Ep 567: Aging Strong with Ayurveda with Dr. John Douillard

In this episode of The HealthFix Podcast, Dr. Jannine Krause is joined by Dr. John Douillard, DC, CAP, a globally recognized Ayurvedic expert and sports medicine educator with over 40 years of experience. They explore how the principles of Ayurveda can be used to optimize digestion, balance hormones, and age strong — especially during the perimenopausal and midlife years.

You’ll learn how syncing your diet, lifestyle, and lymphatic health to the seasons can unlock more energy, improve metabolic function, and help you feel good in your body again after 40.

Dr. Douillard is the creator of LifeSpa.com, a hub of free Ayurvedic resources and home to the Ayurveda Meets Modern Science podcast, his popular 3-Season Diet, and free health quizzes for digestion and lymph flow.

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🌿 Dr. Douillard’s Top Resources Mentioned:

• ✨ LifeSpa.com – Free Ayurvedic Guides & Quizzes
• 🧠 Digestive Health Quiz
• 💧 Lymph Health Quiz
• 📩 Download the Free 3-Season Diet Guide
• ❄️ Winter Vata Diet + Grocery List

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🎧 About Dr. John Douillard, DC, CAP

Dr. Douillard is a globally respected Ayurvedic and natural health educator, author of 7 health books, and host of the Ayurveda Meets Modern Science podcast. A former Director of Player Development for the New Jersey Nets NBA team, he now dedicates his life to helping the public access free ancient healing wisdom through his platform LifeSpa.com.

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⚡ If you’re over 40 and looking to sync your body with nature to boost energy, balance hormones, and age strong, this episode is a must-listen.

✅ Like, Subscribe & Share
🧪 Take Dr. Krause’s What’s Accelerating Your Aging? Quiz to get your custom vitality blueprint

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Podcast Transcript

Chapters

00:00 Journey into Ayurveda: A Personal Story
06:54 The Intersection of Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science
11:12 Understanding Disease: The Role of Digestion
15:55 The Impact of Stress on Health
20:28 Navigating Midlife Transitions
24:55 The Importance of Breath and the Vagus Nerve
29:22 Cleansing: A Path to Balance and Health
39:38 Cleansing and Dietary Reset
42:15 The Role of Fats in Metabolism
44:39 Eating According to Nature’s Seasons
46:41 The Importance of Microbial Diversity
49:32 Understanding Ayurvedic Body Types
53:28 Balancing Diet with Seasonal Foods
58:10 Lymphatic Health and Ayurvedic Practices
01:05:40 Resources for Ayurvedic Living
01:09:15 Outro THFP 2022.mp3

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Jannine Krause (00:01.471)
Dr. John Duyard, welcome to the Health Fix Podcast.

John Douillard (00:06.562)
Great to be here, Janine. Thank you so much.

Jannine Krause (00:09.075)
Hey, you know, I’m always interested when someone is really into something like Ayurveda because let’s face it, you know, it’s still in the West and in the US in particular, folks are still kind of learning about it. Yoga was kind of the big introduction to that type of medicine and bringing things in. Obviously, Ayurveda is different than just yoga. Folks are starting to wake up a little bit more to it, but…

Chiropractic background, how did you end up falling into Ayurvedic medicine from there?

John Douillard (00:41.646)
Well, I mean, it was a long time ago. It was probably in early 1980s. I was taking a 500 hour acupuncture class and they just mentioned Ayurveda. And for whatever reason, it just kind of clicked. And I was like, what? There’s this ancient traditional system of medicine in India. It’s been around for thousands of years. for some reason, I was more attracted to that than Chinese medicine. So I ended up going to a lecture a few months later.

about meditation and yoga and Ayurveda. And afterwards I went up to the Indian Ayurvedic doctor there and I asked him, I said, and I was training for an Ironman. I said, I’m training for an Ironman. I wonder if according to Ayurveda, would this be good? They’re like, what do you think? And he looked at me and was like, what is that? And I said, well, an Ironman is like a two and a half mile swim in the ocean, a 112 mile bike, and a 26 mile run. He looked at me was like,

Why do you do that? And I was like, no answer. never really, no one ever asked me why I did it. I just did it because I could kind of thing. And he looked at me like I was an idiot. And he said, do you meditate? And I said, yes. Thank God I had something positive to say. And he said, do you sleep while you meditate? And I said, deeply. I get this really deep sleep. I conk out. It’s great. And he looked at me again like I was an idiot and said,

Meditation is a completely different state than sleep. When you’re sleeping, when you should be meditating, you’re exhausted. Meditation is a state of being alert and resting at the same time. It’s like the two opposites coexisting. And I’m going like, oh, I just conk out and go to sleep. And he goes, you’re exhausted. And I was like, oh, and he said, this is whatever you’re doing, I don’t think it’s a good idea. And I say, well, what if I were to…

meditate and stay awake, alert and still do all this training, would it be okay? And he looked at me and he was like, yes, yes, yes. And he’s just like, next please, you know, just to get rid of me. And so that’s what I did. I started going to meditation retreats. I started resting more, training less, meditating more. After a two week meditation retreat, I just did yoga breathing, meditation, yoga breathing, meditation every day, like three four times, rounds and rounds and rounds of that a day.

John Douillard (03:07.202)
I was like shot out of a cannon. got into this runner’s high thing that lasted three months in my life. In my competitive world, I started competing and placing in many events. This is early on in the triathlon days in the South Bay in California. In my internship, my clinic, was just like, had a level of bandwidth and capacity that I never experienced in the four years before I was in school, chiropractic college. And I was just like,

like something happened to me. lot of my friends who were triathletes learned how to meditate because they were like, whatever you’re doing, are you on steroids? They thought I was doing some drug and it was just that I was getting this deep rest and I was getting the recovery that I needed. And that just got me so like blown away that I wanted to know more about the runner’s high and the zone. I started reading books like the Psychic Side of Sports by Michael Murphy years ago and all these books about these peak experiences. And I started

Then I had a chance in 1986 to go to India to study Ayurveda. At least I had a six week vacation and my sister was living there and she’s, don’t you come? You can stay at my place and you can go try to learn Ayurveda. I was like, cool, I’m on it. So I went, I ended up meeting an Ayurvedic doctor there, like the second day I was there, they invited me to stay permanently, which I did for like a year and a half. That’s where I met Deepak Chopra. And after a year and a half came back,

and kind co-directed his center for eight years, and I started teaching medical doctors, and that was his gig at that time. So I started teaching medical doctors, and it became really clear that the chiropractor teaching weird, Ayurvedic medicine to medical doctors needed a little help, and the help was modern science. So I started putting together the ancient wisdom and the modern science way back in, this was 1986.

and I started putting those together. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since is taking this ancient wisdom, which is like phenomenal because there’s so much science behind it that nobody even knows is out there. And from my perspective, if you can take something that was around as a medical practice for thousands of years and still around today and has modern science to back it up, gosh, I think we should at least look at that. Because modern science alone, you know, right?

John Douillard (05:30.21)
Coffee can be good, coffee can be bad, so wheat, dairy, you name it. I can give you science on both sides of the aisle. People don’t know should I be a carnivore or a vegan. People are so confused. But if you have time tested wisdom, 5,000 years old in modern science, I think that’s worth taking a look at. And that’s what I do.

Jannine Krause (05:41.097)
get.

Jannine Krause (05:51.241)
I think that is fascinating to combine the two in terms of the research and the wisdom because yeah, people are confused. I absolutely agree.

I always, my background of course, Chinese medicine, but I find that there’s a lot of overlap when you really get down to the nitty-gritty between Ayurveda and Chinese medicine. And I kind of feel it probably evolved somewhat at the same time, just two different locations in the world. what it seems is that so many people, not people, but so many things are explained really well by the simple principles.

of these types of energetic and balanced methods. sometimes it’s almost too simple. I don’t know if you found that. You’re like, huh, hot or cold, or hmm, some type of constitutional thing. And explains a lot for bases of why someone might have some certain condition or why they’re prone to something.

