Did you know that having excess belly fat threatens our cognitive abilities, like thinking, making connections, and memory?

Did you know that just one incident of serious head-related trauma increases your personal risk of developing dementia?

Today, I had the absolute mind-blowing pleasure of speaking with Ralph Sanchez (MTCM, CNS) who spent 25 years as a functional medicine specialist and complementary care provider. After discovering his own risk factors associated with Alzheimer's disease, Ralph has spent the greater part of his career focused on researching the connection between Alzheimer’s disease and your body and health, including both diabetes and heart disease. He believes that mind and body are connected, and that your diet, health, and lifestyle can help increase or decrease your risk for Alzheimer’s disease in many ways-- some that you may not expect! Listen as he explains the science behind Alzheimer’s disease and the connection that your diet, diabetes, and other factors may have on increasing your own risk.

If you like what you heard today, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave a review. The more reviews we receive, the more women will learn about the podcast and learn from these lessons. If you know someone who is struggling with food, send them a link to the podcast and maybe they can find something here they haven’t heard before!

Listen to the Full Episode:

What You’ll Learn in this Episode:

What is the connection between your body, your diet, and your risk for Alzheimer’s disease?
What are a few risk factors associated with Alzheimer’s disease?
How can a healthy lifestyle and diet help decrease your risk for Alzheimer’s disease?
Why are antioxidants and anti-inflammatories important to for your brain?
What is Ralph’s favorite thing?

Featured on the Show:

Click HERE to take Ralph’s FREE “Brain Defend Self Assessment,” claim your FREE discovery session, or get a sneak peek into Ralph’s new e-Book, “The Improved MIND diet.” All your have to do is scroll down to claim all three amazing offers!
Listen to Ralph’s podcast, “The Diabetic Brain” to learn even more!
Sign up to be the first to know when Ralph’s e-Book, “The Diabetic Brain in Alzheimer’s” is available!
If you have any questions or ideas for upcoming episodes, send me an email at pat@beauprecoaching.com
If you like what you heard today, please head to Apple Podcasts and leave a review.
Join me in my closed Facebook group – It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight.

Full Episode Transcript:

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Introduction 00:10 Welcome to It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight, a podcast for women approaching 60 who have been successful at everything, but reaching their weight loss goals. Tune in each week for tools and strategies to help you lose weight, create a strong body and support a healthy mind. Here's your host, certified weight and life coach Pat Beaupre Becker.

Pat Beaupre Becker: Hi, welcome to It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight. Today, I have a very special guest, Ralph Sanchez, who's the author of an upcoming book called The Diabetic Brain in Alzheimer's Disease. Before we get started, I want to let you know that what we're talking about today, I have to read this disclaimer, okay, because we're not doctors. I am not a doctor or a practitioner, but anything that we're going to talk to you today is for general information and for education. We are not substitutes for professional or medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and none of the information that we're going to give you today in this podcast should be interpreted as a claim of a cure or a treatment of any medical condition. So listeners, you should not rely exclusively on the information provided in this podcast for your own health needs. You need to go to see your own healthcare provider and any diagnosis, treatment, or medical conditions are strictly between you and your own medical doctor.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 01:40 Now, that said, we want to really give you lots of information that you can use. Of course, that's what we're here for, right? We're here to educate you on how you can live a healthier life as you go into your sixties, seventies, and eighties. So Ralph spent 20 years as a functional medicine specialist and complimentary care practitioner. He has specialized over the past 18 of those years in Alzheimer's research. When he actually does is. He's really good at reviewing the research, looking at it, and kind of really explaining it. You've heard of mansplaining. This is science blaming. He is explaining to us how we can apply science to our lives and this is fascinating because I've been around and you have long enough to know that there was a time when the science was for the scientists and we weren't really let in on all of the discoveries that were going on at the time and now we have access to the brilliant minds and all of the research that we can have access to, but we really do need someone to interpret it for us and that's what Ralph is very good at and that's what we're going to do.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 02:50 So as I said, he's the author of the upcoming book, The Diabetic Brain in Alzheimer's Disease and he has a website called the Alzheimer's Solution that's focused on prevention and education. You could go there and you can learn lots of things about Alzheimer’s and your health. Welcome Ralph. I hope that was a clear and honest description of who you are.

