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Oct. 18, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:36:27
20221018_whether-walker-and-oz-can-win-and-learning-to-brea
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Vance Race Not Done Deal 00:15:10
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey, what I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Today, we're going to discuss some good and bad things for your health.
Boy, oh boy, I'm just telling you, in the time since I began reading my research packet to the time I'm sitting down here with you, I have resolved to do several things differently.
And I'll walk you through what they are when we are joined in just a bit by best-selling author and wellness expert Darren Oline to discuss superfoods and the five fixes that will jumpstart your health for good.
That's the good.
Okay, now wait, let's just do one thing before we get started.
Darren recommends this.
You're supposed to do at least four of these.
Okay, we're going to inhale for five seconds.
Let's do it.
Inhale.
Hold it.
Exhale for five.
There's another five, but I don't remember what it is.
But we did five, five, and five.
Supposed to be really good for you.
We'll get into it a little bit.
Okay, the bad, politics.
Well, we enjoy politics, but as you know, these are generally not good people.
But some of the stories that we're going to talk about may just get your blood boiling.
Believe it or not, the midterms are just three weeks from today, although people are already voting everywhere.
That COVID stuff that changed the, you know, one day voting into forever voting, that's not going away.
That is not going away.
People are going to have to run these races very differently now.
And among those races that will determine the balance of power in the Congress, the Ohio Senate seat.
This is our old pal, JD Vance.
Remember, I told you when I first launched this show, he came on that my interview of him, my profile of him for NBC News was truly like my favorite interview.
I was so moved by his story, by Hail Billy Elegy, by meeting him and his wife and his sister, Lindsay.
You got to go look at it on YouTube if you've never seen it.
In any event, the modern day version of JD was enfuego last night in his final debate with the Democrat, Tim Ryan, and things got dense.
Here to discuss all of it, Tom Bevin, co-founder and president of the must, must read, Real Clear Politics.
Tom, welcome to the show.
How you doing?
Great to be with you, Megan.
All right.
I always tell everybody, I tell them on this show.
I tell them when I give speeches.
I tell young women, young men, first thing I do every morning is go to realclearpolitics.com and it keeps me sane.
And as I always say, it doesn't let anybody control my brain.
I get to read stuff from the left, from the right, and I don't let any of these dishonest brokers spin me.
I can make up my own mind about where to land.
So that's all thanks to you.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Oh, you know it's heartfelt.
I've been saying it for years.
Okay, so let's just start.
Let's start with baby politics.
Okay, let's just start with baby politics before we get to the Ohio race.
It still looks like the Republicans are going to take the House.
I don't think any truly smart person is saying anything other than that.
So the action is really in the Senate and to a lesser extent at the gubernatorial level.
So what are the four races you are watching most when it comes to the U.S. Senate?
Well, we have seven races that are considered toss-ups.
But to me, I mean, the races that matter are the four incumbent Democrats, Catherine Cortez-Masto in Nevada, Mark Kelly in Arizona, Raphael Warnock in Georgia, and excuse me, and Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire.
Look, Republicans have four open seats they have to defend.
You mentioned Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania's one, and Wisconsin, Ron Johnson.
They seem to be doing well in all those races.
The one Pennsylvania is Fetterman still ahead in that race.
But let's just assume for the sake of argument that Oz is going to win that race.
Then you've got a situation where if Democrats don't defend all four of their seats, they're going to lose control of the Senate.
And right now, you've got Republicans ahead in Nevada.
Adam Laxalt's ahead there, not by a lot, by a little bit in the polls.
And you've got, you know, Democrats are ahead and Mark Kelly's ahead of Blake Masters in Arizona.
Raphael Warnock is barely ahead of Herschel Walker in Georgia and Maggie Hissan's ahead of Boldock in New Hampshire.
So those are really the four races to watch.
They're going to determine the outcome of who controls the Senate.
You guys have Herschel Walker winning Georgia.
You've projected that at Real Clear Politics right now.
Maybe project it is too strong, but that's what you're predicting will happen, even though Herschel Walker hasn't led in any poll.
Now, this jumped out at me as interesting because I actually just said on the show yesterday, Herschel Walker is going to win Georgia.
And I don't usually make political predictions, but you can just feel it.
It seems like it's getting tighter.
It didn't seem like the scandal hurt him that badly.
And then yesterday I was listening to the New York Times' The Daily, and they're polling.
They're doing interviews, man on the street interviews with voters, Republicans.
Are you concerned about the allegations on Herschel Walker's past?
And there's like some mom, what's she going to say to the New York Times?
No, I don't give a shit about his many abortions and the many children he didn't take care of.
No, they're not going to say that.
The women are like, yes, I'm concerned.
And I might just skip that vote when I go in there to vote for Brian Kemp.
I might just skip Senate.
Oh, baloney.
Do we believe that?
Well, I mean, listen, the argument is split ticket voting has been decreasing over time.
There's no question about it.
2016 was the first time in American history where every single state that voted one way for the presidential race voted the same way for the Senate.
Okay.
And we've seen split ticket voting decline.
So it is hard to imagine when you look, that's one of the rationales why we have this race trending to Herschel Walker is there are a couple of reasons.
Number one are just the overall fundamentals.
And we've seen Republicans pick up some strength in the generic ballot on the basis of inflation, the economy, all of those things, which are the number one issue for voters across the board.
I mean, it's not even close.
But you've also got Joe Biden's approval rating in Georgia is 39%.
You've got Raphael Warnock in the polls.
He's at 46% in the last two polls.
As a Democrat, as an incumbent, at 46%, that is not a place you want to be three weeks to election.
So there's more upside for Herschel Walker than there is from Raphael Warnock.
And the other thing is the top of the ticket.
You mentioned Brian Kemp is leading.
It's very consistent lead, seven, eight, nine points against Stacey Abrams.
And so the idea that people are going to go in and vote for Brian Kemp overwhelmingly, and then Republicans either vote for Raphael Warnock or leave that space blank, it's hard to imagine.
Now, it happened, for example, the one corollary that people point to is Arizona in 2018.
You had Doug Ducey there, popular incumbent Republican governor, win by double digits, while at the same time, Martha McSally lost to Kirsten Cinema.
The difference in those two races, Megan, is that Kirsten Sinemo is more of a fit ideologically for that state than Raphael Warnock is for Georgia.
I mean, he is, as the campaign is pointing out, you know, he's pretty far to the left.
He's trying to portray himself as a moderate.
But again, given the national environment, the fact that he's been voting with Biden and the Democrats in Washington is a drag for him for the voters in Georgia.
Okay, let's go to the Midwest and talk about Ohio.
JD Vance squares off last night against Tim Ryan, and it got personal and it got heated.
And it was, I thought, a very effective moment for Vance.
We'll see.
I mean, I think the Democrats think that their guy got the last word in and that it was appropriately snarky.
But here's the exchange they had on what I will just say they're calling the great replacement theory, which is not actually what JD Vance has endorsed or Republicans are endorsing.
Republicans who care about the border sometimes say that the reason Democrats want an open border is because they want these immigrants to eventually become Democratic voters.
That is not the same as they're replacing all the white people.
Like that is, there's a different racist theory that is pernicious.
And the Democrats have made a political decision to try to conflate the two.
That's the setup to the clip you're about to see.
Here it is.
This great replacement theory was the motivator for the shooting in Buffalo, where that shooter had all these great replacement theory writings that JD Vance agrees with.
This kid goes to a grocery store in Buffalo where black people shop and shoots them up.
This is disgusting.
Here's exactly what happens when the media and people like Tim Ryan accuse me of engaging the great replacement theory.
I'll tell you what.
They're battling it.
I'll tell you exactly what happens, Tim.
What happens is that my own children, my biracial children, get attacked by scumbags online and in person because you are so desperate for political power that you'll accuse me, the father of three beautiful biracial babies, of engaging in racism.
We are sick of it.
You can believe in a border without being a racist.
You can believe in the country without being a racist.
And this just shows how desperate this guy is for political power.
I know you've been in office for 20 years, Tim, and I know it's a sweet gig, but you're so desperate not to have a real job that you'll slander me and slander my family.
It's disgraceful.
Thank you, Mr. Hold on, Derek.
Real quick.
I think one more question in.
I think I struck a nerve with this guy.
What did you make of that?
I thought Vance's response was strong.
I mean, I really did.
I thought it was one of those signature moments in the debate.
Look, this is their second and final debate.
And I thought Vance performed well in both debates.
The thing about this is the problem that Tim Ryan is facing is that similar to Democrats all across the country, including Rafael Warnock, who we just talked about, he's running away from his party.
He has to run away from Joe Biden.
