For many, the decision to vaccinate children 5-12yo is not an easy one. Host Amelia Phillips discusses the major concerns with physician journalist Dr Norman Swan. Concerns such as long term impacts on health and fertility, efficacy of the vaccine and severity of Covid are unpacked. They also discuss top findings in Dr Swans book ‘So you think you know what’s good for you’ covering major health trends and concerns from diet to coffee, screentime, psychedelics and so much more.
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
When it came to getting myself vaccinated, whilst I asked lots of questions, I felt pretty strongly that it was the right thing to do, not just to protect me, but also my local community. Deciding though to vaccinate my four young kids who are age between nine and four has not been so easy. And I know I’m not alone.
I’ve had so many moms express their concerns to me in person over dm, and I can just sense a higher level of vaccine hesitancy out there when it comes to giving our kids the covid jab. So who can we speak to that we respect and trust to get to the bottom of this tricky topic?
This is Healthy Her with Amelia Phillips. Dr. Norman Swan is a multi award-winning producer, broadcaster, and physician journalist. He hosts two popular podcasts, the Health Report and Corona Cast, which won a Walkley award last year. He’s one of Australia’s most trusted doctors appearing regularly in the media to help disseminate the large amount of confusing health research.
He’s pulled a lot of that research into a fascinating and very entertaining guide, so you think you know what’s good for you. It covers all the major health trends and concerns from diet, to sex, to screens, and so much more. Dr. Norman, it is such a privilege to speak to you today. My pleasure, Amelia. Now I’ve got so much I wanna talk to you about with such an incredible career that you’ve had and your amazing book.
But I do wanna kick off with Covid kids vaccines specifically, because to me you’ve become a beacon of sound advice throughout all of this, and I know that many parents are genuinely torn about what to do regarding vaccinating their kids. So I’d just love to know your thoughts and your standpoint on whether we should be vaccinating our young children.
So I should preface what I’m about to say with this is that in the dimon distant past before I became a journalist, I was, uh, training to be a pediatrician. So children’s medicine is, uh, my first love and I, and, and what I have some training in, and I’ve got my British qualifications in pediatrics.
Although I went into broadcasting in Australia before I got finished off my Australian training. So I don’t call myself a pedia. But I trained in pediatrics, so that’s a bit of background in addition to journalism. So I understand parents having the highest priority for their children and thinking hard and long about what?
How they feed their children when they put ’em to bed. Yeah. Exercise, intellectual stimulation, all those things. It’s exhausting. , It is 100% exhausting and it’s all worth doing, and none of it is to be dec. So let’s just talk about Covid immunization cuz it’s new. Yeah. And anything that’s new creates anxiety because you wondered is it so new that we just don’t know how it’s gonna work and we should just hang on and so on.
So lemme just give you the evidence and some of the myths about these vaccines plays. Do the commonest. About these vaccines, and I’m putting aside the mad stuff, you know, that it’s 5G and you know, somebody’s trying to implant, uh, Bill Gates is dumbing us down, you know, well, all that sort of thing. So just putting that to one side.
Yeah. But most parents have very sensible concerns, which need to be addressed, and I think they can be addressed. And I’ll try and do that now. So the commonest thing that you hear is that these vaccines have been rush. And that, you know, they, and because they’ve been rushed, I just wanna hang on here a little bit.
Now it’s actually not true. That they’ve been rushed. If you go back several years and just go with me on this because it explains why they’ve not been rushed and how they’ve not been rushed. Mm-hmm. is that people like Bill Gates and others philanthropists who are concerned about world health and people who knew what they were talking about, were expecting a pandemic.
Yeah. This pandemic was not a surprise to people who knew what they were talking about, but when they looked. At how prepared we were for the next pandemic, they said, Well, we’re not very well prepared for it. And in particular, we’re not prepared in terms of developing a vaccine, cuz when we get a new pandemic, it’s gonna be a vaccine and treatments that are gonna get us out of it.
