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Transcript
- 08:57 Consequences of sleep deprivation
- 11:52 Sleep and Weight loss
- 17:23 Ideal Bed Time
- 18:45 Lack of Sleep Affects Blood Sugar
- 20:25 Food Sensitivities
- 23:52 Parasites
- 28:02 Coffee
- 30:16 Melatonin
- 33:29 Sleep supplements
- 35:26 Calcium supplements
- 36:22 Connection between Sleep Disorders and Digestive Issues
- 37:56 Probiotics
- 39:53 Tips for a good night’s sleep
- 42:39 EMFs
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. I’m your host, Wendy Myers and I’ve got something to say. I love having a podcast and a blog because I have so much that I want to communicate to you listeners and teach you. I love educating about health and wellness.
Today I’m interviewing Ameer Rosic, author of the book The Sleep Solution System. If you’re having trouble sleeping and you go to your doctor, he’s just going to give you a medication for sleeping. Big surprise. Ameer’s book, The Sleep Solution System really blew me away and I regularly refer clients to it when they have trouble sleeping. So today Ameer is going to tell you a million different ways that you can improve your sleep and toss your Ambien. Many of them are really surprising.
But I have to do a little disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. The Live to 110 podcast is solely informational in nature. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment we suggest on the show.
And for those of you who are not in the know, I wrote an e-guide called the Live to 110 by Weighing Less E-Guide ©. There’s a new version of it on the site right now. It’s version 2.0 and about 500 people have downloaded it so far. I’ve gotten such a good response from it. It makes me really happy. So if you go to my site, www.myersdetox.com, it is available to download for free. Just look for the form on the homepage where it says welcome or on the sidebar where it says to join the Live to 110 community. The e-guide is a 35-page basic weight-loss guide. It’s filled with the latest research about diet and exercise and other tips on how to conquer your cravings and reduce stress. It’s a primer for my book, When Diet and Exercise Are Not Enough: A step-by-step plan to eliminate your roadblocks to weight loss. It’ll be available sometime in 2014 but at the rate that I’m going, probably Christmas 2014. It’s a very consuming process. You know I’m a perfectionist. I like to do a really good job because I want to create a really really good product for my readers and listeners so it’s going to be a while. Sorry.
Today’s show is on improving sleep. In the past I’ve had pretty serious sleep problems. For years, I used to wake up in the middle of the night for, sometimes, a couple of hours and it was really frustrating. But hey, at least I get to see every movie ever made. I’m like a movie encyclopedia now haha because of that experience. And frankly I always thought I’m never going to die in my sleep because I just don’t sleep that well. But I know for many of you listeners, one of the biggest health problems you have today is getting enough sleep and some people even try to sleep and they just can’t. Some are sleeping 4 maybe 6 hours a night if they’re lucky. It’s just because there are many many different causes of this and Ameer’s going to enlighten us today on that. I personally have done all kinds of things that you listeners may have attempted to improve your sleep.
I bought a Temperapedic mattress. I spent $2000 dollars on the thing and now I’m finding out that it’s actually one of the most toxic mattresses that you can buy because it offs gases, toxic fumes, a lot more than the next mattress. So luckily, I get to inhale that all night long sleeping. It’s lovely. And I can’t really decide if I’m sleeping really good because I’m comfortably sinking in to the foam or if I’m high from breathing in all the toxic fumes all night. But in the end, I improved my sleep by using a sleep mask and supplementing with calcium and magnesium citrate, chelated of course. This solved my sleep issues. It was pretty simple for me but for others, it’s not that simple. So Ameer is going to give us his words of wisdom. But first, I have a really good sleep tip for you ladies out there. If your husband has difficulty getting to sleep, the words ‘we need to talk about our relationship’ may help a lot. It will do wonders. And that one always helps my husband go right to sleep. And it’s really the best sleep tip that I got. Sorry, haha. I know you guys didn’t sign up for a bunch of boring sleep jokes so let’s get on with the show already.
Wendy Myers: Today I’m thrilled to have our guest, Ameer Rosic on the show. He’s got a couple websites, ameerrosic.com and sleepsolutionsystem.com. So definitely go take a peek at those. They’re really really good. Ameer is a registered holistic nutritionist, a functional diagnostic practitioner, and a functional medicine practitioner. He’s written a book on kettle bell exercise training and kettle bell routines called the Kettlebell Advantage and is currently writing a second book called Diagnostic Testing and Functional Medicine, I’d be interested in that. And he’s also a writer for the Huffington Post. But today we’re going to be talking about his latest book, The Sleep Solution System. Ameer, thank you for being on the show.