He keeps talking about, well, he's standing up to Biden when he does stupid things on the border and the like.
It's just, it's a struggle for Democrats because they have to try and separate themselves from their party.
And it's just not, it's not something that voters are going to, I think, it's not going to pass the smell tests with voters.
I'll say this too.
When I interviewed JD Vance, I've interviewed him many times, but when I did the one for NBC, I interviewed his wife, Usha.
And she sat and gave me a very powerful interview, but she's a force of nature of her own.
She was on her way.
She was pregnant and she was on her way to go clerk for, I think it was Chief Justice John Roberts at that moment.
I mean, this is a very smart, very powerful lawyer in her own right.
They met at Yale Law School and have quite a lovely love story.
Anyway, you'll love the piece.
All right, let's talk about Nevada because you mentioned that's one of the states that the Democrats are trying to hold on to that they don't want to lose, but it's vulnerable.
And you guys are also predicting that's going to be a GOP takeover.
Right.
Adam Laxalt is, he's one of those candidates that, you know, he's portraying himself as an outsider, but he's got this name recognition of a political family in Nevada.
So he's sort of getting the best of both worlds there.
He's ahead in all the polls, again, not by a lot.
And one of the things that we have done to try and answer this question, Megan, which has been, you know, everybody's been asking over the last, you know, three weeks or month, you know, are the polls right or all the polls or are they off?
We've taken a look at all of these individual states and where the polls over the last three cycles, 16, 18, and 20, whether they overestimated or underestimated support and in which way for which party over those over those three cycles.
In Ohio, for example, Republican support had been underestimated by nine points.
So if you're looking at the polls right now and you're thinking, okay, there's a poll that just came out showed JD Vance up two points.
If the polls are off in the same direction they have been over the last three cycles, he's going to win that race by 11, okay, by double digits.
Holy.
If you look at, though, in Nevada, that's a place where Democratic support has been underestimated.
Democrats have actually done, the polls have underestimated Democratic support by about 0.8 percentage points.
So almost 1%.
And that's, again, you know, it's the vestiges of Harry Reid's machine there.
He always managed to turn out more voters, the Culinary Workers Union there in Clark County, Las Vegas.
And that always seemed to, you know, Republicans always thought they had the goods in Nevada and would end up losing.
So Black Salt's up about a point and a half in our average.
And again, if the polls hold true as they have been for the last three cycles, he'd still win that race, but it'd be very, very close.
So I think he's got the upper hand, but that race is not an absolute done deal for Republicans again with three weeks left.
So right now, you're predicting the Republicans will take the Senate because they'll take over in Georgia and they'll take over Nevada Democrat-controlled seats and they'll hold the seats that they're defending, including Pennsylvania, which is interesting because Fetterman's been ahead in every single poll.
It's like the Georgia situation.
The Democrat's been ahead in every single poll.
But does Pennsylvania suffer from another deficiency in getting and capturing the Republican vote?
Yes.
And over the last three cycles, it's been about five and a half points.
I think that race now is somewhere around the three-point range in our average.
And so, again, if the polls are off in the same direction they have been for the last three cycles, Oz would be ahead, not by much, but would be ahead in that race.
And that race has been moving in Oz's direction over the last week or two weeks.
He's been hitting Fetterman, I think, effectively on crime, on the issue of crime.
It's become a central focus of that campaign.
And also the issue of Fetterman's health, which again is an issue that Oz is bringing up, but other people are bringing up too.
It's not purely a partisan issue.
It's been editorialized in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and some other newspapers have said, listen, he needs to be more transparent about his health issue.
Now, they're going to debate on the 25th, I think.
And obviously, early voting is going on and there will be a lot of people who have already voted by then, but there'll still be a good chunk of the electorate that I think are going to tune in and going to see for themselves how Fetterman performs and judge his, you know, judge his ability to do the job based on what they see that night.
Democrats Peaked Too Early 00:05:02
And it was crazy because the NBC news reporter who interviewed Fetterman said, you know, when he was off this sort of computer that was translating my words into the written form so that he could read my questions, he didn't seem to understand everything I was saying.
I would 100% have shared that detail about a Republican or a Democrat running for office that I interviewed.
It was an appropriate thing.
Just because we didn't see it in the interview, we did see it in the interview, but just because we didn't see them off of the computer doesn't mean she's not in her reporter mode in dealing with him.
Anything between them is fair game unless they've agreed it's off the record, which clearly they hadn't.
And Mrs. Fetterman, Mrs. Fetterman is out there who knows nothing about anything, is out there asking for this reporter to be disciplined.
Why hasn't anything been done to her for revealing this detail about John Fetterman's health?
It's absolutely absurd.
The reporter should be praised for doing her job.
And Mrs. Fetterman should tell us what exactly she's so afraid of, because that kind of comment only makes us wonder more.
Let's just jump back and zoom back to 30,000 feet before I let you go and talk about the generic ballot.
Now, we saw in that New York Times Sienna poll, the Republicans have gone from what was maybe a one-point advantage in that ballot to a four-point advantage in that ballot.
Not long ago, there was the Harvard Harris poll that shows the Republicans, they now have a, they're up with a four-point advantage.
And it had been Democrats plus two.
So that's a big swing.
So more and more we're seeing voters seem to side right before it's time to vote with the Republican ticket.
There's an article in Politico today citing, you know, weathered pollsters and Democratic operatives saying we peaked too early.
We peaked over the summer.
We would have preferred this election happen then.
So if the Republicans take the House and the Senate on this November election, Tom, to what would you attribute it, right?
Because the Dems were doing better over the summer.
Well, I mean, it's clear it's the economy.
I mean, and it has been for months.
And this was true before Dobbs.
This was true after Dobbs.
It's just, you know, Democrats thought they had found this silver bullet that they could use to not only energize their base, which it has done, by the way.
I mean, prior to Dobbs, Democrats, and Biden's approval rating was like 36.8% in our average late July.
The Democrats were moping around the country.
And so it has energized the base and brought some Democrats home to these candidates.
However, the problem is they focus so much on that, they've ignored the issue that is of top concern to the majority of voters, certainly Republicans, but also independents.
And so you're seeing now ad after ad after ad all around the country by Democrats on the issue of abortion.
None of them are dealing with the issue of inflation.
Michael Bennett was asked on television on Sunday, you know, when is the Inflation Reduction Act actually going to start reducing inflation?
And he said, Colorado, well, you know, maybe next year you'll see.
I mean, Raphael Warnock was asked about it yesterday.
You know, Democrats have been in power for two years.
Inflation is still raging.
Why should Georgia voters give you, send you back to Washington?
And he paused, this awkward pause.
And then he said, we're still in the throes of a pandemic.
I mean, that is just not going to cut it.
Yeah, it was so bad.
Democrats, they should be talking about the issue, even if it's just to say, look, we feel your pain.
We're doing the best we can.
We need some help from Republicans.
They're not helping.
They're not voting for any of this stuff that we're trying to do.
To just ignore the issue or focus solely on abortion, again, it's motivating their base.
They need their base.
That's fine.
But it's not speaking to independents who they also need, particularly in the suburbs of Atlanta and Philadelphia and Milwaukee and Phoenix.
And so for that reason, I think Republicans have big leads on the issue of the economy and inflation and immigration and others.
But Gallup came out with a poll last week showing that Republicans had an 11-point lead over Democrats on the issue of the economy.
And for Gallup, in their metric, that was the largest lead for any party since 1942.
So that just gives you a sense of how the public is viewing this election.
It is through an economic lens.
And Republicans are speaking to that issue and Democrats are not.
It reminds me of the people who are like, the end of the world is coming.
It's coming on, you know, October 31st.
The world ends, October 31st.
And you're like, how are people believing this?
Right.
And then you get to November 1st and you're like, okay, the jig is up.
Like, you know, like the whole inflation is transitory.
Don't believe your lion eyes.
You know, the Inflation Reduction Act is going to solve it.
Our lion eyes are exposing those truths and just in time for this election.
So, you know, the White House could only mislead for so long before the truth was just blaring everybody in the face.
Tom and has been for a long time.
Such a pleasure.
Come back soon.
Thanks, Megan.
Healthy Approach to Puberty 00:15:21
All right, coming up next: health and wellness expert Darren Oline.
And I will tell you, there's something that you may be drinking every day that could be causing you a lot of trouble.
You will not believe what it is.
Stay tuned.
We are hurdling towards the trifecta of holiday decadence right now.
It really is, right?
Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
It's like people's goal is to make you gain weight and be less healthy, right?
If they wanted, if that were their goal, would they treat you any differently than what happens on Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas?
Like, here's for me, it's peppermint bark.
I love it.
Don't give it to me.
