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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and I absolutely loved this interview with Dr. Anthony Gustin about the importance of returning to our natural human environments and not just about nutrition. We actually talk about that very little, but I love his perspective on this because it mirrors a lot of what I learned in my journey of resolving inner and emotional issues, finding community and how profoundly that impacted all areas of my life and my health. And he comes from a typically very research and data-driven background and talks about his journey of really letting go of a lot of the things that he used to hyper fixate on when it came to physical health and how nurturing good human environment around relational health and emotional health actually really profoundly impacted his life. He also shares of his experience in staying with one of the only remaining hunter-gatherer tribes and how this impacted him so profoundly and truly shifted the course of his life and provides some practical ways that you can cultivate true community in your life. We also go deep on the topic of sunlight and I get to step on my soapbox for a few minutes on this one. Very fun conversation. I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I did. So let’s join Dr. Gustin. Anthony, welcome back.
Dr. Gustin: Thank you.
Katie: We had such a fun conversation recently about regenerative agriculture, and I will link to that one in the show notes. But on this one, I want to go deep on the topic of the importance of human environments other than just the nutrition side. So we’re going to get to go in several directions with that one. But before we jump into that, I have a note from researching your bio for this episode that you got to stay with one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes. And I would love to hear a little bit about what your experience was with that and what led to you being able to stay with them.
Dr. Gustin: Oh man, I still think about it most days, honestly. Like what a wild experience it was. I don’t know if this will be on video for everybody who’s listening to this podcast and not on video. Actually, behind me have a jawbone. It’s a baboon jaw from a baboon that we hunted together with them. And so I see it every day and I just think about. Now, what a wild experience to go to Tanzania, East African Rift, where it’s thought that humans have evolved from. Like the first humans have lived there. And to see people that have lived the same way for 50,000 years. It was mind-blowing.
And some of the biggest takeaways I had were just how happy they were and how at ease and at peace. It wasn’t even the physical health piece. And this is like one of the reasons why I started shifting a lot of my attention away from the physical health data benchmarks that I’ve been obsessed with for years and started getting way more interested in what I believe to be, you know, health, quote unquote, as we define it and started thinking about it more of wholeness, of human wholeness, instead of physical health data metrics. Which is I think where so many people are talking about with the very popular you know, PhD du jour, podcasts that are out there breaking down scientific studies saying, go in the sauna for X minutes at Y degrees to do heat shock proteins by Z percentage. It’s just, it doesn’t matter. And you don’t have to manage things when you’re living in a normal human environment. Like you just exist and everything takes care of itself.
And that to me is far more interesting. Like how do you create an environment in a modern world to be able to have the sense of abundance that these people in Tanzania that I met had without having to manage intellectually. All day of, okay, my morning routine has to be these things. And I need to take these supplements and those amounts and then, you know, jump into my cold plunge and then get out and eat that. And it’s, it’s so overwhelming when you start stacking all these habits. Especially for a couple of years. And now you have 94 different things to manage for your sleep routine. And to see humans in such a raw state full of love and abundance, which to me is honestly more important than just the physical health metrics. We can get into like why I’ve changed my mind on that as well. And it’s like, again, like I think about it so, so much in my day-to-day basis. And I feel very grateful to have, to have gone on that trip and to have that experience.
Katie: Yeah, it does seem like we’re going to elaborate lengths to biohack and recreate what essentially is just living in alignment with nature and how I think of that, I believe it was the camping study that showed that even periods of less than a week of living in nature without artificial lighting and without all of these inputs we have in daily life drastically shifted people’s hormones, their sleep, even in just a week. And we’re so far removed from a lot of those things. But it’s just funny to me how much science continues to confirm what nature has always known to begin with. And I feel like another important context piece of this conversation before we jump into some specifics, if you’re willing to share, is a little bit of your own journey with mold exposure and detox and kind of the health journey you went on.
Dr. Gustin: Yeah, so just to give some context, when I was young, I was very sick and diseased from effectively a standard American lifestyle. Think that’s a little bit more than just the standard American diet, which is one pillar of the standard American lifestyle. And I sort of like found my way through that quite a lot and got healthy, was a clinician helping people through that, that same thing of like, how do you sort of unwind a lot of these diseases of our modern environment.
