Episode 40: Psychoneuroimmunology & Biohacking with Dr Olivia Lessler

Can your lifestyle be the key to your health? We explore this intriguing possibility with Professor Dr. Olivia Lessler, a leading expert in neuroimmunology and emerging diseases. This episode of "Your Lifestyle is Your Medicine" unpacks Dr. Lessler's transformative journey from disillusionment in family medicine to becoming a pioneer in health optimization and chronic condition management. Driven by the personal loss of her mother to breast cancer, Dr. Lessler's focus on diet, sleep, movement, and mindset has not only resonated profoundly with her patients but also established her as a valued advisor to health companies worldwide.

Dr. Lessler challenges traditional medical practices and highlights the crucial roles of psychoneuroimmunology and epigenetics in managing chronic diseases. We discuss how addressing a patient's psychological and cultural needs can be just as important as treating physical symptoms. Drawing on insights from Bruce Lipton's "The Biology of Belief," we explore how lifestyle and mindset influence gene expression and health outcomes. With anecdotes and practical tips, Dr. Lessler emphasizes the importance of clinical observation and thoughtful, economical medical testing over an indiscriminate approach.

This episode also delves into the significance of understanding inflammation, the healing power of mindfulness, and the benefits of incidental movement. Dr. Lessler offers valuable insights into managing stress, improving sleep, and making personalized health plans that fit individual lifestyles. From the fascinating phenomenon of broken heart syndrome to the practical steps for incorporating healthier habits into daily routines, this conversation is brimming with actionable advice. For those looking to connect with Dr. Lessler or learn more about her innovative approach, we provide all the details you need. Don't miss this enlightening episode that promises to reshape your perspective on health and wellness.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Welcome to the your Lifestyle is your Medicine podcast, where we do deep dives into topics of mind, body and spirit. Through these conversations, you'll hear practical advice and effective strategies to improve your health and ultimately add healthspan to your lifespan. I'm Ed Padgett. I'm an osteopath and exercise physiologist with a special interest in longevity. Today's guest is professor dr olivia lesla. She is an adjunct senior lecturer with griffith university's national center for neuroimmunology and emerging diseases.

Speaker 1: 0:34

This is a world-class research facility focusing on mechanisms of chronic fatigue syndrome and long covid. She is the chief medical officer Altus, a plant medicine company headquartered in Australia, and she is the Resident Medical Consultant of CFS Health, which is an online chronic fatigue syndrome recovery program. She has interest and expertise in preventative medicine, psycho-neuroimmunology, biohacking and works with complex multi-system chronic conditions like neurodegeneration, cancer, allergies, hypermobility, gut problems and autoimmunity. Her unique skill set is in problem solving these multi-system chronic conditions. She splits her time between Australia and Europe and I think it's safe to say she is not your average GP. What we're going to learn today will shed light on why many of us are sick and why the medical system is not equipped to deal with it, and what you can do about it. Dr Leszla, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Speaker 1: 1:34

Now I really want to get into the nitty-gritty of health optimization by using sleep, diet, mindset and movement, but before we do that, I want to know how you got to where you are today. What was the path you took from being a medical student to working in multiple companies, being on the board of several longevity and biohacking companies and speaking internationally? Can you tell us your journey?

Speaker 2: 1:56

Every time I tell this story I feel like there's a little bit more that comes into play and it depends on who's asking play and it depends on who's asking. So it basically goes back to the fact that, um, at some point I wound up in family medicine and I was getting bored with what essentially felt like guidelines to write prescriptions and that just didn't feel like healing to me, because I became a doctor to be a healer and I started to speak to my patients about things like diet and sleep and movement and mindset, simply because it seemed like common sense to me. Funnily enough, it seemed like common sense to my patients and it really resonated. And before I knew it, I became very busy with more and more patients coming through my door and I think they were all a little bit disillusioned with how medicine had been practiced. You know, maybe just in that area that we were, we were in, but, um, they really wanted to speak to someone who not only understood the benefits of paying heed to these things but also was delving into the science and evidence behind it and not just talking offhand about sleep or diet as an afterthought.

Speaker 2: 3:27

And when I realized how much it resonated with patients, it got me even more excited about it, and before I knew it, I was writing white papers, and it was those white papers and my self-research, self-directed research, that got me the attention from several companies, or rather from several CEOs and, I suppose, important people from up-and-coming companies, and so they were starting to. They started to invite me to come onto boards and to advise. That's how I got to where I am. I've been very lucky.

Speaker 1: 4:04

In the UK, where I grew up, the normal path to medical school is to graduate high school, potentially take a year off between high school and university, then go to university at 19 or 18, 19 years old and then graduate five years later as a doctor and then go to residency. But you went later in life. Do you think that changed your outlook on how to treat patients?

Speaker 2: 4:26

later in life. Do you think that changed your your outlook on how to treat patients? Yes, but also partly because the reason why I went back to to uni later is because my mother passed away. So she was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 43. She passed away when she was 45 and actually this is the first time I'm talking about this on a podcast. I turned 45 a few days ago and it was, it is. This is my year to celebrate my mother, her life, my life, patients who are struggling and patients who have been gaslit, patients who you know who are, who need the care that they deserve, may not necessarily be getting that. So, um, this is an important year for me and I fell apart. My family fell apart after my mom died. I was 17. And, um, I was kind of lost for a little bit, you know. So I only went back uh to uni when I was 26, did my first degree in international relations and then uh got into medical school. So I didn't start medical school till I was 30.