And we’re not ready for that. So this is several years ago. Wow. I did not know that. So what they did was they set up a competition they call a challenge between different researchers around the world and the challenge. Come up with a vaccine technology. So in other words, a way of developing a vaccine that could produce a new vaccine to a virus you’ve never seen before within 16 weeks.
That was the challenge and. Four vaccine technologies won it. And this is long before the pending? Yeah. Yep. And one was mRNA, so that’s what’s in Moderna and Pfizer. Yeah. Another was called Viral Vector, which you use a harmless virus to get the genetic message inside the body. That’s Astra and the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which we don’t have in Australia.
Another was a vaccine technology, which was developed at the University of Queensland, which unfortunately fell by the wayside. It didn’t. There were problems with it, and there was a fourth one as well. So essentially, when this pandemic hit, thanks to that competition, there were several vaccine technologies ready to.
Had they been tested over a long period of time, which is I think what most layman people are concerned about, we give it to our kids now. What’s the impact gonna be in 10 years time? I’ll come to that in a moment. That’s a very good question. Okay, so the viral vector, the Astra one has been tested in previous ways, largely one of the ones was Ebola.
So they’ve, they’ve tried it out in the field before with different virus. The mRNA is true. There’s no been no experience of mRNA prior to this. So the vaccines were then developed and they produced vaccines very specific to the coronavirus within a matter of weeks because that’s what they were set up to do.
And then everything went quickly from there because we’re in the pandemic. So normally when you develop a new vaccine, it takes you forever. To actually develop it, because you gotta recruit people, you gotta wait until they’re infected, and then you gotta analyze the results. But there was no problem in recruiting people because there were unfortunately tens of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people infected.
So there was lots of people that you could recruit and there were being exposed to the virus. So let’s imagine you’re, you’re developing a new virus to chicken pox. You gotta wait till people have been naturally infected with chicken pots that can take years. So anyway, long story short, within a few months they had enough people who’d been infected naturally to know that they were worked and that they were safe.
Now, what has happened since then, which has never happened in the history of vaccines, so it never happened in the vaccines that children get. It never happened with any of the drugs that you might be taking yourself, uh, for prescription. Nothing to do with Covid is that after these vaccines were, you know, given to people we’ve been monitoring or people have been monitoring them in large populations of people and so billions of these doses of vaccine have been given with unprecedented scrutiny.
Now, never in the history of vaccines have new problems are arise. After about six months. Uh, see that’s really interesting. That’s a really powerful point. So within six months, you know what the problems are, and now we know what the problems are with billions of people had the vaccine. So we know that with older adolescent male, like 16, 17 year olds and to maybe 20.
Sometimes females, they can get a heart inflammation with the mRNA vaccine, which can make ’em a bit sick, but it’s self-limiting. In other words, you get better from it, but that’s rare. It’s like one in 50,000 doses. I was just about to say. And we know that that incidence of myocarditis is a lot higher if they contracted covid.
So the incidence is a lot lower. And the vaccinated, if you haven’t been vaccinated, the incidence is a lot higher. Hugely, and we just covered that in CORAs the other day, which is that 12 months after you’ve had a Covid 19 infection, the incidents, you’ve got about five times the risk of myocarditis compared to not having had the vaccine.
Yeah. So we, we know what those risks are and we also know that the younger you are, the less the risk. So that risk of myocarditis becomes lower and lower and lower now. So when you come to young children, so young children, five to 11 years old, So we know that in adolescents and adults, we know exactly what the problems are.
The mRNA does not interfere with the basic genetics of the person. In other words, you’re not manipulating your core genetics, it’s simply doing what the virus does. So if you get infected with covid, The virus goes into your cell. It’s a very dirty process with the virus, and it takes over the cell, say in your respiratory tract, in your gut, and it tells the cell to produce more virus.
That’s what happens when you get infected. It’s a genetic process. Yeah. Now what happens with the vaccine? Is that they just take the tiniest little bit of genetic material, so it’s not the virus at all. They’ve synthetically produced the little bit of the spike protein, which is the bit that joins with yourselves, so there’s no virus there at all.
