Optimizing Health: How to Defy the Aging Process - Dr. Sean O'Mara

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Jack Heald: Welcome folks. I am joined today by Dr. Sean O'Meara, sorry, whom I have interviewed for Dr. Philip Ovedia's show, oh year and a half ago, thought it was a terrific conversation. But Sean today, I want to be super tight and super focused in this conversation. So as you know, I've got nine questions and it starts with what one specific health issue do you want to address today?

Dr. Sean O'Mara: Yeah. You know, I think the biggest health issue I'd like to address is that you don't have to have disease. And despite the overwhelming evidence that's out there that shows everybody else falling apart, the reality is there is an exception to that. And that is that you can actually improve as you get older and that is the normal course of human existence. We should actually be getting better now, just despite everybody else falling apart that's what I like to do. I'd like to confront the position that most people think that, Hey, as I age, I just got to fall apart and just become diseased and that's normal.

It's not. It's really not the case. And if you look at nature, most animals actually live a pretty high-quality existence, quality of life. Their health is very good until the very end, and then they rapidly kind of deteriorate. But humans do something very different. We just kind of slowly fall apart. It's not scientific and it's not even anecdotal if you look at what happens out in nature. So that's my gig. It's my passion. I like to, as a health and performance optimizing physician, get my clients, people that come to me to actually optimize their health and optimize their performance.

And though, although I'm an MD and I'm a physician-researcher. I don't call the people who come to me patients. I call them clients and I advocate for that position because I think calling the patients kind of carves them out from everybody else. We're all consumers. When we go to somebody and we pay money for a service, we're really a consumer. And I like the idea of calling my clients, somebody, it really just clients. I work for them. And I think if the healthcare system adopted that kind of strategy where we saw the people who came to us consumers as our clients instead of our patients, we would treat them very differently and the individuals going to those doctors who treat them very differently, i.e. if you're not getting better, you're going to fire them and leave. And right now, I think patients don't do that because they think it's just kind of par for the course. I'm just getting older and getting more disease and they should be fired. 

Jack Heald: Wow. I just want to, I want to kind of do a quick summary to take us to the next question. So the issue you want to talk about is you don't have to get worse as you get older, you can get better, and subsidiary to that response or in support of that response, you have chosen to relate to the people that you work with as clients, not patients, because you believe that is more consistent with your message that getting diseased and decaying as we get older is not normal. Is that correct? 

Dr. Sean O'Mara: Yeah, that's a fair summary. That's exactly 

Jack Heald: how'd you get interested in this? 

Dr. Sean O'Mara: It really was because I myself was in the former camp where I just kept getting worse and then I changed my lifestyle, not because of a doctor, but because of really just another human being told me to change some things if I wanted to lose weight and it wasn't a placebo effect. He didn't know I even had medical problems. I had an enlarged prostate that was keeping me up peeing four to five times a day. I had eczema. I had erectile dysfunction. I had coronary artery disease. I had restless leg syndrome, kicking my legs, and obstructive sleep apnea. I had Barrett's esophagus, which is a Precancerous lesion within my esophagus. I've suffered terribly from refractory heartburn and gastroesophageal reflux disease. I was a mess. And I was a fat guy, too, on top of all that. And I changed my diet. This guy told me he was, I didn't know at the time, he was 17. Here I am at the time, I was a 48-year-old physician. And so I listened to a 17-year-old kid who told me to go eat the paleo diet, and at the same time sprint and eat fermented foods. And he didn't tell me to do those things for any other reason other than I stopped being a fat guy, so I did, and then one year later, and it took a year, I noticed that all those conditions had gone away, and I was just as pissed off as can be because you'd think normally guys should be super happy, but no, I was very mad because I felt like I'd invested my entire, you know, adult life studying medicine, learning the science, medical science behind treating disease and helping people. And none of it worked.

I've been doing it and none of it worked. I'd seen all the right specialists. And then this 17-year-old kid comes into my life. And tells me to eat this, you know, popular diet at the time, the paleo diet, which is a low carbohydrate diet and eat these fermented foods and to sprint and that I'd lose weight. And then turns out I lost a whole lot more than that. Jack, I lost disease.