Ralph Sanchez 03:12 Thank you very much. It's a joy to be here and to share with your audience. I know you have a great tribe that really is focused on weight loss and then a very important component to that, which is the emotional component. I remember, well I haven't worked with people in weight loss, but I had a general practice that actually goes back to 95 when I started my practice, so that's now close to 25 years.

Ralph Sanchez 03:39 For the last 20 years, I've been focused on this knowledge base of Alzheimer's disease because I realized I was at risk because of my personal health history. But when I was in a general functional medicine practice, integrated practice, I started out as an acupuncturist and incorporated a very progressive paradigm into my practice referred to as functional medicine and functional medicine is really all about marrying the holistic model of the eastern medicines that focus on the person on the patient, you know, and looking at causes and underlying factors and marrying that with the Western model which is science and technology. You know, and I loved that convergence of your world because that's the way my brain works. I really like to work with people on an intuitive level and really kind of feel where they're at in their lives emotionally and psychologically, but at the same time I like to look at the physiology to see what's going on in your body because as you know, our body and mind are not separated, but they're so connected. We're all one. We're not compartmentalized. Right? So what's going on in our body really affects our brain profound. Some of the things that I've learned over the past 20 years, it's just how our bodies and the things that happened to us as we age, the increase of belly fat is really a threat to our cognitive health as we age.

Pat Beaupre Becker 05:13 Interesting. We'll get into a little bit of that, but I absolutely agree with you. I feel like being alive at this time and even being an elder at this time is really fascinating because there's so much research that's going on that we can actually apply and the work that I do and the changes that I made in my life directly because of learning about the changes in our brain and so neuroscience. Oh, I'm not a scientist. It's been very fascinating to me, so I really have appreciated the way the many books that are written on the brain and the body and health. I mean really there's a wealth of information and sometimes you know, we have to discern which is the one for us and I think functional medicine, what I love about it is it does, it's like personalized medicine. It's like there is a disease, there may be symptoms, but how and why it's caused in that human being is not necessarily the same as in somebody else. So it's really important to have that approach. So why don't we just start by telling me, I know you're passionate about Alzheimer's and prevention. Now that you've been discovering that, how did you initially get involved in that research?

Ralph Sanchez: 06:19 Well, I started to realize while I was in practice, this was the late nineties in terms of my approach to learning and applying functional medicine that I had some significant risk factors associated with neurological problems. I had had a very severe concussion when I was a young person. My head hit the windshield. I fell asleep while I was driving and just one event of a significant brain trauma in her life really raises your risk for dementia later on in life. So I knew that and then I came across information as I was in my practice and working and investigating things and I was actually in a group of practitioners and we would discuss our personal issues and how we could tackle them and the things that came up for me or A. I was in the landscaping field before I decided to go into healthcare and I was young and stupid and I had a business.

Ralph Sanchez: 07:23 I had a landscaping business and I was using pesticides without protecting myself. And sure enough, it didn't take long before I started to feel pretty crummy. And I was able to get some help that we're a very progressive practitioner and A. I lived in Santa Monica at the time, which was, you know, one of the hubs of progressive medicine and the functional medicine movement, if you will, in this country. You know, a big city, San Francisco, California in general with just a great place to be. And in terms of that vibe, so I started to realize that the, my exposure to pesticides for a lot of why I was not feeling well, and like I said, this practitioner that I've gone to, I was able to help me in terms of how I felt, but she never connected what was the cause to my problems. She totally missed.

Ralph Sanchez: 08:14 Uh, it was pretty amazing and I started to realize, wow, this is why I have been feeling so crummy. So I knew how to address that through detoxification therapies and whatnot. But I came across another piece of information to actually. The first was that at the time those pesticides and herbicides that I was using were laden with mercury and mercury. And the functional medicine crab was really understood to be a very potent toxin that could affect your health in so many ways. And of course, it's a very potent neurotoxin. That's why they always recommend that women that have conceived away from fish that might be high in mercury because the exposures expose their penis. And that's not a good thing. That can be pretty bad for the child as he comes into life, but I went and did what's called a mercury challenge test to figure out if this was part of my problem and my mercury was off the chart and it wasn't because of amalgams, because that's really the main cause of mercury problems in people over time.

