The Science and Wisdom of Ayurveda for Midlife Women’s Health and Longevity

Natalie Tysdal (01:48)

Dr. DuYard, thank you for joining me today.

John Douillard (01:51)

Great to be here, Natalie. Thank you.

Natalie Tysdal (01:53)

So this is a favorite topic of mine because I believe so much in Ayurveda my whole life. As a matter of fact, the reason I was turned on to it probably in my first pregnancy out of three was I had restless legs and I had a doctor who wanted to give me a medication and I looked into the side effects and I went, oh, I don't think I want that. And I started looking into root cause. And that's where I was first turned on.

to Ayurveda. So can you tell us a little bit more about it? And you've been doing this a long time, so explain it to us.

John Douillard (02:29)

So Ayurveda, Ayurveda means science or truth. It's what I like because those words means it doesn't change. And in our culture, everything changes. Dias change from one season to the next. And, you know, the fads just keep coming and we keep getting more and more confused. But what's really cool about this is Ayurveda was a really in-depth study of nature.

didn't have microscopes, they didn't have any sophisticated equipment, so they just deeply studied it. And they saw that there were circadian rhythms, and there were times of day when the body was better able to digest and better able to sleep and better able to exercise or even think. sound that there were actually, they even predicted that there were microbes that you could see, some of them, and some of them you couldn't see. And they said, so they understood that there was an invisible bacteria.

that was coming from the soil, coming from the foods that was actually running the show. And they said, there's good ones and bad ones, let's call it a microbiome, right? And they said, the bad ones, you don't want to kill them. You want to support the ecology of your own intestinal tract and body and let the body fight its own battles. Something we're just beginning to understand today. So they were so prophetic and

When I went into India in 1986 for just a couple of four week vacations to try to study, I'd end up being invited to stay there. I stayed there for a year and a half. I had a practice in Boulder, Colorado at the time. I closed, I went to India, came back and ended up teaching medical doctors Ayurvedic medicine, which was sort of odd ⁓ because I'm a chiropractor and teaching medical doctors. I figured...

If I'm going to do this, I have to speak their language. So I started digging into the science behind the ancient wisdom. And that's what I've been doing for 40 plus years now, is seeing that there's this incredible understanding of circadian rhythms. We're only just beginning to understand that now. They understood the microbiome. We're just beginning to understand that now. We still, in our life, what we do in America is if you don't feel good eating your food, we just take the food out. We blame the food, the wheat, the dairy, the nuts, the seeds, the grains, the lectins, the nightshades.

We just take everything out and we say the food's gotta be the problem. When the foods are oftentimes the problem, because of pesticides and processed nature of them, but even more so is say those symptoms are canaries in the coal mine letting us know that there's some underlying breakdown in our digestive process. So our beta would say, why don't you fix the digestion? And...

and create a robust ability to digest food like you were when you were 18 years old. And that digestion is directly linked to the most important system of our body, which is we only talk about when you get cancer, which is called your lymphatic system. And that system in Ayurveda was the system of longevity. They said if you cannot evaluate and treat the lymph, which is going to do three major things, take out all the trash, big deal, right? Carry your immune system.

and deliver fatty acids as baseline energy and hormonal precursors to every cell of your body. So, and if that limb system breaks down, you can't carry your immune system, you can't carry your stretch, you can't deliver fatty acids. And where does it all start? In your digestion, that coordinated effort of stomach making acid to break down those proteins like gluten, the liver gallbladder and pancreatic function to break down fats and deliver fatty acids. If that breaks down, which happens so

commonly because of stress and poor breathing. mean, even though it's so funny, there's 15 studies in the medical journals that say if you strengthen your diaphragm, train it to fully contract and fully relax, you can reverse your heartburn, GERD, reflux, and indigestion. When was the last time you went to a doctor for a heartburn and they told you you could breathe away your heartburn? Literally, it's in their medical journals, but unfortunately, they don't have time to read them.

Natalie Tysdal (06:24)

Wow.

Thank

John Douillard (06:35)

And that's kind of what I try to bring to the table. Bring all this incredible ancient wisdom, bring the science to it and say, you know what, before you take the HRT hormones, before you start taking anti-acid medications to block your acid production, before you take all the food out of your diet and become nutritionally deficient, why don't we fix some of the upstream causes? And that's all based on really good science and thousands of years of time-tested wisdom. It's a good place to start.