And so that's what changed it for me. And it wasn't any of my medical colleagues. And I want to say, I was just sharing this online about two weeks ago and a follower said, when he saw that comment, this guy's a quack cause he's an MD and he listened to a 17-year-old. Screw you, buddy. Screw you. You listen to the man or woman that's going to optimize you and you get better and you have the metrics. Your problem, that person, is probably following metrics that really don't show he's getting better. But I guarantee I'm better because all those disease processes left me.

I became better performing across the board in everything I did, besides losing all my disease, and my quality of life significantly improved. So I really feel sorry for that one lead, that one follower said that comment like that, but you know, I like to tell people today, you know, we need to pay attention to the man, the men and women in our lives that help us live better. We need to have the metrics to know that we're living better. It can't just be some laboratory study that some other pedantic physician is telling you is healthy. You need to see your disease, whatever disease you have going away. And you need to see the quality of your life inversely improving as that disease process is going away.

Jack Heald: You know, I was going to normally question three is what's the biggest popular misconception about this issue. But I think you articulated it perfectly. The popular misconception is that getting old and getting more diseased, and more weak, and more decrepit, and more deteriorated is normal. 

Dr. Sean O'Mara: Yep. And that's really it, that it's a big misconception. People just think, you know, because I'm older, I need to be, I just need to accept that I'm getting disease. But, you know, a good example, I have this picture pulled up and it's coming to mind, so I'll pull it up now to show you that is.

So here I am when I met that 17-year-old kid and he told me to go on this paleo low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet. And this is me today. I'm 61 years old. You can see what I look like, but I put this photograph out and share with people because really you should be getting better. I mean, most people like on LinkedIn social media accounts, they put their old photographs on because why they look better in the past. But the reality is you shouldn't, you should actually be improving as you get older. And that's where leadership, the concept of leadership came about. The people that headed up our clans and her tribes 100,000 years ago were the healthiest, best-performing individuals.

And today, oh, let's think about that. Look who's leading our country today. And the leadership oftentimes are falling apart because they have lost all the insights about how to live and how we should be living, and they fall apart and then we're stuck with low performers. But just imagine a country, a world where the leadership was improving all along, acquiring knowledge and expertise and building on their health and performance as they get there. And then you know what our ancestors were benefited by, older men and women, who were alphas with some great hair, that were fantastically healthy and high performing and how much benefit that provided to their clans, their tribes, their organization. So my heart pines for the day, perhaps in my lifetime, where I see a healthy head of state in our country, that's truly getting healthy and has abandoned seeking pleasure and comfort in exchange for living correctly. And it's not like I don't have any pleasure and comfort.If anybody thinks that interpreting what I just said means you've got to give up, you know, good things and I'll have any pleasure and comfort. You have to give up things that are bad that might give you momentary pleasure and comfort for a brief period of time, in exchange for the blissful living, I get to enjoy all day long because I'm a 61-year-old man who FEELS Like I'm 18. 

Jack Heald: That is just, I really try to keep this focused, you know, really clockwork organized tick, but my gosh, the passion and the, just the inspiration of seeing you and hearing you talk just makes me want to stop and go, yes.

So typically what we ask here is. What's the most likely outcome of people don't take action, but obviously the most likely outcome is you're going to, you're going to fall into the popular misconception, which is you have to get sicker and you have to get more disease and you have to decay. So that takes us to, let's talk about specific actions.

So you're a 61-year-old man who's in infinitely better shape than you were at 48 because of specific actions that you've taken. What do our listeners, what does our audience need to take away from this? Not just the idea that you don't have to get worse as you get older, but what are the specific actions that they can take to get that, to reverse that decay process and to get better?

Dr. Sean O'Mara: All right, so I can get and I will give it to you guys but not before I say something And what I'm going to tell you is, the majority of people are in like a slow riptide. The tide is slowly carrying them out to the ocean where they're surely going to drown. And all along as they're carrying, being carried out, they're succumbing to and experiencing more and more chronic diseases, destroying their quality of life. But they're stuck in the masses and everybody else is with them. And the tide is so slow that they don't really pay attention that they're caught up in this. And so you can throw a life preserver to them and Jack, they won't grab it. They won't. They don't really believe that they're going to drown. They won't even believe that there's any other existence, that a way of life, another life available to them so they don't grab the life preserver. They're drowning man who understands or a woman who understands they're drowning. They have a need, they'll grab hold of it with a grip to save their life.