Ralph Sanchez: 09:23 Chronic exposures related to your mercury fillings in your teeth. Amalgams. I only had a couple, so that's usually not enough to really drive up mercury like that. So it was definitely the pesticide, you know, I wasn't eating a lot of fish which can show up that way. Besides what's called this mercury challenge tests. You're taking an agent to provoke this release of mercury into circulation. So if you're eating fish, that's kind of like an ongoing exposure. Your body usually can handle it depending upon certain genes, if you will. But in this case it was pretty clear that I had had some significant exposures that had built up into my tissues. Right? It's called a mercury body burden and so between the brain trauma, the pesticides and mercury, and then something else I won't go into later in life. All of that is actually in the preface of my book on my story, but I started to realize I was really at an increased risk for brain health issues as I aged and coincidentally I saw my mother at the time starting to really decline and her cognitive.

Ralph Sanchez: 10:30 Then she went on to develop dementia disorder. She died last year. I knew that because of the genes and one of the things I always focused on with my patients. Whereas let's look at your history really carefully because whatever it's been going on in your family, you're highly susceptible to. My Dad died of heart disease. My mother was in the dementia pattern. I didn't know why at the time, but later on I realized why so I had the genes that for actually setting me up along with all these other factors. That would probably be even bigger problems later on in life if I didn't take a very proactive approach to what I say now in my message in life is that you can control your risk factors, your risk factors having to do with one health disorder or another. We'll know that so we now know that you can control issues related to heart disease and diabetes.

Ralph Sanchez: 11:28 These are all lifestyle and dying issues as you age and then genes get kicked up because of those patterns. Well, it's the same for Alzheimer's disease for most people. As a matter of fact that that time when I was realizing all of this, I had been to a seminar and I was reviewing the notes. This was from a well known leader in the functional medicine community named Jeffrey Blatt and there was a mention there, a genetic marker for risk of Alzheimer's disease called a Po, and I saw that in my life. I was really lit up. I go, wow. Nobody talks about the outcome. Right? About that time, Alzheimer's was just starting to build up some momentum as to what's the cause, what do we do about it now we know the last 20 years the information has just exploded in terms of our understanding, but back then the science was still kind of stuck on what's referred to as being the cause and plaques is really, as I described in the way that I write.

Ralph Sanchez: 12:35 It's the death and destruction of a war after all the battles have been waged, so plaque is just the end result. There are like 20. We know now there's 20 to 30 years of stuff going on that builds up into those plaques. So all of that information, that genetic marker really set me off on a tangent of study and about that time. This was about the year 2000. I said, that's it. This is what I really want to become an expert, and I was actually looking for something. I specialize in Gi health and back then the name was and now a similar thing called Cbo, just small intestine bacterial overgrowth and I had realized all those things way back then and I was really good at addressing that because I had that. I wanted to write a book. I knew that was in my future. I want it to really be known as an expert in something and I decided that because of my personal history and what was evolving as a passion for this information, that this was going to be my thing.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 13:45 Well, it's our benefit for sure that you've got this passion. Yeah, I think it's fantastic. So we know that you're talking about Alzheimer's as being a form of diabetes, type three diabetes, but let's talk a little bit about what we know about type two diabetes, especially about insulin resistance and that's something that I talk to my clients about a lot because it can interfere so much with your hormones and your ability to know when you're hungry, when you're full. And so can you describe in your layman's terms, tell us what is insulin resistance?

Ralph Sanchez: 14:21 First, let's start with what is insulin? Insulin is a hormone and it's a signaling molecule that's really important to know because you know all hormone function as a way of conveying information that is triggered by receptors. So insulated comes to the receptor and that receptor triggers a host of mechanisms, the host of signaling mechanisms in the cell which triggers another little item. It's called Gel. You cheat a molecule and that molecule goes to the surface of the cell and allows glucose to enter through that. So insulin is really important in terms of Glucose Metabolism, glucose uptake into the cell so it can be utilized for energy metabolism. So what happens with people early in life is that if there are indulgent and the bad foods that we all grew up with, I grew up with them, you know, which are sodas and white food, meaning white bread and crackers and pastries and stuff made with all of these baked goods, you know, that are so yummy and sugars.

