Boosting Resilience: Your Shield Against Chronic Inflammation

Ari Whitten, MS

It is my pleasure, my friend. Thank you so much for having me.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I am so excited. We have done a lot of projects together over the years, and I could not do a talk on solving inflammation without bringing in the authority on cellular health, mitochondrial health, red light, etc. I am excited to have you here because today we are going to shift gears and we are going to do a talk on resilience. Now I want to introduce our audience to who you are. You are the Founder of the Energy Blueprint System. It is a comprehensive lifestyle and supplement program that has helped more than 2 million people and counting experience optimal health, better performance, and more energy. You are also the bestselling author of The Ultimate Guide to Red Light Therapy, which is the most popular book ever written on this subject. You are the world’s authority on red lights. You are also the host of the popular podcast, The Energy Blueprint. It features some of the world’s leading natural health experts. Finally, you are the founder of the Human Optimization Project. Your latest project is unveiling a new paradigm in health and longevity. This is going to be an exciting talk. Let us jump right in. Why resilience, Ari? Why is this the thing that you are talking about now? Why are you creating The Human Optimization Project?

Ari Whitten, MS

Yes, good question. Maybe I will introduce this with a little bit of background, and a context of medical paradigms. This is something that has always interested me tremendously in different fields. We have to understand that how we think about a problem and how we think about solving a problem has a lot to do with our paradigm, with our worldview, and with the way that we understand how things work. There are radically different ways of understanding how things work. 

I will give you a few examples to give endless examples here, but let us just imagine that in the history of medicine, we had the ancient Greeks. This was the initial version of medicine, and before the ancient Greeks, we did not have any scientific systems of medicine. People thought of medical problems, health problems, and diseases as the will of the gods and supernatural forces. The ancient Greeks were the first, you could say, a somewhat scientific system where they started to see health problems as the result of natural causes. They started to talk about food, for example, as influencing health. Hippocrates was famous for saying, Let food be your medicine, right?

This was the first conception of natural factors in the world influencing human health and disease outcomes, rather than simply the will of the gods and mystical supernatural forces. At the same time, or maybe actually before the ancient Greeks. I do not know the exact timeline. I had to look it up. But we had other medical traditions, Ayurveda in India or Eastern medical traditions in China, and traditional Chinese medicine that was also emerging with different, completely different views of health. Where were the ancient Greeks focusing on the Four Humors, which is now a concept that is considered to be unscientific? That is their paradigm of health. We had these different humors in the body, these different forces, and these were the things that controlled our health. The Ayurvedic practitioners were talking about chakras and energy flows in the body. The Prana and the Doshas, of Pitta, Vata, and Kapha, and these kinds of things in a way somewhat similar to the four humors. Then traditional Chinese medicine had these acupoints, yin and yang, and different energies circulating in the body. They had a system of acupuncture that was trying to address these energetic flows, herbs, cupping, and all kinds of other interventions that were designed to address health problems.

Something happened about a hundred years ago, which was originally largely the result of the need to develop systems for war and for treating battle soldiers on the battlefield. We started to develop a new medicine that was designed to address these wounds in the battle: people getting shot and stabbed, legs being cut off, and getting gangrene. There was a system of medicine that started to develop around that, which was the origin of modern medicine and emergency care. Modern emergency care, in particular, has been amazingly transformative for modern humanity in many ways. 

In the roughly 1930s and 1940s, there was an observation that took place that transformed the way modern medicine is shaped. Scientists observed in petri dishes that certain species of mold inhibited the growth of bacteria and killed bacteria. There was some toxic compound being produced by these mold species, especially Penicillium mold species, that was inhibiting the growth of this bacteria, and that observation led to the discovery of antibiotics and antibiotic chemicals that were transformative for medicine. This was the origin of what we now consider modern medicine. The reason why is that it led to something called the antibiotic revolution. It truly was a revolution. It was a game changer for health, human health, and disease, particularly, and especially, infectious diseases, especially bacterial infectious diseases and some parasitic diseases.

It led to the synthesis of penicillin, which was a game-changing antibiotic that took certain diseases, bacterial-induced infectious diseases that were previously lethal in many cases, and cured them in a matter of days. You could take this pill; it would go into your digestive tract and your bloodstream. It would have this chemical floating around your bloodstream that acted as a heat-seeking missile that killed the bad guy, causing the disease and leaving the rest of your body intact and healthy and eliminated, completely cured what used to be, in many cases, a lethal, deadly disease. We developed dozens and dozens of antibiotics that cured many infectious diseases that were previously deadly. In a matter of days, you cured a previously deadly disease. That observation, this concept that you could take a single chemical and cure in a matter of days, a disease that typically killed lots of people. That idea was so, and that this chemical, this single chemical, was highly targeted and specific for killing only the bad guy and leaving the rest of your body intact. That idea was so alluring and so powerful, and in our minds, basically what happened was that it shaped the whole paradigm of modern medicine. They essentially said that if we can do this for infectious diseases, maybe we can also do this for all the other diseases that affect us, like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, depression, anxiety, and every other disease. 