John Douillard (06:54.274)
I love that. And that’s why you don’t have to memorize anything because Ayurveda and Chinese medicine are sort of like, know, Ayurveda means the science of life. So it’s sort of like really studying nature and understanding how seasons change and the microbes in the soil change. And we have a constitution that kind of employs some of those governing principles in nature, like winter, which is cold. We call it vata.

you know, or air-based. And there’s people who are really cold all the time. They have a of winter qualities in their constitution. And there’s other people who are very fiery and competitive and driven in summer qualities. We call that Pitta. And they’re the ones throwing off the covers, never wear a jacket or a hat. You know, in the Vata, winter types are always bundling up, right? So we are basically, you know, we mimic and have those same governing principles inside of us that…

we see in our seasons, in the times of day that change. There’s an incredible understanding of circadian rhythms now and seasonal changes and how we’re so disconnected from those rhythms. And Ayurveda and probably Chinese medicine too, were systems to help get us back into rhythm. So the body is going with the current versus against it. And we’ve done a bang up job going against it in our culture. And what I love about Chinese medicine and Ayurveda too, and this is kind of my take.

on what makes them different is they are designed to help the body do the job, to restore function of the body so the body can heal itself. And that is a huge place to start. If that doesn’t work, well then maybe we use some naturopathic or functional medicine approaches, or we’ll use a natural laxative or a bioidentical hormone or digestive enzymes.

to help do the job for the body to get it back into balance as a natural medicine. And a medicine means get on it, better, get off, which is completely changed in our culture now. People are on medicines lifelong, which was really a bad idea. And then if that doesn’t work, you can go to Western medicine and they’re gonna give you a drug or a surgery. You can do the job for you at any cost, but…

John Douillard (09:13.942)
Sometimes that’s what we need as well. And it’s like three buffets, right? And I think the buffet you want to start with is the one that’s going to get us to do the job for ourselves so we don’t become dependent on a pill or a powder or a drug or anything like that down the road. And that’s kind of where I think you and I live is this kind of Ayurvedic Chinese world where we’re trying to get the body back into balance so it can function on its own. And that means getting in harmony with nature.

living downstream with the current reset biological clocks with nature circadian rhythms. When that happens, a lot of good things happen.

Jannine Krause (09:47.605)
Absolutely, absolutely. One of the things that you mentioned and something that I keep trying to reiterate on the podcast and with my clients as well is the balance in the body. Because I think we’ve kind of got even away from like, why do we get sick? We’ve gone all these pathways of killing Lyme and going down mold and we are going down these rabbit holes of chronic illness. And unfortunately, we have to think about like, where did this start?

What was the imbalance in the first place? What’s out of balance? And could we maybe put that balance back and then we’re not dealing with all of these chronic issues that can happen. What’s your take on all the long, you know, viruses like Epstein-Barr and Lyme and all that kind of stuff? What’s your thought process there?

John Douillard (10:35.96)
Well, from the Ayurvedic perspective, 85 % of all disease starts in your digestive system, right? So if you want to, and there was a study done that showed if you don’t digest your protein and your fats properly, okay, so what are those? Your proteins are the gluten, the dairy, the nuts, the seeds, the beans, the lectins, the anti-nutrients, the nitrates, the goitrogens, the oxalates, everything that everybody’s telling us not to eat because they’re hard to digest.

If you don’t digest them well, they will go incompletely digested into your intestinal tract. If you don’t digest the fats well, good fats and bad fats through 70 million tons of toxic chemicals dump in our atmosphere every year, according to the EPA. They filter down to the air we breathe, water we drink, and food we eat, right? So those are bad fats. We have to break them down and detoxify them. We have the ability to do that, believe it or not, if digestion is strong.

But if digestion is weak, the proteins and fats go into your intestinal tract. And this is a quote from the Medical Journal. Those proteins and fats will be too big as a molecule, because they’re not broken down, to get into your blood and nourish you or be detoxified properly. And they’ll get uptaken into the garbage can, which is the collecting ducts of your lymphatic system. Your lymphatic system, most of it, the lion’s share of it, lines your intestinal tract. And that’s called your gut immunity.

70 % of your immune response is right there. And the lymph is also trying to take out the trash, the garbage, trying to carry your immune system and deliver fat as baseline energy to every cell of your body. So things like Epstein-Barr, chronic fatigue, know, viruses penetrate through you, the respiratory mucosa or the intestinal mucosa. And if you don’t have a good lymphatic function around those tissues, then you’re going to have

an immune event because that’s where your immune system lives. And if your immune system is compromised because you didn’t digest properly, because all the trash, undigested proteins, that are clogging up the lymph and creating a big problem there, you’re gonna have a more vulnerable experience with immune events. So when you take out all the hard to digest foods, because we don’t digest them well, because we have lousy digestion in America,

John Douillard (12:56.792)
That’s why we’re dependent on digestive enzymes to do the job for us. Then the proteins and fats are gonna go into your incestinal tract, into your lymph and create potentially a vulnerability in your gut immunity. What’s really amazing is those harder to digest foods that everybody’s saying, don’t eat, don’t eat, don’t eat, because you feel bad when you eat them. And if you feel bad eating something, of course don’t eat it. But that didn’t solve the problem. All that did was take the issue, the symptomatic issue away.

Let’s now identify what part of your digestive system is broken and fix that because your digestive strength and your immune strength and your ability to detoxify are all linked together. They’re the same system. So those hard to digest proteins provide a hormesis, a little bit of irritation on the lining of your gut. And that is why we have gut immunity, 70 % of your immune response.

And the gut immunity is bi-directionally linked to respiratory immunity. So there’s our two places we’ve become vulnerable to viral infections. So if you take all those hard to digest foods that create just enough irritation to give us an immune response, we become vulnerable in terms of an immune event. There was an crazy study real quick with Amish kids. And Amish kids, which were traditional farmers, they have

Jannine Krause (14:21.717)
Mm.

John Douillard (14:26.018)
They run around, the kids run around barefoot in the barns. They have cows as pets and they have the lowest rates of asthma on the planet. Their genetic cousins that came from the same valley in Switzerland, came here called the Hutterites and they became sterile modern farmers, dairy farmers. And those kids had the highest rates of asthma on the planet. Like it doesn’t make any sense, right? Same genetic pool. So they measured the dust in the barns of the Amish kids and they found that the dust

was creating just enough hormetic irritation of the respiratory mucosa to trigger an immune response against asthma. They have the lowest rates of asthma on the planet. Point being, we take out the dairy, the nuts, the seeds, the grains, the looms, the nightshades, the beans, the rice, which we are hearing nothing, eat meat and vegetables, and that’s all you should eat. It’s like we are feeling better because we’ve taken everything hard to digest out of the diet.

but we become more vulnerable to the environmental pollutants, the toxins, we’re not detoxifying well, we’re not digesting well, we’re not delivering the nutrients well, and our lymph system, which is the most vulnerable piece of the puzzle, and Ayurveda, it’s the system linked to longevity, and if that system’s compromised because you didn’t digest your food well, you’re gonna pay those prices, as you said, Epstein-Barr, all that, and that’s where it comes from. So yeah, treat the virus the best you can if you get one, but boy.

go upstream and get to the upstream cause, that’s the key.

Jannine Krause (15:57.137)
such valuable information there. I think a lot of people, you know, have heard the treat the gut and then it turns into do the AIP program or like you said, carnivore or, you know, or go into just meat and veggies. And I find that a lot of people when they do that, they’ll come back and go, now I’m more sensitive. I can’t eat. You know, I go to a restaurant and now my system pops off. And I’ve done this to myself because of course, as a naturopath, we’re known for

Elimination diets and all that kind of stuff and one of the biggest places that I see this being a huge detriment is in midlife because women are noticing like their metabolism is changing men too and Then it starts to become what do I take out? What do I need to remove? What do I need to do? So I’d love to hear your your thought process on Moving into midlife whether it’s andropause whether it’s menopause whether it’s

you know, this transition and how to keep the metabolism going, how to keep the lymphatic system going. Where do we start? Do we start looking at what is our constitution? What are we presenting with? Give us the scoop.