Ameer Rosic: Hey, my pleasure, Wendy. How are you doing?
Wendy Myers: I’m good, I’m very excited to have you because I heard you on another podcast and everything you said really resonated to me about how to get better sleep. Because that’s probably one of the number one health issues that people have or number one complaints that people have and it profoundly impacts our health. So I’m really really excited that you’re on the show.
Ameer Rosic: Thank you, my pleasure.
Wendy Myers: So you just did Sean Croxton’s Real Food Con. How was that experience?
Ameer Rosic It was fun. It’s always good to work with close friends and it was a blast. We educated a lot of people in the world. Hopefully, we helped a lot of people too to improve their health. I had a real great time doing it.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and why you wrote the Sleep Solution System?
Ameer Rosic : Well, the problem with the health world today is that a lot of people are looking in very, I’d say, a linear point of view. Meaning, diet is the only thing. And if mere diet is perfect, you’re all set, which is not the reality of things. We live in a world called epigenetics. It’s I wanna say a new science. It’s a fairly new discovered science for the mass public out there, meaning, we are the product of our environment, its expression. Our genes aren’t set in stone. So that’s why you hear people are more prevalent to cancer. Well, maybe because they’re living a toxic life. They’re eating you know shitty food, not sleeping properly, you have a toxic relationship with their loved ones. And this toxicity is feeding into their expression or over-expression of say, cancer genes. At the same time, we can have an individual that has the same cancer genes but does the opposite; eats a healthy diet, sleeps accordingly, has a beautiful loving relationship with their partners and that gene is turned off.
That’s epigenetics. It’s like a dimmer on a light switch. A certain degree dictates the expression of those genes. Now what led me to sleep was my own personal experience with it. For the last 5 years, when I started my health journey, I was really, linearly focusing on diet and exercise but as a professional athlete and as a person always looking to improve the best version of myself, I started looking into different avenues of how I can recover fast or how I can increase my performance and how I can get clarity and memory. Memory’s always a big one for people. That’s when I discovered the world of coronal therapy and coronal biology and how we are dictated by the laws of nature. So man doesn’t make the rules, nature makes the rules. And that was kind of my hidden point where I really got addicted to the world of sleep and how actually sleep controls your diet. It controls how the molecules in your body behave. Sleep controls everything on who we are because we are mammalian species that actually recharge at night through sleep. So it’s a whole interwoven system that kind of fascinated me and something as simple a little bit of tuning and fixing your sleep has dramatic potential beneficial effects towards your health.
Wendy Myers: I know people don’t realize that if they’re trying to be healthy, they just have to go back to the basics. Just get more sleep. So what are some of the health consequences of not getting enough sleep?
Ameer Rosic: Everything! I’ll tell you this: a person who hasn’t had proper sleep for 2 days, so 48-hours sleep restriction, has the same blood sugar levels as a diabetic. Even a news story just came out in Scientific American showing that sleep deprivation is linked to Alzheimer’s because of the degradation of amyloidal or sordomylin within the brain. So sleep controls your t3 t4 thyroid and metabolism. It controls your circadian rhythm and dieting with leptin and grhelin. It controls cortisol response to stressed-out situations, it controls growth hormone, controls an antioxidant called glutathione. Sleep is connected to everything, your hormones are on a clock, a circadian clock, and and this circadian clock runs on a 24-hour period. That means, your hormones in the morning are different than in the afternoon. There’s no such thing as a static human being. We are quantum beings. And that being said, when we go against the quantum clock, basically, nature shuts you down. Within our spricasmatic nucleus in the pineal gland in your brain, we have a bank. This bank counts the hours and days you missed on sleep. What does that correlate to? In real life, we have the opportunity to pay back our loan. Worse comes to worse, you call bankruptcy and you are bankrupt for 7 years. Well, in the world of coronal biology, think of your life actually shrinking, so the more you deprive yourself of sleep, you’re actually cheating days away from your life.
Wendy Myers: Wow. So what’s the number 1 reason that people are sleep-deprived.
Ameer Rosic : My number one reason?
Wendy Myers: Or anyone’s. In your opinion, what do you think is the number one reason that people are sleep-deprived?
