Warren discusses "Fat is Good for You" with Aleksandra Quartel on her podcast series, Reclaim Your Health.
Did you know...
- 80% of chronic diseases are caused by lifestyle?
- Mitochondria's role is to produce energy in your body?
- Mild exercise, calorie restriction and fats are GOOD for you?
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- Prevent pre-mature aging and fatigue
- Fight diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer
- Battle age-related neurodegeneration
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Transcript
Aleksandra : Hi everyone. My name is Aleksandra Quartel. Welcome to Reclaim Your Health Summit where our goal is to find out the root causes of many chronic illnesses, as well as finding real and lasting solutions to prevent and reverse sicknesses through natural and functional medicine. Are you ready to reclaim your health back? Well, then let's go.
Aleksandra : I'm super excited to have with us today Warren Cargal, who is a licensed acupuncturist, herbalist, and a clinic director at Acupuncture Atlanta. He has practiced Chinese medicine for over 20 years in the field of infertility and chronic disease conditions.
Aleksandra : Warren’s interest is in the integration of classical Chinese medicine with modern scientific study, and evidence-based protocols. He spent hundreds of postgraduate hours in Chinese herbology, nutrition, and endocrine education. He is the author of Your Mitochondria: Key to Health and Longevity, which is based on the latest research on herb isolates and nutraceuticals. So super excited to have you here with us.
Warren Cargal: Hey, thank you so much for having me.
Aleksandra : Can you share a little bit with us why to go towards Chinese medicine?
Warren Cargal: Oh, well, my original training is a psychotherapist. I'd be with people in psychotherapy. It's not unusual to hang out with a person for a year or so or longer, and so I started getting headaches, right-sided temporal headaches. I tried some conventional medicine. It didn't work really well. So I went to an acupuncturist down the street, and the darn thing went away for six months, which got me curious.
Warren Cargal: What I started doing is some of my patients, I would refer them over there to the acupuncturist, and what I began to notice is those patients would get better and they would leave. So by that I mean, I don't mean that they would have some revelation where all of their problems were solved or anything, but they'd just be able to tolerate the problems, and they'd be able to cope with them a lot better to where their life would move on. Right? So that really impressed me, and so I decided to do a four-year training for that.
Aleksandra : Wow. So that's also like a first, yeah. You kind of had first experience with that.
Warren Cargal: Yeah, totally.
Aleksandra : Where you went with it. Okay. So in your practice, a lot of people come to you. What are the main issues that they coming in with?
Warren Cargal: Well, I mean before the release of the book, we'd treat the spectrum. I mean there'd be a lot of fertility issues. There'd be then the common things like back pain, low back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, leg pain, knee pain, all the pains. We get all the pains here. Then we would have another group of people who have chronic illnesses that they're dealing with, where there's cardiovascular disease. I'm sure you understand that stress can drive high blood pressure, chronic stress, things like that. People would be coming in here to relax, to help with their sleeping, to deal with their diabetes, to deal with their cardiovascular disease. Then because we're near a large hospital, teaching hospital Emory University, sometimes we would work with people who have cancer also. So we've got a really good, diverse patient base and we've got a lot of experience in dealing with a lot of chronic issues.
Aleksandra : Yeah. When you say chronic issues, the diseases, what is the number one cause of a lot of diseases that you see?
Warren Cargal: Okay, so hope your guys write this down. So 80% of it is driven by lifestyle.
Aleksandra : Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Warren Cargal: Yeah. Right. The other problem concurrent with that is Western medicine is set up to treat trauma. It's not set up to treat chronic disease conditions unless you consider medications for the rest of your life.
Aleksandra : Yeah. That is so true. That's just not an option for some people because they have so many different side effects from the medication.
Warren Cargal: Yup.
Aleksandra : What can a lot of people do with that? You said it's the lifestyle, right? Now that lifestyle is causing them pain or discomfort or that chronic disease, can they do anything to reverse that or bring the health back somewhat?
Warren Cargal: Well, totally. I mean there's so many things now. That's what's so exciting about this particular time. There are so many things that people can do right now starting today that can really significantly improve their health for the long term. I don't mean just health where you're functioning good.
Warren Cargal: But I mean in the aging process where there's vitality for the long term that you look good and you feel good. That's traditionally in Chinese medicine, that's what vitality and aging would be about. Not that you're getting old and you're going to end up in a nursing home, or you're going to have dementia, or you're going to have disabilities. That's not what you're looking forward to. You're looking to a really long healthy life that's vibrant.
Aleksandra : Yeah. That is so true. So is there maybe three simple ways where we can actually bring back the quality of our life and to extend our lives so that it is a quality life? Like you said, that it's not going to be when you're in a nursing home and can do nothing.
