Episode 122 | Mar 20, 2025

The Truth About Cholesterol, With Jonny Bowden

Is everything we’ve been told about cholesterol wrong? This week on Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi welcomes Jonny Bowden, PhD, a renowned expert in nutrition and functional medicine, to challenge conventional wisdom about cholesterol. As the co-author of The Great Cholesterol Myth, Jonny explains why the outdated “good vs. bad cholesterol” model falls short and what we should focus on instead for true heart health.

“Health coaches say to me, ‘We’re not nutritionists—we can’t give advice, right?’ But you can point clients to the experts who will show them a better path… Coaching isn’t about prescribing; it’s about guiding people toward the right information and helping them see the bigger picture.”

Jonny Bowden, PhD

For decades, cholesterol has been labeled a primary culprit in heart disease, but emerging research paints a far more complex picture. Jonny breaks down why total cholesterol is a misleading metric and why particle number, size, and other factors matter more in assessing cardiovascular risk. He shares insights from cutting-edge cardiology research, offering a fresh perspective on how we should approach cholesterol testing and treatment. His conversation with Dr. Sandi dives into how these new understandings impact both medical professionals and health coaches working with clients.

Jonny’s path to becoming a trusted voice in nutrition and functional medicine is anything but conventional. With a background in music, psychology, and holistic nutrition, his journey led him to question mainstream dietary advice and advocate for a deeper, more nuanced look at health. He has spent decades educating individuals and corporations on the importance of looking beyond surface-level health markers and making informed, science-backed lifestyle choices. His work underscores the power of knowledge in reshaping how we approach cholesterol, diet, and overall well-being.

Health coaches play a critical role in helping clients navigate the confusion surrounding cholesterol and heart disease prevention. Understanding the limitations of standard cholesterol tests and empowering clients to seek the right data—like LDL particle number and metabolic markers—can be a game-changer. Jonny and Dr. Sandi discuss how coaches can educate and guide clients to take proactive steps in their health journey, from advocating for comprehensive testing to supporting sustainable lifestyle changes that go beyond medication alone.

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Transcript

Dr. Sandi: Perhaps no subject in healthcare is more controversial than cholesterol. What is dangerous about it? Is it dangerous? What levels are safe, too low, too high? Do you need medication? This is an area where, depending on who you talk to, you’re going to get differing opinions.

Well, we’re talking today to one of the experts in this area, the one and only Jonny Bowden. Let me tell you a little bit about Jonny. Jonny Bowden, PhD, earned a bachelor’s in music, a master’s degree in psychology, and a PhD in holistic nutrition. He’s the best-selling author of over a dozen books, including “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth,” “The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer,” “Living Low Carb,” and with cardiologist Dr. Stephen Sinatra, the controversial bestseller, “The Great Cholesterol Myth,” revised and expanded edition. He’s a faculty member at the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy, our school, FMCA. He consults with both individual clients and with corporations in the natural health space. He is happily married. They live in Woodland Hills, California, and he spends as much time as possible in Saint-Martin in Paris and experiencing gratitude.

Well, I am grateful that he is our guest today. So, without further ado, here is my interview with Jonny Bowden. Let’s just jump right in. I know you are an expert on many topics regarding nutrition, but something that you’re passionate about and I know our audience would like to know about because there’s so much confusion, and that is around cholesterol. February is heart health month, but what does that really mean? What is heart health? Do we need to get our LDL, the bad cholesterol, as low as possible? And is that a route to heart health or have we been wrong all this time? So, welcome, Jonny.

Jonny: It’s a pleasure to be here, and I don’t even know where to start. All right. I think before we even get into cholesterol, which is such a rich topic and which I’m so brimming with thoughts to share with you, having just… As I mentioned offline before, I just came back from the University of California at Irvine. There’s an annual conference. It’s part of the Integrative Health Institute, the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute at the university. And they are first-rate people, the top researchers in cardiology and pain management, all this stuff. And we had a number of significant lectures by cardiologists on the state of the art in cholesterol and heart disease treatment in general. People think they’re confused now. Just wait. I would love to share that, but I’d like to start, if you don’t mind, with what you began with when you said expert.