Maybe what we need to do is study the mechanisms on a micro level of how they work. and we are taught to believe that the more micro we can get in understanding the specific cellular, biochemical, molecular, genetic, specific molecules and biochemicals that are involved and receptors that are involved in that particular sequence of interactions that are found in that particular disease. Once we understand what is going on at the micro level, we understand the causes of that disease. We understand what the bad guy is and what dysfunction is. Then, once we have in-depth knowledge of those mechanisms of the disease at the micro level, what we do is go to a chemistry lab and synthesize synthetic, man-made chemicals that are highly targeted for that specific micro-level dysfunction. 

As an example, if we have heart disease and it is caused by an atherosclerotic buildup of plaque in our arteries, let us analyze the specific micro-level biochemical mechanisms of how that plaque gets deposited in the arteries. It is associated with too much LDL. Let us synthesize drugs that lower the LDL level or treat depression. Let us understand what is going on in the brains of people with depression. There seems to be a deficit in serotonin. Let us invent chemicals that a person can take that raise a person’s level of serotonin in their brain. What about dementia and Alzheimer’s? Well, there seem to be these amyloid plaques in the brain that are associated with disease. Maybe these amyloid plaques are causing the disease. Let us figure out the biochemical reactions that are involved in the formation of these amyloid plaques. Then let us go invent chemicals in the chemistry laboratory that inhibit certain enzymes or chemicals that are involved in the production of these plaques, and that is the general principle. By using drugs that combat these mechanisms of disease, we can stop the disease. 

The only problem is that it worked well for infectious diseases because there is one clear-cut bad guy, this specific pathogenic microbe that is causing that disease. The problem is, as we have discovered, after 75 years of hundreds of thousands of scientists spending trillions of dollars trying to synthesize millions of potential drug molecules, 19,000 of which have gotten FDA approval, that this model does not work very well when it comes to chronic, complex diseases. 

The reason why is that there is not one clear-cut bad guy. It is not an infectious disease. Many things are going wrong in the body. It is not just this or that specific mechanism that we can fix, modulate, or block with a drug that cures the disease; the body simply does not work that way. 

One interesting thing to consider, so maybe I will go here. This is the paradigm, right? This is why we have people who say, No, it is the four humors that control our disease. Let us modify the four humors. It is in these doshas. It is these chakras. It is these meridians. Let us use acupuncture, and let us use herbs. No, it is specific mechanisms at the biochemical and molecular level. Let us go to a chemistry laboratory and synthesize man-made chemicals that block this or that mechanism. These are paradigms; these are ways of understanding human health. That is the conventional paradigm. I will let you jump in, Laura, if you want to say something. I know I have been talking for a while, but I have some more to add to this. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. First off, I am sitting on the edge of my seat because you just took us through a history of the world in health in 10 minutes. You had the whole history piece done in 5 minutes. Greek medicine, the grandfathers of medicine, all the way through to the modern-day discovery of penicillin. I do not think anyone could ever give us a history of medicine on the edge of our seats that quickly. That was extraordinary. I just want to acknowledge you for that. This is the first time I have heard you talk about this. I knew it was going to be good, but I did not know it was going to be this good. 

Now we are digging into these paradigms. You have set this stage of paradigms. That is what I am hearing you say. In every wit and style, I know you are going to tie this into some paradigm that we have either missed or that has been lost, or that is just right under our noses and we are not utilizing it. I have a feeling that is where we are going. I know you are a cellular health guy. You are a mitochondria guy, you are a nutritionist, and you know a lot about the inner workings of the human body. Why resiliency? I know you are about to tie this up for us. Resiliency must be a paradigm.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yes. There is one more step before we get there. That is the conventional medical paradigm. What I just explained now let us go to what is the main paradigm of people in natural health and especially the functional medicine space. This is a different paradigm, and it is called it. It goes by various names, and some people do not even name it. But the general gist of it is a homeostasis, or homeostatic, paradigm of health, or an almost allostasis paradigm of health. What people in this paradigm say is that those people in conventional medicine who are trying to reduce the causes of the disease down to the specific micro-level mechanisms, whether it is the LDL, the amyloid plaques, the serotonin, or this mechanism or that mechanism,

No. We need to go more upstream of that and look at the root causes of why that thing is dysfunctional. When we do that, we come back to the environment, lifestyle, and behavior. We start to see that things are going on at the environmental level, the lifestyle level, and the behavioral level that is heavily influenced. Seeing these specific micro-level parameters that we are measuring, whether it is LDL or triglycerides or fasting blood sugar or markers of internal inflammation, CRP, things that, or even neurotransmitters in the brain or hormones, everything else is being heavily influenced by your exposures to environmental toxins. What are your nutrition habits like? What are your exercise habits? How are you managing stress? What are these factors in your lifestyle, your nutrition, and your environment, that are influencing the physiology that shows up on these tests? Let us look at the root causes of these changes and try to address things there. This is a wonderful paradigm, and it is vastly more accurate, helpful, and close to being more closely aligned with truth and reality than a paradigm that confuses biochemicals with causes. However, I want to do justice to this paradigm because it is a largely good one. It is the one I have operated with for 20+ years. I think that serves a huge number of people and helps a lot of people. It is an excellent way of thinking. 

