Why Health Feels So Hard

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Most of us have a mental or otherwise full of health advice. Macros, supplements, heart rate, variability. But I think the right kind of light are at the right kind of R. And in the middle of all that information, because I think there's been a lot of information lately in the last few years, I think a lot of people are quietly more anxious about their health than they've ever been. And today's guest is going to say something that almost feels rebellious in 2026. Welcome back to another episode of Healthy Mind, Healthy Life. I'm your host Cyan, and this is the show where we sit down and have conversations, real conversations like this. My guest today is Anand Conrad. Anand brings a perspective that cuts through the noise of modern wellness, and tonight we are talking about something that more and more people are starting to feel but really name it or say out loud. Folks, health is simple, and we are the ones making it complicated. So I welcome you to this conversation where we would be navigating through and unpacking what that actually means and where the complication is even coming

A Doctoring World Without Noise

SPEAKER_01 1:15

from. So, Anand, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you here with me tonight.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Thanks, Anand. So, Anand, with that being said, uh, before we get into uh the right kind of mentality that needs to be uh adapt adapted to, I want to start somewhere, uh honest with your story. I think uh uh when you look at the way that people approach health today, you know, all the apps, uh the protocols, the the brands as well. Uh was there a particular moment in your own work uh where you have realized just how far we have really drifted away from this simple, uh really simple version of this I don't know that I can pinpoint a uh specific moment when that happened.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

Um but remember my experience at the bedside, my experience around health and patients and disease uh goes back over decades. Um my earliest, my earliest memory, my earliest medical memory is when I was six years old, when I um my when my father took me on a house call. So that was my immersion into the world of doctoring. It was a simple world. It was my father saying, get in the car, let's go in to see a patient. It was simple. There was no insurance company, there was no electronic medical record. Right? It was a very simple, very simple interaction between a doctor and a man who, in that case, was having chest pain. I had similar such experiences later. For example, uh in 1981, I worked in a clinic in a remote part, remote part of Kenya, uh, no electricity, okay, removed from modern centers, um, just patients and me. So, for example, um I ran a nutrition clinic for children who were under nutrient undernourished. They were suffering principally from protein under nutrition. Uh even though we were surrounded by protein. We lived on a lake that was rich with fish, for example. So that too was a very simple um arrangement. A doctor and a patient, no insurance company, no deductibles, no coinsurance, no electronic medical records, no core measures, no guidelines, right? And it was easy to see without all that noise, it was very easy to see what was important. Okay. So, in the case of this particular baby that I'm thinking of, what was important was to teach the mother how to feed the child.

How Systems Complicate Care

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Okay. Later on, uh things uh became much more complicated. I entered the world of conventional Western medicine in the United States, managed care, electronic records, all the things I just referenced. And um those third parties, which were not originally at the table with the patient and the doctor, as I experienced it, had their own opinions about what should happen. Now, if you step back and you look at the net effect of introducing third parties with their own opinions, their own needs as to what should happen, you realize that they sometimes conflict with the needs of the patient, the doctor too, but let's focus on the patient for a moment. So I think I've had a sense all my life, really, that we are needlessly complicating things. And if you look at our society today and you look at the requirements of health, okay, and and and there are not very many, you know, don't be fat, don't be sedentary, don't be sleepy, right? Eat right, exercise, and get lots of sleep. I mean, that's 90% of your health equation right there. So why aren't people just following those very simple ideas? They're not following them because there's so much noise around us. You touched on some of it, you know, with supplements. That's just an illustration, but there's a lot more. So um it it does seem ironic to some people that I'm a physician and I'd like to get free uh of doctors and drugs, but I'm a man like any other man. I just want to be healthy.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Yeah, and and I think that really tells us uh where we have really drifted away, you know, compared to last few uh maybe two or three decades. And um uh Dr. Anand, I think there is also an entire industry, if I'm honest, you know, that's pushing uh the consumers in that direction, all right. And uh so I think that there's something internal to I think the urge to really feel like uh we are in control, that we are doing something. So could you tell us uh perhaps the deeper patterns that you see underneath all of this, both in the system, which is obviously uh pushing us towards this, and in us as well as individuals. And you know, how how should one really uh approach the solution to this as well? Because I believe it's not gonna be just easy, because there's also an entire system that's built around this, you know, uh not just uh the food industry, the pharma industry, and um I I I I could say the entertainment industry to some extent as well. So,

Who To Trust In Wellness

SPEAKER_01 6:30

what what would you really like to see?