I think the older that we get and the smarter that we get or the wiser that we get… And this seems to be true not just in my own field. It’s certainly true in my own experience, but it’s definitely true in other fields as well. I think the more wise you get, the more in awe of what you don’t know you get and the less confident that what you know is the truth. And you become much more, I don’t know, an expert. Yeah, I guess in some senses, yes, but in my larger perspective that I have now, there are different stages of knowledge and expertise, but I’m uncomfortable with being called… When I go to a conference like the one I just was and listen to the level of discussion that’s going on in these different fields, and none of us, certainly not me, is an expert in this stuff. I am a very skillful guide, and that’s how I see myself with clients, with the corporations I consult with, the individuals I work with.

I wrote a piece once saying, “I am not your…” I took a few 20 talks about that a lot. Don’t follow gurus, including me, but I will give you my expert opinion. I will give you a very thoughtful opinion about the things you ask me about, including cholesterol, but I don’t want anyone to think who’s listening to me like, “Oh, he’s got the answers because I don’t have the answers.” I have enough of the information to know that there are no absolute perfect answers to most of the questions that we ask one another. So, with that said, I will give you my 35 years of experience in the world of cholesterol, heart disease, personal training, fitness in general, health, nutrition, and all the other things that I know you want to talk about. Let’s by all means start with cholesterol.

So, we have heard for many years, and I trace this in my book, “The Great Cholesterol Myth,” but other people have written about it. Nina Teicholz wrote an amazing book that everybody who’s listening to this should read called “The Big Fat Surprise.” Gary Taubes wrote a book called “Why We Get Fat.” They’ve all told the story. So, I’m not going to go back to the 1950s when Eisenhower was president and how Ancel Keys did these studies of low-fat diet. The point is, for years and years, we were wrong and we’ve been told low-fat diets, stay away from animal products, and cholesterol causes heart disease. To say that simplistic is really an understatement, and most of it is just untrue. Fat does not cause heart disease. Saturated fat does not coagulate arteries. None of that was true.

The story with cholesterol is a lot more complicated than we believed. And it might be worth just going through a tiny little bit of how we got to this ludicrous notion of good and bad cholesterol. Why do I say ludicrous? I’ll give you a hint at what’s coming. Because if you look at cholesterol under a microscope, it’s the same cholesterol. There is no good cholesterol or bad cholesterol. You can get a team of cardiac surgeons who look at cholesterol in the U.S. and which is the good and which is the bad. If you’re only looking at the molecule of cholesterol, it’s cholesterol.

The way to think of it, folks, is you’re a passenger going someplace in an airport. I’m Jonny Bowden. I go to LAX. I get on a plane to go to New York, or I get on a plane to go to Hawaii. I’m the same person. Cholesterol is the same person. We are on different planes. So, that’s the first distinction that’s important to make. The cholesterol isn’t good or bad. The cholesterol travels in a container called a lipoprotein. In 1963, they thought, there’s two kinds of lipoprotein, the high-density ones and the low-density ones. Remember, folks, the L in HDL and LDL, the second L in there is lipoprotein. That’s the boat. That’s the plane on which I am a passenger if I’m cholesterol.

Why is this important? Because the lipoprotein is what gets stuck in your arteries, not the cholesterol. So, one of the reasons that this whole good and bad cholesterol thing is so outdated is that back in the times that people in the United States didn’t know what cholesterol was, the early ’50s, early ’60s, they were still trying to educate people. This was all this new information about this. We knew there was a substance that was always found in the arteries when there were problems. It was called cholesterol. We needed to be more aware of it so they’d have these health fairs. And you’d go to the health fair, an educational kind of thing that would be put on by churches and schools, and they had little booths. We’re going way back, but this is where we were with it. And you’d have a couple of doctors sitting in one of the booths, and they’d come by and they’d take blood pressure. Wow, that’s an interesting metric. We didn’t really know you could do that at home, stuff did in the hospital. And then you’d go to these other doctors, and they’d take a little finger prick, and they’d go, “Oh, Mrs. Jolie, your cholesterol is 230. That’s very good,” because it used to be 40 or under was considered healthy and normal. They’d keep dumbing it down to lower, but they would tell you that’s very good.