And then it was like four years ago, my wife and I started having all these weird health symptoms. I had no idea where they came from. Ended up leaving our place in Austin for a couple of weeks, feeling way better than coming back and realizing that all the symptoms had returned. And in the beginning, it was sort of, I don’t know, minor. And then it became to a point of like a frog boiling in water where depression, fatigue, brain fog, energy, irritability, hair loss, joint pain. It was insane. There were days where I couldn’t even get out of bed and reach into the cabinet for a bowl to, to have any food. I was that depleted. And it just creeps up over such a long period of time. And then working through and trying to figure out and find out, okay, it’s from our house. We tested our house. Didn’t find mold for a while, then eventually found it. And then figuring out, I find like four different sections of it. You have to figure out, what kind of mold it is, where it is in your house. You have to find what kind of mold or mycotoxins in your body and how much is in your body. Then you need to figure out how to get out of your house and remediate your house. You need to figure out how to get it out of your body and remediate your body or detox. These are all very complex topics because every quote unquote expert in space conflicts every other expert in the space. And so nobody agrees on anything in this.
And so it was maddening. And then trying to navigate that while being super sick and having brain fog and being overwhelmed and I mean, we ended up having to, luckily our builders cover it, but. We had to throw away almost everything in our house. And do this big remediation process. It would have cost us $200,000 to go through this. And luckily our bill, our builders had covered it because it was a newer home. If that wasn’t the case, like how did most people go through that? And again, it’s this very clear manifestation of our unnatural environment. We live in these boxes with drywall, with plumbing and things like that. And we, I mean, what happened with this occurrence is that there was a leak that we didn’t know of for three years. So one bathroom was over another bathroom and another floor. And there was a rupture in one of the pipes. They didn’t install something correctly when they built the house. And it leaked into this dark cavity. There was no airflow. We seal everything. It’s hermetically sealed. And so in an area like Texas, we’re always using HVAC, and we’re bringing humidity and all these other things. It’s basically food from the mold. The mold grows and you get these types of mold that are not present in nature, because in nature, we have different environmental factors that balance out mold growth. So even if you see mold growing outside anywhere, this is not mold that produces microtoxins, which are the things that make humans sick in the same ways.
So the only reason we have this epidemic, and I think that way more people have mold issues than they realize that it’s estimated like 70% of people have mold issues to some degree. Does your body have a point where it can basically stop detoxing? Like think about it as like a cup overfilling. There’s a point where like you just stop being able to tolerate the symptoms and you start getting symptomology and it takes forever to clear them out of your body. And trying to unwind all that, I mean, we’re like mostly through it, like 90% through now. We still have some recalcitrant stuff going on, but man, it gives me a lot of empathy for the types of issues that people deal with and how hard it can be to restore health after a setback like this.
Katie: Yeah, I’ve watched some personal friends go through that process lately, and it’s incredible how detailed and involved that is on the home remediation side, on the physical health side, and how long of a process that can be. And to your point, it points to we’re living in these unnatural environments that may have things going on that we’re not even aware of, and not to come from a place of fear, but more from understanding and knowledge around those things.
And you mentioned that your time living or being with the hunter-gatherers really shifted your perspective. And I know you were known very much as someone who was super dialed in on the physical health side and extremely into the research on that side as well. I would love to hear more about what those long-term shifts have looked like for you and what parts of our human environments you now view differently after that experience.
Dr. Gustin: I really don’t look at any research anymore. I just don’t care. And that is like the mindset shift that I have had over the last three to four years since I was with them and going through this health issue and realizing, not only on top of that, like what’s important to me in my life. I optimized it 10 years prior for physical health, like individual physical health outcomes. And even though I had good labs and good Oura ring stats and all this type of stuff, I was still very unhappy and miserable as a human being. Didn’t have phenomenal relationships, didn’t have any spiritual connection, didn’t have like the actual fabric and riches of my life was still so objectively poor. And I think this is what people, I think, get sucked into this allure of, if I achieve high amounts of physical health, with the way the influencers tell me I could or should be with look or feel from a physical perspective, they miss what I think to be is with what the most important question is like, what is a full and rich and whole human experience actually involve? And this is the thing, again, going with Hadza and seeing what they’re working with of how tight knit that community was. I mean, these people were born and live with the same 50 to 150 people their entire life. And are around them 100% of the time, and have to depend on them, and have so many built-in mechanisms to create abundance for them. And it just, it showed me how distorted our current modern lifestyle is beyond just the Twinkies and the ho-hos. Yeah, it’s messed up.
You can see the physical health changes. And that’s what makes it, I think, easy to obsess over. You can see the food that’s whole versus the food that’s not whole. You can’t really see the social connections that have frayed. The mental and emotional health that has degraded. These are all invisible things that I think are likely far more important than the physical stuff. Because trying to recoup so many of the things in the physical health space without support and security, and safety, and love, and connection are almost impossible. And so it’s this losing battle where you’re going to be searching for physical health, grasping it for a second, and then it falling away because you have no structure or scaffolding around it. And I have a, I hate to use the word holistic because it sounds, I don’t know, there’s so many connotations with it that can be tossed away. Yeah, this is why I’m shifting my mentality more towards wholeness than quote-unquote health. And yeah, I could get into like an immense amount of different ways I’m thinking about this. But for me, it’s. It’s way more of a seeking of richness in my life rather than an outcome of a number on a smart device.
