The Myth of Disease & Defining True Health with Ari Whitten – #43

Dive deep into the heart of true health with Ari Whitten, an acclaimed health expert, and Dr. Kevin Conners in this eye-opening episode of Conners Clinic Live. We tackle the big questions of what it means to be truly healthy and how conventional medicine’s focus on disease may be missing the mark.

Tune in to learn:

• Critique of Conventional Medicine: Both criticize the conventional medical paradigm for being too focused on disease and pathology, rather than health and wellness. They argue that this approach is ineffective, especially for chronic diseases.
• The Importance of Creating Health: Whitten advocates for a shift in focus from treating disease to creating health. He believes that understanding and optimizing human physiology, as athletes do, is key to improving health and extending lifespan.
• Limitations of Pharmaceutical Interventions: The discussion points out the limitations and sometimes harmful effects of relying solely on pharmaceuticals to manage diseases, without addressing underlying lifestyle and environmental factors.
• The Role of Lifestyle in Health: There is a strong emphasis on the impact of lifestyle choices on health. Whitten and Dr. Conners argue that many diseases are a result of poor lifestyle choices and that improving these can lead to better health outcomes.
• Educating and Empowering Individuals: A significant part of the conversation is dedicated to the importance of educating individuals about health and encouraging them to take responsibility for their health outcomes.
• Misconceptions and Propaganda in Health Care: The speakers discuss how misinformation and propaganda in healthcare, often driven by pharmaceutical interests, hinder public understanding of health and wellness.
• The Future of Health and Medicine: Whitten envisions a future where health care is more focused on optimizing health and preventing disease through lifestyle and environmental changes, rather than solely treating diseases.
• The Significance of Energy and Fatigue: Whitten concludes by highlighting the importance of focusing on indicators like energy levels and resilience to assess health, rather than just disease markers. He suggests that energy level is a central indicator of cellular health

About Ari Whitten

Stay tuned for Episode 43 (you can see all episodes on the Conners Clinic Live page!)

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Transcript

Dr. Kevin Conners

Hello, everybody. This is Dr. Kevin Conners. Welcome to another episode of Conners Clinic Live. We have a great guest today, Ari Whitten, who does a lot of work with energy and increasing people’s energy. And we got a lot to talk about in this short time, so we’re going to jump right into it. Welcome to our show.

Ari Whitten

Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Dr. Kevin Conners

So we’re not going to dig deep into your history. We’ll let people discover that on your website, we’ll have all that information. But let’s talk about what your passion is in helping people.

Ari Whitten

Yeah. Well, the very short version of it for me is I’ve been studying health science since I was a little kid, since I was 12 years old. This health science, fitness, athletic performance, body composition, being healthy, what it means to be healthy and live a long life has really been at the center of my existence and my world, my world mentally. This is what I’ve been studying pretty much my whole life. It’s going to be three decades now pretty soon. I’m turning 40 this year. And the initial portion of my study was very much dedicated to athletic performance and bodybuilding and body composition. And that was my world for a very long time. I was very dedicated to it. I was very gifted in that area. By the time I was 14 years old, I was reading college-level textbooks on nutrition and exercise, physiology, and things like that. And I think that also gave me a really unique background. My older brother, who we were just talking about, who’s a chiropractor, was my best friend from a very young age. He was also dedicated to health. He was a bodybuilder and personal trainer from the time I was very young, and being mentored by a professional bodybuilder.

And so I had this introduction from a very young age to that world, which was really biohacking before biohacking was a term. The original biohackers were bodybuilders. And this knowledge is a very unique knowledge because it’s experiential. It’s not sitting in a classroom learning abstract concepts about health and biochemistry and different mechanisms. It is literally the day-to-day constant experimentation with your own physiology.

Dr. Kevin Conners

I want to touch on that just a second. I think that’s a key point, and I haven’t heard anybody really talk about that. We take care of mainly cancer patients here, and we hear people like, I have a weekly Zoom, and just yesterday in the Zoom, somebody asked a question about a book that was a best-selling book written by a scientist saying something whatever. But he’s even treat people. He’s never even seen a cancer patient in his life. That’s where so much of the, even the functional medicine information is coming from professors or PhDers that haven’t actually been in the real world, haven’t lived it themselves, haven’t seen the people, that’s a problem.