Natalie Tysdal (07:01)

Wow,

there's so many different directions we could go, but I think that the point you're making, and you used a hurricane analogy a minute ago before we started recording, but in being still long enough to understand what the real problem is, because we just live in a culture that is so busy that it's just quick fixes left and right.

John Douillard (07:07)

Thank

Yeah, you know, it's so true. know, when I was in chiropractic college in the early 1980s and I went to a lecture on Ayurvedic medicine, yoga and meditation, and I went to the doctor afterwards and I said, you know, I'm training for an Ironman Triathlon. I wonder, what do you think about that from the Ayurvedic and meditation perspective? And he said, what is that? And I said, well, two and a half miles swim in the ocean, a 26 mile bike run and a 112 mile bike ride. looked at me and said,

Why do you do that? And I had no answer for that. No one ever, I never, they're never already asked me that before. And he said, do you meditate? And I said, yeah, I do meditate. He said, do you sleep when you meditate? I said, deeply, I get this really deep sleep. It's great. And he said, well, meditation is different than sleep. Meditation is being alert and resting at the same time. I was like, ooh, that's not me. I'm completely out. And he said,

Natalie Tysdal (07:56)

You

John Douillard (08:25)

you're probably exhausted. And he said, probably the best thing that you should do is stop doing all this exercise and try to rejuvenate yourself. So I started going to meditation retreats like on the weekends, like once a month on a weekend and just meditate, yoga, breathe, meditate, yoga, breathe. And then I went for a two week course. And when I came out of that two week course, this is a true story, it was the last chapter of my body, mind, sport book, I called it Jet Fuel.

I went into like a three month runners high zone peak experience where talk about the hurricane effect. I felt like I was totally calm, but I felt like the winds of my storm, like my capacity was just off the charts. I was competing at a higher level, kind of winning medals. Many of my friends thought I was on steroids. Some of them learned to meditate because they realized what I was doing. In my clinical internship, I was just like had a level of capacity and bandwidth I never experienced before. And it was like,

I dropped into this deep, deep state of which I think we all hail from. And the bigger the calm that you can create, the more powerful the winds. Our culture just flips us out into the winds of the storm constantly, constantly doing more, trying to get more, squeezing more juice out of the environment so we somehow feel happy on the inside, as opposed to finding our happiness and our joy from the inside and letting that govern

you know, where we hail from. And that's the runner's high. My best race is my easiest race. So I came, went to India, came back, published studies on this. We actually published studies on nose breathing versus mouth breathing. In the International Journal of Neuroscience, we found that when you breathe through your nose, the brain goes into a meditative calm, an alpha brainwave state. So imagine running as fast as your legs can carry you, but your brain responding to that as a meditation. That's the coexistence of opposites.

the calm of storm and the winds of the storm. mean, solar systems, atoms, they'll have things in the middle that are sitting still and really powerful things spinning around it. That's who we are. And that's the memetic that we can create in our life to actually deal with this crazy constant over-stimulation in our culture.

Natalie Tysdal (10:32)

.

And it's just a norm for many people. I told you before we started recording a little of my history ⁓ as a news anchor and chaos was all I knew, right? I mean, it was a teleprompter and a TV screen and a person talking in my ear and my phone. And that was like, wow, this feels really stimulating, probably like the runner or, you know, it was stimulating, but then coming off of that.

was nearly impossible when that's what you do day in and day out.

John Douillard (11:19)

And that has, you we've created a culture that is so overstimulating and, you know, there's so much research on creating coherence or resonance between our physiology, our brainwaves, our heartwaves, our respiratory waves and creating that creating some resonance with nature. And that's what I made a start of doing with, hey, there's a we need to be aligned with those rhythms. And when you get disaligned or decoherent.

It affects your digestion. It affects your hormones. It affects your lymphatic system. It affects all these systems. Nitric oxide, which you probably have heard of, it's just the vasodilator in our body that makes your kids when they're 10 and can roll downstairs and do it again and again because we're so elastic. And then when you're 50 or 60, you're like, I'm not rolling down those stairs because you've lost your elasticity. Nitric oxide is the molecule that creates vasodilation. By the age of 40,

Natalie Tysdal (12:05)

Thank

John Douillard (12:12)

The average person has lost 50 % of it. By 75, 80 % of it. So this is one of those really important signaling molecules that come from coherence because it's a gas. It's a very light gas and it can dissipate very quickly. It's disturbed by stress. You breathe through your mouth like you see a bear on the list. You make no nitric oxide. Breathe through your nose. You make nitric oxide. So there's so much.