What I have found as a health optimizing health and performance, optimizing position doing this now for 13 years, is I got to show my client that they're drowning and they're accumulating all this disease because if I tell them what to do and they don't recognize that they're falling apart and that they have, there's another existence available to them, they're just not going to do it.

They won't grab that life preserver. So how do I do it? I give people MRIs. And I show them giant chunks of fat around their heart, giant collections of fat inside their abdomen, and I show them marbleization going on of their muscles in their arms and legs, all over their body, including their gastrointestinal tract and their beautiful puborectalis muscle, which is also understood by layman's term as the anus.

And as all those muscles fall apart, you will slowly lose the ability to stand up on your own, and you will be relegated to a walker, a wheelchair, and other humans that have to help you get out of a chair and eventually, no longer even help you to get out and when that anus goes, you got diapers. It starts out as gas when you pass urine, and then eventually you start passing more than gas. You start passing stool with little accidents in your pants, and it's adult diaper time. So unless you're paying attention to all this, by the time that's happening, you're too late. You're in your 70s, sometimes in your 60s, when it starts happening. And you're like what can I do about this? And your doctor's not going to be able to help you. They just point you to maybe medicines to help a little bit, stave it off for a tiny bit, but you're just falling apart.

So I'm trying to set this up to have those listening understand that, hey, pay attention to the next things I'm going to tell you about. What I give on social media, and very few people do it. Very few. I'm going to estimate one in 100,000 or one and maybe easily 10,000 will do these things.

But when they do, they will change their whole lives and then they write me. You have changed my whole life by doing these things. So I will pull these strategies up. They're very short. There's not a lot of them and they're on the website.

I'll just step out of the way and you can zoom in and take a screenshot of those if you're following this and if you can't you can go to my Instagram page which is just @DrSeanOMara. And pinned to the top of my Instagram page are my strategies. I've also pinned them into my YouTube videos, which is my same handle, @DrSeanOMeara. And they're on X and LinkedIn and multiple social media accounts that I have. And you can follow them. And they're easy to do, easy to implement and to follow. They just get a little bit more esoteric at the end where I start talking about optimization. But in short, I advocate people eating a predominantly meat-based diet and something different that nobody thinks about is our ancestors, when they hunted didn't just hunt any animal, like every predator today will hunt the easiest, the animal that's closest, the one that's got a limp, the older one, the younger, the calf. That's how lions and tigers and predators hunt today. Our ancestors hunted the best. Why? They weren't maniacs that wanted to, you know, be glutton for hard work. They realized when they hunted the best, they became better.

They became better because the best animal in a herd had healthier nutrition. Here's one you never heard about, that animal comes with a skin on it. They could tell which animal was the healthiest in their herd by its silhouette, the shape of it. We can tell unhealthy people because they got big guts and big fat asses when they're walking down the street. Our Native Americans, our ancestors of long old, could tell the shape of that animal and the sheen of its coat, the fur. Why did the fur have such an important role in selecting? Because the fur is where that animal's microbiome is stored. The microbes it collected from its lifestyle were stored in the fur of that animal. And when it would mate, it would transfer those microbes and would acquire other microbes. It wouldn't mate with anything. It would mate with ones that it looked at and said, that's very healthy, I'm going to contribute my genetics to that particular female specimen. And so the healthiest male animal in a herd had the best microbes. And guess what? They would skin that animal. And then that skin would be given to a human being. And those people were so smart back then, they noticed when you hunted the very best and you gave the skin to a human being, that human was made better by the best animal. And a human was made worse by the worst animal.

Because how you live your life, whether you're a homo sapien or an animal, dictates the microbes you have on your body. And what gets conferred in that animal skin. And it's been like that for most of our existence until modern-day, man. And we got close and we've lost the concept. Of the microbiome, the healthiest animals and the healthiest human beings have the healthiest microbiomes, which are a direct reflection of our lifestyle. And so I like to equate my clients with the need to understand the microbiome and the decisions we make daily in terms of selecting for either good microbes or bad microbes. Honor body and insider body by what we eat. 