John Douillard (17:06.656)
I mean, there’s so much there because, know, let’s start from the beginning. And this is something that is a little bit controversial to talk about, but in Ayurvedic medicine and maybe in Chinese medicine. And this just happened to my daughter. She’s on, she’s on, she’s a college track runner, right? And.

Jannine Krause (17:09.545)
Yes.

John Douillard (17:25.428)
She, you it’s hot. were like yesterday, the day before, was 104 degrees here. And she just started her period. And she was feeling like really, went to her work and she came back. I’m super tired. like, just, my period just started. And she said, I want to go take a nap. said, great, that’s perfect. Just go rest. And then like four hours later, she comes back. She’s all ready to go to the track. I’m going like, what are you doing? And she goes, I’m going to the track. I go, you’re menstruating. And she goes, yeah.

but I got to go to the track.” And you know, they’re just addicted. And so she’s really stubborn, so it’s hard to sometimes, you know, tell her, I said, okay, go, whatever. And then she came back, that was yesterday, and then yesterday she went to work again, came back, and she said, like, I feel achy, I feel sick, I feel so tired, I think I have West Nile viruses, like, happening in our little town here. like, I think I have West Nile and all this stuff. And I’m going…

You know, so in Ayurvedic medicine, the idea is that when you’re menstruating, the energy is all going down.

And it’s a time when the body is designed to be more introspective and to develop like intuition and women’s intuition and really pull back the bow and become more self-aware. And during that period of time where the body is going within, it’s a power surge. It’s a really important time. And if you exercise or stimulate, then you’re just taking the energy, which is going down for really healthy reproductive function. It’ll be keeping the biological clocks for reproduction and synch

with the Seriocradian rhythms, they’re getting pulled up to go run on a track at 104 degrees. You know what I mean? And then that body has to borrow from Peter to pay Paul to give the energy to go run the track. And then that becomes depleted where if you let the body just take a little bit of time. When I was…

John Douillard (19:21.42)
years and years ago, Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King, who wrote the forward one of my books, they would come for Ayurvedic detoxification when I had an Ayurvedic detox clinic. And Martina told me, she said, whenever I would go to a tournament and I had my menstrual cycle, she was like, it ain’t gonna happen. Like, I’m not gonna, I just know I don’t have the juice to just win this tournament the way I would when I was not cycling. And it’s just a thing. And if you just respect that time,

If you don’t have to go to the track for 104 degrees, don’t go. Don’t schedule a marathon during that time. Schedule lighter duty, read a book, go in within, meditate more. There are cycles in nature of rest and activity. Winter is a resting dormant cycle in nature. And summer, very active, longer days. We are part of those rhythms. So during the menstrual cycle, don’t schedule…

extra stuff during that period of your month, just see if you can dial it down a little bit and meditate more and read more and rest more. Those kind of things. Simple because that sets up a rhythm of not barring Peter to pay Paul for a whole lifetime. So by the time you get to, right, the time you get to midlife where you start to transition, haven’t go, you don’t go, you’re not going into that with no gas in your tank. So that’s the first piece of the

And I get, a lot of times, years ago when I first started talking about that, women would say, no, you’re telling us that women aren’t as good and not as strong. I think women, I just came back from Utah spending a week at a ranch in the ancient, the Canyon of the Ancients where in the Pueblo ruins and all that.

and talking to a lot of Navajo. And that’s a matriarchal society. And I was like, I think that’s who should run this world. There’s women, because they’re not going to kill everybody. I mean, I just think it’s so crazy. We have men running the show here. It’s stupid. And so I am such a big fan of that. And I don’t think that.

John Douillard (21:32.338)
having a master cycle and taking a little time off is a weakness. I think it’s pulling back the bow to become more self-aware so they can govern from deep within, from the science within versus all the stimulation that we kind of live and breathe by from the outside world, if that makes any sense.

Jannine Krause (21:50.429)
Makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense. I’m kind of glad you’re saying it, because it’s kind of like, you know, when mom says something, we just need somebody outside to say it again, because the biggest thing I see, and I’m guilty of it myself being, you know, into heavy weightlifting, running, biking, all the things too, I pushed myself for years. And living, we kind of briefly mentioned Colorado, and living in Colorado,

It’s one of those things, anywhere where folks are very fit, you feel like you have to compete with everyone else. Especially when I lived in Breckenridge, when I had a seven month pregnant neighbor running past me faster, I’m like, I’m going faster. You know, it’s you feel that drive. And I think a lot of people feel that drive to keep competing, keep going, do those things. And we unfortunately pay the price when we start going into perimenopause and menopause, because like you said, the tanks.

are depleted, the adrenals are depleted incredibly. And that’s one side of it. And for a lot of folks that aren’t athletes or former athletes, the other tank depletion is stress and stress on the body. And I’m very curious as to how in Ayurvedic medicine, mean, meditation, we’ve got the other types of yoga, different body, what about in terms of food? What about in terms of other lifestyle things? What does Ayurveda say about the vagus nerve?

and those kind of things, nervous system balancing. What kind of stuff?

John Douillard (23:16.716)
Well, mean, when you look at 85 % of the imbalances caused by digestion, and then you go, OK, what screws up digestion? Well, it’s stress.

You know, they talked about thousands of years ago that the seat of the nervous system was your intestinal tract. They said that 5,000 years ago. And now research has shown that it produces like 95 % of your serotonin, your gut does. All the neurotransmitters are produced here. They call it the second brain. There’s neurons in your gut, then in your brain. And all this research now come out that this intestinal tract with all the microbes that are doing most of the thinking and craving and desiring for us.

Jannine Krause (23:36.509)
And thank

John Douillard (23:57.77)
is in your gut. And that is going to live or die based on the quality, integrity, and strength of your digestive system, right? So that’s where that rubber meets the road. And then you take Pranayam breathing techniques, an Ayurvedic tool, And boy, you know, what people don’t realize is that your diaphragm, the most important muscle in your body,

You can’t put a dumbbell on it and make it stronger. There was a recent study with elite athletes and 91 % of them athletes did not have a diaphragm relaxing and contracting fully. And therefore none of us do. And the diaphragm isn’t just a breathing muscle, which is so critical. It’s the number one pump for your entire lymphatic system.

Nobody knows that, they don’t tell you that. I was coming out of a restaurant about a year ago, and as I was coming into the restaurant, these elderly folks were coming out of the restaurant. They were like in their late 80s or 90s, and they were all very frail, mouths open, breathing really shallow. I was helping them get out of the restaurant. And I looked, I was like, God, I wish someone would have told them that, and here’s science behind what I’m gonna say right now, that…

if someone told them they could breathe five minutes a day and prevent and even reverse the heartburn, the GERD and the reflux, because strengthening your diaphragm breathing techniques in Western medicine called maximum inspiratory breathing techniques, which strengthen your diaphragm, have been shown in about 15 studies to reverse your heartburn, GERD, reflux and indigestion.

Does your doctor ever tell you that? There’s studies that show you can breathe the way your heart burn. No, they just give you a pill, which makes things worse really, ultimately. Studies show that when you breathe five minutes a day, strengthening your diaphragm can reverse your blood pressure just as good as the medication within three minutes.

John Douillard (26:00.782)
Studies show that that diaphragm when you strengthen it pumps the lymphatic system, the cerebral spinal fluid in and out of your brain and reverses and protects you from cognitive decline because the diaphragm is the pump of the brain, lymph and glymphatic systems which dump out three pounds of trash out of your head, your brain every year. And if this brain can’t take the trash out, studies now show, and this is only since about 15 years ago, 17, 18 years ago, I guess now.

that they discovered this at the University of Virginia. But Ayurveda has been talking about brain lymphatic congestion for thousands of years. And they’ve linked it now, congestion of the brain lymph, which is connected to your diaphragm, inability to breathe, to anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, inflammation, infection, autoimmunity, poor sleep. And that’s just the short list. So it’s like, wow, you know, we have to do this pranayama.