It’s just that little bit of a component and it goes into your cell. To tell the body to produce this spike protein. So compared to the virus, it’s a much cleaner process and it doesn’t affect the core genetics, It doesn’t turn, doesn’t mutate, doesn’t cause cancer. Cuz if the vaccine were to say cause cancer, the virus would cause cancer.
And one of the things that Coronavirus does not do, it’s not a cancer causing virus. There are cancer causing viruses like Hepatitis B and uh, Epstein Bar and other viruses, but coronaviruses do not cause cancer. Another concern I’ve heard as well from moms is the spike protein being present in sex organs.
So the impact on our daughter’s fertility in the future, and whether it’s founded or not, you know, there’s talk about. So that’s a myth which has been disproven. Okay. It, it comes from spurious research, which suggested that some of the molecules on the spike protein are similar to some of the molecules in the uterus, and that you could get cross reaction with the uterus.
And what they’ve shown is, You know, and there’s been reports of menstrual changes and reports of infertility and saying, Oh, the the problem. And when they’ve studied the alleged menstrual problems, they’ve not panned out, They’ve just not been real. And when they’ve studied the effects on infertility, they’ve now been some very intensive studies, particularly in Israel where they’ve got a lot of experience of the Pfizer vaccine.
There have been no effects on fertility. I think it was a rat study, wasn’t it? And only one study. And when you’ve looked at it in humans, Yep. It has. It’s not panned out anything. There’s just been no reproductive effects of the vaccine and in fact, with the virus. And so our guide here is the whole virus, cuz the virus, you’re getting massive doses of the spike protein.
Just remember that massive doses. So if there was gonna be a problem with the vaccine, there’d be a problem with the virus, right? And for all the problems that coronavirus causes. Fertility problems are not part of it. So yeah, it can cause dementia and brain inflammation. Heart inflammation. Cause gut problems can cause long covid, but there’s no sign of fertility problems if you catch covid 19.
So not only when they study it specifically, are they not finding any fertility problems with the vaccine. When you get the dirty virus and you get the whole virus with squillions of Sprite protein in your body, you know, and you get Covid 19 disease. It does not seem to affect your fertility, which is good news for people who have actually caught the virus.
Yeah. So the vaccine is highly unlikely to do it since all the vaccine is, is a tiny little bit of the virus. So then what about just the simple fact of the reduced symptom severity in kids? So, You know, parents are saying, Well, kind of what’s the point? Because, and, and I can say that I had Covid a couple of months ago and my youngest, my three year old at the time was the only other person in the family.
She and I got it together that I’ve been, you know, double vaed at the time, not boosted. And she obviously at three has not been vaccinated yet and had extremely mild symptoms. So what about that argument that, you know, it’s a bit of a nothing anyway to kids, so why bother getting them vaccin? So, again, that’s not a silly question.
It’s a, it’s a good question to ask and each parent’s gonna have to make up their own minds about this. The argument I proposed for this and why I would get my five year old, you can’t get four year olds immunized at the moment, but I’d get my five year old immunized. Mm-hmm. of these, first of all, Whilst it’s absolutely dominant that you get a mild disease, and kids generally don’t get problems.
There are some who do, and yet some who do have other problems like obesity and other developmental problems. But there are some kids who are entirely normal who get problems, and there are kids who get long covid. After a mild disease and they’re feeling sick and under the weather and not, And the other thing that I’d be concerned about is Aron is milder than Delta.
It’s not a particularly mild virus. It’s probably about the same level of Yeah. Severity as the original virus. The next virus that comes along will not necessarily be milder. There’s a myth around, yes, I heard about this myth because I was thinking, Oh, isn’t that what viruses do? They start out pretty nasty and then they become, you know, they slowly get milder and become endemic and then you dispelled that myth.