Ameer Rosic : Well, let’s first start with the individual. Awareness is a huge cause. People aren’t really aware of the fact of how important sleep is. People say, “Yeah I’ll get by in 4-5 hours of sleep” but if they truly spent even an hour on the internet listening to a podcast such as this, they would understand and perceive the value of how important sleep is. So it always starts with value first and awareness figuring that, “wow now we really know that sleep controls my hormones, sleep controls my mood, sleep controls my weight loss, sleep controls my energy levels”. So once that person acknowledges the importance of sleep, then that one individual takes ownership of himself to start improving his or her aspect of life. But it always starts with one’s self. And a lot of people out there, I was one for a little bit, that I thought I could get by on a little bit of sleep but reality comes and bites you in the butt and you got to think twice.
Wendy Myers: I’ve heard a lot of people joke that they’ll sleep when they’re dead. And I’m like, well, that’s probably going to be sooner than you think. You got to be taking that dirt nap soon.
Ameer Rosic : We can order that checkup quite soon.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So how does one’s sleep impact your ability to lose weight or to maintain a healthy weight because I think that is a big question a lot of people have and don’t realize that they’re not going to be able to lose weight as easily if they don’t sleep enough. So how can someone bio-hack their sleep to lose weight?
Ameer Rosic : Yeah I’m not a big fan of the whole bio-hacking thing. You can’t really bio-hack nature. Let me put it this way. The more you go against the natural tide of the universe, how we’ve been living for millions of years, the more you’ll realize that nature likes equilibrium. Nature enjoys a homeostatic relationship with its environment. This whole ideology of bio-hacking your circadian sleep cycle is going to come back and bite you in the butt, let me put it that way. So let me rephrase the question, let me put it as, How can you actually in simple steps, increase the REM quality of your sleep to improve your thyroid metabolism and improve the circadian hunger cues in your body? and it’s quite simple. Timing of when you go to sleep is very important. It’s not how long you sleep. You hear people talking about like, “oh! I slept 10 hours” and I’m like, “congratulations, what time did you go to bed?” “I went to bed at 1am”. Wrong answer. It doesn’t work that way. Our body and how our circadian system is functioning or dictated is by photons and light so certain wavelengths of light, like blue wavelengths or red wavelengths. You have different sets of pigmentation of wavelengths and they’re also laid on certain hertz, you know, degrees.
That’s why we’re active during the day, that’s why our cortisol is high during the day, because of the presence of the wavelengths and the photons of the sun. That’s why we get tired at nighttime. Let me just paint this picture for you. They have a study, where they have participants in a room that’s dark. They couldn’t see in front of them and the only thing that was exposed was the portion behind their knee and the researchers shone a ray of laser beam right behind their knee. That little dot of laser beam was enough to stimulate cortisol. So that goes to show you that our whole body has photoreceptors everywhere, is not just our eyes, everywhere in your body has photoreceptors. And we’re controlled by the exposure of light. So that’s really huge. People need to understand that light exposure dictates the environmental cues that controls how your sleep works. And the more you’re in direct sunlight during the day, the better sleep quality you have because the phosphorylation in the proteins in the brain and accumulation of certain stuff. Second, the more you’re exposed to artificial light at night time, after sunset, that’s a carcinogen. It actually will decrease the quality of your sleep and, I’m going to be the first one to say it, it will cause rapid mutations of yourself.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I know, I actually make it a point to get out during the day and spend 30 minutes in the sun which, you know, my dermatologist would think I’m insane, but you do need it. It regulates our bodies. Let’s talk about how diet affects one’s sleep. From my own experience, I don’t sleep as well if I have a big meal or a snack late at night. What exactly happens to cortisol and other hormones and blood sugar levels when one eats right before bed or has a bad diet in general?
Ameer Rosic : We have an ancestral mechanisms of circadian dieting. Ancestrally speaking, we didn’t have the comfort or the safety of really eating whole foods, these meals at night time because, well, even before the advent of fire, we didn’t have fire, and the only thing shining on us was the moon and the stars and for safety reasons, we kept quiet and we went to bed when the sun set and we got up when the sun rose. That being said, most people would have dinner very soon to bedtime like in an hour or two. Most people probably eating their high-carb diets and this high-carb diets increase insulin, causing hypoglycemic effects during the night period of time. What’s even worse is that it causes something called a dysregulation of your circadian rhythm with your two master hormones that control your metabolism and hunger cues.