Jack Heald: All right. For those who are not watching and I'm not positive that the screen was clear enough to or even for the folks watching to be able to read it, but the website is DrSeanOMaraMD. com and it's pinned to the to homepage Sean? 

Dr. Sean O'Mara: Yep. That's it. 

Jack Heald: All right. I think I probably know the answer to this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Anyway, what's the most common compliment that you get in your practice? 

Dr. Sean O'Mara: The most common compliment is, Thank you so much for sharing the information that you shared, and for the changes that I've gotten.

So I hear that all the time.

And it's nice to hear because it's you know, it's complimentary, but the truth is there's not, you know, one of these strategies that I can take credit for. I shamelessly steal, and borrow from nature what exists in nature and science. So there's nothing that I could say is directly, an innovative strategy that I alone figured out and never existed before. It nonetheless is a compliment that I received for at least paying attention, while others have ignored the benefit that's in existence in nature already. And I think we have this attraction for the civilized form of knowledge called science.

Unfortunately, too often, it's to the abandonment of what exists in nature and nature is what is enduring. All the science that we're so excited about today is going to look hocus pocus in 100 years. And so the reality is what nature has established and continues to put in place, is what we really ought to be paying attention to and how few people really pay attention to it.

And I like to incorporate all-natural strategies. They in almost every case, work way better than just modern-day approaches, medications, procedures, and surgeries, which have a place. I mean, there are dark times clearly. I'm an emergency medicine physician. If you're having a heart attack, I'm not going to reach for fermented turmeric, I'm going to get you to a catheterization lab to stent whatever artery has become acutely occluded. But, when it comes to living your life and reversing that disease process that's slowly taking place and preventing it in the first place, I'm not going to rely on procedures in surgeries and medications. I'm going to use natural lifestyle choices. So it's discernment about the place for an acute emergent event, when we need to use, you know, some more scientific or civilized, more advanced medical procedure or medication, and when we should be really, adopting and applying what nature has already set in place and in many cases has been passed on in the form of tradition because it qualifies as something that improves humans and that's why it becomes a tradition.

Jack Heald: Let's talk about the opposite side. What's one of the more common complaints that you will hear? 

Dr. Sean O'Mara: I think sometimes the complaints I get a big, it's kind of, this is one that drives me nuts is, I'm worried about my cholesterol. My cholesterol. Is going to go up and I know Dr Avadi and I have talked about cholesterol and what his position is, you know, on it, but I honestly find cholesterol such a distraction that I would prefer that physicians not bring it up at all unless they bring it up and make the point that the higher your cholesterol, the more likely it is that you both live longer and live better and that we ought not to be you using it inversely as a metric to try to get people to lower that cholesterol for the purposes of reducing their exposure to to life-threatening disease. I just don't believe it. I will go to my grave. I'll reserve the right to change my mind. But right now I just, you're looking at anecdotal evidence and the science behind it, I think it's an enormous distraction, and it shouldn't even be discussed until you have thoroughly investigated what has a far higher degree of relevance and importance, and that is this dangerous visceral fat that's both inflammatory, disease-producing, and deadly inside your abdomen, surrounding your heart.

Where Dr. Avadia works his magic trying to open up those arteries and transplant them and bypass procedures, and also this deadly inflammatory fat that's accumulating inside of your muscle called myosteatosis, which is according to layman, better understood as just human marbleization, and since we last talked Jack, AI has established that the mortality, the rate of death behind having this myosteatosis, this fatty streaks in your muscle that makes you look like a ribeye, doubles your risk of mortality compared to an obese person. As bad as an obese person's mortality risk is, they don't live long. And hopefully, if you're listening to this show, you have enough lifelong experience to realize, Bye. I don't want to be obese because they don't live as good and they don't live as long. If it's double the mortality of an obese person, ought you to pay attention to that? And you probably, if you just heard it for the first, you know, just heard that, it's probably for the first time and you've never even thought about marbleization of your muscle because it's not taught in medical school. It's kept out of the curriculum just like Heart Fat. And I remember speaking to Dr.Avadia, heart fat wasn't taught to him despite the fact he's cutting through it as a cardiothoracic surgeon, but it's literally kept from physicians, med students, residents and sadly, cardiothoracic surgeons whose job it is to cut right through that.