Stop it.
It's like, here's five pounds for Christmas.
You're welcome.
No, I don't want that.
Now is the time before all the pushers come into your life to fortify your health and protect yourself against the endless treats and the stress that comes with the most wonderful time of the year.
Our next guest is here to help us do just that.
Darren Olin is a wellness expert and the best-selling author of Super Life: the five simple fixes that will make you healthy, fit, and eternally awesome.
Darren, welcome.
Hey, Megan.
It's good to be here.
It's great to have you.
All right.
So, just in time for a lot of challenges that are coming our way.
So, let's just start with a little bit about you so people know how you came to this line of work.
And it started 51 years ago when little Darren was actually born.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, well, I was born early.
So, 1970, and I was three and a half pounds.
So, that was interesting because it informed my father kind of later on in life.
He saw me kind of fight for my life early on.
And then I survived, obviously.
And from there, my imprint was like, this isn't safe.
Like, this is a fragile body in an intense world.
And, and I didn't realize how powerful that was until, you know, I was a regular kid growing up in Minnesota.
And, you know, going through puberty, having weird things going on with my body, I realized that, you know, I got to do something about it on some deep level.
And so I referenced this in the book.
I grabbed a newspaper article and I was 13 years old and I started reading up on a grapefruit diet.
And it was the first time this regular Minnesota kid eating everything and drinking old-fashioned bottles of Coke and just being a regular kid, that was the first time it made a significant difference in my outlook.
And then from there, it just kept going into, oh, we have a lot of control over how we feel, how we look, how we perform.
And ultimately, we've got to build some resilience in this life.
That's for sure.
I'm born two months early in 1970 is a whole different deal than born two months early now.
Neither one is good.
But yeah, they didn't have as much technology back then.
Just wondering, Abby, what, how much did Aubrey weigh when she was born?
She was three.
She was, she was three pounds too.
Yeah.
My assistant, Abby, who's like my little sister, she's here.
She, her first baby was born way early too, and also three pounds and very scary.
And like you, was in the NICU for months, but didn't have, thank God, the ongoing problems that you outline in your book that you had, and probably because of modern medicine.
So I never considered the psychological aspect of that.
You know, like I am vulnerable.
It's not safe.
And it would wind up really driving your whole approach to life.
You've wound up helping millions of people because of that seed of vulnerability in you.
So not, I don't know that it was worth it exactly, but you turned it around for good.
Started with grapefruit.
I remember I lived through that time with you.
I was a teenage girl, right?
I'm exactly your age.
And then it morphed into stuff that was much better than grapefruit.
So you go to college, you become an athlete and you go to college.
And then what happened?
Yeah, I had a career-ending back injury.
And I loved beating out really big people.
I was a fullback.
And, you know, the first game of the season, I crunched my lower back on a big hit and I couldn't get back on the field again.
So I tore a bunch of ligaments in my lower back.
And, you know, every kid has a dream to keep playing.
And so that just kind of stopped.
And I went through my own depression and I just couldn't be around that university anymore.
So I transferred and then asked myself some serious questions: like, what do I really want to do?
And first, you know, selfishly, I want to get myself physically better again.
So this, this kind of serendipity of awareness stepped in and said, well, why don't you study that which you're suffering in right now, the body and nutrition and understand this thing.
And I'm grateful for that because, you know, my father was a professor and, you know, go to college.
And I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do, but that event changed the course of my life.
So I started studying nutrition and physiology and kinesiology and all of these different things.
And it was the start of this insatiable curiosity.
And I think underneath it all, it gave me those tools.
It started to give me those tools of that building of the resilience, right?
That understanding that, number one, underneath all of that, this is a freaking miracle.
Like, what do you mean we can eat food and it can transform that into energy and we get to run around in this life?
And so, of course, it makes a major difference between what kind of fuel you're putting in your body.
So that just, you know, that just spiraled from there and it just continued.
Do you think my old friend who I used to work with when I practiced law used to make me laugh because we would talk about some dark story in the news where people had died or some new study showing you're going to die at a young age if this, if that.
And he used to say, I'm, I'm just really sorry that's going to happen to all of you.
Like he just refused to accept that that's how it was going to end for him.
And I know that, you know, your book posits that disease doesn't exist.
And to me, like it occurred to me whether you're sort of in the, I don't know if it's going to happen for me.
I actually might be able to stave it off because you've got real tools for doing it.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, it's a condition of the breakdown of our physiology over time.
And obviously you want to do everything you can to give yourself the right opportunities to thrive.
And at the end of the day, the reason I chose the title, Super Life, was informed by that little kid that was struggling to survive at a 50-50 chance of living.
And when you start realizing, and please understand that I'm only standing on the shoulders of giants who have dedicated their lives to studying and diving in.
I'm not a researcher, but I have started to learn over the course of the career how to kind of disseminate and look and show up and ask questions and read and jump in the middle of the world in different locations and learn just so that I can maybe,
you know, translate a little more of the common sense solutions that we seem to just blow past when 99% of our issues in our body can be taken care of.
Now, this isn't great clickbait because these are systems and we are a system.
We live in a system.
There is no isolation.
I think isolation creates kind of entropy where it goes further and deeper away from that, which is a uniform system.
So I look at it as like, hey, man, if you, you know, get outside, get some sun, put your feet on the ground, get some sleep, eat fresh food, whole fresh food, move your body, have good relationships, be radically honest with your life, you're going to be great.
But it doesn't, you know, it's almost like people don't want to hear the simple, powerful messages of that, that wand that they have is their choices.
And their choices are many choices added up over time, create extraordinary benefit.
And I'm just living proof of that.
And we all are living proof of that, either going down that road or going down the other one where we slowly accelerate, or in this case, we rapidly accelerate the body's aging process, for example.
And invite disease, invite disease.
It's no act.
We look at sort of the skyrocketing numbers on heart disease, on cancer.
And it can happen to anybody at any income level, at any education level.
But there are real ways, as you outline in this book and elsewhere, that you can really drastically reduce your chances of getting one of those two things.
And it's no accident that people who tend to lead these very unhealthy lives tend to be the ones to get these diseases younger.
They tend to be more fatal when they get them.
And so maybe we're not going to be able to turn into you because you're so disciplined.
I don't know if I could do it.
I'll tell you later what happened when I was reading the book and my experience.
But maybe I can have a healthy dose of you in the way I approach my food and my existence.
Right.
But again, Megan, it is not looking at me as like, oh my God, I got to do that.
It's I've been on a journey too.
It is always a journey.
It is that kind of myopic look at people's lives.
Every person that's had any success has put in so much time, energy and um dedication to these things.
And if I looked at what I ate, even during my throes of nutrition classes in college, I would be shocked.
Um, and and now, over time, you're still diving into stuff, we're still learning we're, we're learning things every day, uh, the exponential uh, learning that we're getting around the microbiome and uh this obviously, the gut and the brain connection the, the dopamine, the serotonin, the conversion of healthy bacteria, the enzymatic activity.
It's it's, it's just a mind-blowing journey.
So so, to that point, I think it's easy for people to use the.
Oh, it's just them, and it's easier for them, or it's too far away from me.
But again, we have to go right back.
I, i'm a blue collar person, like I. I've come from Minnesota, I like to work hard, I like to get dirty, I like to do stuff, which is why I super food hunted.
I wanted to go and see the people.
I wanted to go feel the dirt and see the plants and everything else.
It's like that's how we need to do this.
We need to break our lives back down and ask ourselves, what do we want, what do we truly want in our life, and when we start to cultivate that, then you're like, am I integrated?
Like okay, what do you want to do today?
What do you want to be today?
And that again, not to go too philosophical, but that's the reason.
Super life the title exists, that's why I put it there, because I didn't want someone to not have an extraordinary life when they have the tools right in front of them, what they're putting in their mouth, how they're taking care of themselves.
It is not a rocket science kind of thing.
Well, and some of these are simple, like.
Some of them are bigger and more involved and some of them are quite simple, which we'll get to.
Um your.
Your mention of the microbiome reminded me and my staff i'm sure of.
We had on um a guy, David Feinberg, yesterday.
He's one of the co-hosts of All In Freedberg sorry uh, Freedberg and um he, uh.
He's talking about one of his companies and how they've rejected probiotics now that they think prebiotics are better for you and that there's going to be a day when we're going to be able to take a pill that's basically, forgive me, somebody else's crap.
That's going to completely rejigger our microbiome because it's somebody else's and it's all this other.
Don't do this at home again.
Don't do this at home, you don't.
You don't want to eat shit, but but you someday might want to anyway.
Um okay, so let's get to it, because let's start with the five life forces okay, that you outlined.