Speaker 1: 5:45

Interesting. I have a similar sort of anniversary. My father died when he was 62. And I'm not 62 yet, but it's when I get to that age.

Speaker 2: 5:58

I think I'm going to feel what you're feeling. Yeah, you know it's a weird thing because I think, subconsciously, there was a bit of me that didn't see past 45. I didn't think I was going to pass. I didn't think that I was going to get sick and pass away myself. I just just didn't. I don't know, I couldn't look past 45. And here I am, 45 on your podcast, alive and well okay, can you tell us about your specialties?

Speaker 1: 6:25

And I say that knowing that you are a jack of all trades and I don't think you actually specialize in any one thing, which is a great thing to have in a medic. But you mentioned psychoneuroimmunology. Can you tell us what that is and how you apply it to your patients?

Speaker 2: 6:44

So psychoneuroimmunology is actually more easily thought of as psychophysiology, or how the mind can affect the body, ie mind-body medicine. So psychophysiology is the science and art of understanding that not only psychology but behavior can affect the reproductive system, the nervous system, the immune system and the hormone system, but also that those systems can affect the mind and the brain. What this gives us are many leverage points. So when a patient comes in with a particular issue, we take a thorough history, as all good doctors do, of course, and we also listen to the patient's wants, needs, cultural perspectives, and then we figure out which of those levers we're going to pull, because it is not so simple and it should never be the only tool in your toolbox that whatever you are inverted commas deficient in, that's what we're going to top you up with. Right, because that, I think, is quite like.

Speaker 2: 8:04

I think that that's quite um an older school way of thinking. So, for example, if you have low vitamin d, or we'll just give you a vitamin d supplement. If you have low iron, we're going to give you an iron supplement. Um, if you know you're, uh, underweight, we're gonna feed you up, and if you're too fat, we're going to starve you, like. It's just these sorts of things that should be relegated to the past. Right now, it's about understanding the psychological drivers of what's happening in your body, and also what's happening in your body might be affecting how you think about things and about your emotions. So that's, in the nutshell, psychophysiology, or psychoneuroimmunology.

Speaker 1: 8:51

But I thought everything was to do with genes. If I'm overweight, I've been told recently that that's genetic. If I have a thyroid problem, that's genetic Is that true?

Speaker 2: 9:05

Look, there is absolutely no doubt that genes have a part to play. They have been oversold and we all know that, and in fact, studies have demonstrated for decades, decades that genetics has, at most, 30% to play in chronic diseases. Now, this is chronic diseases, lifestyle-driven diseases, because of course there are some disease processes which are very driven by genes Huntington's, for example. But we're not talking about those things. We're talking about the average person, average joe, without a genetic driven disease, more of a lifestyle thing. So think of your type 2 diabetes and many of your cancers, um, your cardiovascular issues, your thyroid problems. All these tend to be chronic diseases, largely inflammatory driven, largely lifestyle driven. And these are the ones where, yes, genetics plays a little part but, honestly, the power is in the patient's hands. The power lies in the patient's ability to change their lifestyle, change their mindset, change how they frame the problems.

Speaker 1: 10:24

I think this might be a great opportunity to bring up our mutual friend, bruce lipton who has? Written a book called the biology of belief, and he was probably one of the first scientists to talk about this concept of epigenetics. That the, the genes are not our destiny, but the way our genes interact with the environment is our destiny. Yes, well, not our destiny. Sorry is is, it's almost changeable. It's not our destiny changeable is this something you look into in your practice?

Speaker 2: 10:56

look. You know, I have to admit I used to do a lot more dna snip analyses. So what that is is your epigenetics, your mutations in your DNA, which kind of give us the different flavorings, shall we say, our responses to the environment, our responses to food, how easily we put weight on, for example, the color of our hair. Snps stand for single nucleotide polymorphisms. There are plenty of companies now that will do direct-to-consumer tests giving you everything from your propensity to metabolize alcohol and how caffeine affects you and whether or not you're a morning lark or a night owl as far as your circadian rhythm goes.

Speaker 2: 11:46

The only problem with these SNips is that, like genes generally, they also have to be expressed. So what that means is that they tell you that which of your guns are loaded, but the environment and your lifestyle, how you think you interact, like all these things that form the soup within which we live, it is those things that is going to fire those guns and the way that SNPs are spoken about. It's as if once the gun is fired, you can't re-hoster it. Gun is fired, you can't re-hoster it, and I I beg to differ. So there's a lot of determinism that's expressed with dna snips. Um, and I know plenty of companies and practitioners who will actually prescribe based off snips, which is largely ludicrous, um, because they just tell you about your propensity, right? They don't tell you what is right now. So let's just say you had snips that indicated you may have some difficulties with methylation, so that would be your mthfr, which everybody knows, your MTRR, and so on and so forth. Would I then prescribe B6, b9, b12, methylated B6, b9, b12 to these patients?

Speaker 1: 13:12

No I wouldn't.