Katie: That makes sense. And I had a little bit similar of a journey in that for a long time, I was extremely data-driven and had literal spreadsheets of all the supplements I was taking. And my labs were all in spreadsheets. And I was trying every protocol and program to try to resolve some physical health issues. And when I actually addressed the emotional and inner side of a lot of the things that were going on, all of those things sort of effortlessly resolved. And after a decade of, for instance, trying to lose weight, I was now eating more food, nourishing my body better, and losing weight effortlessly. And it really opened my eyes to how much this is such a key piece like you’re talking about. And I’m curious if there are any practical examples of things that look different in your life now with this focus on wholeness, which I love that term, as opposed to when you were more focused on those physical health markers or parts of your day that you go about differently, or maybe key parts of things you do that you find the most helpful in that process.
Dr. Gustin: I think when I sort of assess what is a natural human environment, again, it’s easy to think about what is a natural nutrition environment for human, okay. The real foods that we talked about this in, in infinite amount of variation, what’s a natural movement environment. You know, you take a lot, you walk a lot. There’s like pushing things around, even maybe, some grappling. Like you talk about this a lot as well. But I think that what’s really underserved is what does a natural relationship environment look like? And what is a natural human spiritual environment. And these are two things that I’ve really gone down over the last three, four or five years, especially. And have had so much ROI on doing the sort of like community slash relationship and really figuring out how to deeply connect with other humans has to me been like so enriching and so helpful.
I was trying to do, I started like my emotional health, mental health journey, like 15 years ago, maybe. And I was trying to do it all alone. And I used different plant medicine compounds. I did therapy even. But most of the time, I was journal, solitude, doing stuff all by myself. And it wasn’t until I started really investing into being into contact and connection with other humans. So much of the trauma that I had was in a relationship. And I think that so much of it like needs to be healed also in a relationship and trying to do it by myself was, I think, frankly, impossible. I mean, I made some progress for sure, but it was just like dead end after dead end after dead end.
And it was a combination of figuring out how to deeply connect, be vulnerable, have real relationships, real community in combination of spirituality and having like a spiritual connection and having some sort of belief system beyond just my individual self. And it’s very obvious to me like why we’ve had religion for so long. And I think that humans are innately spiritual creatures. I think it’s sort of like it’s tied to consciousness. And we always worship something. And I think without worshiping something greater than ourselves, we end up worshiping ourselves. And this is where I think the same obsession with like the physical health and all this type of stuff comes in. And having connection and some sort of a belief system and a spiritual practice with the relationship piece and with that safety and vulnerability and security and all that type of stuff that’s tied together has led to so much more, like you said, progress in other areas that I had been stuck on in an effortless way where I didn’t have to think about it anymore, which I found very beautiful, but also again, enriching.
Katie: Yeah, I think this is another one of those areas that is often overlooked, but so pivotally important. And I’m curious if you have any tips for cultivating that community or building it if someone just doesn’t have it sort of innately built into their life currently. I know it seems like community is something we’ve all missed more, especially the last few years and in modern life as well as we’ve become more technologically connected, but less proximally connected. So I’m curious if you have any tips for that. Like I know from the data, loneliness is actually, they say, more dangerous than smoking, but it seems like for a lot of us in the modern world, actually creating that community can be difficult.
Dr. Gustin: Yeah, it’s very tricky depending on the person’s situation and where they live. And that, this is what makes the restoration of a natural human environment very difficult. I think one of the easiest ways to think about it, which I again, saw with this Hadza tribe in Tanzania, is the cohesion of like, self-awareness around here are the gifts that I have and I’m giving them to people around me. And so if you can just figure out where you excel and even take half an hour or an hour out of your week to help people around you, even if they’re strangers, the ROI on that is so large to feel like you are connected to other people. Like, oh, I exist because I have these skills and I’m giving them to other people. And this is my participation in the web of humans around me. Yes, it can be virtual. That works too. But I found to be more impactive of just using my skills in person and making connections.
And the other side of that coin is asking for help from other people who have those skills. And so you’re giving someone else a gift when you ask for help, when they have a superpower and they can give it to you. The same way as when you have a superpower and give it to other people, like you’re getting fulfilled and you’re feeling valuable and useful. The same thing the other way, like getting and receiving help and giving help. And this sounds very basic. And I also thought about this as well. Like no way that that could make me feel so again, part of this social fabric and safe and, even we first moved to Bend even last year.