We have to learn how to breathe. We have to practice and keep strengthening the diaphragm because your rib cage has one job in life. Squeeze all the air out, right? And if your diaphragm gets weaker because we’re sitting and slouching and pushing the rib cage into the diaphragm, pushing it into a downward pre-contracted position so it really can’t hardly ever while you’re in your car, on your couch, in your on your desk, at your computer, can’t contract fully.

It ain’t gonna over time. The rib cage will win this war and you’ll start breathing really shallow. And it just goes worse. It gets worse because the upper chest is the fight or flight receptor. So now we’re telling the body with every breath, 20,000 breaths per day, your life’s an emergency right now. That’s like all we really need on top of all the incoming stress in our life. And then we do this crazy thing called over breathing, which research shows that people who shallow breathe and most of us do don’t even know it.

75 % of the oxygen they’re breathing in, they breathe it right back out on you. We’re so wasteful. And as a result of that, the oxygen in your blood, when you put the thing on your finger, the oximeter on your finger, and they say, oh, you’ve got 98 % saturation, Ms. Jones, you’re fine. But that’s just how much, that’s because you’re trying to jam all this oxygen the body can’t take anymore. And what happens is your oxygen goes high.

John Douillard (28:23.074)
because you’re shallow breathing, you’re breathing off all the CO2 so your oxygen goes high, CO2 goes low. And that is the perfect storm for anxiety, which is exactly why when people have an anxiety attack, what do they do? Put a paper bag over their mouth, they re-breathe their carbon dioxide, CO2 levels come up and they get calm. And because we have lost our arithmetic function, we slowly are, and all the incoming stress in our culture, we keep telling the body life’s an emergency.

We breathe in a way that tells the body life’s an emergency. And that incoming stress, to answer your question, sorry to take so long, but the incoming stress is exactly what causes all of the metabolic syndrome issues and even linked to digestive issues. I wrote an article about this because I was so frustrated. you must have this too, right? So many healthy patients that come in and they go to the doctor and…

Jannine Krause (29:02.965)
Thank

John Douillard (29:22.286)
They got high cholesterol, they got high blood sugar, they need to go on a statin, all this stuff, right? And I said, well, let’s look and see, look at stress impacting those. So if you’re under chronic stress, the rev, the stimulation, the go, go, go, I was even thinking the other day, like, when in the history of the world did human beings go 60 miles an hour every day of their life? Like, we’re just moving through space and time faster than we ever did before.

Jannine Krause (29:46.101)
you

John Douillard (29:50.306)
this on the car, the driving, go here, go here, go there. We all know it’s just way too much incoming compared to like where I just came from in Utah, the stillness and the calm of these native people, know? Like, no, it is such a different culture. And so if you’re under that kind of stress, what is your body gonna do?

It’s gonna try to dump as much sugar in your blood to give you more energy to get up a tree to save your life, because this emergency doesn’t end. It’s gonna put more cholesterol into your blood because cholesterol is what’s used to make stress fighting hormone, which you desperately need, because you’re telling your body life’s an emergency. It’s gonna raise your blood pressure, right, to get up a tree. It’s going to tell you any extra fuel I can find, I’m gonna put it under the mattress around my belly, so I have some reserve fuel in case this war never ends. I mean, that…

chronic stress has been directly linked to every aspect of all the epidemics of our time. And then I said, well, what if we did meditation, looked at research on meditation, like a stress reduction technique, and study after study, meditation lowers cholesterol, lowers abdominal obesity, and blood pressure, and blood sugar is like, yeah, it’s not a deficiency in a pill or a powder, or even an herb, or definitely not a statin. It’s we have to

take steps to kind of dialing down the incoming and pull back the bow and become calm. I say pull back the bow, what I mean is that if you pull back the bow and you’re moving it like this all over like this and you shoot it, you’re never gonna find the arrow. But if I pull back the bow and hold it perfectly still and then take action from that calm place, in Ayurveda this is called transformational. Like it’s such an important place to start.

functioning from that inner experience of calm, that deep reservoir of stillness and love and kindness inside of all of us. And that’s really like the message. Yoga, breathing, meditation gives you access to that calm. So you’re not just getting all your satisfaction from this outside world of I’m happy if I get a new car, I get a new dress, or a new this or a new that or.

John Douillard (32:07.662)
food or restaurants or movies and all this stuff from the outside stimulating us, which never does really. And Ayurveda and Chinese medicine is like, wait, there’s a deeper side to this. And if we make the lake really calm, you can see the bottom and then you can look and see what the body can become more self-aware, recognize problems as problems and elicit a natural healing response.

So that’s why all this research shows, yeah, meditation, stress reduction is so critical, but tying that with a lifestyle that’s going with the current, know, biological clocks and rhythms being in sync, yeah, that’s game changing.

Jannine Krause (32:52.944)
I’m thinking of a couple different things. One, this is exactly kind of where I’ve come to with my practice. I’ve kind of come full circle. You when I got out, it was like, yes, I’m going to do all of the restorative stuff. We’re going to work on breathing. We’re going to work on all these things. And then I learned that society is very still looking for a magic pill or the one thing or the one magical thing. And I’ve kind of gotten to the point now, of course, I’m back.

back to where my beginnings came from, just like what you’re describing on it’s a lifestyle. We have to recognize that Ayurvedic lifestyle, right? Chinese medicine lifestyle. I don’t care which way people go on any of these things, more that it’s the recognition that this is a lifestyle. We incorporate these things in and there isn’t going to be just one magical thing. You’re mentioning meditation, you’re mentioning breathing, we’re putting things together.

Now, the other big thing that folks are always asking me, and you already kind of alluded to it earlier, is, Doc, what do I eat? Right? And how do I eat? And you had mentioned your cleanse, and I saw the Colorado, Ayurvedic cleanse on your website. Do you feel like when someone’s starting to work with balancing their body, that a cleanse is something you want to start with first? Or do you want to start with…

the balancing foods and learning about your constitution and figuring out what works best for you in that department.

John Douillard (34:23.95)
That’s a great, that’s a really great question. I think it depends on just where the individual is at. You sometimes people just feel really toxic and their digestion is sort of really weak and they can tell I’m bloated. I’ve got extra weight around my belly. I’ve got indigestion, I’ve got heartburn and changing the lifestyle probably is not going to be, you know, have the oomph.

required to really bring that back into balance where a cleanse might be something where I say, I just want to take two weeks and just reset, you know, and that’s what our Colorado Ayurvedic cleanse is. We also have a four day short home cleanse, which is a four day, which is a really good way to get started where you just do a four day cleanse. And that’s an ebook that’s free. All you get to do is type in the short home cleanse on my website and you get a free ebook tells you everything that you can do. It even gives you, we have obviously herbs that you can take with it and a kit you can get, but would also give you

or if you can buy it at your local grocery store or health food store. So you don’t have to buy anything from us. You get the ebook for free. So it’s kind of really clean in that way. The Colorado clan is a little bit more elaborate for sure. And there’s a book, an ebook for that as well. That’s a 14 day digestive reset, lymph cleanse, liver cleanse, intestinal skin repair, change your microbiome. It’s an overhaul. That’s why it takes two weeks for that to happen. So that’s a really beautiful

way to go. And some people are really ready for that and they really want to do that. And I’ve been doing that cleanse for decades and the results are phenomenal. mean, people who can eat wheat can all of sudden eat wheat. The average person loses between 15 to 17 pounds. I mean, it’s just like amazing reset because you’re not just giving them a cleanse. You’re actually asking why they got toxic in the first place, which is to actually reset every aspect of the

digestion and then the cleansing part they use it the idea is that you take a little bit of ghee every morning or Olive oil could be if you don’t like ghee and you take a little bit more every day every day every day While you’re eating a no fat diet and this is what’s called lipophilic mediated detox Western medicine coined that phrase because they use they use fats to chelate or attach to bad fats in your deep tissues and pull it out of your body in Studies show that when you do this

John Douillard (36:45.582)
you can ghee every day. It’s been shown to reduce the PCBs, were toxins, forever chemicals banned in 1990s, but still here today, out of your body by 46%. And they’ve reduced pesticides out of your deep tissues by 56 % compared to the folks who didn’t do the cleanse. So we have really good science shows. Not only is going to detoxify you and get the stuff out of your fat, which is good, like your brain tissue, which is fat, but more importantly, it’s like, why did I get it?