So you know it's being kept from the medical providers because guess what happens when you find out about it? And more importantly, get rid of it. You get rid of disease and you actually get better.

If you're a consumer and you are going to healthcare and taking medications, if you get better, how happy do you think Big Pharma is going to be about the concept of disease individuals suddenly now getting healthier?

They're not going to be healthy. And it's not just Big Pharma. We like to talk about Big Pharma, but they've got some wicked siblings that are in concert with them that I like to call Big Medicine. And Big Medicine makes a lot of money. How big? It's the largest part. Of our economy. It's bigger than oil. It's bigger than energy. It's bigger than brick-and-mortar commerce or, you know, even internet commerce. 

Jack Heald: I think I read I think I read health 1 in $5 spent in America is healthcare. 

Dr. Sean O'Mara: Correct. 

Jack Heald: It's 20 percent of our economy. 

Dr. Sean O'Mara: The largest part of our economy, nothing is bigger than healthcare. And so just imagine suddenly all of that money being disrupted because people instead of continuing to get disease and making that money, suddenly dries up and shrivels up like a raisin goes away. Don't you think those invested in that? The biggest part, the establishment is going to oppose that, you bet your bottom dollar they are. And they're the bastards to keep it out of the curriculum of medical schools. And so I used to run around being afraid that I, you know, I'm going to get killed because I talked about this. It's out of the bag. Go ahead and kill me. I've trained 20 other doctors about this. You're going to have to kill each of them. And I'm not going to tell you who they are. But they're out there they're going to carry the torch. And there's, oh, by the way, thousands of my clients drawn to this and guess who, many of them are big shot business guys and women, they're going to step in if I get killed, if I have a little suspicious airplane crash, like what happened in Russia with whatever that guy was that, that opposed the leader over there.

The point is. This is a very threatening area.

There's lots of money and healthcare is going to be disrupted. Why? Because one, it's a big pot of money. And two, it's the poorest service delivery to consumers out there. So it produces the most money. And once the consumers, find out how badly they're being disturbed, the arrow pivots to something where they actually get better and the profits who are aligned instead of with the backend, who's providing it, the profit, the benefit will be to the consumer who's benefiting by purchasing that service. And right now it's all exclusively in big healthcare, which is small, a small segment is Big Pharma. So it's not just Big Pharma, it's big healthcare. And oh, by the way, it's big health insurance and it's big food processors that are contributing to this. There are a lot of people whose hands are on this coffin killing people. And by the way, it's not just money. This is humanity's biggest problem, chronic disease.

If you have never asked yourself as a human being, what is humanity's biggest problem? It's not climate change. It's not poverty. It's not starvation, world hunger. That's ridiculous. Let me tell you about chronic disease. Nothing reduces human productivity more.

Nothing reduces corporate productivity more.

Nothing destroys the lives, the quality of life, of human beings more and nothing comes even close to killing more human beings more, than chronic disease. And yet who's talking about it?

Nobody. So that's what I do. I want to slay the giant, chronic disease, take it on. And I want to get more people aware of the enormity of this problem and stop allowing yourself to be distracted by all these other things. Ridiculous work on the big problems. If you cannot figure out the big problems, you'll be distracted from ever meaningfully contributing in your lifetime, to what is the biggest problem facing humanity, chronic disease, and you'll be off working in the periphery and all these other nonsense things.

Jack Heald: Very good. I think we are in violent agreement about pretty well all of that. So this brings us to my favourite question in the show. Question number nine, if you could deliver just one message about health and you only had eight words to deliver it in, eight words is about the maximum that we can put on a billboard and still have it be something that can deliver a message.

What would those eight words be? 

Dr. Sean O'Mara: Nothing is more important as a physical asset in your life, than your body, not your money, not your bank account, not your house.

Your body is your most important physical asset.

We could get people Jack to recognize that, and it's not their bank accounts. They would change how they live their lives. Their quality of life would dramatically improve and we change the world. 

Jack Heald: Your body is your most valuable physical asset. This is Dr. Sean O'Mara. His contact information will be available in the show notes. We appreciate you joining us and we will talk to you next time.

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