That we need to focus on one is the is an obvious one, though the fixes might not be obvious, and that's nutrition.
Eating is the Most intimate thing we will ever do, you say.
And then you go on to say, I know what you're thinking, but it's even more intimate than that.
And the and you've just, you said it: eat a wide variety of whole, fresh, clean foods, mostly vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, seeds, grains, sprouts, and healthy fats.
Eat a lot of it raw.
Now, I know that you love Mark Sisson, and he's a big fan of yours.
And I had him on the show, and I'm, I love him.
I follow his, every day I'm cooking from his two meals a day cookbook, which I recommend to everybody.
But he's way bigger on meat and eggs and animal products and way less excited about vegetables because he, you know, they've been most of them sprayed with pesticides than you are.
Finding Nutrient Dense Plants 00:11:16
So who am I supposed to listen to?
I can't answer that for you for sure.
You know, it's like there's one kind of position I take.
I don't want to tell people how to eat.
I'm just going to share information from my experience.
And listen, I've known Mark for two decades and I respect what he's done.
And, you know, listen, again, I go back to the things that made sense for me.
And you have to look at from many different directions.
It's a personal choice.
For me, I was eating all of that kind of stuff.
I was an athlete.
I was doing all those things.
And then I was having some serious health problems.
And then I had to kind of put my academic hat back on and start looking at this intensely.
And when I started making those choices, I was like, wait a minute, I love animals.
Why do I need to kill in order to thrive?
So I started kind of, again, going back to integration, I started looking at, well, isn't meat a bioreactor or a bioaccumulator of nutrition, of nutrients?
Of course it is.
So, you know, as a, you know, it's funny, the superfood hunter title was given to me, but as a person who spent his, you know, 20 years running around the globe, part of it was also finding the nutrients, the densities, the compounds that are innately within the plant.
And so I spent a lot of my time realizing like, why would I need to kill something in order to get the nutrients that I can find right over here?
So then I was like, well, morally and ethically, that lined up.
I didn't want to kill anything.
Environmentally, that lined up.
And I will agree with Mark on most of the food from a conventional standpoint is, you know, laden with, you know, glyphosate and astrazine and pesticides and herbicides and all of these things that are just ridiculously harmful.
And we can unpack that later.
But so I agree the way we're growing things, you have to understand what we're, how we're talking about this.
Now, okay.
Again, let me jump in because I want to keep it on the practical side too for the audience who wants to know, like, when I see mostly vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, seeds, grains, sprouts, healthy fats, I think I'm having salad at every meal.
Do you have a salad at every meal?
Like, that's boring and it's going to get old fast.
So, like, what, what do you have?
Do you do you do intermittent fast?
Do you have breakfast?
Do you have lunch?
Do you have dinner?
What is your dinner?
Like, what does this look like in practice?
Yeah, yeah.
So, for me, I have fasted on and off for the last 20 years.
So, intermittent fasting comes very easy to me.
I eat two meals.
So, I will have, you know, my first meal, which is a very large bowl of fruit and Maybe some raw spirulina, some of my barucca nuts that I found, maybe some shakology that I created.
And these aren't plugs.
This is literally what I eat.
So it's a Flintstone-size bowl of fruit, usually after my workout.
Then I work and I like to work on an empty stomach.
And then I eat a second meal.
And that's around, I like to eat and kind of be done by 5 p.m.
And that is, yeah, that's a massive bowl of vegetables, as well as legumes, beans, burritos, sweet potatoes, potatoes, all of these things.
And I'll also say, most conventional food sucks.
It's no good.
It doesn't taste good at all.
So when you can grow your own food, when you can get to a farmer's market, when you can buy fresh, it's not even the same, it's not even the same universe.
So there is, and going back to the biome, over time, if I'm eating that way, my microbiome is now infinitely more efficient.
And we've found that if I sit next to, say, someone carnivore, and we eat the same and we eat the same food, let's say they eat the food that I just created, we're going to absorb differently because they've changed their microbiome to adapt to that meat-centric approach.
So, you know, again, I just go back to the nutrient density that is innately within these plants.
What about you mentioned fruit?
Now, I thought the conventional wisdom on fruit was it's just a ball of sugar with a couple of hangover nutrients.
Like, don't think you're giving your kid something healthy when you give him a pear or an apple.
You're much better off getting an actual vegetable in front of him.
Oh, man, that is just the biggest crock that's been unfortunately, you know, this.
Listen, added sugar, processed high fruit toast, corn syrup, all of that stuff, 100% inflammatory, no good.
So, you, but in its whole food form, it is absolutely different, right?
It's got the fibers, it's got all the other constituents, it's got a huge amount of antioxidants, it's got structured water in the form of H3O2.
Like you're delivering this anti-inflammatory, high-antioxidant, rich, nutrient-rich food.
Like, that's and you know, this great, great work by um uh uh uh Robbie Babaro and Cyrus Cambata, uh, they wrote an amazing book called Mastering Diabetes,
and they're proving through the science and through uh getting thousands of people off of uh diabetic medications eating high carbohydrate food, not ultra-processed.
Carbohydrates have been hijacked, right?
It's not a one-size-fits-all thing, so yes, simple sugars, isolated, ultra-processed food, bad idea.
We all agree on that, but in its whole food form, some of the best food ever.
Now, let me ask you a question.
Let me ask you a question.
So, after Mark came on, um, I did.
I went, I got the pasteurized, the pastor-raised eggs.
And I, of course, was already doing grass-fed beef.
And I was looking for farms.
I live in Connecticut now.
Like, there's going to be farms with vegetables that haven't been completely toxicified.
I'm telling you, I couldn't find anything.
I could not find.
So I wound up just going to Whole Foods, which I realize may not be any better.
And if you buy organic, then presumably it's got less of that stuff.
It's expensive.
And now I'm, to be perfectly honest with you, I'm eyeballing my neighbor's garden, which is amazing.
It's right across the street.
She'd probably never know if I just grab the couple, Abby, I'll make you do it.
So what are regular people supposed to do if they're like me and they don't have access to a garden?
Yeah, 100%.
Well, listen, our country is founded on 90% of our country in the early 1900s were growing food.
So number one, let's go back to growing food, right?
If you have a windowsill, put some culinary herbs in the ground in the little pots.
If you have a 16th of an acre, if you have a front lawn, I think there's 47 million acres of lawn that we're watering for no reason, right?
Let's water food, right?
What kind of things can we grow?
Can you just tick off a few things that like an average person like that I could grow?
I mean, tomatoes, lettuces, kale, cabbage.
Cucumber.
I did that one time.
The which one?
Cucumber.
Cucumbers are easy, right?
Even I managed that one.
Yeah, I literally checked my little greenhouse today and I had an amazing watermelon and I was on a trip and I came back and some varmint just devoured it.
And there's also watching nature.
So, you know, that's the thing about picking fresh too, because that's when the maximization of all the nutrients.
So I had a great researcher buddy of mine, Dr. Mohsen Hurmanish, 25 years ago said, you know, watch nature.
Nature will tell you.
And that's the great Incan Empire was watching nature and cycles.
And that's how they were able to provide food for seven years for every person in the village with no refrigeration of any kind, but understanding cycles, understanding food.
So listen, buy some seeds.
If you're worried about food, buy some seeds, put them in the ground.
Here's a really easy.
So my great friend Doug Evans wrote a great book called This, I think it's the Sprout Book.
I think that's literally the title.
And I was just, I just saw him and you can buy sprouting seeds.
Broccoli is great because it's got sulfuraphane.
It's got other compounds in there, anti-cancer, antioxidants, micronutrients.
But you can put, let's say, just to be very pragmatic, you could put two tablespoons of seeds in there, rinse it, soak it, and then drain it.
So you'd soak it for 12 hours, drain it, and then you rinse it twice a day, invert it in a mason jar with a lid on it.
And now all of a sudden, you have a salad for a few cents in about five days.
Some of the most broccoli sprouts are infinitely more nutrient dense than a full mature broccoli.
Wow.
Okay, I'm going to check out that book.
I like that.
And that's something you can do if you live in a Manhattan high-rise like I did before, where a garden is, you know, next to impossible.
This does remind me, I interviewed Elon Musk's brother, and he's big on like these indoor farms and has been doing great work to help people develop them.
Hydration and Brain Chemistry 00:14:40
He's going to be like the guy who is responsible for how we live in the year 3000, possibly even more than his brother, Elon.
All right, stand by because there's so much more I want to ask you about, Darren.
We're going to go through the next, we'll talk about the breathing, the oxygen.
There's so many other things besides diet that you could be doing to extend your lifespan and better than that, have a super life along the way.