Ari Whitten

Yeah, 100%. I think there’s also an important distinction… Actually, you know what? Maybe I’ll come back to that in a second. I’ll just wrap up my own personal story. Basically, I went on to do a degree in kinesiology, exercise science, a lot of focus on nutrition, got certifications in nutrition. And as a performance enhancement specialist, corrective exercise specialist, training and being a nutritionist, working with individuals was my day-to-day operation and experimentation, not only at that point with my own physiology, but with many, many other people. And then I actually went to medical school for a couple of years, hated it, went to a PhD program in clinical psychology, completed all three years of coursework, and then really decided I want to move back to my roots in nutrition and exercise and lifestyle choices to be healthy. And I’ve also done a Masters in human nutrition and functional medicine. But to loop back into what you were just saying there, I think this base of experimentation with human physiology is really important. I would also add, there’s a really interesting distinction between a focus on pathology and disease versus a focus on health. And the whole conventional medical paradigm, certainly, is really a disease paradigm.

It’s a pathology paradigm. It’s the study of disease. The whole paradigm is based on a conceptual framework that says if we study the biochemical mechanisms of disease, we can figure out the cause of the disease. For example, depression is caused by a deficiency in serotonin in the brain, or atherosclerosis and heart disease is caused by LDL cholesterol, and so on and so forth. Then based on that understanding of pathology, it seeks to create drugs that interrupt what it perceives to be abnormal physiology, to interrupt those disease processes. And then by virtue of interrupting abnormal biochemical mechanisms that are associated with disease, the idea is that would reverse the disease or cure the disease or at least hopefully correct some of the symptoms of it. And there’s a context where that model works really well in battlefield medicine, in wartime medicine, and even in the context of emergency medicine and dealing with acute infections, antibiotics can be life-saving. But when it comes to chronic disease, the model has really been a massive failure. What I think is that it’s been a failure largely because of the focus on disease. I think studying disease is not a great way to learn how to be healthy.

It’s different sets of tools. And if we want to be healthy and prevent disease, and I would argue in most cases, the best treatment for most diseases with some exceptions, the best treatment is actually to create health. And so the whole paradigm needs to be upended. If we actually want to create health, we need to stop fixating on the study of disease and start studying the science of creating health.

Dr. Kevin Conners

We’re looking at it completely backwards is what you’re saying.

Ari Whitten

Yeah.

Dr. Kevin Conners

How do you get an average person that maybe has some autoimmune disease or something like that? How do you get them from that medical model into a more functional health lifestyle model? It’s an educational process, isn’t it?

Ari Whitten

It is, yeah. Here’s a big shift in thinking. This is really interesting. I find a lot of people don’t know this. I’ve been shocked actually also at the amount of practitioners that don’t know this, but it’s really important. Extending out from what I was just talking about. There’s a lot of research to show that even if we… Well, actually, let me step back for a second. The whole central core Western medical paradigm is we need to… There’s this disease and there’s that disease, heart disease and cancer, and neurological disease, and obesity and diabetes, and if only we could find cures for these diseases. The assumption built into this is that if we had a cure for heart disease, if we had a cure for cancer, etc. that we would just live so much longer. In fact, this paradigm is completely not true. This assumption is totally wrong. It’s actually been shown in numerous studies that if we had a cure for heart disease tomorrow, heart disease is the number one killer in the Western world. If we had a cure for it tomorrow, it would actually barely budge the average lifespan. The same is true for cancer, the same is true for all the other major diseases that we are desperately in search of a cure for.