That’s why did my body not detoxify that on its own? Because your digestion broke down. So we do an upper digestive reset, lymph cleanse, liver cleanse. We do all that in a testinal skin repair. So you fix the reason why, so you don’t just go back and get toxic again, you reset function. that’s what makes them different.

Jannine Krause (37:32.735)
That’s awesome, because I’m not aware really of any detoxes that you fix things. It’s really, you know, if we look online at like, it’s like colon blows basically for lack of a better term, you know? And really is that doing anything but depleting you? Probably not. And in a lot of cases, that’s kind of where I see people coming into me, especially with women, because, you know, they’re gonna hear.

15 to 17 pounds, you know, that what you just get said in terms of weight loss. And a lot of people right now, as you already I’m sure aware, are grasping for the GLP-1 injections to try to get the weight off. And while some people, you know, have I prescribed them? Yes, because some people it’s necessary, but at the same time, we’re looking at it, I’m looking at it in my head also.

I guess there’s a little battle because I know that the body can heal itself, right? I know that, but some people are not at that stage. And just hearing you say that you could go through a cleanse, lose that weight and be able to keep it off because the body’s corrected and balances. I mean, this is a gold mine for a lot of people to learn about right here.

John Douillard (38:43.478)
It’s so logical really. that’s what you remember we talked about, you talked to the very beginning, like you don’t have to memorize, it’s easy, it’s overly simple.

But isn’t when you think about cleansing, does it make any sense to just clean your intestinal tract out and never ask the question, why did that intestinal tract get so toxic in the first place? Where did the good microbes go and why did they leave? know, there was this back in 2000, I think in four, 2004 when they created the first microbiome project, they gave us two warnings and the first warning was eat dirt, kind of like don’t sterilize everything. Right.

Jannine Krause (39:02.709)
Yeah. Yeah.

John Douillard (39:21.32)
talked about something called…

horizontal transfer of genetic material, which means that, you know, like I have, we have, my wife and I have six kids, right? So we’ve transferred our genetic material to our kids vertically. Horizontally means like, I come to a room and I sit next to you and all of a sudden you grab my genetic material that you want to help do something. Well, inside your gut, if you have a bacteria that has the ability to get through the intestinal wall and a virus happens to come next to that, it can borrow.

transfer that genetic material that it needs to get through your intestinal lining. That’s called the horizontal transfer genetic material. And the really cool thing, what they said was way back in 2004 when they first discovered this, said, why that happens isn’t based on proximity that they just happened to bump up next to each other. wow, I want that. No, it was.

ecology, the environment of the gut. And this is like, I’m sure Chinese medicine as well, that’s what we talk about. Change the environment of the gut, let the good bugs flourish so they can fight the battle of the bad guys and actually win that war. And they said that interestingly, way back then, that the most horizontal transphorogenic material that could be bad for us happens through farm animal exposure.

And now we’re looking at bird flu kind of taking over in a way that is really not being addressed right now very well in our country. And it’s kind of a real big deal. So this is all the warnings that were done way back then. And we just didn’t listen to any of that. It’s the ecology, ecology, ecology. And this is what these cleanses are about is restoring function, healing the environment, changing the gut lining, supporting a healthy and more diverse microbiome. We’ve got research to prove that that can actually happen.

John Douillard (41:12.64)
these cleansers, which is pretty cool.

Jannine Krause (41:15.155)
Yeah, no question I have, you know, talking about farm animals, talking about that. In this cleanse, is it taking out all of the meats? Is it going completely vegan throughout this cleanse? Are we taking out?

John Douillard (41:28.942)
Yes and no. There’s three phases to the Colorado Klan. The first phase is a kind of a digestive reset where you really cleaned your diet. You do get off all the allergenic foods, which are like fish and nuts and dairy and wheat, not because they’re bad, because they’re harder to digest. And we want to take, we’re going to let the body.

take the stress off the system and reboot it. Like when you have car with a flat tire, you put a jack under it and then you can take the car tire and put a new one back on. That’s what we’re going to do during this cleanse. We’re going to make it easy on your digestion for two weeks and then restore function and then bring those foods back. However, during the middle of the cleanse, when you’re actually doing the ghee, you do like ghee every morning, there’s three dietary plans. There’s a just…

Rice and beans are what’s called Kitchery only, which is a special type of Ayurvedic superfood that you would eat that’s been eaten for thousands of years. It was baby food. They would give it for elderly folks when they were in the hospital. And now in America, people can’t even eat rice and beans. This is how far, this, this rice and beans, you you take rice and beans out of the diet of the planet. A lot of people die. I mean, still to this day.

the vast majority of our planet lives on rice and beans. And now in America, so many folks can’t eat rice and beans anymore. It’s amazing. So the Ayurvedic one has got spices in it to make it really digestible. And then that’s the first plan. And then the second plan is that with vegetables, cooked vegetables. And if that is even still hard for you to do for seven days, then we have rice, beans, vegetables, soup, salad, fruit, and even lean meat if you need it, but no added fat.

Jannine Krause (42:46.857)
Yeah.

John Douillard (43:16.878)
Because the goal is you have all your fat in the morning, the ghee in the morning, that flips you into fat metabolism, because you got to digest what you just ate. And if you eat fat during the day, you’re just going to digest the fat that you just ate. But if you have no fat, it’ll keep you in fat burning all day long. And you’ll start pulling the fat out of your fat cells, reset your ability to burn fat. All of a sudden you get calm and within three days your appetite goes away. You’re like, I don’t even really feel like I need to eat today. You’re in that kind of fasted, fat burning state. But you’re eating and it’s very similar to the…

Dr. Valter Longo’s fasting mimicking diet where he showed that this kind of protocol increases stem cell activation, which is kind of really cool as well. So it’s well studied, well understood, thousands of years, it was created thousands of years ago, and now there’s all this really amazing science to back it up.

Jannine Krause (44:07.123)
fascinating, fascinating stuff. I, you know, I never would have thought about eating fat just in the morning and then not the rest of the day and seeing how that has an impact on the body. So I think that’ll be interesting for a lot of folks to look into.

John Douillard (44:22.35)
The bulletproof coffee, that whole thing is sort of based on that, put butter in your coffee, right? That slows down the delivery of the caffeine, so you actually feel stable throughout the day, so you can eat less and calorie restrict more easily.

Jannine Krause (44:38.719)
You know, I think all these concepts, we’ve kind of maybe Americanized them a little bit, because we’ll think like, okay, that’s a great way to get the day started. then people will be, I mean, let’s face it, you probably heard it too. Then from there, people are like, well, fats are good, so I’m gonna eat a lot of nuts and seeds. And I’m talking about myself even, I’m part squirrel, I’m convinced. And so, then you eat all like macadamia nuts, right? We pound that in and then we eat some like grass-fed beef that’s not.

a lean cut. You know, and it compounds throughout the day. And I think a lot of people are thinking that way because they’re thinking, you know, this is a way to do it. Or the other thing that a lot of folks will do is do the bulletproof coffee and not eat till later in the evening and then pound a bunch of food. It’s kind of like the one meal a day, gorge yourself situation, which seems to not work out so well for a lot of women in particular. I’m guessing you’ve seen that too.

John Douillard (45:34.688)
Yeah, yeah. So there’s study after study after study now. There’s no question that breakfast is a very important meal of the day to kickstart your metabolism. Studies show that people who have breakfast and lunch…

or a lunch and a dinner. Same food, same calories. People who have the breakfast and lunch lose significantly more weight. Their metabolic health, know, blood pressure, blood sugar, all that is significantly better than people who eat the food in the second half of the day. And that’s, there’s just no question about that. Although I get it. If you breakfast and then you can have more, it’s more socially acceptable, you know, have a dinner together with your family. And that makes it a little bit easier than skipping.

you know, then basically just eating breakfast and lunch and having no dinner. But the word dinner came from the word supper or supplemental. It always meant sup, a very small, early meal, just to take the edge off so you can get to bed and burn fat throughout the night. The idea of the carnivore diet and all these extreme diets, you know, I wrote a book called The Three Season Diet, which is eating according to nature.