However, there is one error and a fairly large error, that is built into this paradigm. The error that is built into this paradigm is that health is assumed to be a natural, innate state of the body and that we just have to remove the dysfunctional pieces. We correct whatever the toxic aspects of things or the deficient aspects of things are. We correct the nutrient deficiencies; we remove this toxin or that toxin. We mitigate psychological stress, we improve sleep, and then health is returned automatically. There is some truth to that because the body is designed to try to maintain homeostasis and move back to homeostasis. There is an element of truth to that. If and if you do mitigate a lot of the toxic factors in a person’s lifestyle and environment, oftentimes the body will certainly move in the direction of health, and sometimes it will completely return to excellent health.

However, there is a big component that is missing from this paradigm, and what is missing from this paradigm is what is corrected for in another paradigm of health that very few people are aware of but exists and is not my unique creation. It is a paradigm that exists largely in the realm of general science and among experts in the science of aging. This paradigm is called the homodynamic space model. The homodynamic space model adds another layer to this story, which is a very crucially important layer that most people do not understand well. That is the layer of physiologic, local resilience, or capacity of the different systems of the body. What this model says is that as the capacities of the various systems of our body shrink, we are in a homodynamic space. Homodynamic space can be thought of as physiological resilience or as the total capacity, total work capacity, or working capacity of the different systems of the body.

Ultimately, we have to understand: What are we as humans? We have been taught to believe in a paradigm that reduces everything down to: we are this black box of liquids where all kinds of mysterious biochemicals are floating around, hormones and neurotransmitters, and this chemical and that chemical. That is how most people think of their health. But what I am presenting is a different way of thinking about it. We are a collection of organ systems. 

Ultimately, we are a collection of trillions of cells, which are grouped into different organ systems. We have a brain, we have a heart, we have blood vessels, we have lungs, and we have an immune system. We have bones, we have muscles, and we have skin. These are the systems that make up our body. We have got a bunch of these parts. What the Homo Dynamics space model essentially says is: What is the total working capacity of those systems? If that capacity starts to shrink, what happens is a state of overwhelm. Then, once the demands on that system exceed the capacity of those systems to handle those demands, you get dysfunction, damage, and the generation of disease.

Okay, so once your homodynamic space shrinks enough so that even very low demands on that system, even just your normal daily demands on that system, are more than what your body systems can handle, That equals death. That is when your life ends. When the homodynamic space shrinks so much that your body cannot handle any even basic demands on it, you die. It can no longer sustain life. What I am saying is that, on the other end of that spectrum, what health truly is, is not simply the absence of disease, which is what most people believe. Most people believe that if only we attack and remove this disease, we will return to a state of health. 

If only we corrected these environmental conditions, that person’s stress and sleep, and this toxin, we would return to a state of health. What I am saying is that health is much more than that. Health is the high working capacity of the different systems of your body, of your brain, of your cardiovascular system, of your lungs, of your muscles, of your bones, of all these different systems. When the capacity is high, that is what a state of health is.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Ari, I can remember a couple of months ago when I saw you and you asked me, Laura, What is health? It was a trick question. In my Western medicine-trained brain, where I spent over 20 years studying functional medicine and functional medicine. What we do here is just the things you talked about removing infections, removing toxins, and helping repair nutrient deficiencies. I said I fell right into the trap. I said, Well, it is the absence of disease. You said, No, that is not what it is. In the second half of this talk, what we are going to do is unpack how to have that health and how to be resilient. What can we do beyond these paradigms of Western medicine, functional medicine, and all the types of medicine that came first? These paradigms say that everyone has died on the hill of righteousness about this is the way, know this is the way, and this is the way you are going to show us what has been missing all along. We are going to get into that. 

I want to thank you so much for joining us today for this talk on resilience for our audience. I hope you are finding this conversation insightful and helpful and on the edge of your seat, as am I. If you are a summit purchaser, stay right here because we are about to dive even deeper into this discussion with Ari. If you are not, click on the button on this page to get access to a continuation of this conversation and many others, and get the tools you need to reclaim your health. If you are watching this continuation of my talk with Ari Whitten, thank you for being a valuable member of our community. We are going to dive right back in. Ari, pick up where we left off here. You just unpacked your dynamic space model, and you said that health is a high capacity of your systems, so your body innately can solve this. Where do I go from here? I know you want to share with our audience how to be resilient. What does that mean?

Ari Whitten, MS

Okay. Let me crystallize this into a thought that really should blow everyone’s mind. We will expand from this place once you understand this principle I mentioned before: the origins of modern medicine are about a century old, starting with the antibiotic revolution leading to this paradigm of disease caused by these micro-level things. We discover what those are. Then we go to a chemistry lab. We synthesize drugs to target these micro-level things that are going to cure the diseases. 

For about 75 years, we have pursued that. Hundreds of thousands of scientists have, as I said earlier, spent trillions—many I do not know if it is tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars—to understand the diseases that are killing us. We have an enormous body of knowledge and a Mount Everest-sized body of knowledge on the mechanisms of disease. We know a lot about disease, I would argue. We know very little about health because we have been studying disease instead of health. There are two different things, which is a big takeaway I want people to get from this so we can talk more about them. But we have gone down this path because health is the absence of disease. What we do to arrive at that is study disease. Once we can figure out how to cure disease, that is what is going to lead to health. That is the paradigm that we have been operating in. For 75 years, hundreds of thousands of scientists with trillions of dollars behind them. 