Speaker 2: 13:13

You know, you still want to do a lifestyle diary. You still want to talk about their poo and their mood and their food. You still want to talk about their sleep, like. There are so many more things that will absolutely affect how a patient, how an animal, lives and expresses day-to-day. That is far outside. You know their dna snips, so do I think dna snips, uh, dna sip analyses can be helpful? Yes, they do. However, to prescribe just based on DNA SNPs is genetic astrology.

Speaker 1: 13:53

The functional medicine world seems to be taking the normal traditional allopathic medicine that's in the UK and Australia, for example. That's more socialized and, like you've said before on different podcasts, it's a safety net to make sure everyone gets something. And what the functional medicine practitioners are doing is they are accessing this new world of testing and they are testing everything, which gives them a lot of information, but then they seem to be prescribing not medicines but interventions, be that nutrition or pharmaceuticals sorry, vitamins or vitamins supplements, and I've heard you say that perhaps that is not the ideal approach. Can you talk a bit more about the shift in medicine and where you stand amongst that?

Speaker 2: 14:43

Yeah, you know, it's very exciting as a medical practitioner essentially, you're a clinical scientist, right? It's very exciting when we have access to new tools, new testing tools, assessment tools, new data, and there are some very clever sort of taglines running around. You know, test, don't guess, and that kind of stuff, and I don't know. When a patient comes to me, generally speaking they're sick, and I know that if I do testing that has not been thoughtfully, testing that I haven't curated thoughtfully, that of course everything is going to come back lit up like a Christmas tree. How helpful is that, though? So I think that, and especially in my case, a lot of the time, by the time patients come to me, they've seen six, seven other doctors they've been tested to within an inch of their life. So a lot of the time, I actually prefer instituting some basic housekeeping first, because all of us, including the best of us, get this wrong, but in patients, it seems to make more of a difference, in patients who are unwell, if you spend some period of time instituting again the basics and being mindful about it. That means absolutely getting appropriate quality sleep, whole foods, more water, more clean, clean water, and grounding themselves both emotionally, spiritually and physically, getting themselves back out to nature and so on and so forth. You'll actually find that it's a major domino effect. So all the dominoes laid out are symptoms. You push over some of the major dominoes In this case it would be your fundamentals. Lots of dominoes will fall over and then you see what you have left and then you test.

Speaker 2: 16:53

Now do I test? Of course I do. However, I'm still learning how to do this right. But I recognized many moons ago that just because I can test doesn't mean I should test, especially in the functional medicine world where testing is expensive. Testing costs the patient because we should be absolutely learning to read into every single digit that comes out of one test group. So, for example, and looking at functional medicine testing, you're not at the standard testing. You know the amount of evidence, the amount of information that you get out of an organic acids test or out of the dutch or out of um, you know, like a 360. Is phenomenal and it is up to us to actually, for the benefit of our patients, it is up to us to make sure that we are able to interpret that data fully before we commit our patients to more testing.

Speaker 2: 18:14

I've seen one of my higher profile patients with a significant amount of money go to a very well-known biohacker who is not a medical doctor. Not that that makes a huge difference sometimes, to be honest with you, because medical practitioners can sometimes over test, as you well know, um, but this bio famous biohacker does sort of executive training type stuff and part of that is private functional medicine testing. I saw the list of tests that my patient was asked to do. It came in at almost $5,000. And it literally was like throwing the kitchen sink at it, throwing everything up against the wall and seeing what sticks and that's not.

Speaker 2: 19:05

You know that that shows a lack of clinical acuity, um, and in this case it didn't. I suppose the patient didn't mind because he could afford it, but we wouldn't do that to our regular patients, would we? So I'm not saying I get it right, but at least I kind of see that this can be a problem and I want to make sure that I'm not a victim to that kind of mentality where you know you can't, you know you haven't quite developed that clinical acuity to be able to glean a fair amount of information from history, like we were taught in medical school, and instead you're overly relying on numbers on a page, because the patient is the person that's sitting in front of you in the room.

Speaker 1: 19:57

Exactly. There's an old story from osteopathy and I may put this in the podcast. I may not, but I think you'd like it. You remember sherlock holmes and sherlock holmes um arthur canado was a medical practitioner and he was taught by the surgeon and the surgeon I can't forget the surgeon's name, but he was, uh, the inspiration behind Sherlock Holmes it turns out one of the first osteopaths, uh, from Scotland.

Speaker 1: 20:25

He was a a doctor trainer, edinburgh, trained under that same surgeon, with Arthur Colonel doll, and he went to America to disprove osteopathy. He, it was his mission. He thought it was all bogus and anyway he ended up becoming one of the first converts to to the profession. But he's, he wrote down in one of the osteopathic journals uh, an example of this guy's genius. So he, uh, he asked him, he's, this was the surgeon, the sherlock holmes character. He said, how do you do that? How do you see these patients and know so much? And he says, well, walk with me through the waiting room and I'll show you.

Speaker 1: 20:56

And so he walks to the waiting room and there's a lady sitting there I don't, maybe you know this story and he, she's sitting there and he says, how was the crossing? And she says, oh, it was fair. It was fair. And when will you be picking up your other child, staying with the auntie, is it? And and the person was like what, what? How would you mean how was the crossing? And he says, well, look, look at her hands. They're dyed, a slight blue. And that's the.