Warren Cargal: Right, right.
Aleksandra : What can you do?
Warren Cargal: Yeah. There's actually in the book, Your Mitochondria: A Key to Health and Longevity, that's what I talk about. Just for those folks who don't know what your mitochondria are, right? Your mitochondria, they're called organelles, and organelles means small bodies, and they exist within your cells. And they produce all of the energy in your cell, which drives all these functions in our body.
Warren Cargal: For example, in your skin cells, in a skin cell, which you know the consequence of aging would be wrinkly skin or sagging skin, right? So it has about a hundred mitochondria per cell. Then your heart, for example, a heart muscle cell would have anywhere from 5 to 8000 mitochondria, and they're all producing energy 24 hours a day to drive the expansion and contraction of the heart.
Warren Cargal: And then a female egg, it's going to have 100,000 mitochondria in it because what happens in that first three months of life in the embryo? It goes from a single cell to millions of cells, and all of that is driven by the energy of the ATP and the mitochondria.
Warren Cargal: Okay, so the mitochondria, that supplies all of the energy for your body. People tend to think about when they're eating, the food goes down, it's digested, it produces nutrients, and then after that it just kind of, I don't think about, okay, what's really happening? But essentially all of your energy, including your thoughts, including your nerve impulses, are driven by mitochondria.
Warren Cargal: Number one, here we go. I'm sitting here right now at my desk, and when you're sitting at a desk all day, what's happening is you're breathing in the upper third of your body, and so the mitochondria are just like little car engines and they require oxygen to run really efficiently.
Warren Cargal: When I'm breathing in the upper third of my body, there's an overall oxygen deficiency for the body, and that low oxygen content is called hypoxia. Hypoxia drives a lot of inflammatory responses in the body. It also, because the heart is speeding all the time, it affects the heart, it affects many things in your body, the low breathing.
Warren Cargal: The first thing is, if you're working, you have to sit at a desk all day, then you’ve got to get yourself up every 15 or 20 minutes and walk around your office space or do something for yourself where you're walking. When I say walking, you're breathing. Or even if you're sitting, just like right now, right now I can sit straight with my back up, take a deep breath. That's number one. You've got it.
Warren Cargal: Number two is the mitochondria require exercise. Exercise drives biogenesis. Biogenesis is production of new mitochondria. But the other thing is just like a car engine, it's got a lot of fuel, but you're not running it really well, long, it gets sluggish.
Warren Cargal: The mitochondria, what it's producing is electrons, and those electrons are highly reactive, and when they just sit in the mitochondria, they can burn holes in the mitochondria, they can start inflammation around and in the surrounding tissue.
Warren Cargal: So number two is mild exercise. I mean I'm not averse to rigorous exercise. That's the question I always get from a lot of people, but I'm just starting, if you're not doing something and you want to do something, mild exercise. That would be like walking every day, maybe riding a bike or something like that. If you're doing more vigorous exercise, mazel tov, right?
Aleksandra : Yeah.
Warren Cargal: Right. Number three would be caloric restriction. What I mean by that is a normal American, I don't know if it's Canadian, but a normal American diet, it's probably going to be anywhere from 2800 to 3000 calories a day. What we're suggesting is dropping down to maybe 22, 2400 calories a day, and you're not going to starve, and you're going to feel okay, right? It's just these excessive nutrients that, as I've already said, they stay in the mitochondria and they cause damage, so you want to begin to limit. That's number three, caloric restriction.
Warren Cargal: And the final thing that you can start today, the fourth thing is for every unit of sugar that you ingest, you're going to get two mitochondria out of it, I mean two ATPs out of it, right? ATP is the energy. Whereas for every unit of fat that you ingest, you're going to get 34 units of the ATP out of it.
Aleksandra : Wow. And you know what? I think a lot of people, they're so scared of the word fat. Everything has to be fat-free.
Warren Cargal: I know. It's sad. So when I say fats, I'm talking about good quality fats. But let me tell you the range of fats because for some people they're going to be really excited. Good quality butter is fine.
Aleksandra : I love butter.
Warren Cargal: I know. Like range-fed cattle producing good quality butter. Fats from red meat are okay. Fats from fish are okay. Almonds, I mean, avocados are good, olive oil is good. It's just these good quality fats that will profoundly produce a lot of energy for you and you'll feel a lot better. But it means that you need to stay away from the carbohydrates and the sugars, and that's where it gets into a difficult .. so I left the most difficult one for last. Oh, my gosh.
Aleksandra : Small transitions, right?