Natalie Tysdal (12:33)

Yeah.

John Douillard (12:39)

So the physiological connection between these subtle things like, know, know, stealing your nervous system, going into nature to being calm, being there for the sunrise, learning how to relax and eat your food, you know, all these really logical things. But when you stack them up and then I made it with like target specific, if your digestion is wrong or your stomach's not making the acid or your lymphatic system is congested, they would give therapies for those specific things. Get you back into rhythm so you can begin to feel safe.

in the eye of the storm. And the bigger the calm, the more powerful the winds and the more happy we are in our life.

Natalie Tysdal (13:10)

Yeah.

Yeah. So we won't be able to fix all of this in one podcast episode, but give us a couple of things, a couple of things that someone listening who's feeling this chaos, they know they're in it. mean, awareness is the first thing you have to have is I need this. What would be some steps then you would suggest?

John Douillard (13:37)

So the most important thing, and there was a study recently done with elite athletes and 91 % of them did not have a diaphragm relaxing and contracting fully, which means none of us do. And the reason is the rib cage has one job, squeeze all the air out. The diaphragm's job is to contract and suck and open up this rib cage. But the problem is with every time you get stressed, you see a bear in the woods or something bad happens, we change how we breathe.

And that breath becomes normal and the rib cage takes advantage of that by getting a little bit tighter. And then another stress comes along, another stress comes along next to you. You're breathing really shallow, rigidly without realizing that your diaphragm is not contracting. 91 % of athletes don't have a diaphragm relaxing and contracting fully. And there's studies that show that when you strengthen your diaphragm, it's called maximum.

Inspiratory breathing techniques in the Western journals and I have made this called Pranayama breathing techniques. But the point is just to get that rib cage to be moving and elastic again and your diaphragm to be independent. When you do that, you can reverse your heartburn, GERD, reflux and digestion. You can lower your blood pressure in three minutes as fast as the Western medication. That diaphragm pumps cerebral spinal fluid into your brain, moving three pounds of lymphatic trash out of your brain every year while you sleep. And if you're not breathing,

It affects not moving the trash out of your head. Studies show it's linked to anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, inflammation, infection, and autoimmune concerns. Even long-haul COVID, because you can't breathe when you have COVID, that affects diaphragmatic function, that affects febrile spinal fluid, and long-haul COVID was directly linked to congestion of the brain, lymph, and glymphatic systems when it first came out. No one heard about that because nobody knows in Western medicine what to do for the lymphatic system.

but I'm gonna teach you a breathing technique now that's gonna be something you can do literally right here in front of our computers to gonna get the rib cage and the diaphragm independent of each other. This is like the most critical piece of the puzzle. And in Western medicine, it was called maximum inspiratory breathing, but that would be like a emergency I see in the bare woods kind of breath. wanna get the maximum part, but without the stress part. So we're gonna do this breath through the nose, which creates calm.

slowly, long and deep. So it's going to be a long, slow, deep nasal breath. And we'll do it two ways. First, we'll just do the basic one. There's an article on my website. It's called the best diaphragmatic breathing exercises. This is the first video. Breathe into your nose and just feel your belly a little bit. Stick your belly out like a Buddha.

As you continue to inhale, go to your chest. Continue to inhale, go to your upper chest. If you have any more left, take little sips to take it to maximum.

And when you do that, you'll feel a little pull under the rib cage, breathe out, narrow the rib cage, contract your abdomen all the way. Okay, so that's the maximum breath, but we did it nice and slow not to trigger any fight or flight response. Okay, now, so you do that, get comfortable with that, but then you can take it and get the rib cage involved. By taking your arms over your head like that, reach for the sky like you're being stuck up by a cowboy or something, and then breathe in through your belly all the way.

Now continue to go to your chest, upper chest, reach, reach, reach, and sip, sip, sip. And as you keep sipping, you'll feel a big pull into here, arms come down, narrow the rib cage, squeeze out all the air. Do 10 straight.

