Welcome to the commune podcast. My name is Jeff Krasna. Okay, today's episode is deeply personal.

So despite being in the wellness industry for nearly two decades, five years ago I found myself profoundly unwell.

So in 2019, I was suffering with brain fog and chronic fatigue, a wicked sort of insomnia, and a dad-bod jelly belly. I was tipping the scales at 210. I was irritable.

I had difficulty concentrating. I think I read a total of zero books in 2017. Brown skin tags were

budding in my armpits and as an even greater insult to my vanity.

I developed ghastly, fleshy protuberances on my chest and not just A-cups. So clinically, this

condition is known as gynecumast, and you and I may know it as the

boobs of man. But it wasn't until I slapped a continuous glucose monitor on my

triceps that I got a bucket of ice water over my head, which at that juncture was not a deliberate practice. I stared into

the app that displayed my blood sugar with a degree of disbelief. I had diabetic glucose levels,

me, the guy that ran a yoga festival. But these aforementioned symptoms are just so

common in modern life that we've accepted them as normal. They're just so easy to write off as

having a bad day.

But what people don't know is that in the history of humanity, metabolic dysfunction was as atypical as Stone Man Syndrome, the world's rarest disease.

But now 88% of Americans have metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that

include high blood pressure, high serum glucose, excess body fat around the middle, and abnormal

lipid levels. Now, this syndrome is just barely upstream from modernities, four ubiquitous contemporary killers.

Yes, the acronym F, Uc, K.

And those are heart disease, cancer, dementia, and diabetes.

So there I was, despairingly looking into the mirror, futilely sucking in my substantial

gut and flexing my non-extant pectorals. And I asked myself, what is the provenance of all this

disease? And how do we go about solving it? So my podcast research and conversations with the likes of

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