So you have two hormones, one is called ghrelin that stimulates hunger and the other one’s called leptin that shuts off hunger when you’re satiated. When you go to bed on a full stomach, right before bed, your cortisol’s elevated, your insulin’s elevated and this will cause a dysregulation of your ghrelin and leptin, therefore, the next day actually causing your ghrelin to over-express and your leptin not to be functioning properly. Doesn’t have high affinity for binding in your brain. So that’s huge. You just keep on eating every 2 or 3 hours or having your sugar crashes and you don’t have natural hunger cues as you should be and that’s huge. People really need to understand that sleep controls how much intake of food you eat and how much you need to stabilize your homeostatic energy amount during the day.
Wendy Myers: What about only eating during daylight hours? Something I tell my clients who are attempting to lose weight is to, if they eat at night, it’s going to improperly stimulate certain hormones.
Ameer Rosic : Yeah I have a rule of thumb, 3 hours before bed. And my bed time for anybody, it doesn’t matter if we do live in the modern day times so I’ve found the safe zone which is 10 pm. So be in bed by 10 . Pretty much sleeping by 10, 7 pm would be your dinner and that will be a no-carb dinner. No-carbs because I do not wanna spike any insulin or cortisol during night time. So definitely do not eat at night time for many many reasons. It’s funny because we’re so use to this convenient factor of walking to the fridge, eating what we want, when we want. We are a society of “give me, give me, give me, and I don’t care for the consequences” well, I’m going to tell you, there are consequences. They’re big consequences. Those consequences are diseases, type 2 diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer, Parkinson’s, those are the consequences. And it’s no wonder that in the Western society, we are one of the sickest people in the world wherein the World Health Organization is predicting by 2020, 1 in 3 will have a form of cancer.
Wendy Myers: That’s frightening.
Ameer Rosic : Yes.
Wendy Myers: It’s also what you just said that when people don’t get enough sleep, they have the blood sugar of a diabetic and it goes without saying that you can make that connection that that’s probably one of the contributors of diabetes like the epidemic that we’re having.
Ameer Rosic : A hundred percent! Your sleep controls how your cortisol and how your insulin receptors work the very next day. That’s why when people don’t get enough sleep, get this, so a new study came out showing that most people who have a lack sleep, crave sugary foods and we have an enzyme, a digestive enzyme in your saliva called the amalase. Amalase is used to break down carbohydrates and sugars. People, who are shown to have lack of sleep, have a ten-fold increase within the amalase enzyme within your saliva. So that makes you think, why are we suddenly having an increase of sugar enzyme in your mouth? Well maybe because your body wants sugar. Why does your body want sugar? Simple. Your body wants to induce a state of hypoglycemia because if anybody remembers that they had high-sugary meals, they usually crash 2 hours later. What does that crash equals to sleep. So your body’s trying as best as it can to induce sleep once more. So when you actually decrease the quality of your sleep, your body’s craving sugar on a non-stop basis.
Wendy Myers: I find that too. When I don’t get enough sleep one day, then the next day I’m eating more food and I am craving sugary food.
Ameer Rosic : Yeah it’s all from the circadian rhythm of sleep and how you have; I call it, a negative feedback loop in your body. How one’s hormone dictates the outcome of another hormone or neurotransmitter.
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk a little bit about food sensitivities and how they impact your health. I talk a lot about those. It never really dawned on me until I read your book that they can also affect sleep. How exactly do food sensitivities impact sleep?
Ameer Rosic : Yeah so, there are certain foods out there such as modern-day gluten, commercial dairy. Some people who really have an eye for corn, soy it’s a huge one, and sometimes nightshades, that’s a really really severe case. So these foods, these proteins, that’s the problem the proteins in the foods are actually stimulating your immune system so IGA within your GI track or IGM. And this stimulation of IGA or IGM are actually there for increased cortisol, will increase a histamine response so maybe your h1-h4 histamine receptors in your body and the stimulation of cortisol and histamine will cause something called ??? thickening like taxi driver messengers from your GI tract to your brain and this stimulation storms a hurricane in your body causing you to become active. It’s an imbalance between your parasympathetic and sympathetic states. So certain foods are poison, think of them as alarm clocks. So all these proteins are these foods alarm clocks and they’re just waking up your body. So that’s why it’s huge to understand that certain foods, so in my practice, there are no ands ifs or buts, grains for the majority part of them are out, commercial dairy is out, soy is out, corn is out, for certain people like I said nightshade is out and even for some, but this is a rare case, depends on the source. Source is really more important here, is eggs.
Wendy Myers: I hear a lot of people have problems with eggs since we eat them so much.