Pharmaceutical scientists, doctors, good, good, well-meaning people, brilliant people in many cases, and people with much higher IQs than mine have been working in chemistry laboratories or working in laboratories first to understand the mechanisms of disease, then going to street laboratories and saying where pharmaceutical scientists are synthesizing millions and millions of potential molecules, drug molecules that are then tested for their ability to block or modulate these specific mechanisms that are believed to be causing this disease. After 75 years of the world’s brightest medical scientists, doctors, and pharmaceutical scientists synthesizing millions and millions of these drugs to target the diseases that are killing us, do you know what is the most effective drug for combating the diseases that are killing us?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I would say it is an antibiotic. It is what.

Ari Whitten, MS

Exercise.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Exercise.

Ari Whitten, MS

Okay. A 21-year-old who did not go to college and who has spent a few years studying personal training and exercise regimens has a more powerful drug or medicine for combating disease than all of the world’s combined doctors and pharmaceutical scientists, who have just spent 75 years and trillions of dollars synthesizing millions of molecules designed to combat disease and enhance human health and longevity. We do not have a single and all add to this. We do not have a single drug of all of those millions of drugs—not one that we know we can give to otherwise healthy people and make them healthier and live longer. It is not one drug. Exercise is interesting now because exercise is a stressor. Exercise creates a big surge of stress hormones in your body when you do it. It creates a big spike of free radicals from reactive oxygen species, free radicals, and oxidants. These are the things we are all to believe are bad. Why? Antioxidants are good. Oxidants are bad. Shouldn’t we be avoiding and neutralizing the oxidants? Why is exercise important? forget if you imagine just for a moment. 

Imagine you knew nothing about exercise. You have never heard that exercise is beneficial for you. Why would it be that simply moving your body around vigorously for half an hour would be a more effective medicine for combating disease and helping you live longer than a knee bug created by modern medicine over the last 75 years? Why is it that you are moving your body around vigorously, jumping around, doing any type of movement, whether it is riding a bike, running, lifting weights, or something else? Why would not you move your body around vigorously, causing a bunch of stress hormones to surge in your system and a huge spike of oxidants in your system? Why would that be more beneficial than all the combined drugs of modern medicine and pharmaceutical scientists for the last 75 years? Shouldn’t that thing, given that it creates this surge of stress hormones and oxidants, be bad for us instead of good for us?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You would think. 

Ari Whitten, MS

You would think that what this leads to is an understanding that the body is more complex than most of our medical paradigms believe. The big piece that is missing from this is to understanding that the body is an intelligent, adaptive system or machine. I use that word not, but an intelligent adaptive machine versus a simple non-adaptive, non-intelligent machine. Let me present what is here. If I take this object, these headphones, this clock, or the microphone we are using, the light, the camera, the computer, a phone, a car, a bicycle, a chair, or any other inanimate object, The more stress I am subjected to, the faster that thing wears out, breaks down, degenerates, and deteriorates.

If I take a bicycle and ride it hard down a bumpy, muddy dirt road and I get water and mud on it and I beat up the suspension, the more I do that, the faster that bike is going to degenerate and deteriorate. But the human body is not that. Again, the human body is an intelligent, adaptive system that, when stressed in the right ways, actually grows stronger and healthier. It makes adaptations in many different systems of the body that increase its working capacity, increase its homodynamic space, and increase its ability to tolerate insults and stresses on that system so that it is less likely to be harmed and damaged by those things that it might be or that other people might be damaged by. The right analogy to think of it is to imagine a magical sports car, where this magical sports car has a very special, magical ability. When you take the sports car out and drive it hard, you push it to its limits. You take it on hard mountain roads, and you drive it as fast and as hard as you possibly can, pushing it to its limits. You park that sports car in your garage at night. You come back to it the next day, and it has a bigger, stronger engine, it becomes more aerodynamic, the frame gets stronger, it becomes more fuel efficient, the tires develop more friction to grip the road better, and the suspension learns to absorb bumps better. That is the human body it has. It is an intelligent, adaptive machine that gets better and is designed to get better at the things it is challenged by. 

Now, here is the problem: There is a downside to this magical ability that we are programmed with. If you leave that magical sports car parked in your garage for two months and do not drive it hard, you will come back to it, and the frame will be rusting. that for that Ferrari V8 engine will have shrunk to a lawnmower engine and the whole car will be deteriorating, and the wheels will be falling off. It will be a mess of junk, and that is the downside of having a malleable system. We are built by evolution to have this intelligent, adaptive ability to respond to the challenges in our body, and we can adapt and grow stronger. The goal look is not that the body cares. Let me put it this way: the body only cares about survival. We are designed over hundreds of thousands of years—millions of years to come—to have biological systems built into us that are essentially stress transformation systems. We are designed to sense demands and challenges, stressors on our system in particular, and respond to those stressors by making them less lethal to us, less damaging to us, and less likely to destroy us to enhance survival. That is why vigorously jumping around and moving your physical body happens to be the most powerful longevity medicine in existence. 