Ralph Sanchez: 15:34 Of course, they're all what are called hypoglycemic foods. What they do is they trigger blood sugar to go up and that is a signal for insulin to come into the body and take that glucose out of the blood. Why? Because the idea is that you want to take up that energy into yourself to utilize that, but what happens if you have too much of that? Well then it starts getting converted into fat, fat, fat storage because your body says, well, we can't use it now. There's too much of it, so let's store it for later. Well, that pattern over time and time is that you start to gain way because of the increased demand for insulin, this cell to actually start to become less responsive, so that's where the idea of insulin resistance comes up. Cells become less sensitive over time and there's a whole cascade of problems associated with insulin resistance not being able to take up that glucose effectively into yourselves and this belly fat that starts to become part of that problem, not because of just the insulin resistance because it's been a problem that has led up to that.

Ralph Sanchez: 16:47 With the inability to use all of that excess caloric intake, by now you have this belly fat which is starting to function as an organ of itself. What people don't realize that you're not just carrying around excess weight and fat, especially belly fat. There's a little bit of a different between belly fat and what's called peripheral fat and women. It's very clearly seen as the apple shape versus the pear shape, right? So you've got all this fat around your belly. That's a very dynamic area that functions as an Oregon, that fat around your belly. It's called visceral fat or belly fat is a functions as an organ. It secretes a lot of molecules, you know, so everybody knows about insulin to some degree, but there's another closely related arm on that secreted by fat called Leptin. People that are into this information, you know that realize that insulin resistance as a problem, Leptin resistance, Leptin is involved in satiety sitting the lane when you're full and fat storage.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 17:58 So you're saying when it doesn't work, you never feel full, and that's why people feel hungry all the time. You become Leptin resistance as well. Right?

Ralph Sanchez: 18:08 It creates a lot of what are called pro inflammatory molecules, which is a big problem with a lots of health issues, but it's a big problem for your brain. Chiro, lots of studies on the connection between obesity, insulin resistance, type two diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, and that's basically the message in my book how all of this convergence in a model that emerged in 2005 as a type three diabetes or your brain becomes desensitized and doesn't utilize insulin that well. It's a little different than what happens in the body, but the effects on the brain are profound because insulin in the brain actually functions as a signaling molecule for memory and learning mechanism. So when your insulin sensitivity and the receptors in the brain are not functioning to become dysfunctional than your memory and learning cascades that are involved with and start to go south. It's now seen as a huge component to the Alzheimer's disease issue.

Ralph Sanchez: 19:23 And is it the same cause as the insulin resistance that causes diabetes related?

So back to what I said before, so what happens in our body has a huge degree of effect in our brain, so elevated insulin, elevated glucose. So when you have this insulin resistance, you start to have higher levels of hyperglycemia, high blood sugars circulating around. That's the main problem in diabetes, right? So it's very damaging and it exerts a lot of problems related to inflammation and a related mechanism called oxidative stress. So when you have that high blood sugar, it's not only the process of type two diabetes, it starts to affect your brand because that's. That's another factor for inflammation. That's another vector for oxidative stress. So all of those messages start to filter into the brain and your brain starts going, wow, inflammation, oxidative stress. How are we going to handle this? So the brain start to try and compensate. It actually creates more inflammation.

Ralph Sanchez: 20:39 The immune cells in the brain and then the issue of how the synopsis and start to function related to downstream mechanisms associated with this message of inflammation, which starts to trigger more amyloid plaque accumulation of. But at the synapse is really where it's all happening. Like I said is after all the battles have been waiting, the battle starts wage athleticism apps, so insulin functions at the maps as a very important signaling molecule and really what I really started to realize many years ago and really started to come forward is that Alzheimer's begins when Your Synopsis Start Becoming Dysfunctional, so insulin isn't working. Other receptors there are dysfunctional and when you're not able to transmit information across those synapses so that the other cells getting transmit that information, then you start losing a lot of things related to memory and learning and maintaining your cognitive health.