SPEAKER_00 6:33

At the individual level, I think um the challenge for a lot of people is to A, recognize that not everybody's looking out for your interest. I mean, a lot of people have come to that conclusion. I mean, I see it more and more. There's a lot of skepticism generally. Um, you know, people don't just rush off to TikTok and YouTube and say, oh, let me believe this guy and that guy. I'm not seeing that. I'm seeing doubts, I'm seeing skepticism. Having doubts and skepticism is important given what's what prevails, it's not enough. If you want to move your health forward, you need to find an alternative. You need to find somebody or somebody's plural who you can trust. And and in order to trust, at least this is my view, if you want to trust somebody and really listen to them, they need to have at least two qualities. Number one, they need to know what they're talking about, which is where an awful lot of people fail. They just they're not qualified, just flat out. And number two, they need to have integrity, which is where a lot of other people fail. You know, they have conflicts of interest. They're actually trying to sell you a product or a service or device or something. So when you have that conflict of interest, you know, uh, I'm not sure you can fully trust those people. And it's a problem. I mean, we see it, we see it as a growing problem. I see it as a growing problem. You know, you can't you can't just as a knee-jerk reflex trust the government to tell you how to behave. We have examples of the government screwing it up going back decades. I mean, look, look at the 1970s, when uh an American senator by the name of George McGovern decided to introduce what he calls dietary guidelines for America, which said, don't eat meat, don't eat dairy products, make it all low fat, and eat lots of sugar, lots of bread, seven servings of bread a day. That was not tested. There was no a priori support for that idea. It was implemented on a broad scale. I'm not saying everybody adopted it, but we've seen a massive spike in a number of chronic diseases since the introduction of that particular guideline, right? So you can't you can't, as a reflex, trust the government. And there are other plenty of other examples. So so who do you trust becomes an issue?

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Absolutely. Uh that's really well said. And I think that uh does perhaps induce some uh degree of fear, uh, you know, uh in us. And it should, I mean, uh, you know, when when there are people all around you that's trying to sell you products and sell you stuff, uh, you know, we become ultimately the product, right? Uh, we become their field of uh experiment, I would say. So uh that's it's I'm I'm really glad that you brought this up, uh Dr. Arnold, because I think uh so much of what looks like discipline is actually fear uh in in a track suit. So if I have to be more specific and now talk about what uh listeners

Supplements Versus Real Food

SPEAKER_01 9:40

can uh might try to implement to you know set them apart from the system that we're talking about right now, uh, you know, what would you really like to say? I mean, what does a simple version of health actually look like in their ordinary world? I mean, definitely you you mentioned some of the things like you know, uh organic food and uh plenty of sleep. I think that covers uh the major chunk of uh health. And and so I think there's also this um, I would say, you know, this image that, you know, being buffed and being muscular is something healthy, and you know, it it I mean, I mean, that kind of image is also portraying uh or being portrayed in in the media as well, which leads us to think that you know you you should be doing a certain I mean you should be doing certain things and you know you shouldn't be doing certain things. But really, we we we we need to ask, you know, if if I mean what is the definition of being healthy, right? Is being disease-free, can that be categorized as being healthy? Or, you know, what are we really looking at?

SPEAKER_00 10:42

I think you just raised about 17 questions all in one. You touched on a lot of different facets. Like, let me just back up on a couple of things that caught my attention. You talked about us being the product. You know, I I I refuse to be a product, I am nobody's product, and you don't have to adopt that position for yourself. It's a personal decision. I'm just telling you how I feel. Now, if you feel that you're not here to work for some company's profit, whether it's a food company or pharma company, but rather you're here for yourself, you want to reach maximal function, okay, what I call functional supremacy, then you have to be very clear about that in your own mind. And then the question becomes, how? You know, how do you do that? Okay. Um, you know, the simple rules you touched on them. I did not say organic food, and I just want to touch that. I'm not against organic food, but organic food alone is not going to fix all your nutritional needs, right? So let's say you have a diet of organic carrots. You're not gonna be healthy. There's an awful lot of other stuff. So the court so nutrition is a is a it's a really important, potentially very simple conversation. Again, we mess it up for all the reasons I said, you know, the conflicting interests of the food companies, this goes back decades, at least in the United States, right? But then you look at really simple studies. Let's talk about saturated fat, which has been vilified for decades, okay, going back to at least the 1940s, as far as I can um determine. Very simple study. Um, there was uh, for example, a great study done in India, published in 1967 by um a doctor named Malhotra. A lot of people don't know about the study, but what he did was he compared the health of the railway workers in northern India with the railway workers in southern India, where the difference between them behaviorally was the diet. The workers in northern India had diets very rich in um ghee and butter and milk, uh, those sorts of things. And the people in the south tended to be more on the vegetarian side and really not have so much of the of the dairy fats. Okay. The difference was staggering. The uh the workers in the north came out much healthier in cardiovascular disease. Okay, so it's not enough to say organic, you've got to start getting into what do you really need. And here it becomes potentially very, very simple. Also, but because of all the noise, people start um to get it confused. Now, remind me the other 15 questions you just asked me.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