Everybody’s talking about endemic and how endemic we can relax. Well, small parks was em. Malarias are endemic. You know, there are lots of endemic diseases that are really nasty that you don’t want to get. So endemic just means it’s everywhere all the time and it’s always around, and coronavirus is probably already endemic.
And then when you get a new variant for a new variant to appear, it’s gotta be more contagious. So the next, if it takes over from amn, it’ll be more contagious than amn. But whether or not it’s more or less virulent, in other words, more or less nasty, is kind of a random thing. And it could be less, it could be the same or it could be more.
And the other reason, so that’s the other reason I would be getting my five year old immunized, is you don’t know what’s around the corner. Yep. And even if the next one is a bit more immune evasive, in other words, VA more vaccine resistant, the vaccines will cover you. Better than the natural infection.
So what they’ve shown with Aron, for example, you know a lot of people are saying, Oh well look, let’s cys let it rib and I’ll let my cat child get it and then I can relax. What the evidence shows is if you’ve add Aron, what that’s good for is protecting you against a second Aron infection. Right. But not an infection from another variant.
Ah, really? Where Yeah. Whereas. Vaccine is much better at predicting you, again, severe disease from new variants. I mean, things could change in the future. Yeah. Yeah. So I’d want my five year old to be as best protected as they can. Going into the future, and surely if more of society are protected by vaccinations, then there’s gonna be hopefully less mutations of the virus cuz there’s less viral load out there.
And also less opportunity for us to give it to our vulnerable community members, our grandparents, immunosuppressed, et cetera. Couldn’t have said it better myself. And what happens when you’ve had two vaccine? So it turns out that kids get very good antibody response, even with a very lo, and it’s a very low dose.
It’s a third of the dose of Pfizer, so it’s a very low dose of Pfizer. They get a good immune response. Kids immune systems work really well. It’s good protection against infection, not just the severe disease, but infection for quite a few weeks afterwards. And eventually they’ll get boosters and that will give you even better.
So you’re right there is. Level, even if it’s not a hundred percent, even if it’s 40 or 50% protection against infection, as time goes on, that’s still half. The transmission of infection that you would otherwise get? Yeah. Okay. Um, where would a mom go or a parent go if they wanna just ask more questions?
Where would you recommend they head to? The government’s got good vaccine information. You could look up a targe, A T A G I, which is the advisory group on immunization. They’ve got a FAQs there. The government has two A target, you know, goes on the evidence. So there, there’s good FAQs there. Yeah, that’s probably the most reliable.
And to be honest, I just love listening to your health report and Corona cast because every week you pretty much answer the questions that are ing around in my head. So definitely head over there. And just outta curiosity, have you found yourself caught in the middle of the vaccine debate? Like, do you receive much public commentary, whether it’s, you know, have you been in a Twitter war or counseled by anyone?
How have you found it being on the frontline? Oh, if you look at my Twitter feed, the trolls are out having a go at me, and I’ve just stopped reading them. I just, I, I just stopped looking at them because the moms and dads, particularly the moms that you’re, you talk to are not anti Xers. No. They’ve been immunized themselves and their kids have been immunized against whooping cough, measles, moms, rubella, you know, the, the, all the kids are top top because they care about the kids and because they care about the kids, they’re asking these questions, so they’re not anti-vaxxers.
The anti-vaxxers are a tiny. Minority. Yeah. In Australia, it’s probably three or 4% of the population. They just are very noisy. It, it amazed me when I saw how quickly 95% of New South Wales became double vax. I was like, Oh, wow, okay. There’s not as many , not as many anti-vaxxers out there as I thought there was, and some are reserved because they, they were, they were waiting on Novavax.
Now that the Novavax is available, cuz they might have had a heart inflammation in the past and so on, you’ll find that 95% going up even higher now that Novavax is becoming available. It’s not yet available for kids and it’s gonna be a while before it is. But, um, so you, it’ll just go right up the number of people who are truly vaccine anti-vax, who will never have it as tiny in Australia.
Yeah, we’re a good vaccination nation.