Speaker 1: 21:21

The fact of the. There's a dye factory on the island, uh, away, you know, a wave over the sea, uh, just near edinburgh. So she needed to come in on the ferry. Now there's two pairs of childhood child shoes there and it's uh, it's a saturday, I think it is. So the shoes were nice shoes and they were wearing their muddy shoes.

Speaker 1: 21:41

So he knew that there will be another child in the mix somewhere and most likely staying with a sister, and he guessed the sister bit. But you can put the pieces together and it was this example of the clinical reasoning and understanding your patients. And, and you know, I've often heard that story and thought how do we do that now with our sort of globally diverse cultures and their intermixing of geography, and we don't know those things anymore about our patients. But there is a chance for us to observe our patients, the way they walk, the way they talk, the way they breathe, the way they sit, and just take that time to formulate some ideas, even before they start speaking yes, okay, because it feels like we're over relying on testing and data on a page that doctors now have lost the skill sets in observing and making some differential diagnoses from those observations.

Speaker 2: 22:47

Because from a embryological perspective, looking at going back into the womb, the egg is fertilized by the sperm and then divides right, two, four, eight, 16, so on and so forth. Can't keep going because you'd just be a giant ball. So at some point you divide it to three layers and in these layers you have what we call the germ layers. So they start the beginning processes of downstream parts of the body. So you've got the ectoderm, the mesoderm and the endoderm, and the ectoderm gives rise eventually to your nervous system, your central nervous system, your spinal cord, your brain, your skin, and the mesoderm is your sort of connective tissue, your muscles and so on and so forth. And your endoderm is your connective tissue, your muscles and so on and so forth, and your endoderm is going to give rise to your internal organs. So, because the skin derives from the same germ layer as your nervous system system, generally speaking there is a cutaneous, so skin manifestation of diseases, especially if there is a nervous system component.

Speaker 2: 24:13

We see skin picking, for example, in some mental illnesses we see eczema and psoriatic scars or psoriatic skin sores, with patients who have got inflammatory conditions, and so being able to pick the cutaneous, the skin manifestations of different, not just psychic processes so you know, anxiety, depression, whatever it is but also of um other disease processes, especially metabolism, is actually very important. So I have noticed that this seems to be lost to a certain extent as a skill set in younger doctors and it's something that I'm constantly looking to pick up from older doctors, more experienced doctors, because pretty much everything in this realm that I've learned, either yes, I did see it in in medical school, but it wasn't quite talked about as much, or it's been an older, more experienced doctor that's taught me, so it's being able to, you know, read not just skin but also the falls of the skin and nails, eating nail beds, for example terry's nails skills yeah yeah, you know yeah, all the pitting and the lines and all that.

Speaker 1: 25:40

With osteopathy, because we're not in the UK anyway, we're not medical doctors, we don't have access to those tests, and so we actually have retained some of those old school ways. You know, you look at the fingernails, you look at the tongue, you look at the teeth. Ok, so what is the mucous membrane? What condition the mucous membrane is in? Is there inflammation in the tongue? You look at the teeth. Okay, so what is the mucus? What condition the mucus membrane's in? Is the inflammation in the tongue? Is there, uh terry's nails, which is like a collection of um waste metabolites in the end of the nails? Is it the bags and the eyes? What can we tell about this person just by looking at them?

Speaker 1: 26:12

I once met an old osteopath in in america actually, and he he was the team physician for one of the ultra running uh teams. Um, kind of a mismatch because he was he was like in his 80s I think, but he loved it. He would go around and help these, help these guys off the ultra runs, and he said after a while he, uh, he could feel a patient or one of his athletes and tell which um electrolyte they were down in. And he said he was, wow, he's just like oh yeah, potassium feels like this and uh, magnesium or uh feels a little bit like this, and he could just tell by touching the skin so you know, admittedly, if you told me this story like three years ago, I'd be like today I'm like okay, yeah, yeah, I believe that it's, and they, they used to.

Speaker 1: 27:00

Again, I don't want to talk about osteopathy too much, but they used to do their clinical rounds and the idea would be, you would touch the patient with, um, diabetes, you would feel them, and then you would say, okay, I've touched one, touch two, just, and by the time you complete your residency you had to be up, like at the thousand mark thereabouts, so that you could put your hand on a patient and go oh, that's kind of like a diabetic type touch, you know, because the glucose within the cellular, uh, within the cells, creates a stiffness and you can tell by touching yes, yeah, 100 actually.

Speaker 2: 27:31

So, um, I can pick a hypermobile patient, um, just by not by watching them, you know their joints, but just by how their skin looks. Now, there's just, there's something. There's something about hypermobile patients.

Speaker 1: 27:50

You mentioned that inflammation is a key component of a lot of illness. And I'd like you to expand on inflammation on where does it come from and why is it such an important thing to understand and to get under control in our modern day?