It is because by stressing the systems of your body, your cardiovascular system, stressing your lungs, stressing your immune and inflammatory systems, stressing your mitochondria, stressing your muscle fibers, and stressing your bones, when stresses are taking place, the body senses them and makes adaptations in those systems that increase the working capacity of those systems. You grow bigger, stronger muscles; you grow bigger, stronger physically; and you grow bigger, stronger mitochondria. You grow physically into a bigger, stronger heart capable of pumping more blood. Those adaptations increase the working capacity of those systems. Guess what? It turns out that those adaptations that increase the working capacity of those systems just so happen to be the most potent way to prevent disease known to man.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

What is occurring to me as our listeners here and viewers are hearing this? I find in my practice that getting people to move their bodies is probably one of the hardest things to get people to engage in, believe in, and do because people want a magic pill. Or even if it is not a prescription medication, they want a magic supplement; they want a protocol. They want a bio-hack. They want to do something; can I just do this biohacking thing, or do I have to go out there and move my body? The answer is, yes. To another point that you were making about exercise being quite stressful on our body, I just went through a pretty intense workout about three days ago, and ever since then, every time I sneeze, I feel somebody is punching me in the gut because it was such a big workout. I do not sneeze, do not sneeze. Yes, exercise hurts. I can feel it, and I can imagine what that did to my mitochondria and my cells when I did that intense workout. In the time that we have left here, I would love for you because I know we have done so many talks together on mitochondria and positive stressors on the body and how to enhance life through stressing the body. 

I have a feeling that this is where the rest of our talk is going to go. It is just that the stressors on the body that make us stronger do not make us weaker because we are so different. As you just mentioned, in that analogy of the car, there is no such thing as a sports car that you drive the heck out of it and it gets stronger. It needs a full team of mechanics to keep it going. But the human body does not. So in conclusion of this talk on resilience, where would you go to help our audience understand even what they can do? Moving your body is thing number one. You’ve got to do it.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yes. Let me give you a few layers of insight to add to that. first of all, this magical sports car analogy is not pulled out of thin air. I am not just making up random numbers here. Let me relate it to the human body. First of all, as I said two months later, you go back to your car going apart if you do not use it. Imagine, as an example, just taking one layer of the body that you break. Well, let us put it this way. When you go to a gym, you lift heavy objects. What does your body do in response to that? It grows bigger, stronger muscles. The opposite is true with this positive and this magical ability to adapt to lifting heavy objects that the challenge, the stress of heavy objects, your body goes your body, you are your body says to survive this environment and make this demand on our system less damaging and stressful, and to make it easier for us to handle and survive this environment of with this challenge that we are in, let us build bigger, stronger muscles, because that will make it easier to do this stuff that we are being asked to do, and we will incur less damage in the process of doing it. The muscles adapt so that what used to be a stress that caused damage and made your abs so sore that when you sneeze or cough, it hurts you.

Now, two weeks later, you’ll be able to do the same workout that you did, and it will not make your abs seem at all. Okay, so that is what the body’s doing. It is creating an increase in the capacity of those systems to neutralize damage in those systems and prevent damage from future exposures to that same stress. Now here’s the downside of that ability: If you break a leg and you get a cast on that leg, two months later, after having that cast on and not moving those muscles, you go to the doctor, and they see your cast, you look down at your leg, and it is half the size of the other one. That is the magical sports car. In two months, your leg muscles atrophied because your body only cared about survival. It said, Yes, we do not need those leg muscles to survive this environment anymore. Let us get rid of them. They are just a survival liability. They are just taking energy and resources away, and they are not serving any purpose. Let us get rid of it. The body only cares about survival, and it is ruthless in that regard. 

Now let us go down to the microlevel for a second. Mitochondria is something you and I have talked a lot about in the past. I talked about in that car, that Ferrari V8 engine that you had. We all start with a Ferrari V8 engine in our youth; that is our mitochondria. There are cellular engines. That is what produces the energy that powers us. Now, this idea of shrinking to a lawnmower engine is also not pulled out of thin air. We know from many lines of evidence that the average 70-year-old has lost 75% of their mitochondrial capacity. The physical mitochondria in their cells shrink by about 50%. In addition to that, the number of them decreases by about 50%. 

Half of your mitochondria die off, and the half that are still there have shrunk to half the size. We lose. We went from a Ferrari V8 engine in our youth to a lawnmower engine. However, this is not a normal product of the aging process itself. It is not designed for us. It is a product of modern lifestyles. It is a product of a lack of challenge for the mitochondria. In the same way that immobilizing your leg in a cast causes those muscles to shrink, your mitochondria shrink and atrophy when they are not regularly challenged and stimulated. We know that because when we look at lifelong athletes and exercisers who are 70 years old or older, they do not lose 75% of their mitochondrial capacity. They have the same mitochondrial capacity as young people. 

Now, let me add a few more layers to this. The same principle applies at the level of the brain, and this is a principle, a term. Well, let me explain the principle so we can grow neural circuitry that is more robust and can handle more workload in the brain at the level of our cognitive function and our neural circuitry. However, that can also atrophy. This is a term in the scientific literature called cognitive reserve capacity, and it is very similar to what is also called in the literature, bioenergetic reserve capacity. That it is a function of your mitochondria. It is also very similar to the various terms for muscular reserve capacity and cardiovascular reserve capacity that apply to exercise. What is your exercise tolerance? 