No, I think that was the major chunk. But yeah, apart from that, uh, I believe, you know, what does uh what does one uh I mean indeed needs to do in this case? Because I believe uh, you know, the the the fact that is shared that when you realize that, you know, you are indeed uh, you know, they they're trying to make you the product, and then it becomes your choice. And then the question becomes how I think uh that is something fundamental to what we are discussing today. But uh the other part of it would be, you know, how how can uh because you said I believe you said organic food is not just the only um thing that you should be focusing at. So I'm curious to know what else would you like to really add to that? You know, are we talking about supplements? Are we talking about any kind of uh additional nutrition except from what uh we shouldn't be having too much of processed food? So what's your take on that?

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Yeah, I I I think fundamentally for health, you don't need supplements. Okay, my my grandmother and your grandmother, they didn't they didn't take supplements all day long, they didn't hear about them. It was just not part of the conversation. And you know what? You know, uh man evolved to this point over 300,000 years without supplements. So what did he evolve on? Food. And if you trace back even farther than 300,000 years, if you go back a couple million crow magnon man more recently, you know, we evolved as predators. We evolved as a species that hunted for fat, based on some of the research that I've been reading. Um, like fatty organs, brain, bone, marrow. These are things that we don't even consider these days, but they were actively hunted by our predecessors. If you look more recently, if you look at what health correlates to, and you look at height as an example, as a measure of health, okay, developmental height, you know, from childhood on, you know, stunting versus normal growth versus high growth, where you see the highest growth as the measure of health, whether it's Holland, which has uh, you know, the Netherlands, which has a history of lots of dairy, cheese, milk, meat. If you look at other studies based on Europe from the Middle Ages, if you look at North America, you know, when the Europeans arrived in North America, they were on average five foot six. The natives, like the Cheyenne and the Sioux and the Comanches, who were living on buffalo, which was essentially an all-meat diet, were closer to six feet. So, first of all, today's

Meat, Vegan Claims, And Ideology

SPEAKER_00 15:45

um sort of mantra that you should stay away from meat and and animal-based foods is completely crazy. It's completely antithetical to the idea of of proper nutrition.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Yeah, I think that's a very solid uh message right there, because I I think there's a lot of uh discussion uh that really goes back and forth around being vegan. Um, but you know, that's that's one really solid idea that I would I would really like to uh I mean I totally and let me touch on that.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Veganism is as much ideology as it is nutritional strategy. You hear different arguments for veganism. One is um man is the only animal that uh that drinks milk from other species, which is factually false. We have examples. Number one, number two, who cares? Okay, so we're the only ones, we're the also the only ones that use zoom, but you still use it and it's okay. Uh and number two, we hear that it's um, you know, we shouldn't eat animals because trying to trying to protect animals. And then you look at the data and what you find that olives, which you need for olive oil, which vegans consume, the olive harvest actually winds up killing millions of songbirds. Because what they do, they they vacuum the olives off the trees and they suck all the birds in there and kill them. Right. So factually, yeah. So uh factually, if you're out there promoting veganism and by de facto by example, you're promoting olive oil, okay, you're actually promoting mass death of birds, just as an example. Not to mention the fact that from a nutritional point of view, veganism has been associated with all kinds of poor outcomes. So man is not a vegan.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Agreed. Agreed. And I think that that really comes off as a strong message, especially the uh example that he shared, uh, Dr. Anand. And I I believe, you know, uh this, the solution to this problem requires a race in the collective consciousness, because I believe there's too much of uh information that's floating around, and it's it's get uh I mean it's getting really harder, and it'll get even more harder as time uh passes, because you know, it would be very difficult to uh sit down and look at the data and trust, try to trust, you know, which which information, which piece of information should you actually go with because I think there's just a lot of varying, uh, like you said, you know, different ideologies coming into picture and a lot of conflicts of opinion. So is this one thing that uh I would like all the listeners to carry forth from this conversation? I I would say that when you talk about health, right, it doesn't really have to be this complicated uh to be real, right? You you need to uh distinguish between, you know, what does being healthy mean to you? Is it is it being disease-free? You know, is it being in a in a state where you could do uh most of the activities that you that you wish

Cosmetics Versus Function Goals

SPEAKER_01 18:45

you could? Uh, because I think there's a lot of uh noise around that, you know. Like I said, Dr. Anand, you know, people really uh visualize being healthy means, you know, in a in a uh you know, muscular figure for men or uh for women could be, you know, in a in the perfect figure, right? Whatever uh that we're really ide idealizing here. But I think that is the question that you need to ask yourself, folks, because I think the boring fundamentals are not beneath you, right? They're underneath everything that that actually works. So that is something that I would like you all to move with. Um but as we wrap this off, Ardan, would love to ask you uh where's the best place for listeners who want to keep learning from you and your work and the community that you have built? Where's the best place that you would direct them to go?