And the reason why is that these are largely diseases of lifestyle and environment that are… It’s not just this one part of the body that has some dysfunction. It’s widespread dysfunctional physiology and poor metabolic health, that’s creating dysfunction in numerous systems of the body. Then basically the diagnosis of what disease you get is essentially whatever disease process happens to emerge first, based on your weakest link. But it’s not like if you remove that piece, the rest of you is completely healthy and is going to live a much longer period of time. In fact, the research shows that basically if somebody didn’t die of heart disease at age 79, they’d probably die of cancer at age 80. And if they didn’t die of cancer at age 80, they’d die of complications from diabetes or a neurological disease at age 80 and a half or 81. And if they didn’t… If all of those diseases are cured, it would still barely budge the average lifespan because most people’s whole body essentially breaks down and you get multi-organ failure on average by about age 85. In other words, people die of “old age.” That’s what dying of old age is.

It’s basically the body as a whole becomes so broken and dysfunctional that you get multi-organ system failure. Your body just says no more and it taps out. And basically, what this means, and here’s the key point, the actual maximal genetic human lifespan isn’t age 85, it’s around 120. So the real key, if we want to really live longer, it’s not to cure this disease and to cure that disease and to cure this disease. It’s actually to learn the science around how do we slow the rate of aging as much as possible at the cellular level so that we are on average, reaching close to 120 of the maximal genetically determined human lifespan, as opposed to dying 30 or 40 years sooner from basically accelerated cellular aging and dysfunctional metabolic health.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Yeah. So the named disease that the person may be currently suffering from is just the effect of the epigenetic choices that that person has made that is basically breaking down metabolic pathways.

Ari Whitten

Right. It’s like if you see somebody, you do a blood test, and you determine you’ve got high blood pressure, and your blood sugar, your fasting blood sugar in the morning, and hemoglobin A1C levels indicate that you have type two diabetes. Okay, let’s put you on this blood pressure medication to normalize your blood pressure. Let’s put you on Metformin to normalize your blood sugar. Okay, we did it. We got those biomarkers in ranges that says you are not diabetic or you don’t have high blood pressure, hypertension anymore. And then we assume that you’re healthy, but you’re not healthy. Actually, your physiology is still very much the product of the same lifestyle and environmental inputs that led to those dysfunctions in the first place. And if you take drugs to change those numbers a little bit, that doesn’t mean you’re healthier and it doesn’t mean you’re going to live longer.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Yeah, I’ve always told people like taking something to lower their cholesterol, a statin drug, you might as well be healthier if you just erased the number of your blood test to the cholesterol. You wrote in a number that you wanted to have and then look at it and say, wow, now, I’m healthy. You’d actually be healthier doing that than by taking the drug and having the damage to the cellular structure and the metabolic pathways from the drug itself, complicating things worse, but giving you a false narrative of cholesterol in a healthy range. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

Ari Whitten

The logic can be better understood for people because we’re so indoctrinated into this conventional medical paradigm, a drug for every disease, and where it’s assumed that taking a drug to normalize that biomarker is “healthier,” all you have to do to realize the fallacy of this model is to say, Well, what if we took a healthy person and gave them five different drugs? A blood pressure drug, a blood sugar drug, a drug for whatever other things, an antidepressant and so on. Would we expect that healthy person to be healthier as a result of those inputs or less healthy? Less healthy, no? And this is very obvious that we can expect much more net harm than good by taking a healthy person and putting them on several different drugs. But we assume that taking a diseased person and putting them on the drugs is going to be beneficial. The reality is as a generalization, you look at statin drugs or blood pressure lowering drugs, there’s a specific maybe sub-demographic where you could find studies in people who have had multiple heart attacks and who are on the last phase of… Very close to death and their body’s failing, maybe the statin drug extends that demographic’s life longer than it would have.

But the overall body of evidence shows that statins don’t actually extend lifespan in the vast majority of people who are prescribed statins. And that general finding extends across most drugs, most of the core drugs that are supposed to be life-saving and extending human lifespan.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, I found when I started teaching these truths that you’re teaching back in the ’80s, it was like you were running into this brick wall of propaganda by the other side. It hasn’t changed. It’s gotten worse. The news cannot even share the truth anymore because their entire ad campaign of the pharmaceutical companies is sustaining the network.

Ari Whitten

That’s right.

Dr. Kevin Conners

It is a grassroots effort to try to re-educate people. But there is a large percentage of people that will still run and get a drug when they think that that’s the solve of their problem.