All right, so we'll go back to Darren and we'll talk about his show with Zach Efron, of course, too.
Don't forget, you can find this show, the Megan and Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Triumph channel 111 every weekday at noon East.
Listen to it live.
If you prefer to watch it via video, go to youtube.com slash Megan Kelly.
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We'd love to have you.
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You know, Darren, I have to say, I always like guys who are from the Midwest, guys and gals, because I'm from upstate New York and it's basically the same place.
People make sense.
They make sense.
So, and you have a vibe that makes sense to me.
Now, just to give you the overall list, in case you're just joining us now, we are talking about the life forces, the five life forces that Darren recommends for you to have a super life.
We talked about nutrition.
Of course, you can learn more about the specifics in Darren's book.
We're just giving an outline today.
Nutrition was one.
Just to give you the other five, and we'll go through them: hydration, oxygenation, alkalization.
I think I've said that correctly, and detox.
Number six is a bonus, and that's attitude.
And the part I'm really looking forward to is what Darren calls fatal conveniences.
These are things you're using to make your life better that are killing you.
They're killing your super life.
And I can't wait to get to them.
But let's start with the good stuff and how we can pretty easily be taking better care of ourselves.
Hydration, hydration.
We hear it all the time.
Eight, eight glasses a day, blah, blah, blah.
It really is important.
Yeah, it's extremely important.
And, you know, the thing is that, and this kind of dovetails into the fatal convenience side of things.
And that is, you know, we are so blessed in our country to be able to turn on a tap and have water on demand.
I have definitely been in many situations and seen different classes of people around the world where that absolutely does not exist.
And they have never seen clean water.
It's dirty and that's a horrible situation.
So I just want to set the table appropriately.
So I'm celebrating the fact that we have on-demand tap water.
The problem is that, yeah, just saying drink eight ounces of water or eight ounces of water a day is appropriate.
It's not.
You need to clean the water.
And yes, we have pathogens that will kill you immediately that are not in the water, but we also have other chemicals, industrialized chemicals that have gotten in our tap water from those astrazines and glyphosates and pharmaceutical drugs.
You know, I wish that wasn't the case, but it is.
The data is all out there.
So you need to clean it.
You need to clean that water and then kind of build the water back again.
So the bottom line is the easiest way to do that very cheaply and you get kind of two birds with one stone.
And that is you clean it with reverse osmosis.
So it's a filter that doesn't allow those unwanted contaminants to pass through and it cleans that water or distillation.
So it recondenses from heat into water again.
So that cleans everything out.
However, extremely important to add electrolytes back in.
We have 70,000 little batteries of cells in our body.
We need the electrolytes for cellular osmolotic activity of hydration, water going into the cell.
So adding that crystal salt, Himalayan crystal salt, you have fulvic minerals that are a little more advanced, but you can get, there's a great company called BLK, but there's so unrefined Himalayan crystal salt, you add a pinch per glass or half a teaspoon per gallon, and now you have the appropriate size of those electrolytes that are so important for hydration.
And now you've just created clean water.
Can I just ask you, when you talk about the filter process, do you have to get one of those fancy filters that the guy comes and installs?
Or can you just use like the Brita?
A lot of us use that.
I love that.
It's always the best.
No, the Brita doesn't work.
It doesn't get everything out.
Oh, no.
Yeah, that gets out the larger sediment, but it doesn't get out those smaller particulates and those chemical particulates, right?
And that's really what we want.
We don't want those endocrine disrupting, immune damaging pesticides and herbicides and pharmaceutical drugs.
You just don't want those.
Britta is just not going to do it.
So you can't rely on those things, but it is quite simple, right?
There's a great company called Aquatrue on the Top Counter Reverse Osmosis.
And by the way, fun little fact, season two of Down to Earth, when we were traveling around Australia, I bought one for myself.
And I said, well, we have 100 bags per our crew.
I'm just going to add two more.
I bought an Aqua True for the crew for me.
So I could go to any place, any hotel, put any water in there, and I'm now creating clean water.
And then we are a plastic-free set.
So we eliminated single-use plastic as much as we could.
And that's the other side of it, right?
So the other side of it, the two birds with one stone, is you cleaned your water, you've created receptivity in that water.
And now you've also eliminated the propensity to use single-use plastic by just getting some glass, getting a stainless steel.
Glass is my preferred kind of way to carry around glass or around water.
So it's easy to do that.
And now you're not taking, which is again, this other flip side of the fatal convenience is putting water in plastic is a really, really bad idea.
And of course, we can't avoid it sometimes.
I myself, just like everyone else, when you're in the airport, you have to pour out your water and you have to buy water because I'd rather be hydrated than not.
So easy solution to create good clean water and eliminate the single-use plastic that is harming you.
And those plastic, and again, I could go off on this, but they're plasticizers and phthalates and BPAs in there that are leaching into the water.
So eliminating those things will be good for you in many ways.
Even in your shower or your bath, you know, is it dangerous to bathe in all of that unfiltered water?
And what do you do about that?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, you know, they use chlorine so that those pathogens don't kill you on demand.
So again, that's part of the reason they've cleaned the water treatment plants.
This is not a dig.
They're just doing what their standards are.
So, so, but the reactions of chlorine with other inorganic compounds while it's going through pipes creates other problems down the line with other chemical reactions.
And then in a hot shower, you're vaporizing that and your pores are open and you're sucking that in.
So what goes on the skin goes in the body, period.
Yeah.
So yes, a whole, you know, this is a bigger thing.
A big home water filter is a really good idea.
And if not, for, you know, go to go to Amazon, you can put at least a charcoal filter that's going to get out most of the contaminants on your shower head.
And now you've just at least, again, this whole thing is about small steps that you can become aware of and then take action on.
And all those little things that add up is just going to add up to your overall resiliency and your overall well-being.
Small steps that can make a big difference.
A couple of things from your book.
This made a lot of sense.
Start every morning with a big glass of water.
You've gone eight hours without drinking anything.
That is, I've heard that from others too.
First thing you should do when you get up, have a big glass of water.
And our kids need to drink lots of water too, especially before school in the morning.
You say the latest research has found that test scores and academic abilities actually depend on whether or not they've been drinking enough water, not to mention just their health.
And you point out that that tired, kind of fuzzy brained, emotionally drained feeling that sometimes you have this time of day.
For example, people reach for chocolate or caffeine or some snack.
You might just need a glass of water.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The number one side effect of dehydration is lack of energy.
And statistically, 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated.
75%.
7%, which is a massive number, don't even drink one ounce of water a day.
Oh, wow.
And right?
So, so how are we supposed to be mentally okay?
How are we supposed to function properly?
We're just barely scraping by.
So that's why the simplicity of these may seem simple, but they have exponential benefit once applied and once applied over time.
This isn't, you know, something that you need to, oh my God, you need to overcome.
It's a biohack.
It's whatever.
No, it's the most common sense things that you can do.
And then from there, you can start adjusting as you become your own kind of superhero Olympian.
Do these foundational things first.
And then you can start feeling more and more aligned.
Yeah.
You can go next level.
Yeah.
On the subject of kids, you address that too.
And you say you should be treating them the way you treat yourself.
You should not have a different diet for them.
It occurred to me because it'll be so easy for me to just stick a glass of water in front of each of my kids in the morning.
That doesn't take any time at all.
They will drink it if it's there.
But that's a bigger challenge, right?
They're drawn to the sugary things.
I don't know.
And that seems hard to have your kids eat the way you and I are talking about.
Yeah, well, listen, it's also we've trained them.
They didn't come to this on their own.
So we've trained them a certain way and we can train them back.
I mean, I don't want to, it's not like a dog, but I'm just saying, well, we, they are dependent on us.
So some little fun little things you can do is put mint in the water, put a cucumber in the water, put, you know, whole strawberries and let it just infuse itself in there.
And those are incredible ways.
And it's also helping to mineralize the water.
And now it's giving these effervescent flavors that are delicious.
And keep in mind, you've, you know, when you've, the microbiome and all these habits have been, they don't just show up.
They've been trained that way.
So it might take a little bit of annoying time of adjusting your child's habits as well.
But speak to them as they, as you would yourself.
Like, hey, mommy's doing it.
Daddy's doing it.
This is healthy.
Let's do this together.
I want to.
Darren, I'm laughing.
I'm thinking about myself saying, step away from the mac and cheese and come over to this sprouted broccoli that mommy's been growing.
Yeah, that's a big jump.
That's a big jump.
All right, wait, let's keep it moving forward.
By the way, this is important.
I like this.
Keeping plants around us, beneficial for maintaining healthy levels of oxygen in our systems.
You're right.
Plants are very effective air purifiers, nature's most efficient indoor air cleaners, removing pollutants.