Pat Beaupre Becker 21:48 So it's interesting. It sounds to me from a layman's point of view is like we need glucose. We need insulin. Our brain needs that. Our body needs it, but what's happening is it's so out of balance that everything is adjusting to compensate for the too much insulin, too much sugar, not enough exercise, all of the things that are lifestyle related. So it's really trying to find the balance of, you know, the right amount of insulin, the right amounts of glucose, how to burn your fat. It's like the engine is totally out of whack and we just need to, from what it sounds like from a lifestyle point of view, we can have a big effect on it. So let me ask you. Most of my listeners are in our fifties, sixties or seventies. So when you talk about the underlying risk factors, I know there's the genetic risk factor.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 22:38 You mentioned the apo and then obviously it sounds like diabetes is one, so what should we be looking for? Remember my audience, we're already doing our best to be healthy or we're trying to learn to change our lifestyle to be healthy and obviously this is yet another critical reason why we should. What I'm hoping is that the answers are the same for all of them. In other words, the things we need to do good for our brain are the same things we need to do for that belly fat, the same things we need to do to stay healthy and keep a healthy brain.

Ralph Sanchez: 23:14 No. The bottom line and all of the details, and I'll reemphasize this over and over, is that you've got to control inflammation and oxidative stress. And you do that through diet lifestyle practices that reduce the stress exercise. There is several ways that one can begin to understand all of that and how it applies to you. First of all, it's understanding your own unique set of risks. What I emphasize over and over in the book, and I'm finishing up a second book as I shared with you called the improved mind diet, which is the complimentary piece to understanding of this issue about what's going on with Alzheimer's and how you can address it through diet, and then there's a third book on the way which is called the dementia and what that's all about is what everybody can simply do to keep their brain as young and as functional as possible as a and it's through a phenomena called neuro genesis, which new brain cells.

Ralph Sanchez: 24:18 Now I know that you picked up a book on that topic as well, so the main, what is neurogenesis forming new brain cells throughout your lifetime becomes even more important at midlife and later, and it's all the things that were told about what to do to keep ourselves healthy. Exercise, having fun, social engagement, supplements, all of these really are a wonderful pool that stimulates the formation of new brain cells. Now why that is so simple and at the same time profound is early on when they were investigating this association with Alzheimer's disease, they look post-mortem at studies and started to realize that a lot of individuals that were not demented when they passed away, their brains were written with plaque.

Ralph Sanchez: 25:20 Well, that's one. Yeah, so they were a little bit puzzles that the government may be plaque isn't the cause because we're finding these people that were pretty cognitively intact, so now we realize that what has happened in those individuals is that they were able to compensate for a disease process and that's really well understood now and that's referred to as brain reserve, so in euro genesis builds up his brain reserve, so even if you have a disease process going on in your brain like Alzheimer's, you may be able to compensate and keep yourself cognitively intact until you pass on. Now, that's a great approach. Bar none, but you still want to start looking at what may be some of the risk factors that you can control that I talk about all the time and those are associated again with inflammation and oxidative stress as it may relate to various factors going on with your health that are related to blood sugar management, issues related to vascular health.

Ralph Sanchez: 26:32 One of the things that's extremely important to your brain is blood flow - flow to and throughout your brain so that problem starts to arise. When you have diabetes and heart disease. Those two things go together so as you gain weight and go more towards the insulin resistance side and go into type two diabetes and heart disease usually follows your live long enough and all of that starts to really create a problem in terms of the blood flow to your brain and that creates a whole other set of circumstances that are related to stroke or the risk for stroke. Like what I saw in my mother is that she would complain about these little crunches in her brain and what she was having. She was having these little mini strokes rather high, and so fortunately because of what I knew, I was able to give her some stuff that helped her a great deal with that because that's what I started to understand why she was going into this cognitive decline.