We have the same thing going on in the brain’s cognitive reserve capacity. How do we grow it? Well, we know that pursuing higher education grows your cognitive reserve capacity. We know that demanding jobs grow your cognitive reserve capacity. We know that the opposite will shrink your reserve capacity. If you do not spend your time doing cognitively demanding things, your brain’s reserve capacity decreases. Why does this matter? Well, we have a whole bunch of science showing that low brain reserve capacity is linked with a massively increased risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s, and so what I am, as stated in the affirmative, means having a higher cognitive reserve capacity. Using your brain frequently to do cognitively demanding things massively decreases your risk by about 50%. It cuts your risk in half a year.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I want to point out quickly are so a 50% decrease. As we are talking, I want to play a little bit of the devil’s advocate here because I have taken care of so many people in my practice and seen my family. I think of people I know who are scholars, and they are constantly learning. Yet they did not dodge the dementia bullet. We have even seen it in well-known public figures. We have presidents who have become victims of Alzheimer’s. There is this piece, and I just want to highlight that 50% of it. The other piece that our audience cannot deny or ignore is that you still have to get the toxins out. You still have to clear the infections. You still have to replace the nutrients. You still have to do these things. I just want to put a pin in that and make sure that people understand that you can do all of this that you are talking about and still end up with dementia.

Ari Whitten, MS

Let me add another layer to the story. Let us take one other type of reserve capacity, cardiovascular and muscular reserve capacity, and let us add that to the mix. There was a study in Sweden that tracked over 1400 women over 40 years. one of the only studies of its kind that looked at the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s about a person’s fitness habits, only that, and their exercise capacity. In the group of women with the lowest exercise capacity, almost 50% of them—46 of them—ended up getting mild cognitive impairment, dementia, or Alzheimer’s. In the group with the highest levels of fitness, it was about 0%. It was close to 0%. They determined based even comparing a baseline from a medium fitness level, that the group with the highest fitness level, so not starting from the lowest but starting medium fitness compared to the highest fitness level, reduced their risk by 88% of ever having dementia, Alzheimer’s over 40 years. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This is also relevant because it is a very high likelihood in women. Dementia is very high in men, and Alzheimer’s is very high in women. This is quite a relevant point that you are making right now.

Ari Whitten, MS

Exactly. Muscular and cardiovascular reserve capacity, which physically alters the physical structure of your muscles, of your heart, and of your vasculature, which we know is a big factor in supplying blood to the brain, which heavily influences the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s, reduces risk and almost eliminates risk. Just that one variable of exercise. Cognitive reserve doing cognitively demanding things also decreases risk by 50%. We have not even touched nutrition yet. We have not even touched sleep yet. I am saying that just one variable of exercise alone can virtually eliminate your risk of dementia or Alzheimer’s. Are there exceptions to the rule? Certainly. Are there exceptions to the rule that people who are scholars and academics end up getting dementia? Yes, it is way more rare than people who are never scholars because of that cognitive reserve capacity. But if it does happen, guess what? I bet you they were not eating a very good diet, and I bet they were not very good at exercise. They probably were not very fit. I would almost guarantee it. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Maybe they were not. 

Ari Whitten, MS

Well, I would guarantee that they were not fit. One and probably both of those pieces are missing. But the big picture of what I am talking about, and this applies to almost everything, is that there are no drugs in existence that prevent or lower your risk of ever getting dementia or Alzheimer’s. No drugs are in existence. I can show you lots of things that massively lower your risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s. The biggest ones are things that increase the working capacities, the physiological resilience, the homodynamic space of your heart, your muscles, your vasculature, and your brain, of the neural circuitry in your brain. Increasing the work capacity of those systems massively reduces your risk of heart disease. 

We have drugs that are very ineffective in preventing heart disease, and the only demographics that they seem to affect are people who have already had preexisting heart disease and had a heart attack. Statin drugs are used in people with mild to moderate risk who have never had a heart attack previously. They do not work, or they have the most minuscule of possible effects from heart disease. You cannot take a drug to massively reduce your risk of ever getting heart disease. However, you can do things that almost eliminate your risk of heart disease. Do you know how much heart disease exists in hunter-gatherer populations that exist in the world today? The Tsimane tribe in Bolivia, the Chenovant of the South Pacific, or any number of other tribes, almost 0%. Yet it is the number-one killer in our society.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Hey, Ari, I want to. This is what is coming up for me now. As we have talked about the paradigms and we have talked about about 100 years ago, so let us just go 120 years ago. Let us go. Turn of the century.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yes.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

At one point, human life in developed countries, and we will just use the United States because this is where we are, there was a peak age, a life expectancy of around the 60s to 70s. Then, with the Western medicine paradigm and the development of antibiotics, the lifespan drastically improved. Now today and, at the time of this production of this project, 2024 is where we are at, the life expectancy of humans has drastically declined despite modern medicine. I guess where I am going here is, and the question I have for you is, can you connect? Why? Let us just call it 1930 or 1940. Why the life expectancy? Just because people were more active then. My point is that people were more active. We did not have this sedentary lifestyle that we have now because we were not sitting in front of televisions, cell phones, and computers, and we were not all working from home. We were more active. How come the life expectancy was not much better then? Can you connect that? Because there is a disconnect for me there. Do you do what I am trying to say? I exercise. I do.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yes. I just so happened to explore that research so deeply that there are some implications for writing my new book. It is an important question. However, it is a bit of a long answer. I will do my best to be very succinct. There are some misconceptions—very widespread, very common misconceptions—built into the question. First of all, we have to understand. Let me introduce it with this first. If it is true that we are living so much longer today than our ancestors did, explain to me why many of the most famous Greeks, ancient Greeks 2000 years ago, lived to be 80, 90, and 100 years old. Are we living longer than humans ever lived before? If 2,000 years ago, before modern medicine existed and before any drugs existed, how did those people live to that age? 