Studies have shown that hospital patients who have plants in their rooms recover more quickly.
So plants is another simple thing that we can do to help ourselves breathe better.
And you talk about, yeah, because this is, sorry, I jumped ahead to oxygenation.
And oxygenation, we did a little exercise in the beginning that I got from your book.
We need to be getting plenty of oxygen.
We need to be breathing in and breathing out.
And can you just tell us the 5555 step?
It's not even a meditation.
It's for getting your brain oxygenated and your body oxygenated.
Yeah, it's a bit of, it's just a nice little easy box breathing.
So it's an inhale of five, hold for five, exhale of five, and then on the exhale, you're holding additionally for five.
And if you want, do it for five minutes, right?
And we know, and Dr. Andrew Huberman does a lot of great work on this, where that that those types of box breathing can really downregulate all of us, any of us, right away.
It's shifting us all from this chronic stress that we've somehow created in our world very effectively that's undermining us, but it shifts us back into that parasympathetic state.
And every process, including the immune system, works exponentially greater.
Sunlight and Controlled Breathing 00:04:28
So you're getting many things going on.
You're helping brain chemistry.
You're downregulating from the adrenal response to the parasympathetic chill out space, but then you're also oxygenating the body.
And we know that with extra oxygen throughout the body, this helps fight bacteria.
This stimulates the substances of growth factors and stem cells and promotes healing.
Like it is, again, this is why I love this stuff.
It's like when you actually look at it, it's just pleomorphic.
It's just, it's not a two plus two equals four.
It's a two plus two equals 24, right?
And it seems so simple, like oxygenate.
I mean, that's the step we're talking about.
Oxygen, well, we're doing that now.
We're doing that now, but you're basically saying we can amp it up.
We can make, we can do more of it.
We can do more controlled breathing.
The thing I mentioned about the plants, there are ways, and even you say, if you have the opportunity to like study or be outside while you're doing some of your work around plants and trees, take it.
Like there are these tiny things that can improve our health.
Well, Megan, you know, you started with, you know, we were talking about, you know, the indoor things and the plants needing the plants inside.
Well, part of this kind of fatal convenience is we now are living 93% of our lives indoors.
And with all of that, the unpacking of that are fire retardants and formaldehydes and cleaning products and indoor air circulations and dust and molds and mites and God forbid, black molds and everything else.
And so, and then artificial lights and everything else.
So, so when I'm saying breathing, I'm saying de-stress.
And when I'm saying go outside, it's the antithesis of what I just said.
And it's that easy.
It's opening the door, going outside, getting some sun, taking your shoes off, putting it on the ground if it hasn't frozen, because I'm well aware of that, coming from Minnesota.
But at the end of the day, hey, make a choice of maybe getting some powerful stress, and that will also stimulate your immune system.
But that's a whole other tangent.
But yeah, these are really powerful things that you can do to counteract this weird ass modern world that we've created.
It is weird.
It is just weirdly strange.
To never go outside.
Yeah, it's, you know, I was reflecting, I was watching that new show, 1883 with what's that actor's name, Elliot and Tim McGraw.
And the reason I'm saying that is because my grandmother, who ended up in the Dakota, South Dakota, before she passed away, she was 93, and she told us the story of her coming across Minnesota and South Dakota in a covered wagon.
And she, they're friendly Native Americans and she fed them.
And, you know, obviously they survived.
And it's like, think of that.
That was, that's my grandmother.
That's just that far away.
And think of how far away we've accelerated ourselves outside of nature and think that somehow we can reek, we can do something and not be intimately connected because we are.
All of our elements that we are made up of is absolutely nature.
So we, you know, it gets funny terms now of biohacking and all of that stuff.
Well, it's just really turn the common sense switch back on and don't be afraid of all of these things like the sun.
Be mindful, get some sun and settle down on some of these chemicalized things.
And learn to breathe.
Learn instead of upper recipe.
Learn a couple of other tips on that because you say breathe consciously.
Avoiding Toxic Compounds Daily 00:11:04
This means inhaling deeply, filling your lungs, then emptying them completely.
Too many people breathe shallowly.
And breathing deeply through the nose is also a great stress reliever.
Inhale properly through your nose, which filters out the dirt, pollution, and other weirdness that would otherwise go straight into the lungs.
Get some exercise every day.
Physical activity requires you to inhale and exhale.
And then this also from your book, Dr. Arthur C. Guyton, author of the respected textbook of medical physiology, put it like this.
All chronic pain, suffering, and diseases are caused from a lack of oxygen at the cell level.
And you go on to cite another study out of Leeds, England, that concludes there's a clear link between low oxygen levels in the brain and Alzheimer's, not to mention things like fatigue, circulatory problems, poor digestion, muscle aches, dizziness, depression, memory loss.
We need to think about oxygenating.
Our lungs do a nice job on their own, but they could use some help.
Let me jump forward to alkalization.
What is it?
And is it good or bad?
Yeah, well, I mean, it's really talking about the different gradients of food in this case and water.
And the body regulates itself.
Obviously, the blood has to stay in a certain pH or alkaline.
It's really, I mean, maybe I would have changed the chapter back in the day because it's talking about voltage, really, because that's how these little cell batteries work, right?
We have to have the electrolytes, just like a battery does in order for electrical conduction.
We are an electromagnetic field.
I'm sorry to say.
Like if the heart stops, what do you do?
You step away from the body, you take paddles, and you try to start their heart again.
EKGs, we're measuring the electrical regulation of the body.
So the alkalinization chapter starts to understand that whole fresh food is typically very high, not high like over alkalinization, but balanced alkaline.
But if you consume things that are acidic, acidic, acidic over time, then that's going to lower your electromagnetic field.
And by the way, there's a great book.
I don't remember the title, Dr. Jerry Tennant, The Body's Electric or something like that, where he measured the millivolts go up when the body goes into a healing response.
So if I hit my thumb, it is in fact the frequency and the voltage that goes up to signal the body to pull in the growth factors, the stem cells, the constituents that it needs to heal.
So this body's communication from a cellular level, from a water level, from electrolyte level, from high vibe foods are all this high degree of electrical conduction.
So if you're taking in coffee all day, you're not consuming water, you're eating ultra-processed food, your vibe is super low.
And there's a, then that creates the opportunity for disease and other things to flourish because you've created that environment to do so.
It doesn't have a point of view.
If bacteria or virus have an opportunity to proliferate, it will.
Like I said in the book, go put your garbage out.
And then if the garbage man doesn't come, what happens?
Right?
Nothing good.
Yeah.
Squirrels, raccoons, rats, if you live in New York.
All right, let me keep it moving.
The last life horse listed is detox, detoxification.
And I mean, I think we generally understand what that means, but I don't know.
I mean, to me, I'm like, there goes the booze.
You say, don't become a booze hound.
Don't become a drug user.
Check.
Got it.
But there are a lot of chemicals in our food, in our drink, in things we put in our, like on our skin, our clothing, personal care products.
So describe detox in a way that is useful for the average Jane or Joe.
I'll describe it this way.
If you're not doing certain things, some of which you've described, putting toxic compounds in your body or on your body, you're going to be doing a lot better.
When you line up all of these kind of representations of these life forces or fixes, then the body really stays in harmony.
But if you overload it full of just this made-up food, this, you know, manufactured food that we are somehow calling food, and then we're slathering on, you know, 60 to 80,000 chemicals that are somehow created, you know, in our atmosphere and in our environment and every year.
And we're getting blasted with personal care.
We're getting blasted with shampoos and deodorants.
And again, like the water, then your body's going to be overloaded and it won't stay in tune with what it needs to because of all these other man-made inputs.
So the body is naturally with cellular autophagy.
The body is naturally great at allowing cell death and replenishing cells and everything else.
But now from this modern day world, we have just blasted ourselves with chemicals that largely haven't even been tested.
You know, I think it's about 7% have actually been tested.
And then none of them, virtually none have been tested as they interact with each other.
And again, we are interacting.
We are, you know, in our life, interacting with the deodorants we wear, with the clothes we have on, with the environment all the time.
So our bodies have a hard time clearing out some of that stuff.
So the number one thing, the takeaway is start to learn what you can eliminate and then replace with a healthy opportunity, a healthy situation.
So like a cologne, like there's no part of me that ever wants a cologne or anything on my body.
However, I will lean towards and put on essential lavender, rose, everything else that's actually sympathetically very good for my body and also incredible for people around me, as opposed to a chemical soup that's affecting my immune system and other people's.
So that's just one example of starting to get out of this world that just because you can buy it doesn't mean it's healthy.