Speaker 2: 28:04

you know, I've recently been sort of deep diving again, um, into so the evolutionary drivers of the diseases that we see today, because all these symptoms that we see are actually were actually appropriate at some point. Right, the body is expressing these things in an attempt to protect you to a certain extent, and we know that inflammation in the short term, acute inflammation, is meant to be protective, regenerative, recuperative, but it is chronic, calcitrant inflammation that winds up hurting normal cells as well. In a way, the nervous system, immune system are willing to lose a few battles to win the war system, immune system are willing to lose a few battles to win the war. And inflammation in and of itself is not a positive thing or a negative thing. It has to be appropriate for the situation. So, because inflammation is one of the oldest evolutionary mechanisms, we have to protect the body. It is also one of the mechanisms that's induced in the body now when a threat real, perceived, hardcore, whatever is seen by the nervous system. So there are inflammatory processes which will get turned on, whether you get a splinter or there's an actual virus invading you or you have a fight with your partner and you are upset and the cortisol is churningurning, racing through your body and your subconscious brain thinks my gosh, I mean, what's happening here is is this something that's going to eventually take us out? I'm gonna turn on inflammation because I'm going to short-term try and protect you loss and figure this out. This is also known as the inflammatory bias of uh of the human body. It is a theory concept that was elucidated by charles raison in a 2016 paper of the same name and essentially going back. You know, from an evolutionary perspective. Know from an evolutionary perspective.

Speaker 2: 30:46

We, generally speaking, died because of disease or trauma, so the disease is going to be brought about by, you know, viruses, bacteria, parasites. Trauma is either a saber-toothed tiger or the person in the next village who wants you to take over your heart. You know, and so you get the inflammation sparked in the body whilst your immune system surveilled and tries to get rid of said virus, bacterial, parasite or try to stop those things from invading the wound that you've sustained in the fight, from invading the wound that you've sustained in the fight. And we didn't have or we had very low, I assume incidents of autoimmune diseases and chronic diseases back in the day. Then you have the advent of hand sanitizer and antibiotics and all these weird and wonderful things that we've managed to do to ourselves and we have had less infectious mortality, which is fantastic, in other words, less death from infections but we now have this incredible rise of autoimmunity and constant chronic inflammation. So, um, to reiterate, inflammation is neither good nor bad. It needs to be appropriate. The 1990s thing of chucking a thousand supplements at someone as an anti-inflammatory mechanism needs to die in that century as well. So we're not looking to quell inflammation, quell inflammation willy nilly in a patient. We need to help that patient modulate that inflammation instead.

Speaker 2: 32:26

The interesting thing about how the body turns on inflammation is that one of the things that it will do is because the biggest seat of your immune system is in your gut, which we all now know because of the gut brain axis. But because the biggest seat of your immune system is in your gut, the fastest way to turn on inflammation is to poke the gut immune system, and the fastest way to do that is actually to send a signal to the tight junctions of the gut and actually physiologically open them up. So it's kind of a leaky gut, but it's. Your body is doing it on purpose and that is so your immune system is able to see things that it normally wouldn't see. Long chain fatty acids, long chain proteins, long chain sugars, you know bacteria in the gut, blah, blah, blah turns on the immune system. They send a signal back up to the brain by a paraganglionics of the of the vagus nerve and light out the microglia.

Speaker 2: 33:32

Now the whole leaky gut that has been sort of um espoused for the last 20 years or so has been about how the food that we eat and the chemicals that are in the food are punching holes in our gut wall.

Speaker 2: 33:50

So it's a very you know we're passive bystanders in this process to a certain extent, but I think that, even though lots of that is true, of course, you know, we do know that certain types of foods like Tom O'Brien, for example, is big on gluten being a massive hole puncher in the gut wall it is also important to see that. You know our neuroimmune system is very active as well in modulating our inflammation and that's how it does it. That's how it does it to one of its mechanisms and that's why there is this sort of neuro new world wave of thinking with regard to ibs, so irritable bowel syndrome where, in order to help modulate what's going on in your gut, it's not just about these. You know quite restrictive diets and supplements and all that, but there is merit in looking at, uh, modulating the vagus nerve or, more importantly, looking at your mindset and your emotions.

Speaker 1: 35:04

Let's get there, let's go. That's a great segue into mindset, emotions and movement. So your way of treating, as I understand it, is to start with the big rocks first, and I think I've heard you say you can't supplement supplement your way out of a poor sleep yeah, yeah, that's right, it's helpful.

Speaker 2: 35:25

Look, supplements are so helpful, interventions are so helpful. Of course they are right, but only because you have to be compassionate to patient circumstances. You cannot hem them into this fOMO, into this FOMO mindset where, if they don't have the money or the time, they're not going to be able to achieve the outcomes that they want. And that's exactly what we do to patients when we tell them that they have to do hyperbaric oxygen therapy or they have to do hypothermia therapy or acupuncture or take these supplements or whatever it is like it's formal can kill patients. It really can, and I've I've seen that kind of anxiety that that way of thinking can bring about, um, can be brought about in cancer patients, you know. So, when you're fighting for your life, it's, it's difficult not to jump on google and keep googling for more solutions. And so I have had patients, to be fair, not just cancer patients, but anyway I've had patients, you know, message me almost incessantly what about this, what about that, what about this, what about that?