Now, it is not just them. Some studies have been done in the last six months in Bolivia, in the Tsimane tribe, where they examined hunter-gatherers over the age of 65, some of the participants in those studies in the actual cities. You can go look on Google Scholar right now, T-S-I-M-A-N-E, and look at the ages of the participants. Both of them are over 90 years old. The oldest one is 94 years old. These are hunter-gatherers living in the Amazon jungle with no access to modern medicine. Now what is going on is this misconception. I will try to do this succinctly. Essentially, this misconception is largely the.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I apologize.

Ari Whitten, MS

Is large. No, it is okay. It is largely built around a statistic called life expectancy at birth. Life expectancy at birth does not tell you the age at which people reach the maximum age that people reach in that population when they die of old age. What it tells you is the average age at which people die. Imagine that 20%, 10%, or 20% of your population dies at age zero because of the very high incidence of child mortality. What that does to the average lifespan is, it massively lowers it. In the Tsimane tribe, about 14% of people die at age zero. That is also a high.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

A lot.

Ari Whitten, MS

Die maternal. Yes, it is a huge amount. It is a huge amount. It is, and it is way under 1% for us. There is a huge difference between the ancient humans in terms of child mortality and not even in the ancients. 200 years ago, in the States and Europe, about 50% of children died before the age of 15. Okay. To maybe quickly summarize the remainder of this, basically ancient humans lived just as long as we do. According to Daniel Lieberman, an expert in this field, hunter-gatherers from 10,000 years ago frequently lived to ages 68 to 78. How long have modern humans lived in the United States? For men, the average age is 73, and for women, it is 78 or 79.

 Okay. they were frequently 10,000 years ago in pre-modern medicine and were frequently living to the same old ages that modern humans live today. Again, ancient Greeks, same old ages. What happened is that in the last few hundred years, as humans moved into a world apart from violence and child mortality, we became urbanized in Europe and the United States. People took on a very polluted lack of sanitation in cities, which was a major driver of disease and infectious disease and massively lowered the average life expectancy. The biggest things that have created the change in average life expectancy are reductions in child mortality and reductions in violent deaths among hunter-gatherers, a lot of them die from accidents and violence, and sanitation, modern sanitation in cities, not drugs that are curing disease. This is what I just said, which is not controversial in the least. Daniel Lieberman has written extensively about it. A Harvard researcher who has written extensively on evolution, human health, and lifespan.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Ari, what I am hearing you say as a modern woman is that everything is in my favor. I live in a country where childbirth mortality is low. I am not subject to major traumas that could end my life. If my life ends early, it is my damn fault because I did not move my body or protect my mitochondria. I stress myself because I have access to everything I need to be healthy.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yes. That is exactly right. I am glad you introduced me to this piece. The human historical piece of this is important because it is important to understand we are still in the human stream of human history. These are a couple of things I will say just to add to this. One is that accidents are still actually a major cause of death, which is interesting and must be neglected because we all tend to see things through a paradigm of human health that says we are products of our biochemistry and these micro-level mechanisms of disease. A lot of people do not realize that a major cause of death in people over 65 and the major cause, the most common cause in people over 65 of early death and disability are physical frailty and falls. Accidents and falls are the main causes of falling and getting a fracture. Now let us tie that back into the concept of physiological resilience. What protects you against falls, fractures, and physical frailty?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Moving your body.

Ari Whitten, MS

Regularly, build up the work capacities of and the physical structure of your muscular system, of your bones, and of your cardiovascular system so that you are, and there is another term called movement reserve capacity, which is how well your body moves and balances in different positions. All of those have nothing to do with biochemistry, but they are hugely protective of the major cause of early death and disability in people over the age of 65. You, no matter your physical structure and the work capacity of your physical systems,

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

The irony of the full circle of this conversation is crazy. I worked for the largest fracture prevention and liaison service in the country. I worked as a specialist in osteoporosis and metabolic bone disease for 15 years. I prescribed every drug out there, and this was before my functional medicine journey began. The hardest part of all of this was to get people to just move their bodies and preserve their muscle and bone strength. A hip fracture is indeed a death warrant. It truly is. If you have a hip fracture and survive it, you are in the minority. and it may not result in mortality from that. It may not realize itself for another year or two years, but your life will be shortened. It is just the irony of sitting here and speaking to you right now. It is something that I spent over a decade working on and not solving the problem for people.

Ari Whitten, MS

Because it is not a deficiency of Fosamax, it is a deficiency of physical movement.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It is not so this talk; as per usual, we could go on and on for hours. I could always do that with you because you have just the capacity and level to break down these complex concepts, tell stories, and have people sit on the edge of their seats and experience this. You have a gift in that, but alas, we cannot go for 2 hours. I would love for you to wrap this up with your final thoughts on resiliency and this paradigm, and maybe also what is possible for humanity. Share with us where you see this going.