And there’s three harvests in nature. There’s a spring harvest, a summer harvest, and a fall harvest for winter eating. Winter takes a break. So there’s three active seasons we interact with. And what you can do is go to my website. There’s grocery lists for winter, summer, and spring. Circle the food on this you like. Eat more of the foods on this that you like. The ones with the asterisk are the superfood for that season. You can eat whatever you want, but…

Try to get medicinal doses of what nature is intending for you to have during this season. Why? Because the bugs in the soil in the spring are different than the bugs in the soil in the summer. And that means the foods that we eat have the right bugs for the right season. And studies have shown this, that the bugs in the winter will boost your immunity. That’s what they do, so you don’t get the flu. The bugs in the spring will decongest you, so you don’t get allergies.

John Douillard (47:41.858)
The bugs that are on the foods in the summer will dissipate heat, so you can handle the heat of the summer better. You know, what we do, we take the food and we spray pesticides or insecticides and sterilize them. And then when we eat them, they don’t have a microbiome. And if I took the microbiome out of you or me, we would be totally different, really a mess, right? So we do the same thing with our herbs. We take our herbs, we say,

I’m gonna take curcumin, which is the more potent version of turmeric, right? And I’m gonna soak it in alcohol and sterilize it, take one of the 300 constituents out and I’m gonna take that as a medicine. Well, that is a medicine and medicines have side effects. Guaranteed, well studied. So what I revated was say, well, why don’t we use all 300 of the constituents of the turmeric plant and take it in its whole form.

with all its natural occurring microbes in it. And now you have the intelligence of the plant, its microbiome and the biochemistry of the plant, and you put them together, you have something that will help restore function of us so we don’t end up using something that does a job for us and then creates a dependency and any major side effects. And that’s the beauty of whole herbs is you’re getting an inoculation of the right bugs.

for the right condition or even the right season. You can take the herb seasonally as well. And now you’re not overruling the body’s intelligence. You’re restoring function so you can get on, get better, get off and really be healthy and inoculate our gut with the right bugs because the problem is, I buy organic spinach.

and it comes in a little plastic container that was probably grown on a conveyor belt somewhere. mean, or left thrown, I mean, it’s just so processed, even though it’s organic, in the same soil again and again and again. You think, okay, it wasn’t sprayed, but like how many microbes are really in this? You know, there was a study with, in Utah, in Arizona, and they went into a museum and they took mummies that were a thousand years old and they measured their microbiome. They could figure out how to do that.

John Douillard (49:55.432)
and they then may compare it to modern humans. And us modern humans had such a lack of microbial diversity that the Stanford study concluded that this is an extinction event. So our lack of microbial diversity, and that’s why we have a whole herb line. I take my herbs like regularly, seasonally, because I want the bugs. And I’ll tell you a story about turmeric. We import our herbs organic from organic farms from India.

and we have to test them as soon as we get them. So we tested the turmeric, it was fine. We mix it 16 parts turmeric, one part black pepper. That increases the absorption of the turmeric by 2000%. So when you take your turmeric and make your spicing at home, 16 to one turmeric to black pepper, crazy absorption benefit. So we did that and we had it, then we make the capsule.

Jannine Krause (50:28.469)
Mm-hmm.

John Douillard (50:51.566)
And then we have to get everything tested again after the product is done. This is according to FDA standards. Not everybody does this. It’s very important that you know that when you buy herbs that the GMP FDA laboratory certification needs to be there because they were tested twice. Then my guy calls me up and he goes, we made the capsules, we retested and the microbes are off the charts. He goes, it’s still within the legal limit. And there’s all these amazingly good bacteria. goes, your product is a probiotic in addition to the turmeric.

that you wanna get delivered. And I go, that’s the beauty of Ayurveda when you combine herbs the way they did for thousands of years and how they knew all this, I have no idea. You create something that’s not just, know, concumen, which is going to actually maybe help cure your breast cancer and colon cancer, which is really cool, but studies show it’ll block stem cells and it can be toxic. I mean, there’s study after study showing their side effects to that.

but it’s a medicine, so it can do something really important for you as a medicine, and that’s why medicines are so cool. But you get on that, get better, get off. You don’t stay on that forever. But the turmeric, the 16 to one turmeric, with all the good bugs in there, you can take that for the rest of your life. You know what mean? I would probably take it spring and fall because that’s when they’re harvested, so you take it at the right season, get the right bugs at the right time, and it becomes even way more cool.

Jannine Krause (51:55.957)
Yeah.

John Douillard (52:14.434)
to keep inoculating your gut and getting your body more in line with the natural cycles of nature.

Jannine Krause (52:21.141)
That’s neat. never, you know, I mean, I guess I thought about it, but I didn’t think about it in terms of herbs encapsulated and being probiotic benefit. You know, I think about it in terms of the food I grow and getting my beneficial bacteria from them and things of that nature. that’s a whole nother level because, you know, probiotics, I’m going to be honest, it’s kind of controversial as to are they doing the things? I kind of feel like I’d rather have my beneficial bacteria from the foods I eat.

versus the bugs taking dead bugs, really.

John Douillard (52:56.888)
Well, there’s so much more diversity. You take foods that come, herbs or plants that come out of the ground. know, these, every plant, every herb has a different affinity for a different kind of species of bug. So every plant is on microbiome. So when you have different, and the food we eat is sort of like the same again and again and again. So those herbs, like in my mind, I take, know, manjista and Brahmin, different herbs like Bacopa for my brains. Like my brain stays good.

They have bugs in it that are inoculating my gut with a level of diversity that I’m just not gonna get in the foods that we eat, you know what mean? And that’s kind of, think, a really cool side benefit is keeping that diversity alive and well.

Jannine Krause (53:41.461)
It’s huge. It’s so huge. Now, one of the last things I kind of want to go through and then of course we got to talk about Life Spa and the quiz and this will lead into the quiz nicely because a lot of people will say to me, I’ve read the books on Ayurvedic medicine. I’ve read the books on Chinese medicine. It’s so complicated. I can’t juggle what I need, what I need for my body when. And of course you’ve got your quiz that helps us to figure out like where am I possibly out of balance? Where is my constitution at? And of course I took the quiz

before this because I wanted to be able to use myself as the guinea pig for folks here so that you guys can all kind of hear what was up because I took the Ayurvedic body quiz on John’s website there at LifeSpa.com and it talks about the winter, the summer, and the spring, so vada, pitta, and kapha, and maybe some of you folks have heard about that. And what I found was that I was kind of across the board.

But I have the predominant is summer, the Pitta, and I have some Kapha, and I have a little bit of the Vada. I’m much less on the Vada. So, Dr. John, give us a little breakdown as to like, we see the quiz and use it as a platform to be like, I’ve got, so a number 23 was my score for the Pitta. I’m 17 for Kapha and I’m seven for Vada.

when someone looks at a quiz, how do we incorporate that information with the eating seasonal and help to keep the balance within the body?

John Douillard (55:14.816)
Right, so, and this is great. When I first started reading the books, I was like, I have no idea what they’re talking about. I totally get it, you know?

Jannine Krause (55:21.781)
Really.

John Douillard (55:25.646)
And then when I finally learned, I was like, oh my God, this is like so simple. Okay. We have winter, summer, spring, the three growing seasons. That’s why I call the book, The Three Season Diet. By the way, people thought that I didn’t know that there were four seasons. So nobody read that book. So what I did, you know, I to buy the book. You can go to my website and we have something called The Three Season Diet eating guide, where we put recipes and grocery lists for every month of the year for free. So.

Jannine Krause (55:35.765)
in the herd.

John Douillard (55:55.552)
you can just go on my website for free. There’s 1,500 articles on all your health topics there, so you can get all that stuff for free. But the point is that we have these three seasons, winter,

spring and summer. Winter is called vata. So let’s just call it winter for now. You don’t have very much winter, so you’re not very cold, right? If you had a lot of winter, you’d be cold all the time. And like you said, you’re a park squirrel. And if you were a squirrel, what would you eat in the winter time to not get cold and freeze to death? Nuts and seeds. And that would help insulate you from the coldness and dryness. So what is harvested in the winter time?