Natalie Tysdal (17:18)

And your stomach, your diaphragm is getting bigger as you do that.

That's the point, which so many of us, we squeeze in, but it's getting bigger each time you take a breath.

John Douillard (17:28)

It is, at least the first part is belly and then you continue to the chest, continue the upper chest and then sip, sip, sip to max. Do 10 straight up, 10 to the side, feel the pull here, feel your belly and your chest.

Natalie Tysdal (17:31)

Uh-huh. I'm not.

Leaning to the side

if you're listening with your arm above your head.

John Douillard (17:47)

your side bending and then upper chest and then sip, sip. And as you sip, sip, sip, you'll feel the side of your ribs just pulling like you're just pumping air into this balloon and forcing it to be elastic. Then when you breathe out, you go all the way to the other side, bit lateral bend the other way, squeeze out all the air, squeeze it out, squeeze it out slowly, narrow the rib cage, use your abdominal muscles to contract all that air out and you do 10 on each side.

You can literally do that just like we did in front of your computer. You do like 10 straight up and up all the way, belly chest, upper chest, sip, sip, sip through your nose to the maximum breath. Arms come down, narrow the rib cage, fully exhale, do 10 that way, and a lateral bend on both sides the same way. That will start to get that rib cage to start to become elastic and create independence between your diaphragm and your rib cage.

Your diaphragm is the number one pump of your body's lymphatic system. Nobody tells you that. And it's directly linked to digestion. It's directly linked to brain lymphatic detoxification and the movement of the lubricant brainwashing fluid in and out of your brain. And if your rib cage is getting tighter and tighter and tighter, you're going to force to be breathing more shallow, which is the fight or flight emergency breath, which keeps you in the winds of the storm, keeps you stressed out, constantly worrying about incoming.

Natalie Tysdal (19:07)

Yeah.

When you're breathing in through the nose, are you breathing out then through your mouth? Through all of them?

John Douillard (19:15)

No, you're breathing, and it's

when you're breathing through your nose the whole way, both ways. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, both ways.

Natalie Tysdal (19:19)

you are. ⁓ Both ways. I guess that's when

I'm trying to calm down, it's and then I blow out, but that's also like probably from exercise. You know, I just kind of get that that habit, but all through your nose.

John Douillard (19:35)

There's a releasing effect by letting the breath go, it's sort of physiological, which is great. But when you actually breathe out through your nose, you're breathing out back up into the brain's lymph and lymphatic system. So you're engaging the trash removal system, which is really important from getting the brain to function, because it's totally linked to cognitive decline and insomnia and anxiety and worry and inflammation. Because the master computer can't get its trash out.

It's not going to know how many fire trucks just end to an immune event somewhere in your body. Too many, too little. This is such a critical piece of the puzzle and your diaphragm is the pump for that.

Natalie Tysdal (20:16)

I love it. It's something we can all do without buying anything, without seeing anyone. But let's move just a little bit towards what we intake. So from our foods to, you know, there are a million supplements out there. I just talked recently on an episode about just the noise in the wellness industry that actually causes anxiety. You know, am I missing something? What am I not doing that everyone else is doing? The new trend. But are there some basics?

John Douillard (20:43)

Yeah.

Natalie Tysdal (20:45)

that are like, are just essentials.

John Douillard (20:50)

You know, in terms of supplements, I think the thing that people miss out on the most are spices. ⁓ Most spices are herbs and. Turns out that like there's five spices that folks should know about ginger, cumin, coriander, fennel and cardamom. Those five. And if you sprinkle them on your food or you know, cook with them.

When you cook your food, probably have talked about on your podcast that you can damage your food because there's heterocyclic amines when you cook meat, there's acrylamides when you cook toast in the morning, there's reactive oxygen species when you cook anything. you know, that charcoal steak is not good for us. It's a carcinogen, right? So when you put spices onto that, it actually protects the food from creating that damage. But they don't tell you that.

But that's exactly one of the, not as it make it taste better, but it also protects your food. And the ginger, cumin, corinthofenol, and cardamom is a specific combination that reboots stomach acid, bioflow, pancreatic, you know, acid, pancreatic enzymes, duodenal enzymes. So it reboots that upper coordination of your stomach and your pancreas and your gluteal bladder and your liver. So whatever you put in your mouth, you digest completely. Because if you don't digest it completely, let's say you wheat, you feel bad. Well, wheat.

