Your Dose of Dr. Molly: Issue #3
Psychedelics as catalysts for creativity? Learn how screen time affects your health, the FDA is redefining “healthy,” & grab your golden ticket soon!
Welcome to Your Dose of Dr. Molly: Issue #3!
Before diving into this information-packed newsletter, I want you to first pause, take 30 seconds to close your eyes, and just breathe…
How did that feel?
This is something I recently picked up from my dear friend Lillian, and it’s truly made such a difference in both personal and professional settings. Try implementing this practice at the start of your next team call, family meal, or group gathering. It’s such a quick and easy practice that can make all the difference to help you and those around you quell anxiety, clear the mind, and re-center.
Now, let’s get into some health, science, technology, and psychedelics!
You heard it here first…
If you’ve been on the fence about making the investment and commitment to my online course, YOUR HEALTHSPAN JOURNEY, you’re going to want to pay attention!
In the coming weeks, I’m going to be running an EPIC deal (I’m talking >65% off!!!!) on my entire online course for anyone who pre-orders my book, THE SPARK FACTOR: The Secret to Supercharging Energy, Becoming Resilient, and Feeling Better Than Ever. This will be a limited-time, one-time-only offer, so get your pre-orders in to make sure you don’t miss out on it.
As you may already know, I firmly believe that blood sugar is your energy gauge, it’s the ultimate energy biomarker, and it’s absolutely imperative to master your blood sugar if you want to extend your healthspan and longevity.
Signs of insufficient energy capacity:
Are you storing belly fat (visceral fat around the organs)?
Do you feel like you need a nap (or a double espresso) halfway through the day?
Do you wake up frequently throughout the night?
Do you struggle with focusing on work and find it hard to concentrate?
Do you feel the need to eat constantly, including in the middle of the night?
Are you experiencing inhibition of sexual activity and reproduction?
In my online course, I provide you with all of the science and data behind the health issues we are all facing, along with tools to measure where you’re starting from and the techniques and instructions to improve your numbers. I learned how to reverse my insulin resistance which yielded unprecedented returns in my energy levels, mental clarity, and weight control. I’ve helped my Stanford Medical School students and patients in my concierge medical practice do the same. Now, I’d like to help you too.
Stay tuned for more details, all you’ll need is the pre-order confirmation. If you want to dip your toes in and take a single lecture or module from the course in the meantime, you can get a head start here. Oh, and don’t worry if you already pre-ordered it, the offer will be valid for you too. 😊
Can psychedelics be catalysts for scientific creativity and insights?
Creativity, being ideas or objects considered novel and valuable, is a trait that makes the world go round, and it's especially important in the sciences.
This research article describes how dream states have been highly influential in promoting scientific creativity and insight, contributing to some important scientific breakthroughs. And, it talks about how dreaming and hypnagogic states (the phase between sleep and wake) share a great deal of overlap with the psychedelic state of consciousness, which has also been associated with illuminating scientific creativity.
The psychedelic state may have its own characteristic features making it amenable to creativity enhancement, such as brain hyperconnectivity, meta-cognitive awareness, access to a more dependable and sustained altered state experience, and potential for eliciting sustained shifts in trait openness.
Albert Einstein dreamed about cows, an electric fence, and a farmer and came up with the Theory of Relativity, the idea that events look different depending on where you’re standing because of the time it takes the light to reach your eyes. And Dmitri Mendeleev was the revolutionary chemist that created The Periodic Table. His breakthrough came as he fell asleep and saw the table of elements perfectly form together. When he awoke, he created the foundation for what many of us still learn from today.
As for psychedelics and creativity, many chemists, including Alexander Shulgin, David Nichols, and Hamilton Morris, credit their passion for chemistry and psychopharmacology to early exposure to psychedelics. Biochemist Kary Mullis won a Nobel Prize for developing a new polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology, an insight he ascribes to LSD. And Steve Jobs credits his experimenting with LSD as some of the most influential experiences of his life.
For me, psychedelics can act like a jump start to get the brain out of the stuck state. But remember, we have a long way to go in the research of these medicines before they are fully ready and safe for mainstream adoption. In the meantime, I recommend using time in the morning right when you wake up and in the evening right before you fall asleep to explore your consciousness and see if you can use this time to problem-solve and come up with creative solutions.
Your smartphone is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master
This is a riff off of the famous saying by Robin Sharma, “The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.”
The same holds true for mobile devices. And if your phone frames your days, you could be in trouble. Nidhi Gupta, Director of KAP Pediatric Endocrinology, spoke directly about the worrying trend in smartphone-associated health disorders, such as obesity, sleep, and behavior issues.
And Nidhi is concerned about health on all levels: physical, mental, and emotional. Of course, there are obvious physical signs worth paying attention to, like prediabetes, dyslipidemia, and other metabolic disorders associated with major health risks, including cardiovascular disease. And when we stack unhealthy, unconscious food choices with disruptions before bed, those who can’t put their phones down aren’t stacking the deck in their favor.
Excessive screen time contributes to a growing obesity epidemic, lack of physical activity, and unhealthy eating. The problem is that there is a vicious circle. Compulsive use of devices follows the same loop as other types of addictive behaviors, according to Gupta. She traced the overuse of wireless devices to the dopaminergic system, which is a powerful neuroendocrine-mediated process of craving, response, and reward.