Speaker 2: 36:47

The one thing that people need to, kind of including myself, one thing that we really have to keep remembering is that you cannot heal if you are in a sympathetic state. Now remember, when we're talking about the nervous system, when we talk about the sympathetic state, we're talking about fight flight. We're not talking about being sympathetic to someone, right? So the sympathetic nervous system state is fight flight cannot heal in a sympathetic state because your body is primed metabolically, spiritually, energetically, emotionally. Your body is primed to engage aggressively, to run if need be. It thinks that it might have to jump into action and save you, and save you it can.

Speaker 2: 37:42

In that sort of state, you know, redirecting resources to healing is a luxury and it can be done later when you run the safety of a cave. This is obviously from a liberation perspective, but it holds true now. So when we are, you know, when we are constantly ruminating about things and there's regrets and there's shame and there's guilt, these are all things that keep us in the past, right. So I in my you read, you know, listen to a few my podcasts and all the rest of it those, those emotions fear, guilt, shame and regret those are like the four biggest emotions that will kill. If you are worrying, you're in the future. Whatever it is, you're either in the future with worry or you're in the past with regret. You cannot be here, you cannot be present, and if you are not present, your immune system is not going to put any resources into regenerating recuperating Sounds like the work of eckhart tolle.

Speaker 1: 39:01

Yes, yeah, the power of now. Well, I mean, I've read the power of now. I've read a few of his books and there's a lot to be said for his approach yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 39:10

I mean all the. You know. There is a reason why the there is a reason why the big thinkers in this field Bruce Lipton, gabor, maté Bessel, van der Kolk, eckhart Tolle. There is a reason why there is actually a lot of simplicity to the message and I wonder if, because there's a perceived simplicity, it's not given the kind of time that it deserves in the medical fraternity. Because doctors like numbers and they like things that seem progressive.

Speaker 2: 40:02

To a certain extent, they like things that seem a little bit more, uh, aggressive as well, you know, and that that's why, you know, going back to basics seems quite boring and unsexy to the majority of biohackers and doctors and what have you. But you know, there's something, there's something quite beautiful that lies in the simplicity of it all, isn't there?

Speaker 1: 40:19

let's try and break it down with some helpful tips, hints and resources for the patients. I want to try and keep it short because I know you could answer any one of these questions. Um, you know, for hours and hours and hours. So if I said to you give me like three top things that someone can do for their sleep, what would you say?

Speaker 2: 40:37

like. So you know I'm actually I always like going back to sort of this great paper that was talking about circadian biology. That was written not too long ago and it was talking about the basic, fundamental evolutionary inputs to the oscillation of the cell light, temperature, nutrients, that's it. And the output was metabolism, locomotion, fertility, that's it. So this is a hardcore rna paper on circadian biology, and so that's why I fall back on that light stuff, right? In other words, trying to get up with the sun and then trying to wind down from sundown, trying to make sure that you are not exposing yourself to inordinate amounts of blue light.

Speaker 2: 41:35

And I say I mean, look to be fair, I should be saying don't expose yourself to any blue light after you know, after dark. But we live. This is 2024. You know that's impossible for most people, right? So it's trying to decrease your exposure to inordinate amounts of blue light. You know, blue light blockers can be very helpful. Blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2: 41:56

And then temperature. There is an ancient temperature switch in in us in that, you know, when the sun goes down it's kind of like in the desert it gets very cold very quick, and your body knows that too. So if you're able to take a warm bath, for example, and then have a little bit of a cool, cool plunge or, you know, cold water blast, that actually switches that, that, that temperature switch in you which says, okay, it is time to wind down for sleep, or it is sleep time, because that's what normally would have happened back in the day when the Sun set. And as far as nutrients go, just making sure that, of course, you have enough tryptophan in your diet. No tryptophan, no serotonin, no serotonin, no melatonin outside of diet. Actually, the majority of serotonin made in the gut is from gut microbiome, and so making sure that you are feeding your gut microbiome in whatever way it is that works for your body.

Speaker 1: 42:59

So, light, temperature, nutrients that segues quite nicely into nutrition as well. So you mentioned tryptophan and trying to get a lot in the diet. How would someone do that?

Speaker 2: 43:11

you know, with the popularity of the mediterranean diet, if you ask someone what is the ideal diet that should be eaten, everyone talks about Mediterranean diet. I spoke to a neurogastroenterologist who's quite famous, actually, in Australia and I asked him okay, so when you're talking about diet to patients, what are you suggesting? Because I'm Mediterranean, like, it's a broad strokes brush that applies to everybody, right? It doesn't matter if you're Chinese from the north of China, like my grandfather was, or if you're from southern Portuguese, like my mother's ancestors are from. How is this one diet for everybody? It's not. What are the components of Mediterranean diet? That's the thing that we should be asking, and then, as culturally appropriate um as possible, it should be those components from where you're from or that seems to appeal, that sings to appeals to you, or that you like the taste of. Those are the things that are going to give you the most bang for your buck. So, the mediterranean diet, yeah, okay. Olive oil, fine, but you know. But what's in olive oil? Oleic acid, great, it's very high omega-3 fatty acids and so on and so forth. What other oils, what other fats have that from, where you're from? Or the other side of the coin is to avoid, uh, taking in fats that you know are detrimental across the board, across all cultures, right? And so those are going to be oxidized oil. It doesn't matter whether you are from alaska or you're from somalia, oxidized oils are going to be detrimental to your health, full stop in the story. So I used to be quite prescriptive with diet um, and you know I went through the whole thing, like I went through the low carb thing and then it was the keto thing and then it was a paleo thing, and now I'm like you know what I I have.