You know, Dr. Norman, you have had such an amazing career. You’re born in Scotland. I can still hear it in your voice there. You’ve completed your medical degree, as you mentioned, specializing in pediatrics and then moving into radio broadcasts. You do have the, uh, voice for it. Some people say, I’ve got the face for it, so I I wasn’t gonna say that.
I was not gonna say that. But you are also awarded the gold walkley. 88 for revealing scientific fraud conducted by gynecologist William McBride and another Walkley last year. You overachieve a you , but what I love about you, your, your ability to investigate, to ask the tough questions and to get to the truth is incredible.
So tell me with your book, why did you decide to write so you think you know what’s good for you? Look, the main, the main reason I wrote the book is that in all the years, by the way, I was only 12 when I got the Gold Walk in 1988 in just in case you . Wow. Anti aging’s really working well for you. It is working well.
Yeah. That’s my, that’s my next book by the way, is how to live Younger longer and get rid of the bullshit. Oh, I will a hundred percent get you back to how to live longer. Younger, yes, please. Yeah. Yeah. So, and it’s aimed at the 30 to 40 age group, and this book, by the way, is also aimed at the 30 to 40 years group.
Oh, I just scraped in there. 42. Yeah. Yeah. Just a millennial . And I’d been given a lot of talks for various reasons, complicated reasons. But anyway, a lot of talks to millennials about health and highly informed group. They’re not smoking as much. You know, the previous generations not drinking as much.
They’re not using about new drugs Totally into nutrition and so on, and lots of questions and not knowing where to go for reliable answers. Yes. So I knew what interested that group and I knew they were under informed, not their fault, but because there was so much noise around in the system, we were confused as to what was reliable information.
Yeah. And I knew also that if I, if I were to follow those themes, Older people, and indeed younger people would read it as well, because everybody’s interested in those themes. So as you said in your intro, it’s sex, drugs, rock and roll, how you eat, how you exercise. Game of Thrones was thrown in there as well.
I’m like, if you’re referencing Game of Thrones, you are like, so in my camp also, the other reason for writing it is that as long as I’ve been in broadcasting, I’ve been sick to death of most health books. Yeah. So most, most health books, you pick them off the shelf and they offer a really simple solution.
To what you know yourself is a really complicated story. Yeah. So your health and wellbeing Yeah. Is really complicated. And if only, and they treat you like a fool. Mm. They say, you know, they don’t say you’ve been an idiot, but they kind of imply, Yeah. You know, if only you’d been eating goji bees all your life, your life would be transformed
So, you know, why don’t, And here’s 17 recipes with Goji Bear. And you’re gonna live forever or whatever, and you know, just pick your theme. Yeah. And everybody’s offering you Yeah. A simple way to do it. And most of it, it’s not quite bullshit. It’s, it is part of the story. And you know, what is the whole story?
Because that’s what people are into and they know intuitively is it’s, look, it’s my whole body and you can’t just treat a part of my body. You gotta treat it all. And there are lots of myth. And also we’re very, At Medicalizing the normal. So there’s a third reason for writing it. So for one is to burst the bubble of traditional health books and treat you like an adult.
Yeah. And not tell you what to do. Offer you the evidence and you make your choice about what you do. And you pick and choose. And the third reason is that one of these things, these books do, but also a lot of the, the news about healthy that you hear every. Is they making you anxious about stuff you shouldn’t be anxious about?
Yeah. Yep. You’re suddenly eating, eating some bread and you feel like it’s the wrong thing to do and maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. And it fills you with this sense of doubt that then makes you question, you know, what, how you are brought up and what should you do, and it’s a horrible way to live.
That’s right. So sleep. Classic example, we’ve been told we need seven or eight hours sleep a night, I get six hours. I’ve been told I’m gonna get dementia. So you, I reckon you’ve got a, you’ve got an epidemic of insomnia because people are anxious about having insomnia. They’re not sleeping cuz they’re not sleeping.