Warren Cargal: Yeah. Small steps. That's what's really required, and that's what will give you, that's what you can do today, and it doesn't cost anything, and you will start feeling a lot better in your life long-term.
Aleksandra : Yeah, and it's so important what you said, right? The oxygen, movement, and the right foods that we put in. Simple. It's not really that hard. And when you say that lowering the calorie intake, so many people think, oh my God, I don't want to starve. I was like, well, you're not starving. You'll be okay.
Warren Cargal: Right. You really will, you really will. You'll be fine.
Aleksandra : Yeah, that's so true. Really, there's not really too much of really hard stuff that people need to do to bring that energy back. But if there is something like a chronic disease, what is the first thing they need to do? Is it-
Warren Cargal: Yup. We talk about that in the book, and we step through all of the disease categories like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neuro-degeneration, which is Alzheimer's, arthritis and cancer. Those are what would be called the age-related diseases.
Warren Cargal: As you get older, because of your lifestyle, you start seeing these diseases come up over and over again with people. Sometimes they get coupled with cardio-metabolic diseases where there's combination of diabetes and cardiovascular issues, coupled with high cholesterol. It gets real complex quickly, but it's all being driven by the mitochondria.
Aleksandra : Yeah. Let's say if somebody does have Type 2 diabetes, what would be the first thing that you would suggest for them to do? Because obviously their lifestyle got them to that point.
Warren Cargal: Yeah.
Aleksandra : What can they do? Like little steps, right?
Warren Cargal: Little steps. I mean that would be Step Two. I mean it would be all four steps really. Really the thing is, and this is sad. I see this all the time. People come in from their doctor, they're on a diabetes diet or something. They're eating white rice, I mean the white foods, and then just like, give me a break. You know? I mean, you’ve got to put that stuff down. You've got to put the carbohydrates down. You've got to put those sugars down, and you've got to eat the vegetables, eat the fats. That's really what's going to begin to start normalizing your blood sugar.
Aleksandra : I think a lot of times also with doctors, they say, well, you don't want to cut out all the sugar. So the person thinks, okay, well you need sugar to function, but then they're taking the wrong sugar, right?
Warren Cargal: Right.
Aleksandra : White sugar.
Warren Cargal: Right. That's correct. That's right. Yeah. The sugar, there's so much data right now about sugar being causative for so many diseases. I mean I taught there's lifestyle and then there's a huge subcategory of lifestyle, there's sugar.
Aleksandra : Yeah, and sugar is in everything, right? So the main thing would be to get rid of the processed foods because if you're going low fat diet, well, where are they putting it instead to make it taste good? Probably sugar. Warren Cargal: I mean this isn't my topic, but you have to really understand that there's an interlocking thing going on with food production, pharmacies, and you start looking at canned and package goods and what's in there. I mean there is a ton of sugar, and you want to avoid that stuff. You just want to avoid it. And not to mention the canned foods, what they use to preserve it, is not good for us. You've got to get really vigilant about your health. That's the takeaway here. Otherwise you're going to be on medications for the long-term.
Aleksandra : Yeah, yeah. You have to take control and you either want to be healthy and do those steps or pop them pills. Right? And sometimes it's not an option for us when stuff like that happens.
Warren Cargal: Yeah.
Aleksandra : Yeah. Well, thank you so much for the insights. I had no idea what those mitochondrias were, so that's pretty great.
Warren Cargal: Those little rascals.
Aleksandra : Those little rascals that they're living in us and little mechanisms. So it's really great perspective to know what they actually need to bring that energy back so that we can have that energy back into our life. I know you have something for our audience. Can you share what it is?
Warren Cargal: Well, if this sounds of interest to you and you'd like to read more about it you can visit my website, which is themitobook.com. So anyway, you can visit the website and there's a free download on the website, like a little mini book that you can read.
Warren Cargal: Then our main website is acuatlanta.net which is, we have a lot of herbal supplements and nutritional products there. And on both sites you can either email us or on the main website, you can chat in with us. We have a naturopath online and you can get a little consult for free for 15 minutes. We try to make it as easy as possible to help people.
Aleksandra : That's amazing that people actually can reach ...They don't have to actually go step out of their house, which they should, but it's great to have that.
Warren Cargal: We're busy. Yeah, and people are really busy right now and we want to honor that, and so we try to respond really quickly whenever we can.
Aleksandra : Yeah, that's wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing. It was absolutely amazing to have you on this show and share your knowledge, and just a little bit of information, bits and pieces, and people can actually use those little tips on health, and how they can regain it. So thank you again. Warren Cargal: Yeah. Thank you, Aleksandra for doing this.
Aleksandra : You're welcome.
Aleksandra : Thank you everyone for joining us today. We will see you next time.