Well, after a while, you get better technology, you get better microscopes, you get better communication. We realized it actually travels in two different ways. It travels in one kind of container and this other kind of container, and we’re going to call one of them good and one of them bad because of their function in the body. And in a very rudimentary, simplistic way, this was an improvement over total cholesterol, which is completely irrelevant to anything at this point. And it was an improvement. Now you know, “Oh, is your bad cholesterol high or is your good cholesterol high?” It was like the difference between the satellite phones and the flip phones. Those long phones we used to have the size of a brick. Then we got the flip phones. Wow, that’s great. Okay, so it was an improvement. That’s 50 years ago. We now know that there’s 13 different subtypes of LDL. There’s something called functional HDL and non-functional HDL. There’s HDL2 and 2A or 2A and 2B, and there’s oxidized LDL. There’s Lp (a), which is a particular kind of nasty LDL that you don’t want to have too much of. There is small and large LDL, makes a big difference.

These are all metrics that we can now see in the cholesterol test, and we are still acting as if it’s 1963 and cholesterol magically comes in a good package and a bad package, which is just not true. And it shouldn’t even pass the smell test because any smart human being knows that, to do a medical diagnosis based on something good or something bad, were you talking to a third grader? It would be like doing a medical diagnosis based on short or tall. Those are important things to know. People who are 4’11” have certain health things that people who are 6’9″ don’t have and vice versa. Important piece of data. You’re going to base a prescription on that? It’s doing the flip phone, which was a great improvement over the brick phones. It’s doing the flip phone in an age when we have iPhone 16 Max. It’s crazy. We have all this data and people come to me on a weekly basis, private clients for consultations saying, “My doctor says my total cholesterol is 230. He’s going to put me on a statin.”

So, let me first tell you, everybody, here is one thing that certainly everybody at the conference I just attended, which is the forefront of this stuff, but even people in the trenches know total cholesterol has as much to do with you getting a heart attack as your hair color or your eye color. Total cholesterol is a meaningless number. And it turns out I was talking to one of my colleagues the other day. They read me a passage from 20 years ago. Using total cholesterol to predict heart disease is a fool’s errand.

So, everybody, forget about that. I would not say LDL is a useless number, but if your LDL… Let’s go back to the analogy… very important because I want you to do this as a thought exercise. So, you’ve got cholesterol that everybody’s worried about. You’ve got these LDL containers that nobody seems to worry about quite as much or they look at it and they say it’s high. But if you were a traffic cop trying to prevent an accident, just like we’re trying to prevent accidents in the arterial wall, we don’t want things getting stuck in there and we don’t want plaque forming, right? So, you want to keep things flowing. You’re the traffic cop. What do you want to know? What’s your number one piece of data you want to know? It’s how many cars are on the road. It’s not what’s in the glove compartment of the cars unless you’re a cop looking for drugs. Basically, to maintain order on the highway and prevent crashes, you want less cars, right? You’re a bouncer in a bar, right? And even the nicest neighborhood in the world and the nicest people in the world, if it’s overcrowded, there’s 10,000 people in there, there’s more chance somebody’s accidentally going to spill a drink, somebody’s going to step on a foot, somebody’s going to start a fight. Not likely if there’s only 10 people in the bar, right? It could happen, but probability wise, your most important piece of data, if you’re security, how many people are going to be there?

It’s the same thing in the arteries. How many folks are traveling the road? How many LPL particles do we have? And that’s why the LDL-P test, LDL particle test… Particles are science talk for lipoproteins, right? Each lipoprotein is a particle. When they do the particle test, they’re doing the lipoprotein test. They are telling you a number of how many cars are on the road, not how much cholesterol they’re carrying. Because when they crash, the cholesterol spills out into the road and then everybody blames the cholesterol, but it’s like blaming the firemen for the fire. They show up at the scene of the crime, but they didn’t light the match. That is the difference in how we’re thinking about cholesterol now.

What was interesting to me is that a lot of the things we said in “The Great Cholesterol Myth” Original Edition was that, “Guys, stop getting this silly good and bad cholesterol test. Start getting the particle test, the one that really matters,” was completely kind of new information that nobody was talking about and nobody knew. This last conference, they were talking about whether the particle test would be apoB, which is more accurate because all of them have given up on this good and bad. So, now they’re actually debating which is the best.

So, I will stop this rant in a minute. But if your doctor is prescribing you a statin, it does not mean it’s the worst drug in the world. It does not mean you should never listen to them. It does not mean you shouldn’t take it. It means that prescription should be based on more information than good and bad or total cholesterol. Find out how many particles you got plowing around in the road because that’s the number that’s going to predict heart disease way better than LDL alone.