That’s right. And it turns out that, in fact, when you look at the evidence is sleep duration is not the issue. It’s actually the quality of sleep that you get. So if you, you could get the. Sleep therapy and there’s some very good sleep therapy out there, and what it does is it consolidates your sleep and you get a better night’s sleep.
But if you’re a six hour a night sleeper and you get sleep therapy, you’re still a six hour a night sleeper. Yeah. It’s just that you have a better night’s sleep and so thirst. How many people have got a bottle of water on their table and they’ve been told, I’ve gotta drink guzzle, all these lit of water, forgetting that we’ve got this thing called thirst.
Yes. If you’re very elderly and frail and you’ve got a bit of cognitive impairment, you forget to drink. But for most of us, we’ve got thirst. Ethiopian marathon runners are at their fastest. When they’re 2% dehydrated. Interesting. Dehydrated and elite athletes are taught not to over drink. So when you’re on a marathon, it used to be you gotta stop at every drink table and have a drink.
That slowed them down and some of them got water toxicity, and now if you’re an elite athlete, you drink to thirst. And also these health books are so serious, so I want to get rid of the anxieties. You don’t need to have, I want to give people a laugh. Bit of a memoir. Yeah. Silly stories about me and the sort of mistakes I’ve made in life.
Well, you have had a fascinating life and I just implore anyone to read it, just to learn about your life, your near death experiences, and how you’ve had such an interesting career through medicine into journalism, even some theater in there. Dr. Norman, I wanna throw some questions at you as we’re wrapping up just a.
Of the ones that I know my listeners would be curious to have your thoughts on. Okay. The big one, you’re gonna have to answer this relatively quickly, so , I dunno if you can, what’s the best way to lose weight? ? Eat less and move more . Funny that isn’t it really? Yeah. And don’t be begar by fasting. You gotta even it out during the day.
You gotta eat an even diet. Lots of plants, not too much meat. And just get those portions down and increase your level of activity, and it will slowly come off. The first half of my career, I was at all my clients to eat breakfast, eat breakfast, eat breakfast, and now evidence. Is shifting on that. So to skip breakfast, To eat breakfast, your thoughts?
So there’s a little bit of evidence that if you skip breakfast as an adult, you must never do it as a child or adolescent because it reduces school performance. Yep. There’s a little bit of evidence. You eat fewer calories during the day, but in fact, for muscle synthesis, Uh, if you’re getting exercise, you want to even your protein intake during the day, which means you don’t skip breakfast.
So it’s not just about losing weight. If you lose weight, 20 to 40% of the weight loss is muscle mass, which you don’t want. Exactly. And if you lose weight through time, restricted feeding, which is not eating till midday, like intermittent fasting is, is an example of that. Yeah, yeah. Respecting that, the evidence suggests that 65 to 70% of.
Weight loss is muscle mass. Yeah. Okay. So be careful what you wish for. You know, the balance of evidence is stick with breakfast and just reduce your portions during the day. Yep. And spread your protein throughout the day. Yep. The challenge I have with that is that in the world that we live in right now, reducing portion sizes is very challenging.
Most people are eating out at least one or two meals per day. So if you’re someone out there that finds it hard to reduce your portion size, You know, if the food’s put down in front of you, you just hoover it all up. Then maybe there is something to be said about having a brunch in the mid-morning and then an early dinner and a little snack in between or something like that.
Just avoid the extremes. Yeah. Bottled water. Bottled filtered water, or straight from the tap. Straight from the tap. It’s got fluoride in it preserves your. What about all the toxins that are going to cause cancer? Um, I’m not aware of any in, in the Australian water supply. If I was living in China where 300 million people are drinking contaminated water from industrial sources, then yes.
But in Australia, no. I mean, we’re mostly drinking water that’s, um, fallen into dams. Well treated and fun fact for you, pregnant or breastfeeding mums out there. When you drink tap water, uh, the fluoride gets into the breast milk, which then enters your baby, which then helps to strengthen up their teeth, budds that aren’t even fully formed yet, which I thought was absolutely amazing.