Natalie Tysdal (21:44)

No.

John Douillard (22:13)

because gluten is hard to digest protein, I get it. And because of stress, your stomach acid is going to dial down. That's how it works. So you're to let that protein go into your stomach. And the science shows that that protein will be too big to get into your blood. So where does it go? We wish it would be the toilet, but it doesn't. It goes into the lymphatic collecting ducts around your belly, which is what causes the extra weight around your belly and hips. And that's when that when that lymph gets congested, you start getting tired in a food coma.

If goes into the brain, you get brain fraud from wheat. I did a podcast debate, two of them, with David Perlmutter, the guy who wrote the Grain Brain book. And it was very clear, according to the science, that the wheat is not the actual issue. It's the inability to break it down. And if you can't break down wheat, you probably can't break down a whole lot of other really important proteins or fats as well. So if you start taking stuff out of the diet and bubble wrap your diet, you're going end up with nothing to eat. And that's what we've got in our culture. Let's just eat.

carnivore diet, which is just meat and some vegetables, or let's go full raw food or full vegan. None of those diets are bad. In fact, they're probably part of the natural cycles. Think about spring. If you're living in the spring in the 18 or 1600s off the land, it's a very austere, no carb time of the year. Where are you going to get your pasta and pizza in the spring? So Ayurveda was all about, man, there's foods that come out of the ground in season.

Natalie Tysdal (23:35)

Yeah.

John Douillard (23:40)

and they have different bugs in the spring to the summer to the fall. And when you eat those foods the way we were designed, you inoculate your gut with the right bugs for the winter to boost immunity, the right bugs different in the spring to decongest you and different bugs in the summer to cool you down. So I wrote a book about this years ago called The Three Season Diet, because it's a three harvest, summer harvest, fall harvest, winter eating and a spring harvest. So all you do is you take the grocery list like this one, it's a free on my website.

This is all the foods harvested from around the world in the winter that have those winter heavy warm kind of nut and seed like the squirrels eat properties. Circle it, eat more of these that you like in an organic fashion because you want microbes. And then when spring comes, you switch to the green diet, which is the spring diet. And simple. You don't have to go crazy. You just have to get medicinal doses of what nature intended because we're connected to those rhythms and the bugs in the soil are what deliver those rhythms.

in season in an appropriate fashion. They're called bacterial endophytes. The bugs on the food, on the plants, they provide a big part of the intelligence of that plant. What we do is we sterilize everything with pesticides. We take our supplements and we sterilize, make herbal extracts 100 times potent. They're sterile. They've got no intelligence to them. We're traditionally

You would want to keep intact the organic nature of the chemistry of the plant, its natural intelligence, its microbiome, and bring that together. And in that regard, you get on, get better, get off. You don't become dependent. But when you start taking things and take away them, if I took all the microbes out of you, you'd be completely different person. So we're so deficient in diversity in our culture that the last thing we do is start taking sterile nutraceuticals and supplements.

We want to start to get things in season that were designed to restore the microbiome and the function thereafter.

Natalie Tysdal (25:36)

Yeah, it's also just more interesting if you're eating the same thing all year round, but it provides that variety that we need as well. Yeah, in so many ways. Just so many great, great tips here and great things. And I love the spices. That's an easy thing. And on anything, fruits, vegetables, your meats, all of that. Do you mix them all together in one? and choose.

John Douillard (25:46)

Yeah.

Well, you could add it to your salt and pepper, which we do a lot of in America. ⁓ you could, you know, what's neat about those five is they're so specific to the real weakness that most people have. Over 80 % of the population have a digestive issue. So they're going to kind of really work on that upper digestive process. So whatever you put in your mouth, you break it down completely. You don't have undigested proteins. It's irritating the lining of the gut, causing

Natalie Tysdal (26:16)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

John Douillard (26:31)

the precursor

Natalie Tysdal (26:32)

Yeah.

John Douillard (26:32)

to irritable bowel issues, things like that.

Natalie Tysdal (26:35)

When it comes to the lymph system, and I understand the importance of that. I think it's so important that we really pay attention to that. Are there other things that we should be doing to help support the lymph system?