Ari Whitten

Right. So I think what comes out of this, the point that I want to make to people is that we’re doing things all wrong by making the focus all about studying disease and then trying to develop drug cures for disease. Again, even if we cured most of those diseases, it wouldn’t make much difference to your lifespan. What most people need to actually be focused on is creating health. And interestingly enough, I’d make the argument that if there’s any demographic of people that really understands that science, it’s the people who have been seeking to optimize their health and their performance since the time that they were young, like athletes who are constantly experimenting with their physiology and trying to gain the edge. It’s like, how can I optimize my physical performance? How can I do everything possible to give the right inputs in terms of nutrition, give the right inputs in terms of training, give them right inputs in terms of rest, give the right inputs in terms of recovery, in terms of sleep and circadian rhythm, in terms of drinking pure water, in terms of breathing clean air, how can I gain the edge over my competition by optimizing my physiology in every way possible?

And of course, there’s a dark side to that, the use of steroids and dangerous things that are harmful to health. But in principle, that body of knowledge, as distinct and different from the study of disease and the attempt to reverse disease and interrupt abnormal pathology with drugs, I would argue that it’s those athletes who have been studying how to optimize their physiology that are actually much better equipped. It’s that body of knowledge, much more so than the study of disease, that’s going to add years or decades to your life, to your lifespan, and especially to your health span, which is the amount of time that you’re alive that you have a highly functional brain and body.

Dr. Kevin Conners

I think most of our listeners agree with everything that you just said. And you coming from that athletic world and having that experiential knowledge that really drove you and continues to drive your passion, how would you take somebody who didn’t come from that world, is living a typical American life, having now been diagnosed with whatever disease, and wants to get off their medications, how do you now practically deal with a person like that?

Ari Whitten

Yeah. It really helps a lot if someone can start to see themselves as an athlete. You don’t have to be an athlete. You don’t have to do sports. You don’t have to compete against anyone else. But to the extent that an individual can adopt the mind frame that they are training to accomplish some objective, that they are learning how to optimize their physiology, their performance in body and brain, and learning the knowledge and the skill sets and creating the habits that are necessary to do that. So it’s a process, again, of learning knowledge, skills, and behaviors/habits that has to be systematically integrated and cultivated in one’s life. And this is obviously we get started with simple things. If somebody has zero experience, you walk around a grocery store with them and say, Hey, we shop in the periphery. If something has a label on it, you probably shouldn’t eat it. Buy single ingredient foods that don’t have a label on it. They’re not wrapped in plastic with a set of nutrition facts. Like you go into a grocery store, buy some carrots. Just buy some lettuce. Things that don’t have a label, buy some beef. It’s got one ingredient, beef.

Buy some chicken, buy some seafood, and start to build that set of knowledge around, Okay, we’re going to start by doing arguably probably the single most important thing that you can do to optimize your health, and live longer and prevent disease, eat only whole foods. Get processed foods out of your diet. You start there, just building that knowledge, and those skills, and those habits to make the right choices and eat only whole foods, regardless of whether you’re vegan or paleo or keto or whatever, just the commitment to eat whole foods and learning that set of knowledge and how to shop in a grocery store will make a massive difference in your health just by implementing that one simple thing. And then there’s 20 or 50, or 100 things like that that can be implemented after that initial basic step.

Dr. Kevin Conners

I would summarize what you just said is you have to get people to take responsibility.

Ari Whitten

Absolutely.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Because we live in a culture where I have a disease and I’m the victim of a disease, instead of I have this array of symptoms that my doctor has labeled as a named disease because of my choices in what I have done up to this point. Getting people to take responsibility, like an athlete, okay, you’re an athlete and you’re going to perform, it’s all up to you. A coach isn’t going to make you good. A coach can only tell you what you have to do to train, what you ultimately are responsible to do to train to get to that level that you want to be. That’s really what doctors have taken that responsibility away from people, and maybe I’m talking about standards of care. Because they want everybody to have that co-dependent relationship on them, instead of real doctors, which are teachers, coaches, continue to keep the responsibility on the patient to do the things that they need to do to get better. So that’s the big shift, I think, that you’re talking about.