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Um if I might just respond to what you said, you know, I think please, please. I think in your mind you should um distinguish between cosmetics and function.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

Oh, yeah. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Right. So you you you touched on this a couple of times, at least implicitly, you know, people who like to have big muscles. Um there's a fundamental question. Is man by nature a bodybuilder or an endurance runner? Because we have bodybuilders, we have some very strong people, right, in the world, big muscles. You know, India. I'm assuming you're in India, by the way. I didn't ask, but uh yeah. Okay, so India produced uh a man, a wrestler by the name of the Great Gama. That was his stage name. I don't know if you ever heard of him. Um, from I think it was Bengali. In any event, this guy would do 5,000 squats before breakfast. Okay, uh about a hundred years ago. So unbelievably strong. But do you need to be that strong to be healthy and to live your life? He needed it to become the champion wrestler that he was. But this begs the very personal question. What do you want? I'm not looking to be a champion Indian wrestler. Okay, I'm not looking to be a power lifter at the Olympics. My personal goal is to hike the otter trail, the trail um in Africa. I want to hike it on March 14th, 2074. So that's 48 years from now. That's my goal. I've defined it on a personal level. You don't have to have the same goal. And now the question is, how do I get there? In order for me to make that hike on 48 years from now, I need three things. I need physical function so I can walk. I need cognitive function so I remember where the trail is. Okay. And I'd like to have emotional function, I'd like to enjoy the experience. And now we work backwards from there. So, number one, distinguish between cosmetics and function. I I like the focus on function because it's definable and it's measurable and you can make progress towards it. Uh, and then once if you define that it's function you're after, which I think is the case for a lot of us, then uh you have to ask how you get there. And the pillars are going to be physical, cognitive, and emotional. And then the question is, how do you get there? Well, in theory, it's very simple. You know, it's don't be fat, don't be sedentary, don't be sleepy. The the technical requirements are you need food, you need gravity, and you need a pillow. That's that's all you really need for health. Okay. You got to be nourished, you got to be able to do some resistance. So gravity, you know, squats, that's about all you really need: walking, running, squatting, and a pillow, meaning you need to sleep. So that part's very easy. There are challenges, there are toxins of all kinds, there are poisons in our environments. You need to know what they are. Is this medication that's being rolled out good for you? If it's bad for you, even if you do all the things we said, the simple stuff, and you take a poison, it doesn't matter. So you need to be aware of those too. How do you get that information? You know, it's very tricky. Uh, our group, which is now running uh seven years, almost seven years, um, is devoted to tracking the kinds of information that you and I are discussing, the things you have to do and the things that you have to avoid doing. It's called ES, he c the world of ES. Uh, we're we're

Avoiding Poisons And Closing Advice

SPEAKER_00 22:55

one option for doing that. There are many.

SPEAKER_01 22:59

Perfect. So uh well, Dr. Arnold, personally, I love the way that you articulated uh and you added your own perspectives to this. Um yeah, I think that's that's a message as clear as it can get, right? What is it that you're after? Yeah, you know, it can get uh on a personal level. And that's where I would like to pause and let you guys think about, you know, where's the place that you would like to uh really pause and sit down? What is that uh which you want? You know, is it something uh that arbitrary that we're talking about, or is it something fixed perhaps that you have uh in your definition? And if that's fixed, well, then there might be time for you to really look closer uh into this conversation and pick a part that really resonated with you. So, Anand, thank you so much for the honesty that you brought, the clarity that you brought uh into into this uh conversation, because I believe we really needed that kind of clarity. So, folks, I will include the details in the show notes so that you could easily reach out to Ez and work with Dr. Anand. And with that, folks, to whoever is listening right now, maybe at the end of a long day, uh I would want to leave you with this that you are not really behind or falling. I think you may simply be carrying a piece of advice that was never meant for your body, meant for the rhythm of your real life. So just step it back, keep what works, and let the rest go. So, this has been Sion on Healthy Mind, Healthy Life. And with that, folks, I'm signing off for today. And we'll see the next one real soon.