John Douillard (26:49)

Yes. I mean, there's so many things, you know, the things that we all have heard like hydration. It's a river and if it's dry, it's not going to be very functional. Green foods are really good. Any food like a berry or a cherry or a raspberry or a beet or a pomaget is going to stain your white shirt, red, black or blue. Those dyes that we're sure to use, they're all lymphatic movers. They're really important.

Nose breathing exercise, go for a walk, breathe through nose. Well, we go for a walk. Really simple. Try to take 10 steps for your nasal inhalation and try to take 15 to 20. This is a goal for the nasal exhalation, and that will actually provide more diaphragmatic function and more lymphatic flow when you're actually at walking and get your body into producing more.

nasal nitric oxide, which is producing your nose when you breathe through your nose, but not through your mouth.

Natalie Tysdal (27:50)

Wow, okay, I'm gonna set that goal on a walk today. What about massage and vibration plates and the things that are trendy that we hear to support lymph?

John Douillard (28:02)

You know, I actually am a big fan of the oscillating vibration plates because they're cheap and they're not really very aggressive and they will get you to move a rebound or a walk, any type of movement while doing it. And Ayurveda, I remember the first time I went to India in 1986 and I saw this guy in a fountain in the middle of this little village taking a bath and putting oil all over his body in the middle of like the town. I thought that was odd.

And ⁓ it turns out that when you put oil on your skin, our body makes oil, which is sebum, that feeds our skin microbiome. So they had a tradition where every morning they'd wake up, they would shower and they would put a little bit of oil on their skin. And that's how they would protect their skin. there's really good science to back that up. Now, they would even, the guy took a little bottle oil and swished it into his mouth and was like, swishing, was like,

I was just sitting there watching the sky like fascinated. And now we have science to show that when you take fluoride or mouthwash and kill all the bacteria in your mouth or eat foods with pesticides, you kill the bacteria. Those bacteria would convert the nitric oxide, which research on won the Nobel Prize as a panacea, converts, there's bugs in your mouth that convert nitrates like beets and arugula into nitrates and nitric oxide.

but it starts in your mouth. And if you're constantly putting fluoride toothpaste and things, and then you lose the bugs, if you wake up with a dry mouth, you lose the bugs in your mouth to convert the nitrates to nitrates. You don't make nitric oxide. You can't roll downstairs with your kids anymore because you become rigid and stiff. You really become hardened as you get older.

And here they had a culture that they would take oil and there's good science to show they would just...

Natalie Tysdal (29:57)

What kind of oil? When you

talk about skin and in your mouth, what kind of oil?

John Douillard (30:02)

And you think that would be a combination of cold pressed sesame and coconut. And when you swish it, it pre-digests it, it saponifies. And studies show it works just as well as a mouthwash, but it doesn't kill all the bacteria. It just creates an environment for the good bacteria to proliferate. And there's a bug in your mouth called Streptococcus mutans, which is directly linked to about 61 % of all the plaque in our arteries comes from a bug that makes plaque, same bug that...

they think makes plaque on your brain, and it gets in there through our mouth. So they add this technique of putting oil in their mouth to keep the oral hygiene really healthy, keep the right bacteria to convert the right bugs into the nitrates, into the nitrites from those bugs that make that conversion. So you continue to produce nitric oxide as you age. mean, it's just like really incredible ancient wisdom. Nobody talks about it, but...

What we've done is let's just give you fluoride, which kills everything, give you mouthwashers that kill 99 % of all the bacteria. How can that be good? We are so lacking diversity already. It's just stuff that's so logical, right? But that's where the ancient wisdom comes in. The science is there. And that's what I try to bring to the table for folks.

Natalie Tysdal (31:19)

I love the mix of the ancient wisdom, let's be smart about it and let's use the research that we're lucky to have. Well, lots of good tips today. I really appreciate it. I'm going to be sure and put your website and you mentioned your books. I'm sure on your website, put that in the show notes for anyone who's interested. And you're about 40 minutes away from me, so I just need to get up there to Boulder to see you sometime.

John Douillard (31:26)

Yeah.

That'd be great. Thank you so much.

Natalie Tysdal (31:50)

Yeah, it's great to talk to you.