Jannine Krause (56:22.602)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (56:29.301)
Thanks.

John Douillard (56:38.784)
is gonna give you the antidote to the extreme of that season. So winter’s cold and dry. What does nature harvest? Nuts in the season. If you were living off the land, you’d have to hunt. You’d eat more animal protein and animal fat, and you would antidote the quality of the cold and dry. You wouldn’t be eating cold frozen smoothies, because they don’t exist in the winter, and they would also make a cold person colder, right? So it’s pretty simple. If you have a lot of vata, then the one season you probably

Jannine Krause (57:01.973)
Absolutely.

John Douillard (57:08.716)
need to really eat on the straight and narrow, take the winter grocery list and eat more of the foods on this list would be winter, if you’re a winter Vata, if your winter numbers are high. But yours are not, yours are low. you have a, you can sort of take a little bit of time off. It’s not that urgent for you. Summer is pitta, fire. You have a lot of that. So you’re a hot body type.

Jannine Krause (57:29.661)
Mm-hmm.

John Douillard (57:35.212)
And if you’re eating hot, spicy food, Mexican food, acidic food, coffee, beer, wine, cheese, all these fermented foods, kombucha, all this stuff a lot, in the summer months, you’re hot person in a hot season doing hot stuff, eating hot food, you could overheat and inflame. So nature said, I had a plan for that, but they didn’t listen, which was foods in the summer are the antidote.

to the extreme heat of that season, cooling fruits and vegetables. and what’s kind of cool is that the bugs in your gut in the spring are predominantly, when you eat seasonally, according to the hunter gatherer tribes, they have what are called actinobacteria, which are really good at getting their energy and their fuel from fat and fiber and protein. Come summer, the bugs in your gut change according to the hunter gatherer tribes, and they have what are called bacteriodych. So they’re gonna take all that starch from the wheat that’s harvested at the end of the summer and the grains and the fruits.

and deliver that as energy. So nature is gonna give us the cooling foods in the summer, the warming foods in the winter, and in the spring, there ain’t no lot coming out of the ground in the spring. It’s an austere time of the year. The deer are gonna dig up some deer roots, clean all the villa of your intestinal tract. It’s a calorie-restricted time of the year. Your body’s gonna be forced to make energy on its own from the reserved fat.

reserves. So you’re going to go into ketogenesis quite naturally during that time of the year. And you’d probably have to hunt a little bit. So it’d a little bit higher protein, little higher fat, or you just do fasting, which is why all the religions do their fasting in the spring. Vision quests were done in the spring because this is a time where there wasn’t a lot of food to be had. It is a naturally occurring time to detoxify and calorie restrict and force the body into a natural state of fat metabolism.

And then one of the simplest ways to do that is just eat significantly less carbohydrates because if you tried to find pizza or pasta in the spring coming out of the ground, you’re not gonna find it. So that’s the time where you just naturally go into a low carb diet. Summer is a higher carb diet and winter is a higher protein, higher fat diet. Simple. All the diets everybody’s completing, arguing over exist in nature for three or four months of the year.

John Douillard (59:55.862)
along the way. So we changed, which is what every human did for millions of years to stay on this planet, is we ate according to what came out of the ground.

Jannine Krause (01:00:05.781)
makes sense. mean, it makes perfect sense and I love

you know, explanation, does simplify quite a bit more for folks, because yes, it’s the, I think it’s the words and that you put it to the winter, the spring and then summer. I think it helps folks to really get that and be like, okay, I understand. And so yeah, now I have to watch my spice that I add to my summer foods and that’s fine. I actually don’t like spicy stuff. So I’ll be good. I’ll be good. And once my garden goes a little bit more, I just got to watch the tomatoes, because that’s the acidic thing that I’m.

John Douillard (01:00:40.202)
Or you could just take this peel, the skin, and peel the skin and then tomato. Skin is the more acidic part of that tomato. So if you’re really pitta, you really want to be, you know, dive into the details, the inner side of that tomato can actually be cooling for you versus the outside skin. Yeah.

Jannine Krause (01:00:57.877)
That’s cool. I mean, I know that we can dive into the other things about the doshas and go in very deep and this would be like a five hour call because I love to pick people’s brains about all the doshas. But usually the biggest question and the best place to start is the gut. And so many folks start to struggle with their metabolism as they get older. And I think this is what we’re overlooking, that huge connection gut lymphatic system and how we move that much better.

Beyond breathing, are there any other types of, and beyond yoga, are there any other types of Ayurvedic secrets that women or men could use to help with lymphatic drainage as a whole? Is there anything else Ayurveda explains, baths, herbs, things of that nature?

John Douillard (01:01:48.59)
Well, you’re so right. You know, in Ayurveda, the the word for lymphatic is rasa. And the study of rasa is called rasayana in an Ayurveda. One of the major branches of Ayurveda is specifically for longevity. And it’s called rasayana, which is the study of rasa, the study of the lymph. So the whole thing is about lymph. The first thing you need to understand, and that’s how the body takes the trash out, right? So if your house has a toilet that’s clogged, you know,

You can’t put anything else in it.

Right? So you can’t put new stuff in until you take care of the waste coming out. So the limiting factor to our health and longevity is our ability to move waste out of our body effectively. And that, of course, bowel movements are important, sweating is important, skin, but also critically is your lymphatic system. And nobody really talks about that. So there’s many ways through the hydration is key piece of that puzzle. Lymph is like your river. And if that river is dry, you’re going to be in trouble. So staying hydrated is really important and sometimes making sure you’re taking that with

a little bit of salt or some electrolytes does matter because water alone, gallons of it isn’t gonna hydrate you. You do wanna add something to make it more.

to help it penetrate the cell better. Movement and exercise. Lymph is pumped by muscular contraction and it has nothing to with your heart. So if you’re not moving, and this is why so many of the longevity experts say exercise, exercise, exercise, because it’s actually moving your lymph, which is helping kick the trash out. And that’s the critical limiting factor that nobody really talks about the why, but that’s one of the major reasons why it works so well. And then of course there are Ayurvedic herbs like manjista, phenomenal.

John Douillard (01:03:31.98)
herb for a lymphatic decongestion agent. We have a whole lymph kit you can get that treats every aspect of your lymphatic system from starting in your intestinal tract to the brain lymphatic system with an herb called Bromie or what’s called Centella asiatica. So there’s herbs called Red Root, which is an American herb that is really good for the lymph nodes, which are the lymph vessels are carrying all the trash out of your cells. They go into lymph

where the white blood cells clean everything up, make sure there’s no bad stuff headed back to your heart and therefore your liver, and they can get congested as well. there’s herbs have been studied to detoxify the lymph nodes, the lymph vessels, the brain lymphatic system, the intestinal lymph. It’s kind of really cool. And of course you have what’s called the skin associated lymph as well, which is when you get rashes or hives or eczema, that is your body using your skin as an exit ramp for impurity.

Thanks

because the regular lymphatic pathways are congested. So your skin through eczema will be sort of like, hey, I’m going to dump it out through psoriasis or whatever. And that means there’s an underlying congestion in the lymphatic system. My brain headaches or another vasodilation, your body’s trying to get trash out of the brain lymphatic system. So it’s all really quite beautiful, really quite simple. Sounds complicated, but it’s really that you treating your lymphatic system with dehydration, exercise,

movement, green foods, berries, anything that will stain your white shirt, red, black, or blue, like a pomegranate or a beet or a berry, that’s going to have antioxidants in it that work specifically through your lymphatic system and green things. So green things and red, black, and blue things, and then some of those herbs, hydration, movement. And don’t forget that if you don’t have good digestion, right, if you can’t eat wheat, dairy, nuts, seeds, grains, beans, and eat oxalates and you feel terrible, which is…

Jannine Krause (01:05:10.261)
you

John Douillard (01:05:32.238)
crazy because the world lived on oxalates for millions and millions of years and all of sudden people can’t eat them, that’s not an oxalate problem. That’s not the oxalate, it’s not like the oxalates are the cause of this. It’s a broken down digestive system and what we do in America is well, if you don’t feel good eating that, don’t eat it and then go further and further towards a diet that feels better for you.