Speaker 2: 45:13

I have seen patients do well, do better, not by changing what they eat although of course we recommend that but not by changing what they eat but how they eat. So eating, you know, parasympathetic, in a parasympathetic way. You know you chew your food, you smell it, you enjoy it, you're grateful for it. You eat with friends, you. You know you chew your food, you smell it, you enjoy it, you're grateful for it. You eat with friends, you. You know you have a little walk after you eat you. There are a thousand and one ways to eat better and it doesn't necessarily mean what you eat and put in your mouth. Of course that is going to make a difference. But there there are several ways of skin a cat right and sometimes patients need to slowly get to where they need to go. And this might be an easy way to do that right, because I've also seen patients who have a little bit more money and they're able to change their diet to everything organic, everything from the markets. You know everything grass fed, grass finished and all the rest of it. And they do know better because they are orthorexic and, as a definition, orthorexia is where you pathologically become obsessed with eating. Well, these are the kind of people who are, like you know, not fun to go out with. They're bugging the waiter, they're weighing the food. You know they won't touch anything if it, you know so much as looks like it may not be grass fed. So I don't know. Like to each their own. I think that most patients will have an idea of what works for them.

Speaker 2: 46:59

I used to be very sick at some point. You know. I had constipation dominant IBS for 13 years and I was able by accident. I don't want to make it sound as if I know everything. I didn't, you know like I, by accident, I sorted myself out within four months and part of that was that I got into a routine with my food.

Speaker 2: 47:18

I kept it super simple, um, and the food itself that I ate was like clean and inverted commas. Only because at that stage, me and my partner we just going to the markets on the weekends buying fresh food, buying fresh veg, and cutting it up, leaving it in, um, we cut it up into big chunks, you know, left it in vacuum sealed bags in the fridge, come back from work, olive oil, salt pepper in the oven, that was it, you know. But performance and, yeah, you know, just kind of kept it simple. I I didn't expect that it would have was going to fix my ibs because I've been, you know, I I learned to live. It was my new normal for 13 years, you know. So it was a nice surprise when I got there.

Speaker 1: 48:07

Yeah, all right, we have two more areas to sort of do a quick sharpshooter on. We've got mindset and movement, what I know. This is hard because it's not individualized to the patient and that's how you work. But what are some of the top tenets for mindset that you can advise people to use?

Speaker 2: 48:26

I never realized how important emotional healing was until fairly recently, because you know emotions are, it feels hard to qualify, it feels hard to quantify, you know so. But I have had many life lessons now, uh, mostly through patients, mostly through colleagues, from what I'm observing. And then you, you know, start putting in place some, some of the things and you realize, oh, actually it makes a difference. Right, because it cannot be denied that psychophysiology, how your emotions affect your physiology, is absolutely demonstrable in labs, in clinic we see it, whether it's heart rate variability, heart rate, blood pressure, inflammatory molecules, il-6, human acrosis factor, histamine, it's all there, it's all in the literature. So emotional healing is huge for me. Mindset, which is like a cousin to emotions, right, mindset is how I feel, how you approach problems, how you frame issues. So two people can see the same thing. One person sees adversity and the other person sees opportunity. I can tell you that that affects their physiology as well, for sure.

Speaker 2: 49:46

Look, once in a while, being a bit of a downer is, you know, that's part of life, right? Things happen. It's upsetting, we get annoyed, we yell, we throw a plate, whatever. But for that to be the state of being, to allow fear, anger, frustration, guilt, rage, shame like be the tone of your life. Any person is going to tell you. Any doctor, any scientist, any person with common sense knows intrinsically that that is going to be a recipe for disaster over the long term. So, however you choose to do it, do not think that dealing with emotions, embracing some sort of philosophy that is going to tide you well over the course of your life, learning to massage your mindset so that everything is just that much more surmountable. Set so that everything is just that much more surmountable.

Speaker 1: 50:57

Never doubt that that actually has massive repercussions on your physical and mental health, and there are some doctors that german new medicine is what's coming to mind who are trying to map the emotion to a certain disease condition. Certain emotions can cause cancer, certain emotions can cause other diseases, and I don't know how much, um how well they're respected within mainstream medicine, but I, like you just pointed out quite eloquently, there's a connection yeah, look, you know German new medicine is never going to be accepted by not in my lifetime anyway.

Speaker 2: 51:36

But we have definitely got evidence in mainstream medicine for how emotion, emotionality, can affect physiology. Takotsubo's cardiomyopathy is one that comes to mind. So takotsubo's cardiomyopathy is also known as stress cardiomyopathy. In other words, it is a stress-induced or negative, emotion-induced swelling of the heart. So you actually get low emotion issues and all that. That's demonstrated on scans. It presents like an ACS, it presents like an acute coronary syndrome, it presents like a heart attack.

Speaker 1: 52:25

Is this a broken heart of old?