Dr. Sandi: This is such useful information. So, it is the particle size, the particle number.

Jonny: The particle number. Now, I’ll tell you what the size…

Dr. Sandi: Actually particle number we’re talking about… And what about the size? Because we’ve heard those big, fluffy versus the small, dense ones, the ones that could fit under a tennis net versus those that are big and fluffy and won’t go through.

Jonny: It’s a really good analogy. A good way to think of it, in terms of big and bad, large and small size particles, is if you had a chicken wire and then it’s tightly knit. And that’s how the artery wall should be, that’s how the gut wall should be, they should be intact. They should be closely locked. And if you imagine a chicken wall is that endothelial lining of the arteries or the gut wall and you take a big fluffy volleyball and you toss it at that chicken wire, nothing’s going to happen to it, right? It’s basically going to bounce off it. It’s neutral. I’m doing damage. It doesn’t do any good. But if you took a little golf ball and you set it on fire, then you load it with toxins and then toss it with the speed of a Yankee pitcher, it’s probably going to damage it. It’s going to make a little hole in it. Well, that little hole then has to get repaired. That’s plaque.

So, basically, it’s the hard, nasty little small LDL particles that are the damaging ones. The big fluffy ones are not good for you, but they’re also not bad for you. They’re basically neutral. So, first, you want to know how many there are, but the second thing you might want to know is how big are they, because if they’re not only plentiful but they’re mostly the big ones, you’ve got a very big [inaudible 00:16:56.698]. None of this is seen in the good and bad cholesterol. And the other thing about the particle size is the small dense ones, the bad ones correlate with a lot of other stuff. It’s a very good marker for insulin resistance, which we can talk about, which is a passion of mine to educate people about, but it’s a very good marker for that. So, that’s why the size matters. But again, the particles matter the most, and none of this is available in a standardized test. And these days you want this information.

What I was going to say about that is that it used to be very difficult, even emotionally, to work with clients to give this information knowing they couldn’t get it, knowing their doctor is not going to order the right test. Now, why is that? We could talk about the politics of the medical industrial complex for a long time, but insurance doesn’t pay for it. And if the doctor orders a lot of tests that are out of the insurance network, they come and get an audit and they could lose Blue Cross and their career is over. So, there’s a lot of reasons that… And doctors don’t know about it because the pharmaceutical industry controls a lot of the narrative and what doctors hear and the reps go into their office. And we all know this story, we’ve read a million books about it or a million articles about it, I hope. And it becomes very hard to get this information that isn’t covered by insurance. They’re not teaching them about it. The reps are not telling them about it. I can’t tell you the number of clients I’ve had come in and said, “I asked my doctor for the particle test and they said, ‘What is that?’ ” And the other ones will say, “You don’t need that.” And once in a great while, you’ll get, “Damn straight, you’re getting that and you’re getting the one by Boston Heart, because that’s the best.” Once in a great while, you’ll get that. Not very often.

Dr. Sandi: And that’s where coaches can play such a big role because they could educate people about this and then they can become empowered to say, “Doctor, I want this. And if they’re not getting it from their doctor, fortunately, we have direct to consumer tests now where you can order that on your own.”

Jonny: You stole my thunder.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah.

Jonny: You stole my punch double. I was going to say is I used to really feel bad about this. I’d say, “How am I going to tell these people this is what you need?” And then, “My doctor won’t do it.” And then what do you say? Or they’d say, “We all know we need this. Where do I find a doctor? I’m in North Carolina. I’m in Ohio or I’m in South Dakota. Where do I find a functional medicine cardiologist?” Well, good luck with that. You can barely find them in LA.

So, luckily, our friend Mark Hyman… And I barely know Mark. I’ve said hello to him a couple of times. I have no contact with them, no financial interest with them. They have a company now called Function. They do all these tests. I think it’s $500 a year…

Dr. Sandi: Yes, it is.

Jonny: …which is a bargain.

Dr. Sandi: I’m a member. I do it. Yeah.