Ralph Sanchez: 27:32 She had all this vascular health issue that was never adequately diagnosed and controlled by her doctor because she had hypertension. She was on a medication for that, but everything else wasn't being addressed. Unfortunately that went south from my mother, but those are the things that typically happen with people, so you have to start looking at that through lab assessment. I have a personal health assessment that I created based on the main lifestyle dietary factors, but I included two biomarkers. Biomarkers are biological indicators of where you are in terms of any particular type of risks like high blood sugar is a risk factor. It's a risk factor for diabetes. The risk factor for heart disease, that's a risk factor for Alzheimer's or a related biomarker, which most people are beginning to understand and recognize readily is called [inaudible] or more appropriately hemoglobin a, one c, it's a biomarker that's used in your typical blood chemistries that it's ordered by your doctor or through certain channels, but that's an indicator of the doctor will tell you it's an indicator of your blood sugar control over a certain number of months.

Ralph Sanchez: 28:51 Whereas your fasting blood sugar will be kind of like on the spot measurement and hemoglobin is a component of your red blood cell, so the a one c measures how much sugar has attached to that hemoglobin, but when your doctor doesn't tell you is that that's actually a measure of what's called glycation and glycation is a very deleterious process. The main health issue associated with diabetes, because as blood sugar circulates around and interacts with proteins and other molecules in your body, they become glycated and what is glycation? Glycation is the interaction of sugar with proteins and it causes those proteins to become this functional. A perfect example of the glycation and where it may look like in your body. That's actually a very favorite technique used in cooking. It's called the Mei yard reaction or the Browning of fat, so when you realize food,

Ralph Sanchez: 30:01 What about when you meet to get roasted duck? Well, guess what? You're actually bringing this glycation process and all that Browning and all of that interaction where sugar and proteins starts to turn your proteins in your body and the fats. It's a process, right? It starts to destroy. It starts to rate. This whole pro inflammatory process associated with that interaction is very, very deleterious, so when your hemoglobin a one c starts to crowd up into the five point seven and above, that's when you're really starting to get into more serious glycation issues. That can be somewhat control it through diet and supplements, but why don't you start getting into the range of six, six point five, you're diabetic and that's a big problem. That whole process, that's what's associated with the diabetes disease process. That's the main thing about high blood sugar and the glycation.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 31:13 I’ll never think of caramelized onions the same again.

Ralph Sanchez: 31:20 Carmelization is not so bad. Actually what I described as far as the browning effect with meat that is really bad

Pat Beaupre Becker: 31:30 now. Was that ages? Is that what ages is? Oh, we want to get into that a tiny bit. So glycation. The reason I don't want to is because I eat barbecued meat all the time. I know it's the worst thing for you. Oh my God. People. I'm sorry to give you this information. Oh my God. Toxins are absolutely through the roof.

Pat Beaupre Becker 31:57 Really. So interesting. Okay. We grill just google it know. I know. I've read it A. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to have to really do some serious thinking about lifestyle changes for that one because I don't cook the meat. My husband grills all of our meats because I don't really even know how to cook. Everybody loves to grill. I used to love it when I was younger, but um, but it's, it could be a problem and you could measure that where you bright. You could measure your ages, ages a more sophisticated analysis. But here's the tape

Ralph Sanchez: 32:30 Part of this, the literature now clearly indicates that if you're leaning towards this whole diabetes problem, if you're eating that way, that contributes to the disease process.

Pat Beaupre Becker 32:43 Right. But what if you're not? What if you're not leaning towards

Ralph Sanchez: 32:47 Then you might not have a big problem, but it depends on the rest of your diet. Vegetables do you have?

Pat Beaupre Becker: 32:55 Oh good.

Ralph Sanchez: 32:57 So if you're compensated with healthy anti oxidants, anti inflammatories in your diet, it will offset. That really comes down to an individual thing.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 33:11 But it is good to know. And, and, and I am happy to hear you say that because I eat lots of vegetables.

Ralph Sanchez: 33:17 Well that's really important. Some other things. That's where most of your anti oxidants and anti inflammatories come from. You know, nuts are very important.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 33:30 Yes, we do not. We do. Yeah. We have a very, a very healthy diet, but we do do a lot of grilling.

Ralph Sanchez: 33:37 That's why I wrote the improve mind diet.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 33:39 Good. Well we can't wait for that one.