Well, and thankfully now there are a lot of products that will come without these chemicals because more and more manufacturers are paying attention to this and realizing there's a whole market for people who care about this stuff.
When we come back, we're going to talk about these conveniences, these fatal conveniences, the things that you're doing in your life every day that might be really easy for you to eliminate that could really help supercharge your life.
More with Darren coming right back after this.
Darren, I tell you the truth that during the break, we were talking about how like we're kind of, oh, can't do it.
Probably not going to get filters on our showers and we it's expensive and like, we like the way we're eating and, like some, that diet coke every once in a while tastes good and we like meat.
And it's like the sunscreen and the chemicals is everywhere and the fire retardant in the, in the carpet.
It's like I can't, I can't do.
It makes me want to just walk away and say, forget it.
Oh, I mean, I think it's easy.
It's easy to go into that place, that apathetic place, that overwhelmed place, and but the here's, here's the other side.
I spend the majority of my time focused on the solutions of these things.
Because it's, it's, it's again.
Do you want to do something that ultimately leads to you not living your best life or your children's best lives?
Um, and undercutting opportunities?
Um, because it it will.
You know it you, you will have to pay the debt.
Uh, the body in our minds.
I'm like that too.
Our minds want to just put it in these boxes.
I don't want to think, I just want to live my life.
And I understand you don't have to make any choices on my account.
I'm just delivering a message.
Uh, my father suffered from this stuff, chemical sensitivity.
Chemical sensitivity in the 90s.
Um, so it was an early indoctrination because in order to hang out with my father, I had to wear these things.
Uh, I had to change.
I had to put on different deodorant, I had to wash my clothes differently if I was going to see my father.
So the truth is that it's hitting you anyway.
So I don't know about you, but denial just doesn't work.
Um, you know, I just as a caveat, I was so surprised to get the message that you guys wanted me on, because i'm like, i'm not political and i'm so happy that you're excited about these topics and stuff, and and so my point is like, if we don't discuss things, if we don't, um, tell me how good it goes when you're dealing with the marriage your your marriage partner or regular partner and you blow things off and you don't discuss, how does how does that go?
It doesn't go well and then inevitably, you have to pay the, the debt on.
You know, not being honest with yourself, not being honest with your partner.
It's the same with the body, and maybe even more so, because this physical avatar that we get to run around with and we get to participate in this life with this is getting hit with it.
I wish, I wish at the core of me, that I didn't have to write a book on fatal conveniences, that I didn't have to talk about it, that these chemicals are not in our products because, at the end of the day, why the hell are they?
Sparkling Water Health Risks 00:03:51
It's like these forces are working against us.
Wait okay, let's switch into that gear and get into it because um, I want to make sure I made a list of the things that we're not supposed to be using.
Um, i'm just going to tick them off and then we'll go through.
This is the tease that I had from earlier, sparkling water.
Oh, we'll come back to it in a second, acrylic.
Acrylic and polyester.
Antibi bacterial soap.
That one for me is no problem.
Canned food.
Oh no.
Every time we make tacos, we make black beans out of the cans.
Now here's where we really go off the rails.
Botox.
Fuck you, Darren.
Eyeliner and mascara.
That's the point where I was like, I'm out.
I'll get a plant and I'll get a water filter and I'll give up seltzer and I'll breathe and I'll get rid of my polyester blankets, but I am not getting rid of the poison that keeps his face looking 10 years younger.
Well, listen, hey, hey, to that point, if you're doing really good things and keeping yourself healthy, then that's going to be better than blowing everything off and then just sprinting towards a disastrous life.
Pick your poison, as they say.
Pick your poison.
Yeah, pick your poison.
Pick your time.
All right.
So let's talk about sparkling water.
Everybody drinks sparkling water.
You mean like the little canned sparkling waters with a little flavor?
Those are actually not particularly good for us.
Yeah, well, I mean, now even turning on flavor, that's a whole nother thing, right?
So the, you know, in my supplement world background, you know, I looked under flavoring, the laws of the FDA around flavoring.
There's so many loopholes that they can put different terminologies and flow agents and everything else.
And now you're walking, those natural flavors, even if they say natural, have other unwanted things in there.
I thought those were a nothing.
I didn't think there was anything in those seltzers.
Yeah, there's usually not, but you mentioned a flavoring thing.
So I'm just addressing that.
But the just on their own, yeah, they're infusing with carbon dioxide and that converts to carbonic acid.
And so again, so think of that now in the context of what we just talked about.
Okay.
We just talked about water.
We just talked about electrolytes.
We just talked about the batteries and the electrical conduction of the body.
Now, knowing that these sparkling waters have a pH, which is a low acidity, between anywhere from three to five pH, which is, it's like a Richter scale.
Every unit down from seven is a 10 times factor.
So they're very acidic.
Now, do I drink?
Will I drink sparkling water?
Yes.
But how these fatal conveniences come up is because I know people and they'll reach out and go out, hey, I'm drinking water.
I'm drinking like 10 sparkling waters a day.
And like, yeah, that's not a good idea.
So what I'm saying.
The bubbles themselves are problematic.
What they do to make it carbonated is what you're trying to avoid.
Go to flat water.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And listen, we now told you a couple of little hacks.
Infuse it with some mint and some strawberries.
And I'm not saying juicing.
I'm saying soak it in and that will vibe up.
And a kombucha, a great kombucha with lower sugar is great.
And it gets that tickle.
I love kombucha and you got the fermentation, you got the biomes.
Soaking Fabrics for Vibes 00:08:41
I've never had that.
Oh, oh, man.
Well, yeah, I'll point you to some good, good kombucha.
So that's number one.
Let's go, let's go forward to acrylic and polyester.
I mean, literally everything has polyester.
While I was reading this, I had this nice, comfy blanket on me.
And I'm like, oh, God, what's, I, I'm so dumb.
I did not realize that acrylic is right directly from fossil fuels.
I learned this about plastic a couple, like a year ago from Michael Schellenberger.
And now I find out polyester too is right from fossil fuels.
So it's like curling up with an oil spill.
Like, oh my God.
So I already went online and I ordered a blankie that didn't have any of that.
It was $200.
I'm like, okay, that's.
So I don't know.
Like, but that's just a blankie.
I bet you half the clothes I wear.
I bet you the sheets I have over.
Like, who doesn't everything have polyester in it?
Yeah, unfortunately, there's a lot.
And that's the, again, this, this kind of weird world that we got sold.
And it's like to make these cheap, super cheap products from, you know, the aftermath of petroleum and wrapping ourselves and wrapping our children, you know, in plastic diapers and phthalates and endocrine disruptors.
I mean, it is just insane.
When you really start to kind of look at it, again, I have to stop myself every time I look at a fatal convenience.
And I've already looked at it and I look at it some more and I see the research and it calls out and it's like, oh my God, what are we doing?
And so I'm compelled.
You know, I lost my father 22 years ago, but he embedded this in me.
And so I'm compelled to write about it.
And then again, over time, you can change.
And here's what I'll say about choosing expensive.
Like, I love upcycling, but keep in mind that the older blankets, for the most part, the older blankets and clothing are, the less toxicity they have.
So hold on to stuff longer, upcycle.
There's amazing upcycled companies.
There is, I think I can say this, there's an incredible, there's a lot of hope.
And let me say this.
There's a great company called Kentra run by this amazing woman CEO.
And they figured out the molymers.
So all of these petroleums, they're playing with certain chemistry to create what they're creating.
But also now just putting some effort into looking at other chemistry, they're now able to create waste streams from sugar and play with the molymers.
And now they are absolutely creating textiles from sugar.
And it doesn't have the petroleum endocrine disrupting problems.
And they are pushing away some of the top brands on the planet to convert over to this stuff.
So maybe I got a question to ask you.
This is a personal question.
But we have a terribly naughty dog.
He's so naughty.
My audience knows about my Strudwick.
And we just ordered a rug that's basically made out of plastic, but it feels soft.
And it's taking like eight months to get here.
And now I'm like, oh man, we shouldn't have gotten that rug.
And now I'm going to have to have my kids keep their sneakers on whenever they walk across this rug because it's basically like rubbing yourself with polyester and acrylic and bottled water.
And it's, yeah, exactly.
And we're inhaling that.
And there's micro plastics.
And, you know, I think the stat is we're consuming unknowingly about a credit card's worth of plastic every week from all of this ridiculousness.
And so I, so again, you go back to just turn on the common sense radar again.
Don't neuter your pet or your children because there's certain elements to all of this stuff because you've got the parabens, you got the formaldehydes, you have the phthalates, all of them based in petroleums all have very, very similar things.
They're endocrine disrupting, so they're absolutely affecting female and male hormones.