Jonny: Somebody says to me, “Didn’t you know they did that?” I don’t know anything about how they… I just know Mark Hyman’s a great guy. Andrew Huberman is the scientific director. Mark Hyman’s the medical director. They’re doing tests that you need to see. And they’re doing these tests, among others. I think that’s an incredible model, and it bypasses the whole medical industrial complex reasons for not getting the right tests.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. And we had webinars with him. It’s great. It is on Function Health, and it’s a membership, and you could get twice a year over a hundred tests. And you just go to Quest, your local Quest for the blood draw and it’s all right there. It’s AI interpreted and a health coach can help you in terms of what action steps you want to take.

Jonny: Absolutely.

Dr. Sandi: So, speaking of action, so you mentioned insulin resistance and that leads to metabolic… And it’s not just cardio, but cardiometabolic. They go together. It’s one word really.

Jonny: It’s actually a new term… The World Health Organization recently made cardiometabolic disease a thing. So, this thing that’s been floating around since the ’80s and Gerald Reaven started it out as Syndrome X and then became called metabolic syndrome and then called… It is actually pre-diabetes. And now the name for that pre-diabetes is cardiometabolic syndrome.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. And we teach at FMCA all about cardiometabolic functioning and dysfunctioning, and that leads to, well, your lifestyle. What are you doing every day in terms of your fitness, addressing your stress, your sleep, the foods you eat or not eat.

Jonny: And you mentioned health coaches, which I’m… I taught for many years, a course, life coaches called the art and science of weight loss coaching, trying to combine the best of psychology, which I know you have even better background in psychology than I do. You have a PhD, I have a master’s, but combining psychology with nutrition, because what I found was that the coaches who knew their psychology and were good life coaches had no idea about the nutritional aspect of it.

I’ll give you a perfect example of how the two can be married and the nutritionists had no idea of the lifestyle. So, here’s an example of how they don’t work if you do them in silos. So, the psychologist, the life coach, the person who comes from that aspect, Mrs. Jones is going…she wants to get in shape. She wants to do the right thing. She’s going to make the effort. Great, the coaches are all for it. What are you going to do? What are your action steps? “Well, I’m going to eat Special K, orange juice, a banana, and toast for breakfast. No more of that bacon. And I’m going to go on a low fat diet. I’m going to…” Well, if you’re a psychologist, you want to send her on the right road, but that’s the wrong road.

Dr. Sandi: Exactly. Such a good point.

Jonny: The coach might say to me, and they have many times, but we’re not nutritionists. We can’t give advice, right? But you can point them to the people who will tell them that’s not the right road instead of simply accepting, “Oh, great. You’re going to go on a low fat diet and count the calories. That’s really good, Mrs. Jones. You’ll be there in no time.” So, you’re right. You can’t prescribe. You can’t say that’s a bad idea, but you can sure point them to people who will make an incredibly good argument about why that’s not so. And then you can discuss that with them. Same thing true with medicines.

Now you go to the other side of that, the nutritionist. Let me see your food diary. You’re not getting enough selenium. So, you’re going to be needing to eat a little bit more macadamia. Forget it. They’re not coming back for a second… Because you haven’t seen them as a person. You’re looking at their food diary. The art and science of weight loss coaching, as I taught it, was how do we put these two things together?

Dr. Sandi: I love that. And that’s what we teach at FMCA.

Jonny: Why do you think I’m so proud to be on this family?

Dr. Sandi: Health coaching, it is taking into account mental health, what’s right with you, not what’s wrong with you, eating psychology. Why are you eating? What myths did you grow up with about food? Your parents, your peers, your culture. These traditions are very ingrained and you cannot separate the two. It is critical. Also, I like heart health. When I think of heart health, I also think of… And Mimi Guarneri talks about this a lot, the heart book.

Jonny: Mimi Guarneri is the founder of the Integrative Health Institute where I just came from that I was telling you. And she was one of the cardiologists who was presenting. So, I was talking about Mimi Guarneri and her colleagues.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, yeah. And her book, “The Heart Speaks,” and heart is an emotional organ. And heart centered and experiencing that warmth that comes from your heart in terms of love, self, love of others, love of life, and I don’t think we can separate that. It’s really critical. I’d love your thoughts on that.

Jonny: Well, I’ll tell you… I’d be happy to share my thoughts on that. I almost always bring this up because I have a particular coaching model, which I’ll also share with you if you want to talk about that as well. But in my coaching model, I see them for one session and I try to leave with this. And I try to end podcasts and interviews and talks with this, but you asked me about the heart. So, I’ll bring it up right now.