Ari Whitten

Yeah. And it’s actually really simple. It’s just that humans are great about doing it in lots of other contexts. We’re just masters of not being able to do it with ourselves. And here’s what I mean by that. If you’ve got a plant in your house and you notice that the leaves are starting to brown or the plant is wilting, everybody immediately goes, Well, something’s clearly off with the inputs. Either it’s not getting the right light, it’s not getting enough water, or maybe it’s getting too much water, or the air quality is not great, or the soil quality is not great. But it’s going to be one of those things. It’s going to be something about the environmental inputs because you know that that plant isn’t genetically programmed to wilt and be diseased and to brown. We know that it’s actually genetically programmed to be healthy. And assuming, and we know that if it’s not healthy, that means by definition, essentially it’s not getting the right environmental inputs to express what it’s been programmed genetically to do, which is to express health. Humans are exactly the same way. We’re programmed genetically. Millions of years of evolution have programmed us genetically from our ancestors who had to deal with extremely harsh conditions, surviving famine and wars, and crazy climates and all kinds of difficult circumstances.

And we are programmed, like other creatures on this planet, genetically to express health. And if we are not expressing health, particularly if the species, a large portion of the whole species in a particular environment, is not expressing health, we need to be able to go something’s off with the environmental inputs. How can we correct that? But instead, most people go, Oh, just for random reasons or bad genetics, I’m diseased, and therefore I need to go to the doctor to get a drug to fix my disease. And it’s the equivalent of saying when your plant’s browning and wilting, let’s go study the biochemical processes of browning and the biochemical processes of wilting, and then go to a lab where we engineer drugs that we can inject into the plant that interrupt this pathological process of browning or this pathological process of wilting.

Dr. Kevin Conners

It’s a laughable concept, when do you think of it that way?

Ari Whitten

Exactly. We have convinced ourselves that we’re doing something very sciencey and very sophisticated, but it’s actually laughably absurd when you just look at it in any other context than humans. Imagine you’ve got a big lake with lots of fish that are dying and fish that are washing up on shore with tumors on them, and fish with brain diseases and all kinds of weird behaviors that indicate mental illness and atherosclerosis in their arteries and so on. And you go, imagine you’re a biologist studying this and you get up on stage and you present to a conference of other biologists. And you say, I think what’s going on is that there’s random genetics that are causing all these diseases, and these diseases are just occurring for random reasons. And what we should do is study the biochemistry of each of these diseases and set up little hospitals on the shore of the lake to administer drugs to all the sick fish with this disease and that disease. I mean, you’d be laughed off the stage if you presented this thinking. Any basic biologist knows, Oh, there’s something off in the environment. There’s probably something toxic in the lake.

There’s some toxicity in the environment where these fish are not getting what they need to be in their natural state, which is health, right?

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, we’ve come a long way from that understanding you said, just with the human race. And of course, there’s been a propaganda campaign that spends billions of dollars a year to educate the masses that disease is from a deficiency in a drug. And we’re still fighting that fight. You just wonder why people can’t have their eyes open to this maybe because so many people are tied to the pharmaceutical industry in some financial way also. The medical monopoly in some financial way. We saw it with this whole “pandemic” the last few years of how people were just bamboozled to believe things that were nonsense. I had semi-arguments with people that were highly educated in the office building that I was in prior to this. There were highly educated attorneys that were wondering why I refused to wear a mask. It’s like, You guys can’t read articles. I just don’t get it. It is a battle of understanding and getting people to look at life through a different paradigm. It takes people like you to continue this grassroots effort to get people to open up their eyes to this.

Ari Whitten

Yeah, agreed. I think ultimately there’s just going to be a bifurcation of types of people and types of thinking. And some people are going to insist that the “scientific,” the “evidence-based” way of doing things is to keep researching disease and try to find cures for disease. I don’t really want to talk about disease, and I don’t want to spend decades of my life trying to understand all the complex, infinitely complex, and constantly… The complexity is constantly expanding each day as new articles are published on new intricacies of the biochemical abnormalities of each different disease state, because I think we’re under a delusion, we’re operating in a fantasy that the answer to living longer lives and healthier lives lies in that deeper understanding of disease. It doesn’t. So I’m not interested in that anymore. And even playing the natural game like so many functional medicine practitioners do, it’s certainly noble work to help people who do have diseases. But I think ultimately the bifurcation is either you are going to be in the majority of the population that disowns any personal responsibility for your own health outcomes and says, I’ve spent seven decades drinking Coca-Cola and eating donuts and McDonalds.