Ari Whitten, MS

Yes, absolutely. One thing, just to tie this directly into the topic of this summit of inflammation and infections and things like that, we also need to understand that layer of the story through this lens of physiological resilience being tied into that story. Why is COVID, for example, lethal to elderly people, especially elderly people who have preexisting conditions like heart disease or diabetes, but rarely lethal to young kids or too young people who are athletes? This is a matter of the homodynamic space that is built into the system. If you have a large reserve capacity built into these key systems of your body, that is the difference between a particular insult, whether it is an infection or toxins or things that are debilitating and drive disease or death, or whether you recover easily from it. Physiological resilience. That is the layer, the story. We tend to attribute these things only to specific causes or triggers. But what we are missing from the story is our body’s capacity to handle that. what we need to do, and the same is true with chronic inflammation. This is a chronic overload of your body’s capacity at the cellular level. We also have systems at the mitochondrial level, our internal redox system, our internal antioxidant system, and our ability to neutralize stressors at the cellular level and at the biochemical level that are heavily tied into this story. 

We have a capacity for a large internal antioxidant and detoxification system, a lot of physiological resilience at that level, at the subcellular level, or very little capacity. The relative demand on that system versus our capacity to handle demand is what is going to be determined. Is that a level of stress that our body handles easily and we are still healthy, have lots of energy, and feel great? Or is that same level of demand chronically overwhelming that system and driving chronic inflammation, chronic oxidative stress, dysfunction, and disease? What we have to do is understand and recognize that these reserve capacities—our cardiovascular reserve capacity, our muscular reserve capacity, our immune reserve capacity, our redox reserve capacity, our metabolic flexibility, and our metabolic reserve capacities—are hugely determined by the demands, how we train our body, essentially, and things like various kinds of exercise, heat and cold exposure, fasting, and feeding windows. These are the reserve capacities that are built into the physiological resilience of these key organ systems, which is a massive determinant of our overall health and our ability to live disease-free. Ultimately, you ask where this is going. The current lifespans of modern humans in the U.S. are 73, 78, and 79 for men and women, respectively.

The average health span is considered to be 66 years old, though that term is poorly defined because, for example, over 40% of kids and adolescents already have some chronic condition. The semantics matter here. But basically, 88% of the adult population over 25 is considered to be in poor metabolic health. We have massive epidemics of disease. We are incredibly unhealthy. We have become the sickest species of animal ever to walk the face of the earth. The answer to this is not just to take more drugs; it is to build up the capacity of your system so that instead of your body breaking down and becoming dysfunctional at age 50, 60, or 70, it is more like 90, 100, or 110. That is what we are trying to achieve. The main thing that influences that is, of course, having a foundation of healthy habits, good nutrition, stress management, and sleep. These sorts of things minimize your toxin exposure. But the main thing, and especially the main thing that is missing from most modern paradigms, is to understand that our physiological resilience or work capacity of these key organ systems is a massive, massive determinant of that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I was not expecting this talk to go there, although I do not know why. I am not surprised you did not just blow my mind. Ari, as always, it has been extraordinary to have this enlightenment. I think people watching are going to get out of their chairs and go do something physical. If they make it to the end of this talk, they cannot move their bodies, and I cannot wait to see what you do next to see this new book that you have coming out. Can you share with our audience where they can get more from you? You are already a copious creator of health content. You have your podcast; you have previous books that you have written; this new one is coming out. Can you share with our audience where they can find more from you?

Ari Whitten, MS

I am going to be building out a whole new paradigm of health and longevity that is built around some of these core concepts that I have that I have shared here today. I am going to make it all very practical, and step by step, it is going to all be built out under my new brand, Human Optimization. Maybe the last thing that I will leave people with is that I am not trying to, so I do not have anything to sell right now anything like that. I would say to follow human optimization. There is going to be lots more coming soon, but maybe the last thing I will leave people with is to just understand that you have all been indoctrinated into a paradigm that has taught you to believe that you are a product of the biochemistry that shows up on your blood test and that the way to modify that is by taking drugs. Here are the chemicals that are controlling your disease. Here’s the list of chemicals you need to take to influence these chemicals. What I am telling you is that, for example, your VO2 max, your maximal capacity to take in oxygen, and your muscular physical measures of your physical capacity are way more powerful influences or predictors, I should say, of your risk of disease, your longevity, and how long you will live compared to anything that is showing up on those blood tests. I understand you have been indoctrinated into a paradigm where you have been taught to externalize your power to practitioners in possession of chemical, synthetic, or chemical drugs, and what I am saying is to take your power back and be empowered to understand that it is your actions daily that are way more powerful predictors of how long you live and how diseased you will be than any drug that they can give you.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Resilience, or health, I should say, is not the absence of disease.

Ari Whitten, MS

That is right.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Thank you so much, Ari. Tell me the website where people can come find you.

Ari Whitten, MS

Humanoptimization.com

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Perfect. Thank you so much, Ari, for being a huge contributor to this project as always. Until next time. Take good care. Bye now.