There’s been a lot of talk about biohacking so that you can be a kickass 100-year-old. There was a bestselling book from the New York Times bestseller list, which deserved to be there because it’s the best book I’ve ever read on anti-aging. It’s called “Outlive” by Peter Attia. And Peter Attia’s… The meme that he’s created is this kickass 100-year-old. So, what is a kickass 100-year-old? That’s what he thinks we all want to be like, which probably is true. We want to be a kickass 100-year-old, and we want to get to 100 and not be in a nursing home. That’s basically what he’s saying.

So, Peter Attia is also a mathematician, and he’s also very, very direct about his data. So, he looked at the human body and how we deteriorate over the decades. And he figured, “Okay, we lose this much muscle mass. Therefore, we will have to train these muscles in our 50s. We lose this much stability and this much balance. So, we’re going to have to do this for balance and this for…” And you get these young guys doing the ice baths because they’re adrenals… All in the service of how do I live to 100 and be, as he says, a kickass 100-year-old, which doesn’t mean you’re running marathons. It means you can lift two grocery bags out of the car and you can maybe put a 15-ton bag in the overhead compartment of the airlines, you know, function, happy, play with your grandkids, right? So, that’s a great goal.

So, these researchers said, “That’s a great goal. Why don’t we go ask some kickass 100-year-olds what they do?” This is great. He made Excel spreadsheets of his workout and the things he does. And it’s great. That’s all wonderful. I’m not saying we should do all those things, but it would be interesting to know what the people who have succeeded at this goal actually did and what they do, right? So, the researchers went to Sardania, which is one of the five blue zones, but it happens to be the blue zone in which there is the highest population of 100-year-old men in the world and not 100-year-old men who are being fed through a tube. They’re shepherds and they’re walking around. And they’re in the town square and they’re 100-year-old, largest number. And they go and they observe them to see what lessons we can learn from it. Is it taking more ice baths? Is it more supplements? Is it lowering our cholesterol? What was their secret?

And they came away with three lessons, three lessons observed from the longest living 100-year-old men in the world. And you have to take these with a little bit of a grain of salt. There’s a little humor in them, but you can extrapolate from these lessons to everyday life. Lesson number three, it’s a list of three and number one is with a bullet. Number three was live where there’s lots of stairs. You ever seen anybody who’s ever watched “White Lotus” second season that was filmed in Sardinia? Take a look at the mountains. You can’t walk out of your house for a quart of milk without walking 10,000 steps. So, the lesson of that is walk or just move. I don’t even know if they have gyms there. They just walk. They just move.

Lesson number two, what do they do all day? Now we all know that we observe… I mean, you of all people, we all know at the health coaching institute, all the people who are students, we all know that we are absorbing information all the time. And if you’re a cop, an emergency medical technician, you are seeing things, stuff’s getting into you and your compassion, whatever, the dangers of being… those things rewire your brain. We know that. So, now let’s look at what these guys do all day. First of all, they live in Italy, in Sardinia, the most gorgeous… When you’re absorbing information from nature all the time, that’s why there’s a system of psychotherapy called ecotherapy, because that is information that’s coming in about balance and harmony and eternity. It’s just all coming in.

So, what do these guys do all day? They go out in the hills with sheep. So, they spend time in the most beautiful hills in the world with the most docile, sweet animals that ever lived. What do you think that does to their nervous system? And we know that all healing takes place in parasympathetic mode and none of us live there. Well, these guys live there. So, number two lesson was spend as much time as you can around sweet docile animals. And you can extrapolate that any way you want to. We all know what that means.

But here’s the number one lesson. And this is like number one with a bullet and they say, what’s the most important thing in real estate? They say, well, three things, location, location… This is the location of long and healthy lives. You ready? Make family and friends your number one priority. End of story. That was the biggest predictor. That was the thing that went with it. And that’s been confirmed in the research with the Harvard Happiness Study, which is going on for generations, started in 1936. They’re following families of people looking at their endpoints, what they die of, when they get sick, if they get sick, what they get sick from, what their happiness scores are on a million different tests, the Hamilton Depression, whatever they use, you’re figuring it out, right? And guess what comes up as the number one predictor of a long life and a healthy life? Social connections, family and friends.