Ameer Rosic : That’s another thing, the seasonal eating that people need to get back to but that’s a different topic. Going back to the eggs is that we had… I had a client and lot of other practitioners talk about this as well. She wouldn’t be reacting to one set of eggs but go to another form set of eggs and she’ll be having a horrible horrible reaction. It’s what the farmer is feeding the chicken with! They shouldn’t really be feeding them anything, chickens are carnivores. They’re warriors. I love chickens. I respect chickens. They’re awesome creatures and they’re great pets. I’m pretty sure the farmers can agree they’re sociable. They fend for themselves, they do the chicken thing, they eat the worms, crickets, bugs and they can take care of themselves. There’s no need for us to feed them poisonous soy and corn and all these other foods that they never ate ever in the history of chicken life. Haha
Wendy Myers: I always make sure my chickens have dark yolks, dark orange yolks. I know that they were pastured.
Ameer Rosic : That’s right.
Wendy Myers: If they’re yellow, they’re fed corn and grains. I think it’s really important that people pay attention to it, if they’re having sleep problems, to pay attention to food sensitivities or do food elimination diet because it profoundly affects 70% of people. So I think that’s really great that you brought that up and you mention that in your book. Let’s talk a little bit about parasites because parasites are another one of those things that people are not aware of. They’re doctors are not talking about it; no one’s talking about it. Can you explain why parasites could be a problem for some people in not getting a good night’s sleep?
Ameer Rosic : That goes back to histamines. Cortisol controls histamine. That’s why people, who have reaction to histamine take hydrocortisone, because it reduces histamine reaction so at night time your cortisol should, if you have healthy circadian rhythm, decrease. As soon as cortisol decreases, histamine reacts and a lot of people who have parasite infections have a direct correlation to histamine, also with the parasites, they’re going to release toxins for the parasites that stimulate sinucal storms. These are like taxi driver messengers from your GI track to your brain that cause another issues. But you got to also look at mechanical issues, parasites are actually moving creatures. They move around in your small intestines, heart liver or kidneys and all over the body actually. At one point I was looking at parasites and saying, they shouldn’t belong in the human ecosystem. The more research I went into and the more study I did I kinda realized, wait a second, so many people are trying to eliminate these parasites but with no success and they keep on coming back. I read a recent book by Moises Velasquez-Manoff. It’s a fantastic book talking about an immune epidemic.
Wendy Myers: I interview him last week! Haha.
Ameer Rosic: Yeah he is a nice guy. I had him on my show too. We’re talking about, after the podcast, about certain third world countries that have exposure to bacteria more or less than the western society because we are scared of bacteria, the whole Hygiene Hypothesis thing. And I came to a conclusion that I truly believe parasites are a natural part of us. The question is why we aren’t living in equilibrium with them anymore. That’s why I’m trying to look in focus on. The question is, are there certain foods that you’re eating that your parasites don’t like or the geographical location of your parasites. And you can ask anybody who’s been fighting a parasitical infection or H pylori infection and they have been trying to fight it for years and trying to attack the parasite directly but to no avail. It’s very hard even for pylori for example, which is not a parasite, however, people need like 3 rounds of high-induced antibiotics but even then it’s not taken care of.
So the question remains, it’s really good to identify certain parasite infections so doing like a PTR stool testing for certain labs. It’s kinda pricey but, honestly, worth every penny for a lot of people. And once you identify these certain parasites, you can figure out what’s the natural approach to live together with these parasites. Because it has been shown too, the people with pin worms and other parasites within the body are actually healthier that other individuals that don’t have them. So you have to look at, ancestrally speaking and evolutionary speaking, we are an ecosystem, we’re not humans. When people think of humans, we are not. We are in fact a hundred trillion bacterial DNA cells human somatic cells. So we are an ecosystem just like mother Earth, just like the soil, we are soil. We have to figure out why our ecosystem is not living as a society as it should be, together.
Wendy Myers: A lot of people do have parasites. They’re a walking around they are a parasite farm and are not aware of it. Even testing can’t identify all the parasites. They can be anywhere in our brain and what not. I always just tell people to do an infrared sauna because parasites don’t really like the heat…
Ameer Rosic : Even goes beyond, infrared saunas are great because of the wavelength actually structures the water intracellularly within your mitochondria. It’s one of the most beneficial things to increase your lymphatic system, get structured water in there and get high frequency to re-balance your DNA.
Wendy Myers: I totally agree. They have so many health benefits, including getting rid of parasites. You have to do it a while, like every day for a year or two. So it’s not the easiest route but it’s amazing. Let’s talk about coffee. Everyone wants to know how can I have my coffee and still get a good night’s sleep? How does negatively coffee negatively impact sleep and how can one smartly incorporate it into their live without disturbing sleep?