And my wife and I have very different types of gifts that we can give. For example, I’ve seemed to have cultivated quite a lot of like figuring out how to get things done and business stuff and et cetera. And I’ve now helped a bunch of local businesses involved in food systems and just like volunteering my time basically. And my wife is so emotionally available and can help people go through stuff. And she takes a large part of her day to go, you know, bring friends who have had children meals and connect with them. And this type of giving of gifts, again, just like, I think creates an element of abundance and sense of community. I think people code community in a modern world is just people they hang out with and friends that they have, but now it’s become taboo to actually have any reciprocity to do anything. Cause you can use apps to have people, strangers come and do stuff for you. And you’re working in a computer. You don’t know who you’re impacting. You might be part of a team, but like, you don’t like understand, like, do I even, do I have any worth? Like, do I, do I have anything to give anybody? Everything’s been abstracted so much, so many different layers. And now community is just like this social enclave that we have people who have similar socioeconomic status as us and have a similar life. And just, we’re friends and we just all hang out, but we don’t actually do anything for each other. We don’t rely on each other. And that reliance, even on like abject strangers, where you’re giving your skills and people that you can actually see face to face, for me, at least has gone a tremendous way and as far as like creating a community feeling, which I think is core to our needs as a human, which you look at like, you know, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, what’s in the bottom right here, we have food, shelter, and safety or security. And then, that safety or security is impossible unless you have this feeling of that other people can take care of you and you can take care of other people. It’s a core thing that we’re overlooking, I think.
Katie: I love that. And I haven’t heard it framed that particular way, but I love that kind of that interplay of what can I give? And also, when can I ask for help? Which you’re right, does seem to be difficult in the modern world. But I think you’re so right about that community piece being so key. And I’ve said for a long time, you know, everybody gets so obsessed with Blue Zone data and they want to know exactly what they ate or exactly how they moved or whatever it is and if they did or didn’t drink wine. And to me, what stood out in that data was they did all of those things in community. And perhaps there is actually something to the idea that, yeah, maybe sauna could be great for you, but sauna might be better for you if you do it in community or if it’s a shared experience. So I love the way that you just explained that and the way that you talk about it.
And I also don’t want to miss the chance while we’re talking about natural human environments to talk about the importance of sunlight exposure, because I think this is something that has been sort of unfairly demonized in the modern world and that perhaps we are actually sort of sunlight deficient. I know there’s actually research that backs this up, but even research aside, can you speak a little bit of how you think about light exposure, sunlight exposure, and it’s important as part of this picture of natural human environment?
Dr. Gustin: Yeah, I was in Costa Rica earlier this year for five weeks for some work stuff, had some friends events, et cetera. And so we’re just there. And my wife and I were basically spending 99% of our waking hours outside. Not outside but even like a lot of the dwellings there just like have no windows and the big open walls and they’re really indoor-outdoor living. And the amount of circadian entrainment that I got and how much energy I got just from doing that has been miraculous, and it makes sense. If you look at what a normal human environment is, what is just a natural environment in general? And the sun has been hitting the earth unencumbered for the longest. And the longest tail is actually that. And then we started changing things like nutrition, whatever. Every cell has been exposed for all of history of life for billions of years with sun, with a circadian rhythm over and over and over again. And not until literally like a couple hundred years have we been removing ourselves from that cycle. Which I find to be absolutely insane. And then not only that demonizing that cycle. And saying, the sun is bad for you. Get out of it. Cover your eyes, cover your skin, remove yourself from the sun, or else it will do bad things to you. It’ll give you cancer. It’ll make you have cataracts. It’ll make you blind, et cetera. It’s absolutely insane.
Literally, everything on the earth has been exposed to this at all times until recently. And so I’ve changed the, I mean, there’s people in this space. If you Google, for example, a quantum biology or circadian biology, people like Jack Kruse are like, he’s Camilo Brash, but he’s like a person who’s like kind of pushing a lot of this stuff forward. I try to just think like, what, what is it? Like, how do I integrate this into my modern life as easily as possible? And some of the basic things that I do now, and just go outside for every single sunrise and go on a walk. No matter what time of year it is, no matter what the weather is, I get outside at the sunrise. Every single day. My life is not as easy in Bend, Oregon to have this indoor-outdoor lifestyle as it is in Costa Rica. And it’s great to be there for that time, but not everybody has access to that.