Come save me with your drugs from these diseases that I’ve developed. And you want to operate in that fantasy that you think they’re going to develop drugs that are going to be able to cure you of your diseases, and that therefore you’re going to live decades longer than you would have otherwise. Or you’re going to be in what I consider the much smarter segment of the population that says, You know what? My health, my health destiny, is a reflection of my habits. And the inputs, just like any other plant that I’m taking care of or animal that I’m taking care of, it’s health, whether it’s obese or lean, whether it has a good mood or not, whether it’s mentally ill or not, whether it’s highly energetic or chronically fatigued, is a function of the environment and lifestyle inputs. And I’m going to take responsibility for my personal environmental and lifestyle inputs to provide the right inputs so that my genes can express properly, express health, so that my mitochondria can produce abundant energy, so that my brain works well, so that my hormones and neurotransmitters work well, so that I live a long and healthy life as close as possible to the maximally genetically determined human lifespan of 120.

And then I accept that eventually my organs will fail and I’ll die of old age. And I think that’s the right way of looking at things. That’s the smart way.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, we are totally on the same page of that. I think getting people to accept that personal responsibility is the key. It’s also the hardest thing to do, to get people to do that. I do fully agree and I think it’s been played out in the last few years that there’s just a separation of people that some will and some won’t. There’s a lot in the middle that you’re trying to convince, and that’s why we’re doing these podcasts. But there’s a big group of people, probably the majority that think this is nonsense, that there’s just some magic potion out there that’s going to be the cure all. That is living in la la land. Thanks for being on. I would love to have you again. I just know that you are a wealth of knowledge, and I think our listeners would love to hear more from you, because I really would like to get into, and probably another hour conversation, what you’re doing. We’ll share your information and your web presence and everything and what you’re doing with your energy information and your program that you have. But I would love to get in and dive deep into that if you’re willing to be on again.

Ari Whitten

I’d be happy to. Yeah, we didn’t get a chance to go into fatigue and energy enhancement. But suffice it to say if I can add one little bit on that. I think what we ought to be focused on, and we ought to be measuring and trying to improve, is not focused on studying disease, and this disease, and that disease, and trying to reverse abnormal pathology. What we should be focused on and measuring are things like energy, and things like resilience, and things like mood, and things like physical performance and mental performance. We should be measuring those parameters rather than just doing lab tests to organic acids tests, and blood tests, and measuring blood sugar levels, and blood pressure levels, and cholesterol levels. We ought to be measuring these parameters that actually give us an indication of our health status way before a disease emerges. And if we measure that, and we know a person’s lifestyle habits and environmental inputs, and we match that up with, okay, what are the more optimal lifestyle and environmental inputs for the human species? Now we can start to make changes that are about creating health rather than waiting until we get disease and trying to reverse disease.

And I think energy, in particular, and how energetic you are, how fatigued you are, is the single best central indicator of your overall cellular health that will tell you whether you have healthy physiology or not. Do you have abundant energy throughout the day, or are you chronically fatigued in brain and body? That’s a really key indicator, and I would absolutely love to be on again and talk more about that.

Dr. Kevin Conners

I would love to have you. Thank you so much. We’ll give our listeners all your contact information. Ari Witten, you are a wealth of knowledge.

Ari Whitten

Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Conners.

Dr. Kevin Conners

All right, bye-bye.

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Dustin Ranem

NOTE: All of the above statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This and any product(s) discussed are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Dustin has been passionate about holistic health since he met his wife, Dr Mallory Ranem (Conners) 20 years ago. As the Digital Media Manager, he coordinates content across Conners Clinic’s large online presence, including written, video, and audio.