That’s right. And in un fluoridated areas in Australia, you, you’ve got things that you, you’ve got kids who are having dental clearances at the age of eight, which dental surgeons don’t see in cities where you’ve got fluoridation. There are parts of Australia where there’s dental, there’s no dental fluoridation.
Yeah. And you just get very unfortunate mouths in these kids. Interesting coffee. How much of a good thing can we have? Never too much. That’s my drug , isn’t it? Like you can have up to four cups a day. That’s, you know, before it starts, have any kind of impact on you. Um, look, I I think the main impact is does it meet you jittery and a bit more anxious?
And if it does, you just gotta cut it back. I just don’t drink coffee after midday. But the, um, the, the evidence is now overwhelming that coffee is the balance, is that it’s good for you. So how many cups did you have yesterday? I have two to three shots a day. Oh, that’s okay. It keeps you sharp alcohol.
Give it to me straight up on ice. with a little, Yeah. Twist. A twist with a little twist of lemon. Twist of orange. Look, it’s not true that there’s a sweet spot where. Alcohol’s really good for you. The more you drink, the more harm there potentially is. So if you are pregnant or wanting to conceive, you should just stop drinking for that period of time because there’s strong evidence and it’s in the book, by the way.
And since. So you think you know what’s good for you about the evidence if you do drink? Because it’s disturbing information that women who drink during pregnancy not. It, it might change the brain of the baby. And when you look at them when they’re nine or 10 years old, these are kids who go to the table and wanna start sipping alcohol.
It’s quite disturbing information. What there’s a correlation between drinking during pregnancy and, and what’s called sipping. Sipping in children who are. Preadolescent, what’s the mechanism behind that? Is it nature nurture? Is it, do we know? Well, nobody know. Nobody knows. You know, it’s possible that you’re in a family where alcohol’s more, more of a, more around.
But, but, but they think it’s also, they’ve tried to control for that. And this is a large study, about 10,000 kids and, um, they think it’s some, you know, there may be subtle brain changes, so just gotta be careful. So, none at all. What about the French philosophy of, you know, you start drinking as teenagers and then you have a balance approach as opposed to us binging bogan.
You know, that’s a myth. When you introduce alcohol early, you’re increasing the risk of abnormal drinking patterns later on. And that’s true in France and Italy as well as it is here. They don’t have, in, in some ways, they have as many drinking alcohol problems as we do, if not more. The thing here is if you enjoy alcohol, you, you should just enjoy it in moderation.
It’s good social lubricant. A couple of standard drinks a day, no more than four, that’s fine. And you’re gonna minimize any, any problem there. For people who are in their late fifties on, it’s a real problem. They have not stopped drinking or cut it back, and they don’t have the brain reserve anymore for drinking.
And once you’re 55, 60 years old, you should really be cutting back to, uh, one or two drinks a day. But many are not, and they’re drinking too much and it’s gonna speed up their, accelerate them towards dementia. That’s the risk they take. Interesting. Have you started to look into psychedelics or, you know, uh, some of the, I guess, legalizing of marijuana in America and things like that?
Have you, you know, done any research? People can find it on the Health Report website. I’ve done a long interview with Michael Pollen who wrote Changing Your Mind, which was his investigation of psychedelics. So there’s something. And there’s good evidence for people who are terminally ill that it really, if you but to, to work the si.
So there’s, the question is, does microdosing work? And that’s controversial, but where it does seem to work is where you’ve had the full-blown psychedelic experience where Which is kind of out of body. Yeah. Particularly guided psycho, psycho psychedelic experience. Yeah. And if you’ve had that full blown experience, it seems to reset the brain.
And help depression and help with things like people who are distressed with and are terminally ill. So there’s something going on there and thankfully more research is being done and something is happening there and people are doing, you know, they’re off to ISHKA weekends and yeah, they’re the.