So like getting outside, even cracking a window, no matter what the temperature is, like even a little bit photons bounce around and can get inside, the glass on your windows blocks almost all the light from coming in. All the blue light gets through, which is all the light that comes from your screen as well. But 60% of the red light gets blocked. 60% of the infrared light gets blocked. Almost all UVA gets blocked. All UVB gets blocked. So you’re basically getting junk light through your windows. And this is what makes it so confusing is you, you’re inside and you’re outside. The light looks the same. But when you look at it from an electromagnetic spectrum, the light you’re getting inside via windows is trash. It’s not real light. But we can’t perceive it as different because we don’t have the sensory apparatus to do that. Because we haven’t needed to develop that because we’re outside our entire human history and never needed to know the difference between glass light versus regular light. And that’s just, again, the spectrum of, okay, the glass is supposed to be, what about all the light we’re getting exposed to in screens all day? Do you have any balance to that? And so much of light creates signals, same thing with food, where it’s like as a biochemical barcode, light is a barcode for your entire body of like what hormones should it be secreting? What just, how should it be operating it? How entrained is it to your environment? It’s so important.
And again, just getting out for sunrise, getting out in the middle of the day and getting out at sunset. You can do those three things, I think a lot of this stuff kind of takes care of itself. The more you can be outside, the better. And this is like a very nuanced and I think a very emotional topic. Whenever I post about sunlight not being bad for people, it is the most divisive thing that I talk about across all my social media, which is insane. And so I hope this changes. I hope we just stop being afraid of the sun, which I find to be absolutely insane. But yeah, I think it’s like, it’s been one of the biggest things that I’ve changed recently as well that has been, elevates my mood the most and makes me higher energy and just like feel alive.
Katie: I fully agree. And for people who are concerned about the sun, I recently got to delve into some data that was a large-scale meta-analysis that showed that actually it’s not sun exposure that’s harmful, it’s the number of extreme sunburns you’ve had in your life. And I don’t think anybody’s arguing for the benefits of sunburns, but we actually need that sunlight exposure for that whole host of reasons you just explained. And it’s mind blowing to me that people will spend thousands of dollars on red light panels and then stand in front of these red light panels when those literal same exact wavelengths of light exist naturally at sunrise and sunset, like you just talked about.
Dr. Gustin: Way more intensely as well.
Katie: Exactly. And they’re in nature and they’re free.
Dr. Gustin: Yeah. And even with the sunburns, you have to ask yourself, why am I getting sunburned? Is sunburned a natural thing that humans have had throughout all human history? And the answer is absolutely not because we had graded exposures. The seasons changed and the UV increased. We’re outside all the time. And you’ve probably experienced this. If you go from Alaska to Hawaii and you have no graded exposure, what people call a sun callus, a solar callus, you’re going to get burned immediately. But if you start giving your body more and more and more, same thing. Like you wouldn’t go into a gym, not lifting weights and try to squat 500 pounds. You have to build up to it. And the same thing with sun exposure. And of course you’re going to get injured if you put 500 pounds in your back and you don’t know how to squat. Bar’s going to crush you. The same thing with the sun. The sun will crush you if you don’t have a normal experience of being in sunlight for increasing periods of time over an entire season.
Katie: Yeah, that’s such a good point. And I mean, there is actually tons of data to back this up, but it’s something humans have, I feel like, known throughout human history. We don’t need the data to know how important that light exposure is for us. But it seems like there’s finally talk of at least morning sunlight and how profoundly that can impact your hormones and your cortisol and everything else. But I’m with you. If you haven’t tried it, I feel so joyful when I’m in the sun. And when I get enough light exposure, it really does make a tremendous difference on sleep as well. Like you, I get the most pushback when I talk about that online because we’ve been told to stay out of the sun for so long. But I feel like it is kind of a hill I’m willing to die on because I think it’s so important for human health and that avoiding that is one of the most detrimental things we can do with the caveats that you gave of build up slowly, don’t get a sunburn, don’t go from zero to complete sun exposure without anything in between. But light is so important for our circadian biology, for our cellular health, for ATP, for so many other things. So I’m so glad that we got to speak to that. I also know that you have spoken widely about a huge host of topics and you have a tremendous amount of information available online. Where can people find you and keep learning from you?
Dr. Gustin: My podcast called The Natural State, I believe, the natural state of any organism is health. So it’s my basic exploration in how to change your modern environment to be able to have a, just a normal expression of health without having to manage it. And then Instagram is @dranthonygustin and same thing, dranthonygustin.com and all these other places. So, reach out wherever.
Katie: Awesome. I will include those links in the show notes as well. And thank you so much for the time. And thank you as always for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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