Dr. Sandi: Could not agree more. And we are launching a functional nutrition course. And you are part of the faculty for that. And we have a lot in that course devoted to sharing meals, eating together and being surrounded by family and friends and the importance of that, which is really outweighing actually what you’re eating. And it is eating together and enjoying a meal that is with family or enjoying other activities is critical. And so thank you for sharing that. And I think these are things that intuitively make sense, but we get so off track and think that again, we want to micromanage through biohacking, things that could be important, but thank you for sharing that, because I think it is really critical.

Jonny: Thank you. I’ll tell you something that Dr. Guarneri, who you just mentioned, Mimi Guarneri, one of the greatest integrative cardiologists in the country, certainly one of the greatest, said at that conference and she threw it out tongue in cheek, but she said, “I’m not so sure that zip code isn’t going to turn out to be a better risk predictor than apoB.” ApoB, by the way, if you don’t know, it’s a very sophisticated and very important measure of cardiovascular health, better than cholesterol, so what she’s saying basically. And they’re now putting zip code into the risk calculators, where age, weight, sex, do you smoke, where do you live. And it’s not just what some people might cynically think, “Well, yeah, if they live in the rich neighborhoods,” well, there’s some of that because there’s greater access to medical care and things like that and better… But it’s a proxy for what kind of social connections you have and what kind of community and what kind of environment.

I vaguely remember from educational psychology classes in my master’s program that there were some correlations between the number of books in the house and how well the kid did in school, just the environment. They wouldn’t read the books at five years old, but they were surrounded by books and words and how many words the mother used. These environmental things, they matter. And we have gone so silo in our… Let’s get our cholesterol right. Let’s get our blood sugar right. Don’t get me wrong. I wear a CGM. I care about blood sugar. I tell people about it. But what I’m saying is I’m calling for a little bit of a corrective. And let’s look at this side of the equation. Let’s put this into the equation a little bit more.

And not only just the family and friends things, just stuff like sleep. When I talk to people about sleep and I do it in webinars and show them what it influences, actually the thing that gets their attention the most is when I show them what it does to their weight. Then they all pay attention. I don’t care what it does to their brain and, “Oh wait, it makes me fat?” “Yeah, it makes you fat.” And people don’t look at those connections. It’s easier to sell pills. We’ll talk about diets and all of which, folks, please, they’re important. But you got this thing right underneath… You come in. But here’s a great example. And I’ll bet you every health folks listening to this has had a client who came in and said, “I don’t have any energy. What can I take for energy? I need something for energy.” So, here’s the deal with that. Trying to get energy is like trying to grab water, right? You can’t get more energy from something. What you can do, same as with water, is you can create a condition like this where the water will stay. You can’t grab it, but you can create a condition where it will appear naturally when it comes from the faucet. You don’t have to teach a two-year-old about energy. You don’t have to teach my five-year-old dog about energy. They come out of the box with energy. So, I look at that energy issue not as what do I got to take for it. I look at it like a fish bowl. You don’t clean out the fish bowl. Well, guess what? The fish poop and everything gets in. Now you have this cloudy water and you’re going, “What can I take for dirty water?” “Clean the tank and keep the water clean.”

So, what gets in the way of that energy? Number one with the bullet is people aren’t sleeping and they come and they’re, “You think I’m allergic to this? You think I have this? I need something for energy.” “How many hours did you sleep and how good was it?”

Dr. Sandi: And now we can track it. We can wear our…

Jonny: Your REM sleep. Yeah, you can track it. And I think they’re getting them… When I bought this, they were the only game in town and they were like 300 bucks, which I think they still are, but I think they’re coming up with better and better ones. The wearables, you’ll be able to get on a $50 Fitbit. Use those. I thought I was sleeping great till I got this.

Dr. Sandi: I know. Yeah, it’s a wonderful market. Well, Jonny, this has been such an incredible conversation and it is always a delight to be with you. Where can people find you?

Jonny: I’m so easy. My name at Gmail, @jonnybowden on Instagram. J-O-N-N-Y, just don’t spell it with an H. And I do one-on-one… I did want to just tell you what my… Maybe some people will think this is something to aspire to maybe at some point. I didn’t like to do coaching. So, I started out in the ’90s as a nutritionist in the Equinox, and I was good at that and working with the food diaries and talking to them about nutrient intake and teaching them about the diets. I didn’t really like doing it.