And now we know that every child born in America has already 200 chemicals in the umbilical cord, and many of them are carcinogenic.
So we've created a world where it's ridiculous.
So that just like threw me for a loop.
Is this, and forgive me if you don't want to touch on this, it's fine.
But if all these chemicals affect like your gender hormones, I mean, do you think that there's a connection between all these chemicals and this, the rise that we're seeing in people who identify as trans?
Like, I don't, is this, is this discussion entered your world?
I mean, it's hard not to just say, hey, there, there is a, we are neutering ourselves.
So I just go back to like, there's great work by Dr. Leo Trissande, right?
Where we absolutely know that the male motility, I think 2040, there won't be, I mean, from statistics, there won't be a man or 2050, there won't be a man with a viable sperm.
So yeah, we're affecting our immune system.
I can't, I'm not a researcher.
I can't make that jump and I wouldn't dare to because I have no idea.
But I do know that all of these chemicals and so many more are absolutely affecting menopause, affecting menstruation, and then the T counts of men are gone.
There were studies around testosterone levels at 1500, I think, millimoles per deciliter, something like that.
And now they've shifted the average because everyone's so low.
And now it's like 500 to whatever is normal.
So we've somehow said, well, this is just what's happening.
Just what's happening is not normal.
Like it shouldn't be the, it shouldn't be the barometer for normal, right?
So, so it's a really big problem.
It's a really big problem.
And do you have any plastic in your house?
Do you have any plastic in your house?
I mean, you can't avoid it, of course.
I mean, what do you have on your floors?
Like, what kind of rugs do you have?
I have no rugs.
I have this recycled.
I mean, listen, I'm rebuilding because the fire from the end of season one, I chose to come back to my property and be here on the ground as I try to rebuild.
And I'm in a 400 square foot yurt for the last three and a half years.
Oh my goodness.
So like I live, I'm living.
It's like the fire retardant is good to some extent.
It's not all bad.
Well, actually, yeah, it is actually.
Fire retardant.
The research goes back to that why they put it in things is because, you know, in the 70s, 60s, 70s, people were cigarette smoking and it was to prevent if the cigarette fell.
It doesn't stop a fire at all.
It does nothing to stop a fire.
And in fact, it releases all of those toxins, makes it much more dangerous for even the firefighters.
It's not stopping anything.
So, yeah, so I checked on my floors.
I checked my, even my yurt couch.
I went out, bought an organic, no formaldehydes.
And like, I eliminate as much as possible.
Wow.
You could never live with Strudwick.
I mean, he's like, we have all the furniture sprayed so that if he craps on it or he does something to it, we can clean it up more easily.
It doesn't work.
As I said, we're now getting plastic carpets.
But now I might need to look into a refund.
Let's see if that's refundable, Abby.
There's so much more.
Ulta Girlhood Framing Backlash 00:06:48
Listen, what's a good, what's a good place for people to go who want to hear more from you?
You got the TV show.
I can't believe we didn't even get to Zach Efron.
That feels very wrong.
But tell us the places where we can get more information from you, Darren.
Well, DarrenOlene.com, Darren Alien on all handles.
And also a special shout out.
It happens to be Zach Efron's birthday today.
So happy birthday, Zach.
And we're excited.
Season two is coming out.
I can't say when, but soon.
You guys are so cute together and they go all over the place.
And Darren does his thing.
And Zach's equally into it.
And it's won all these Emmys.
So this project has turned into something really meaningful and very successful.
And we will definitely watch it.
Darren, thank you.
Thank you so much for the great discussion.
I appreciate it.
Megan, it's been great.
Thanks for having me.
Time for another edition of Thanks But No Thanks, where we say thanks but no thanks to a trend or a story bubbling up in the news.
Today we're talking about beauty, at least beauty as it's defined by a brand that has gone so far over the woke line, it is getting serious backlash now from its own customers.
Ulta Beauty is a cosmetics and fragrance brand with more than a thousand stores throughout the country and tens of thousands of employees.
Last month, Ulta launched a new video series on their YouTube and social media accounts called The Beauty of, with a focus on a different representative influencer each episode.
Sounds interesting.
Let's see what's going on.
The series is hosted by David Lopez, a hairstylist and beauty expert.
The first episode is called The Beauty of Fatness and features Virgie Tovar, who Ulta describes as an author, activist, and expert in weight-based discrimination who has taken her body back from a fat phobic society.
Let's take a look.
Really, we're looking at different layers where fat phobia exists.
We're talking about the interpersonal layers, you know, how we relate to it, how it shows up in our lives as a cisgender, queer, gay man.
You know, our whole identity revolves around like, let's be as fit as possible, thin as possible, be as desirable as possible.
Fat phobia, we're looking at the system that you're talking about.
We love seeing magazine covers of what you said, a over a fat celebrity, for lack of a better word, that now has lost 100 pounds.
We love to see that.
I want to start by saying that, you know, no one has to be healthy.
No, right?
Like, I mean, it's like, no, like there is no governing body that's like out there putting, you know what I mean?
It's like no one owes anybody that in either the traditional sense of the word or any other more innovative or, you know, more politicized, maybe even version of that word.
You don't have to be healthy, but we don't have to celebrate somebody who is morbidly obese as healthy.
That's a lie.
By the way, what is T?
T, what's that?
I don't, truth?
Abby looked it up.
Truth.
You can't even say truth anymore.
You just got to go T. That's cooler.
This goes on for 33 minutes, these two.
The response in the YouTube comments from the Ulta customers was pretty universally outraged.
One commentator, Crystal, writes in, I was obese in 300 pounds.
I was always in pain.
I was slowly killing myself with food and not moving enough.
And critiqued the whole beauty movement, saying, y'all are playing with your lives.
Ulta actually responded.
Comments such as yours perpetuate the discrimination we're trying to combat.
What?
The intersectionality of health and fatness is nuanced, often personal, and needs to consider more than just one's relationship with food.
So in other words, shut the F up, Crystal.
What do you know, former fat person?
Which brings us to episode two, which came out last week.
This time, Dave sits down with someone named Dylan Mulvaney for an episode titled The Beauty of Girlhood.
We actually talked about Dylan Mulvaney recently on an episode of this show when Coleman Hughes was here because Dylan was featured at a Forbes Women's Summit.
This is Dylan.
Day three of being a girl and I've already become a bimbo with the queen herself.
We are drinking martinis at 2.55 on a Monday on Sunset Boulevard and then we're going makeup shopping.
We love it.
Cheers.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
So let's take a look at how this dive into quote girlhood goes with Dylan and Dave.
And we're on day 167 of girlhood.
Mr. Hollywood, I'm right here.
Let's zoom in on that.
But if we're going to talk about like beauty, epheme, my signature, I mean, if anyone follows me on Instagram, it's pretty much a signature look.
It's always like...
I know it.
It's just very beautiful.
It's very B.
I always elongate my eyes.
I'm always taped.
Like, I just like to present the most feminine parts of me.
But the thing is, is that I, a makeup artist friend whom I adore does my makeup sometimes.
He's one of the only people who does it.
And he, he has said to me multiple times, like, there's a point when you, I'm doing your makeup and when I watch you do yours, I see the euphoria happen.
It like shows up in you.
Well, I got to tell you in person, your skin is like gorge.
Like it's giving me like gal out on the town, but without a pour on her face.
Paid a lot of money for that.
I gotta get some of that.
Oh my God.
These are two biological men.
Dave, the host, is wearing a long blonde wig.
Here's what happened.
When Ulta tweeted the preview of this with the sentence, trans girls can do it all, with those annoying clapping hands, the emojis behind every single word, and said the episode featured David and Dylan talking all things girlhood, Ulta's 600,000 followers had a big issue with the framing.
Maggie tweeted, those are two adults.
It's very creepy to hear them talking about girlhood when neither has ever experienced it.
To which Ulta responded, we believe that beauty has no boundaries and we want to create an environment where all expressions of beauty are welcome.
It's clearly secretly Dave making the comments.
In other words, shut up, Maggie.
Or another one who tweeted, two adult men talking about their experiences with girlhood.
Please explain the difference between woman face and black face because I can't see one.
To which Ulta replied, hate has no place at Ulta Beauty or our social channels.
Please refrain from posting disrespectful or hateful comments.
This went on for dozens of tweets until Ulta decided to make a final statement this weekend saying the premise of the beauty of is to feature conversations that widen the lens surrounding traditional beauty standards.
The intersectionality of gender identity is nuanced, something David and Dylan acknowledged themselves within the episode.
Regardless of how somebody identifies, they deserve our respect.
Ulta Beauty, we can respect those two without making them the face of a video show about girlhood.
Thanks, but no thanks.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
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