Ameer Rosic : Yeah so coffee has about a half-life of anywhere from 68 hours depending on what types of coffee. Drip coffee has more caffeine than espresso. Ooh, shocker! To anyone drinking espresso, there’s actually less caffeine in it. It depends on the beans, how they were roasted too, and the good quality of your water obviously. That being said, there is a shut-off point so for people who have sleep issues – insomnia, racing thoughts, maybe some neurotransmitting imbalances I definitely say that shut-off period for coffee would be lunch, 12 o’clock. The coffee you would have is quite simple. It’s an organic coffee, fair trade or linear trade, even better, straight from farmer to the actual person and it’s black – no creamer, no sugars. If you’re using the drip machine, please don’t use a white drip that’s bleached. You can get non-bleached ones which are actually cheaper and really friendly for the environment, which is great.
Or you can use what I use. I use a stove-top mocha. It’s portable. It costs 30 bucks for the best one and you make amazing quick shots of espresso for that. I drink it straight black, I know a lot of people can’t but if you’re a true coffee connoisseur as I am, I love my coffee black. I love the taste of it. If not, a lot of people do the whole bulletproof thing; they’d use some butter, some coconut oil. Other people would add some almond milk with some cinnamon which is pretty cool for blood sugar stabilization. But at the end of the day, just cut it off at lunch time and you’ll be good. But I do want to make a point. There are some people, depending on their liver enzymes, their pathways, like the PE450 pathway whose body, epigenetically for the time being, just can’t handle coffee and they shouldn’t drink it at all.
Wendy Myers: Would they know that? Do they feel caffeine-sensitive if they have that issue?
Ameer Rosic: Yeah, some are. Some are asymptomatic, which are the hard cases. But plain and simple, if you get sweaty palms, if you get jittery, if your heart beats up, if you get a huge dopamine high from it, I don’t think that coffee is the best thing for you at the given time.
Wendy Myers: Okay. Let’s talk about melatonin because so many people and doctors, that’s their go to, think that they can bio-hack their hormones if they take melatonin. They think they’re doing something natural as opposed to medication. What are the issues with supplementing with melatonin or melatonin precursors like tryptophan 5 htp?
Ameer Rosic: Well, they bio-hacked their way into something alright. Haha. Melatonin, stimulated, or I should say 75% created in the GI track, 25% created in the pineal gland. Melatonin is stimulated by the sunset. So about three hours before bed, we have a slow release of melatonin on our bloodstream. I’m talking about 0.000001 micro milligrams within your bloodstream. It’s a very very small amount. This melatonin will start binding to your pineal gland receptors and then dopamine receptors will bind afterwards. It’s a beautiful cascade of neuro-hormone transmitters doing their work. A lot of people today are abusing melatonin. This process of abusing melatonin is not very healthy at all, considering the fact that now you know that melatonin is secreted in your bloodstream, very small amounts, about 3 or 4 hours before bed.
People are popping anywhere from 3-21 mg about 1 hour before bed. That’s a real huge unphysiological, abnormal dose. Then your body will suddenly get shocked at the synthetic melatonin in the bloodstream. What it does is actually decreases growth hormone. It stops the natural circadian cycle of dopamine which may cause other people to have concentration issues and ADD issues. Also, it doesn’t properly attune certain receptors in your body to start creating glutathione. So this whole idea of using melatonin every night and when you want it, like 1 hour before bed, that’s ludicrous. Simple stuff of controlling your life is a 100 times more effective and natural than taking melatonin. Melatonin is something not to be messed around with.
Wendy Myers: Yeah I agree because it’s impossible to try to replicate what the body is doing. It’s an incredibly fine-tuned, delicate feedback loop.
Ameer Rosic: Yeah listen, it’s as simple as this. Our body is controlled by our environment. The reason why the Homo Sapiens control the earth right now is because of the environment. We are dictated by our environment. Sleep: the sun controls the environment. How much we move each day controls how you sleep. How we interact with each other on a day-to-day basis controls our environment. If we hang around angry people, we’re angry. If we hang around happy people, we’re happy. So this whole idea of just food controlling yourself is ludicrous. Your environment controls the expression of your body. Your environment controls how your body uses food. We didn’t survive the Ice Age. We’d adapted for the Ice Age. We left the African Sub-Saharan to conquer the world. Our environment controls us. This is the laws of epigenetics. The people must understand that your environment is 100 times more important than the foods that you eat.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I agree. So what if someone wants to go natural and use supplements to improve their sleep? Which supplements do you believe are the most beneficial?