The carnivore diet we think is the macho man diet, right? You got to be tough and strong and eat the bone and all that. Well, it turns out that there’s no anti-nutrients on meat. It’s the easiest thing for us to eat. It’s medicine food in Ayurveda. Plants produce chemicals to ward off predators and those are proteins that are anti-nutrients so the bugs don’t eat them. Plants are much harder for us to digest. This is the macho man diet, really.

Jannine Krause (01:06:02.773)
Yeah.

Jannine Krause (01:06:22.997)
you

John Douillard (01:06:29.154)
plant-based diet. So if you can’t eat the diet that our ancestors lived on for millions of years, then you got an underlying broken digestive problem, which is going to continue to wreak havoc behind the scenes. And I’m going to find myself feeling really good on eating.

you know, red meat and maybe white rice and some vegetables. And that is a really lacking, diverse diet in terms of your microbiome. Right. So it’s just step by step. We have an article called the Digestive Health Quiz where it asks you questions about every aspect of your digestion. So you can say, it’s my lymph or it’s my liver or it’s my gallbladder or it’s my stomach acid being too high or too low. And then that’s also my book. I wrote a book called Eat We.

Jannine Krause (01:07:19.711)
the

John Douillard (01:07:19.888)
Everybody should eat wheat, but it was more like people are blaming wheat on everything. And there’s so much science. I have 611 studies in that book proving that wheat can be a medicine for you. And it has been for millions of years. found, they found gluten in the teeth of ancient humans three and a half million years ago. So it’s not the wheat.

It’s our inability to break things down. And glyphosate too, we can actually break it down with a strong digestion, not in massive quantities. Unfortunately, this is the world we live in, but if you have a broken down digestive system, you can’t avoid the toxins, the chemicals, the environmental pollutants, the glyphosate, even if you tried.

So again, we gotta go back to fixing your digestion, because that gives you the resiliency and the ability to detoxify the environment that we live in and break down the heart of digest foods. You don’t have to go bubble wrap your diet and start taking stuff out of your diet, eating a more kind of restricted diet, which in the long run,

will actually create problems. Feel better in the beginning. That’s why people go on a vegan diet, they feel great, then they go, I’m not, it’s not working for me, I need something else. And I’m very, I’m a big fan of a plant-based diet.

Jannine Krause (01:08:30.101)
Yeah.

John Douillard (01:08:40.27)
with 10 to 15 % animal protein to make sure you don’t need B12 and you don’t need your fatty, your omega-3 fatty acids and all that. You can get that from that little bit of animal protein without taking it. And I do, as we get older, I do believe we need more protein, but I’m also very squirrel-like. I like getting them from the nuts and the seeds in a more natural form.

Jannine Krause (01:09:05.245)
Yeah, you know, I think at the end of the day, it’s just kind of feeling out what feels best to you. And yes, I’m not a fan of eliminating things in long terms. Let’s call it that, in long terms and seeing when we can get it back because we know if we can tolerate it, bringing it back in the gut is better.

Gosh, so many things and we gotta talk about your website so folks can see all the resources there at LifeSpa.com because you have, like you said, 1,500 articles in there. I was kind of perusing, I’m like, man, there’s a lot of info here and a lot of good free resources. You’ve already mentioned the different shopping lists for the different seasons too, which can be incredibly helpful for folks. Tell us a little bit more about how they can work more in depth.

with you and your group and how they can interact with your website beyond taking the quiz.

John Douillard (01:10:01.708)
Yeah, well the quiz is a great place to start because it’s kind of fun and interactive. And there’s other quizzes. There’s a lymph quiz. You can take that lymph quiz and just type it in the search bar. And now you’ll find out how well your lymph’s doing. There’s the digestive health quiz. There’s, you know, there’s a skin type quiz as well. So you can find out what your skin type is and what Ayurveda says to do about supporting the function of your skin versus just, you know, putting stuff on it to make it look pretty temporarily. So there’s a lot of

But there’s also the search bar. You can just type in your health concern, constipation or indigestion or whatever it might be, a heartburn or whatever. And then numerous articles will come up and then you can kind of read that. idea is that we try to put as much knowledge.

out there as for free as possible so people can become self-sufficient. That’s the goal at LifeSpot. That’s always been my goal and that’s been our business model. And there’s e-books also that are there that you can go, there’s there’s digestive e-books, there’s there’s lymphatic e-books that can take a deeper dive. You want to go instead of looking at article after article after article, you can go to the e-book and get more of that way. What else? There’s also we have a podcast as well, so that’s something you could look at.

for deeper information. And of course we have an Ayurvedic store and I formulated Ayurvedic herbs for, I’ve been doing this for 41 years now. And so we have an Ayurvedic pharmacy that are all the whole herbs that we talked about and the benefit of that. And you can check that at LifeSpot.com and there’s a store of link there as well.

And of course we have a newsletter, we have a newsletter and people can sign up for that. And then you can find out, that’s like the main thing actually. You can find out about like courses we’re producing and new articles that are coming out and all the new stuff that’s coming out. Cause I’m constantly digging into the ancient wisdom and modern science. And there’s so much unbelievably more information that just keeps coming, which I thought.

Jannine Krause (01:11:39.925)
awesome stuff.

Jannine Krause (01:11:47.135)
You

John Douillard (01:12:03.85)
at some point, there’d be like nothing to write about, but Ayurveda is incredibly vast, so it’s pretty cool.

Jannine Krause (01:12:08.531)
Yeah, that’s what I love about it. And I saw that you also have some events too, and one in the Bahamas I think next year and some things there too so folks can interact with you in person as well.

John Douillard (01:12:20.418)
Yeah, for sure. You can go on the website and just look at our events page and see everything that’s coming up, courses that I’m teaching and events and so on. Yeah, for sure.

Jannine Krause (01:12:27.935)
Very cool, very cool. Gosh, Dr. John, so much information. And I think folks are really gonna like this one because it’s relevant. And let’s face it, us ladies, we’re gonna be like, all right, weight loss, some lymphatic stuff. Yes, please, because most women this age in life are complaining about the weight gain, the lymphatics, the cellulite, brain fog, lots of different things that can be helped out by doing some balancing techniques that aren’t anything extravagant here.

John Douillard (01:12:58.668)
Yeah, absolutely. And don’t forget that the breathing is the diaphragm is the pump for your lymphatic system and cellulite is a lymphatic congestive issue linked to digestion and lymph. so none of this is going to work in this. We all start to learn how to breathe in. There’s article after article is one article called the best diaphragmatic breathing exercises I would refer you all to. And there’s three videos there. And there’s one called lateral breathing. There’s one called strengthen your lungs now.

Jannine Krause (01:13:02.228)
Yes.

John Douillard (01:13:27.65)
Get tuned into all those breathing techniques because that’s the one thing that if we don’t do it, our rib cage is gonna get tighter and it does happen as we age and everything else will work better. That’s like the kingpin and then the other stuff is like, know, tweaking your individual weak link but the diaphragm is the critical piece of the puzzle.

Jannine Krause (01:13:51.123)
I know that with stress I’ve definitely…

had some more breathing issues over time. I think that is definitely like you said, can pin, linchpin, any of that, you know, something that folks definitely need to focus on. So we will make sure we highlight all of those different things. I’ll be diving into them since I work with a lot of women that are trying to, you know, get the bodies looking a little bit better and, myself included, always trying to improve. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of your knowledge. This is just great stuff. And so folks go over to LifeSpa.com, check out all

of Dr. John Duyard’s stuff there and hey, we look forward to seeing what’s coming next from you in different trainings and we’ll make sure that we update things over time. Thanks again for coming on.

John Douillard (01:14:35.416)
Dr. Janine, thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

Jannine Krause (01:14:38.517)
My pleasure.