They’re taking mushrooms. I think for a lot of parents, if there was, you know, the thought of doing something illegal and not regulated and dangerous for some parents, they’re just not willing to, you know, put themselves under that risk when they’ve got families. But at the same time, you know, a lot of parents are looking for that outlet, that circuit breaker, and.
You know, if only there was a way that you could get some of these psychedelics legalized or regulated in some way. Because, you know, as we get older, Yeah, I think it’s gonna come. Yeah, I do. What’s your timeframe? What’s your prediction? Five years, 10 years? I have no idea. Yeah. I’ve stopped making timeframes on, on new things arising, but if you are doing it illegally, you should really do it with a good guy.
It’s somebody who’s experienced. Don’t do it by yourself and probably choose a short acting psychedelic rather than such as lsd. What Well, Sila Sabin, which is magic Mushrooms. Yeah. ISHKA is, um, you know, is pretty unpleasant to think I’m told. What is it? Um, Oh, it’s just a, it’s a plant-based psychedelic right from Mexico, I think.
And, you know, it makes you vomit. It makes you really, really unwell. Um, and I think, so I think I, I’m not recommending that people try, try these, but, but if you’re going to, you should do it with somebody who actually can guide you through it and be safe. The problem with something like LSD is it lasts a longer period of time, and if you’re a parent, Even if you take it on a Saturday, you might still be affected when you get home to the kids on a Sunday night.
Yeah. So, um, I think it’s just gotta be very chill. And DMA acting ones, is that MDMA classified psychedelics as well? Well, it’s, it’s got that sort of reputation and you just gotta be a bit careful. A lot of these things are gonna turn out to have therapeutic effects. It’s just that they’ve not been well reserved.
Now the problem you’ve got here is they probably work best on people who. Have a slightly depressive personality, Right. Or not personality is the wrong word, but slightly depressive. You know, you, you, you tend to the morose. Yep. If you’re somebody who’s up and high and very creative mm-hmm. , then you’re probably taking more of a risk with these drugs.
Okay. Because what it does is there’s a controlling mechanism in your brain, which is like traffic management. So it’s. Planning. It’s about, I’ve gotta write something or I’ve gotta go to the shops, or I’ve got a job to do. And you’ve gotta have traffic management in your brain to get that coherent outcome, which is a decision.
Creative people have less of that traffic management and they’ve got more, if you like, short circuits in their brain where they get these creative ideas and sparks and so on for painting art, or, Or, mm-hmm. Or whatever. Now what the psychedelics do is they lift the traffic management system. So if you’ve got somebody who’s got, uh, in their brain, who’s got a heavy handed traffic management system that lifts off, it’s quite liberating cause you get all this sort of creative stuff going on in your head and you feel pretty charged up.
If you haven’t got very much of that to begin with and you lift it off, you are probably running the risk of psychosis with these drugs more than the other kind of person. Oh, that is so interesting. So you just gotta be a lit, You gotta, you, that’s yet to be proven. But that’s the impression that a lot of people have got.
So you’ve gotta be super careful and you probably don’t need the psychedelics if you’re that kind of person. Yeah. Whereas if you are more depressed and you might feel a bit more liberated about it, But I’m not recommending this, it’s just, I’m just giving you the. Early evidence in this area. Oh, that is so, so interesting.
Gosh, I could talk to you all day, but I’d love to just wrap up with one quick health hack. All your years of experience, one quick health hack that kind of give us the best health reward for the littlest effort or the best bang for buck, a really hard seven minute workout. Just get one of those apps really hard.
Seven minute workout. Oh, I love that. Get that done and it’s not necessarily replacement for longer exercise. Going out for a long run running is really good for you. If you’re really feeling low, get one of these hit seven minute exercise regimes and you will feel a lot better. Just go hard for that seven minutes and you know, then you lose the the time excuse.
Everyone’s got seven minutes that they can just. Crank up their favorite tunes and go nuts. Absolutely. Dr. Norman, thank you so much for today’s chat. Thanks for having me. A million.
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