Ameer Rosic: You could still use melatonin for time-released. I’d use it for a week just to reset the circadian clock and that’s it. See you later, alligator. That would be taken about 3-4 hours before bedtime. It’s also time-released, it’s sub-lingual. It slowly trips into your bloodstream, that’s one.
Wendy Myers: Is there a brand that you like?
Ameer Rosic: Brand? No. I’m not really big on brand naming so just google it and find out. Second, you can also take L-theanine. It’s a substrate from green tea. It’s really good for sleep. Magnesium is a fantastic one. So about 2 hours before bed, you can take some baking soda and magnesium citrate and have yourself a drink. It’s really good at relaxing your muscles. Baking soda creates a better capability for magnesium going within your cells which is really good. Those are two simple steps but at the end of the day, light. Light is number one. Do not be in front of light 2 hours before bed. It’s simple. Don’t stare at your computer; no electronics, no TV, no iPad, none of that stuff. Two hours before bed should be your tiome to relax. Enjoy it with your partner. Enjoy it with your kids. Read a book. Have some fun family time. Do something that’s relaxing for the soul. Technology today is killing us. It’s like a vampire draining our energy on a day-to-day basis.
Wendy Myers: I know. I feel it slowly killing me. Haha. Because I’m in love with my computer and my iPhone. Haha. It’s going to be the end of me.
Ameer Rosic: We get that dopamine high. Oh, I got message, I got an email, people are talking to me. It’s crazy. It’s funny I was just reading an article on Lifehacker here on the computer ha! and they’ re talking about how people think that the world is becoming a better social place but in reality is not the Internet is making people less social in real life.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I agree. Even though I feel so social, I’m sitting at home by myself. So what about Calcium? Is calcium a good mineral to relax you, to help you sleep?
Ameer Rosic: No. Calcium’s horrible. No one should be taking calcium. Magnesium controls intake and outward release of calcium from your cells. Basically calcium goes in your cell, magnesium kicks calcium out. That’s how the process works. As simple as that. Magnesium is like the parents. “Come here, Calcium. Go there.” So we’re deficient in magnesium. I don’t care if you’re eating organic food. Our soils are depleted. It controls our glutathione, our master antioxidant. It controls the reproduction of our DNA. It controls about 10% of our genetic sequencing. So always focus on magnesium. Why do you think people feel great when they take like a Epsom salt bath before bed? It’s magnesium. It soaks through your skin, goes in your blood and you feel like a million bucks. You’ll sleep like a baby. So it’s as simple as that.
Wendy Myers: So roughly half of my clients have digestive issues, ranging from IBS to constipation. It’s such a huge problem. Many of them have sleep issues as well. Is there a connection?
Ameer Rosic: Yeah. It goes back to the signaling of the brain once again with the taxi drivers delivering messages of pain or discomfort. It goes with histamine. It goes with cortisol disregulation. It goes with your immune system, with the vitamin D. It’s a huge thing with the vitamin D and sleep with serotonin. And if you have IBS, or Chron’s or colitis any AI issue, your vitamin D is being depleted at an exponentially rapid rate. That’s something people need to focus on, likewise with magnesium. That permeability is causing, even healthy foods such as tubers or nightshades, these proteins cause molecular mimicry within your blood causing another issues. So that’s huge and that should be addressed right away at the same time as improving your sleep. Figuring out, how I can, in a simplistic way, try to address my IBS. Maybe just focus on Vitamin D right now, going outside, walking, controlling my light environment, maybe taking more Epson salt baths or putting on transdermo-magnesium cream. Whatever the case may be. Each case is unique. There’s no such thing as general protocols. That’s ludicrous. We’re not robots. Each of us have our own unique protocols that we need to figure out for ourselves. So definitely there’s a huge connection and you have to work on all levels to achieve optimal health.
Wendy Myers: Is there a connection between serotonin production and poor melatonin production? I’ve heard that about 90% of your serotonin or 95% is produced in your gut and if you have gut issues, then you’re not making the serotonin the body needs that converts that into melatonin.