Like fat, sugar, and salt, which provoke a neuroendocrine reward signal, the chimes and buzzes of a cell phone provide their own cues for reward in the form of a dopamine surge. As a result, these become the "triggers of an irresistible and irrational urge to check our device that makes the dopamine go high in our brain," Gupta explained.
I had a realization recently: just like processed food hits our pleasure centers but doesn’t give us the reward of nutrient density so we remain nutritionally starved for real sustenance, our social media is like processed social connection. We aren’t getting the reward of touch, safety, trust, or love in the same way that real in-person human connection can offer us.
The FDA wants to redefine the word “healthy”
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is proposing to update the definition for the implied nutrient content claim, “healthy.” They want to see it become consistent with current nutrition science and Federal dietary guidance, especially the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (Dietary Guidelines), regarding how consumers can maintain healthy dietary practices.
The FDA is considering a revision to the requirements for when the term "healthy" can be used as an implied claim in food labeling to indicate that a food's level of nutrients may help consumers maintain healthy dietary practices by helping them achieve a total diet that conforms to dietary recommendations.
Specifically, to meet the proposed definition, a food product would need to contain a certain amount of food from at least one of the food groups or subgroups (e.g., fruit, vegetables, grains, dairy, and protein foods) recommended by the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
Some problems with the 2020-2025 guidelines that give me significant concern with the FDA’s definition of healthy include the following:
The guidelines don’t take into account the nutritional needs of people with diet-related diseases. For example, the advice to eat 6 servings of grain per day (3 of them can be refined) and up to 10% of calories as sugar will do harm to someone with diabetes.
The guidelines emphasize <10% of calories from saturated fat. Recent research has debunked the relationship between saturated fat and heart disease making this a very surprising recommendation based on out-of-date science. In fact, most French people consume between 10-15% of their calories from saturated fat and they have lower rates of heart disease than Americans.
Updating the “healthy” claim is one of the FDA’s nutrition initiatives, which seeks to reduce the burden of chronic disease and advance health equity. I just wish they would update their recommendations with an approach that takes into account modern nutritional science.
Can you guess what the most dangerous drug is?
This classic paper from 2010 serves as an excellent reminder and basically demonstrates that magic 🍄’s are infinitely safer than ETOH (alcohol).
Multi-criteria decision analysis modeling showed that heroin, crack cocaine, and methamphetamine were the most harmful drugs to individuals whereas alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine were the most harmful to others. Overall, alcohol was the most harmful drug, with heroin and crack cocaine in second and third places.
And when you pair these insights with the graph below, it makes one wonder why 🍄‘s are a Schedule 1 while alcohol is as normalized in society as tap water. Alcohol is a legacy drug! Recent research shows that there is no safe amount of alcohol for human health. Luckily for us, we’re on the verge of tipping these scales and I believe in our lifetime, MDMA, 🍄’s, and other psychedelics will no longer be considered as dangerous as they are today.
Ultra-processed diets cause weight gain and excessive caloric intake. Who knew!?
If you didn’t know, I don’t want to accuse you of living under a rock… but in case you were not aware, a diet chalked full of ultra-processed foods isn’t good for anyone. These malnourished diets lead to less energy, more weight, and even more erosive health conditions.
While we’ve also known about the increased availability and consumption of ultra-processed foods and assumed that this has been associated with rising obesity prevalence, scientists had yet to demonstrate this correlation.
Researchers at the NIH found that despite the ultra-processed and unprocessed diets being matched for daily presented calories, sugar, fat, fiber, and macronutrients, people consumed more calories when exposed to the ultra-processed diet as compared to the unprocessed diet. Plus, people gained weight on the ultra-processed diet and lost weight on the unprocessed diet.
So limiting your consumption of ultra-processed foods and focusing your diet on whole foods may be an effective strategy for obesity prevention and treatment.
My advice? Get on a whole food diet, whether that’s paleo or vegan, I don’t care. Learn to cook more for yourself. Just eat REAL food. Ultra-processed foods, fast foods, and soda will kill you slowly.
Speaking of healthy diets…
Introducing Levels Kitchen
Levels Kitchen is a free 5 part metabolic health cooking series teaching you how to cook metabolically healthy recipes. They also show you how to transform comfort food recipes into delicious low-glycemic dishes maximizing fiber, micronutrients, omega-3s, and smart swaps.
And you’re in luck; the first two episodes just launched! Episode 1 covers: why food matters for metabolic health, tips for prioritizing proactive healthcare, food swaps for metabolic powerhouse meals, and how to maximize nutrients in every meal. Episode 2 is an instructional cooking video on how to make low-spike tacos in under 30 minutes for under $30 (with both a veggie and meat option!). Sign-up here to get notified when the other recipes drop!
Exercising is good for you!
A recent study found that combined weightlifting and moderate to vigorous aerobic physical activity were associated with a lower risk of all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality.
What was interesting about the study was the finding that only weightlifting lowered the risk of cancer mortality. The recommendations were to weight lift at least one to two times a week.
Changing your life starts with small steps, little movements, and a continual momentum of these healthy habits. I started weightlifting with just kettlebells and power blocks at home and eventually joined a gym. Start slow and let your body adapt to increasing fitness.
Quote of the day
“Fall in love with taking care of yourself. Fall in love with the path of deep healing. Fall in love with becoming the best version of yourself but with patience, with compassion and respect to your own journey.” ~S. Mcnutt
With love,
Dr. Molly