilyeu, and welcome back to Women of Impact. And this is part two of this incredibly eye-opening conversation with the New York Times best-selling author, co-founder of a health technology company, and freaking expert in what you need to know in order to feel amazing, incredible, avoid disease, age beautifully, and feel amazing about yourself. That's right, it's my girl, Dr. Casey Means. And we're digging even deeper into the three types of food that you need to start avoiding if you actually want to stop feeling like utter crap all the time. Now, this could be anything from you're gaining weight and you haven't actually changed your diet, you're getting headaches, but you're still drinking plenty of water, you have moodiness, even though you're getting an incredible amount of sleep. I can understand, trust me, I've been there so many times where I'm trying to do the thing, I'm trying to do the right moves, and yet I somehow end up feeling like utter crap, which then, let's be honest, holds me back from building my dream, going towards that goal, having a beautiful relationship, and just in general, having incredible confidence that I can keep showing up every day. So guys, we've got to start looking at what we're eating, how we're doing things, and there's no better person to help us inform us about all of these things. So she's going to actually teach us the real world tactics and tools so that you can spot all the hidden bad foods that companies actually want you to think is good. And now it actually allows you to make better decisions and be better informed on the choices that you make when it comes to your diet. Now, if you follow Dr. Casey's advice and start to look at food and nutrition in a new way, then you can actually finally take back control of your health, which then actually means that you can improve symptoms like infertility, low energy, anxiety, depression, weight gain, and so much more. And as a result, feel so much better about yourself and about life in general.

Knowledge is freaking power, Mahami. So let's get right back in with today's episode. I'm Lisa Bilyeu. Welcome to Women of Impact.

One thing you broke out in your book, which I absolutely loved, are when you eat this, this is what is communicating to your body. And I'd love to go through a few of them because, again, I'm very actionable and so understanding the links between things, and then I can repeat it if I'm at a restaurant, like it really helps me. So you talk about, we already kind of went over the omega-3 fatty acids, which you mentioned are in salmon, sardines, chia seeds, things like that. But you say that it puts down your defenses and that things are now safe. That's what you're telling your body.

Casey Means (2:40)

Yes.

Yeah, so I love to think of different nutrients as a language that we communicate with our bodies. We can't necessarily speak to ourselves with words, but we can speak to them through nutrients and through inputs that we put in. So we should think about what we're putting in our mouths and what story that's telling to our body about how it needs to be and what the environment is like. And one of the things that omega-3 fats can tell our body is that you can put down your defenses, things are safe. And the reason for that is so cool.

When these omega-3 fats are incorporated into our cell membranes, one of the purposes is for structure, but a functional purpose of those omega-3s is actually that our immune cells, when they are activated and we have like an acute inflammatory episode. So think about like you get a cut, a paper cut and it's red and hot, that's because the immune cells have come to the site of injury and they're cleaning up the mess, they're eating whatever bacteria got in and they're helping heal the wound. And then they need to settle down and go back to their place. You know, in the bone marrow or the lymph nodes, we want them to settle down. When they don't settle down and they just stick around, that's chronic inflammation and that's bad. We want acute inflammation when it's needed, but we do not want it turning into chronic inflammation where the immune cells don't know to retreat because then we get collateral damage from their overactivity.

Well, one of the ways we tell the immune cells to go back and retreat after acute inflammation is by immune cells actually snipping omega-3s off the cell membrane and creating these by-products called Specialized Pro-Resolving Mediators, SPM, long fancy word, but basically it's a signal made from omega-3 fats that are the signal to the immune cells that they can go back and retreat. If we don't have enough omega-3s in the body, we don't actually manufacture these chemical messengers to tell the immune cells to simmer down. That's part of the process that leads to chronic inflammation. One of the reasons I eat omega-3s in large quantities and really focus on that in my diet is because I want to have the substrates in my body to be able to manufacture chemical mediators that tell my immune cells to chill out after they've done their work. That is key because we know, of course, that so many of these conditions we're facing today are related to chronic inflammation. How do we get on top of that? We speak to ourselves with nutrients in order to help them have the information they need to simmer down.