As the years went on, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one who was starting to feel this way. A lot of my most esteemed colleagues that I grew up with, we were all trainers and nutritionists, were like, “I don’t want to look at another food diary.” I want to talk to them about why they can’t break through whatever the thing was that was keeping them from being able to eat the waste. They began to see it as part of a larger complex of behavior, and glass ceilings, and self-imposed limitations, and toxic relationships, and gut issues, and sleep issues. Tell me how many calories are in your breakfast. I want to help your life. And I want to help you through nutrition, but I can’t separate that. That’s like treating your right hand and leaving… I mean, we got to look at this as how it all talks to each other. That’s what functional medicine is about. How does the left hand talk?

So, what I noticed is more and more of them were becoming more of what we would call motivational speakers. And JJ Virgin, a perfect example, or Dr. Jade Teta, or people like that, who are much more integrative in terms of they go on retreats, they do all kinds of things, because they know that these things are all related. You just don’t take a life that’s filled with toxins and miserable relationships and undersleeping, bad digestion and say, “Okay, now you’re going to eat healthy and you’re going to put…” No, it’s a lot of things. A lot of moving parts have got to work. And so I didn’t really like doing it. I like talking to clients. I like what we’re doing. And I liked teaching people how to do the day-to-day stuff and giving them the overview and motivating.

A few years ago, I decided I was to take on some clients. I don’t want a practice of five or six clients. Colleagues who do that, I love them. They’re wonderful. It’s not for me. But I didn’t mind working with selected clients who really wanted what I have. So, I designed a coaching… It’s on a program. It’s what I do with coaching and I designed it to be exactly what I love to do. And I think that’s what a lot of people would like. So, I see people for one session. It’s not that easy to find me. I’m on Instagram, but you’ve got to make the effort to… It’s not like I’m out there advertising. And then when they get to the page, there’s a two-minute video. Let me manage your expectations. This is what I don’t do, and this is what I do. And I tell them, “If you’re looking for someone to go through your food diary, that’s not me.” There are wonderful dietitians who do that. And I tell them every single thing in your life is fair game for what we’re going to talk about. We can start with your cholesterol, we can talk about nutrition, but wherever it’s going to go, it’s going to go. And we’re going to look at, from the model of everything that you do is related to everything else that you feel, that you think, that you feel that your body is doing, what you think about affects your immune system. Whole science of that called psychoneuroimmunology, meaning that what you think about affects everything.

The people who come to me are expecting and signed on to that. And then I have these amazing sessions with these mostly extraordinary clients who find me and we literally talk about their lives. I had one guy come who had gained all this weight. And he had a fairly successful life, everything was going well, he had a girlfriend, all this was great and he was really fit and he ate the right foods. And then, oh, he broke up with the girlfriend and then everything crashed, and he stopped going to the gym. He didn’t get past that minute. I said, “Tell me about the girlfriend.” Twenty minutes later, when he’s in tears and we’re talking… I felt like the psychiatrist in Portnoy’s complained at the end of the book. This is now perhaps we may begin with a German accent.

And now we’re getting to something. And what did you make of that? And what did that do? He called me six months after because I don’t… I make follow-ups available, but I don’t push them. I don’t disappear from their lives. They’re available. But my model is a one-time strategy evaluation of everything—nutrition, your diet, all that. So, I didn’t expect to hear from my… I heard from him six months later. He had gone back to the gym, he lost the weight, and he told me that was the most impactful hour that he had spent. And it was mostly talking about his mother.

So, what I’m saying is I can’t do that under insurance. They won’t reimburse me for that, nor do I expect them. And a dietician won’t do that. And maybe a psychologist won’t do that until he’s… I don’t know, but I designed it so that’s what I do. I think that someone labors in the fields enough and does it the way it’s supposed to be done and learns the ropes and evolves, that eventually you can design a practice that is as fulfilling as my very part-time practices to me.

Dr. Sandi: I love that. Well, thank you for sharing that story, sharing your coaching model, sharing so much wisdom. It is always a delight to be with you. Thank you so much.

Jonny: It’s a pleasure to be with you. I love what you’re doing at the Functional Medicine Health Coaching Academy. I’m really very proud to be. It’s on my bio now, faculty member. I really support that. Thank you so much.