Speaker 2: 52:27

Yes, broken heart syndrome, Exactly. I mean, we are taught this in medical school as a little bit of a curiosity. Generally speaking, the majority of women over 90, sorry, over 95% of people who suffer type of subos are women and most of them are postmenopausal. But and the stressor can be anything, usually sort of bereavement, divorce and even even uh, like surgery or a car accident or something like that. But you know, and then before know it, they present like they're having a heart attack. They don't get cardiac enzymes, so the heart tissue is not actually dying, but on scans the heart kind of it's called apical ballooning. It actually changes shape and that's why it's called Tapotsubo, because, uh, it looks like a, an octopus trap from japan, which was, it was, um, look to be honest with you, it has actually been demonstrated, discussed in the medical literature since the 1980s or so, but it was kind of formally discussed by japanese uh doctors in 1990 or so. Dr Severs, right, it is absolutely psychohumeral or also known as psychocardiovascular issue. Right, where an emotion can change your physiology.

Speaker 2: 53:52

So we don't need for doctors to accept German new medicine. You know, the evidence is all there for us. I mean the framingham. The framingham uh heart study actually showed, you know, gosh, when was this 2014, where they did and follow-up studies on framingham offspring study and they were talking about the fact that, uh, women who self-silenced, who didn't express themselves when they were, you know, in conflict with their spouse were more likely to to die we got one more area to cover and then, um, we will come to the end.

Speaker 1: 54:32

So quick hitters on movement.

Speaker 2: 54:35

You know this is very fashionable, right? What movement actually is considered with regards to health? So now the big buzz. I think it's about muscle being an endocrine organ, and the slab of muscle on you is going to tide you through. With regards to metabolic issues and this and the other, is that true? Is muscle a sugar sink? Yes, it is, but it is, I think, needs to be seen in context of our society. Now. So we have issues with meta, um, uh, with metabolism. We have issues with incident with sugar. Yes, absolutely so. Will more muscle help? Yes, however, when you're going back to, like the blue zones research, none of the centenarians were Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know what I mean. So, uh, gym, gymming is not, was not one of the nine tenets of the blue zones? Incidental, movement, how you move day to day, how you move minute to minute. That was sort of more, I think.

Speaker 2: 55:42

Going back to the fundamentals and the basics, most of us have heard that sitting is the new smoking. That is absolutely true. It absolutely affects our lymphatic system, and the lymphatic system is a system that does not get as much attention. As you know, the cardiovascular system does right, because, don't forget, the cardiovascular system has a pump. Well, look, there's a lot more to the physiology of the cardiovascular system as so simplistically, as like, the cardiovascular system has a pump which is the heart, like I'm, you know, talking about fourth phase of water and all that kind of thing, but anyway, it has a pump which is the heart. The lymphatic system doesn't. It doesn't have a pump. So you actually need to move your muscles, actually have to milk the lymphatic system for that to be circulated around the body.

Speaker 2: 56:32

So incidental movement is sort of where I start with my patients. Of course, going to the gym and all the rest of it can be very helpful for some people. Incidental movement is sort of where I start with my patients, of course, going to the gym and all the rest of it can be very helpful for some people. The reason why, just like the food thing for me, I'm no longer prescriptive is because different courses for different courses, right. Different strokes for different folks, different strokes for different folks like I. Would much rather ask my patients and get to know them better about what sings to them and then help them play that song.

Speaker 1: 57:06

Right, yeah, and you're 100. Right, it's patient compliance. You can map out the best, uh, most well-researched sort of plan that covers sleep, nutrition, movement, mindset, and if the patient doesn't do it, it's useless. Right exactly so if a person has listened to this podcast and wants to find out more about you or even potentially work with you, how would they do that.

Speaker 2: 57:29

Look, my website is probably the place to go, so it's wwwdoctorolivialeslacom, and I am seemingly quite active on Instagram and LinkedIn. I have a good social media person at the moment who's cutting out my videos, kind of hopefully like this one, and uploading that. But I work with several clinics around the world. So in the US, the clinic that would be best to contact me through is Everest Health in Washington DC. In Australia, it would be Singulum Health in Sydney, and that is probably the easiest way to work with me. I do take on concierge patients, but that is, you know. That's a quite involved process whereby we make sure that we're right for each other. Otherwise, you know, I do it, as you know, a lot of podcasts and give as many talks as I can, and a lot of the information that I have to share with patients is out there in the world.

Speaker 1: 58:42

Thank you, so much for coming on the show. This has been a real pleasure and I hope you've enjoyed yourself, and I really appreciated you sharing your pearls of wisdom.

Speaker 2: 58:51

Thank you so much, Ed. I really appreciate this too.

Speaker 1: 58:54

That's the end of this episode of the your Lifestyle is your Medicine podcast. Thank you for joining me in my conversation with Dr Lesla. If you would like to support the show, the best thing you can do is subscribe on Spotify and Apple podcasts so that you can be notified when the latest episode comes out, and I'd be very grateful if you would be able to go onto your podcast app and consider giving this a five-star review. This will help me get the information out to more and more people. Additionally, if you are watching this on YouTube, please leave a review or a comment below. Remember, if you want my direct help, go to my website, edpadgettcom, subscribe to my newsletter and drop me a message via the contact us link so I can help you make your lifestyle your medicine.