Speaker 4: 33:41 Yeah.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 33:42 I want to get the copy as soon as it's out.

Ralph Sanchez: 33:44 Yeah. That would have been a couple of weeks, as a matter of fact, I created a page for your listeners. Excellent. The Alzheimer's solution forward slash never too late. Three things on there. There's that personal health assessment that they can do and get some feedback and then I have a discovery session I 15 to 20 minute call they have a burning question on the results of that test I have talked about and then there is a free preview of the mind diet. Oh, excellent. That will be like I said, ready in the couple of weeks and send it to them if they opt in to that.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 34:30 We'll have the links. I'll have all the links in the show notes, so. And we'll have a link to the, to your website as well. Obviously we've covered a lot of ground here. Um, what would you say if you wanted someone to walk away with this without being overwhelmed with all the science, without being overwhelmed with a million things, what is the most important thing that you want them to have?

Ralph Sanchez: 34:52 Well, focus on your lifestyle. Focus on your diet, focus on your stress level, and know that if you have an extra 20 or 30 pounds around your waist, that is a huge factor for inflammation and you should be working with somebody about what that may represent for you in terms of a health risk.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 35:19 Excellent. Thank you. I know the other thing I wanted to ask you is, you know, I usually end my podcast with my favorite things and I'm going to offer for you to give my audience because part of as we discuss having fun, enjoying life is really good for your brain. It's really good for your stress levels and it's just what we want to do, right? It's like we have, in my opinion, we have so much time left is like I want to have a good time. Spent a lot of time suffering. Now. The time is to enjoy life as to the best of our ability. And so tell me one of your favorite things. What do you do to feel real joy and have fun?

Ralph Sanchez: 35:58 Well, I was sharing that. I love nature. I've always been a nature boy since I was a child and I lived in an area called Carmel Valley. I live in Santa Cruz now, but I lived in Carmel Valley and I was able to get to my favorite state park just a few minutes away from Carmel and not too far from Carmel Valley called point logos. Logos is on the northern tip of what's described as the big Sur. Beautiful, but the point logos is probably the most beautiful section of all the fixer and I used to go there quite frequently because it was so close and take a quick walk and just enjoy the magic of the area. I'll never forget when I first went to point lobos many, many years ago, I was standing there just kind of taking it all in. I just have it here so when I made it to Carmel Valley and I was able to get there on a regular basis, I was just thrilled by it. Haven't been able to do that lately, so I'm looking forward to actually getting back over to that area and spending more time doing that sort of thing.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 37:09 Excellent. I'm going to have to find it and explore it myself. I don't think I've ever been there. I've been to big Sur just kinda driving past, so I will definitely.

Ralph Sanchez: 37:21 You're enjoying yourself with some secret to Carmel Beach. If you go to Carmel Beach on a sunny day, then if you walk to the north side of it, you walked to where it dead ends, but you can actually walk up a little tiny path. It's only a few feet and you're on the pebble beach golf course. Beach Golf course meets that part of each of beach. It's a beautiful big crest and what you can do is you can walk along the edge of the pebble beach golf course.

Ralph Sanchez: 38:02 They won't. They won't throw you out,

Pat Beaupre Becker: 38:05 won't they? Don't bother people because not a lot of people know about this, so you can walk around the edge and just. The scenery is spectacular. I don't know if you've ever seen people play golf.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 38:17 It's amazing. Yeah.

Ralph Sanchez: 38:19 The scenery is spectacular for rock around the edge and on one side you've got the homes overlooking Pebble Beach Golf course. On the other side, you have this spectacular coastal scenery. It's really.

Pat Beaupre Becker: 38:33 Alright. I'll report to when I get to do it, so thank you so much Ralph. I really appreciate it. I look, I look forward to the upcoming books and sharing the information and we'll be in touch. Again, I'm sure.

Pat Beaupre Becker 38:50 Thanks for listening to this episode up. It's never too late to lose weight if you liked what you heard and want more head over to never too late. That's number two, dot info forward slash guide to download your quickstart guide. Did Jumpstart your weight loss plan and begin creating an amazing life you love.