Ameer Rosic: Yeah, it goes back to your biome. Certain anaerobic aerobic bacteria ratios. The problem is that a lot of people inoculate or re-inoculate with probiotics which, some work, some don’t. The problem being if you have permeability on your GI track, which then you have a permeability of your cells, these probiotics that you’re taking don’t really have houses. You’re not going to build your roof before you build your foundation, right? So you need a foundation first then your roof goes on. So first you need to address this permeability of your gut, of your cells before addressing the bacteria. There’s no such thing as bad bacteria. When you hear, “Oh my, I got to kill these bad bacteria” like candida umm no candida is not a bacteria is fungi, I’m like, “Wait a sec, you know it’s part of you, right?.
You are it. It’s like you saying, “Oh, I have a misbehaving child, I’m going to kill my own child”. No you’re not. You just got to teach your child how to behave. It’s about finding out why your bacteria are in a screwed up ration or why they are misbehaving in your body. And it goes back to the environment too. Are you walking throughout the day? Are your drinking enough water? Are you vitamin D levels good? What’s happening with your magnesium? What’s happening with the quality of foods? What people don’t think about is that the quality of your environment where you sleep. I found out in one of my old residencies, that I had mold. It was screwing me up. Well, goodbye mold, hello health! It’s that rapid. So really look at where you live. You live in an apartment; you better double-check your apartment. You live in a house; you better double-check your house. Your environment dictates your health more than your food.
Wendy Myers: So can you give the audience a few tips about how to get the best night’s rest possible?
Ameer Rosic: Very simple. Go to bed at 10. Two hours before bed, no electronics, no lights. There are no ifs or buts. I can’t stress that enough. That’s like the omega optimal tip I can tell you for anybody listening to the podcast right now. No lights before bed. Take an Epsom salt bath. Read a book. What I do sometimes is I pour 2 cups of baking soda into water. I’d also put maybe 4-5 cups of Epson salt in it, I’ll have 4-5 candles beside me and I read a book for like 45 minutes and just chill out. It’s relaxing, therapeutic. By the time I get out, it’s see you later in Lalaland. So that’s really good. Another great thing is a lot of people who have families, spend time with your kids. Your kids are going to go to bed at around 8o’clock and that’s when there’s no electronics. So wish them good night, read them a book, talk to them as a parent, talk to them as a friend. So definitely it’s time to reconnect as humans and forget this artificial world we’re living in. Really come back to simplicity and just talk to each other and give in time for us to build on ourselves.
Wendy Myers: So what do you think about sleep masks and black-out curtains because you’ve said earlier that our skin has light receptors and I thought I was being a genius by using a sleep mask. Most people are living in the city. They’ve got lights coming through the window streetlights and security lights and what not. What are your tips to create that environment that’s good for sleep?
Ameer Rosic: Yeah. Sleep masks are fantastic. Definitely use them if you live in a condo or a house where there are lights coming in. You don’t have to get fancy curtains. You can just go to any fabric store and get black curtains for 10 bucks and just put them up. Anything that can block out any light coming from entering the room is fantastic. Also, that goes with alarm clocks. You should not have alarm clocks blaring at your face. Keep the across the room. In fact, I tell most of my clients, “No electronics in the room”. If you rely on your cell phone, keep it on airplane mode outside of your room for two reasons: One, you don’t want the electromagnetic radiation going through your head. Has a three foot radius on any electronic device or more, that’s just radiation. Second of all, when your alarm goes on, like in the morning, you don’t have the opportunity to hit snooze like most people do so you just have to get out of bed to go get your alarm.
Wendy Myers: That’s what I have to do. Haha
Ameer Rosic: Yeah so many people hit snooze, snooze, snooze. If you have your alarm clock in another room and you can hear it, you better believe you’re getting up. So those are simple tips that people can start doing right away.
Wendy Myers: What about EMFs? How are EMFs a problem?
Ameer Rosic: EMF is quite simple. EMF is a frequency just like our body runs on the human frequency the same frequency as the Earth’s. So, like, anywhere from 7-10 hertz. Think of this: we have 2 trains. One train is our frequency and the other train is EMF frequency and two trains are heading on to each other. What’s going to happen? They’re going to collide, right? So if you have two frequencies vibrating on each other, it causes problems. What EMF does in our body is it activates heat shock proteins. These proteins are located on your cell and these heat shock proteins actually explode and cause cell permeability. EMF also dehydrates the water in your cells so if your take like, Jack Cruise talks about this a lot, if you take a steak and put it in the microwave, it becomes dry. It’s because you cooked the water right out of the cells of the steak. There’s no difference with us. When you have EMF you’re dehydrating your actual cells. You’re disrupting the permeability of your cells. That causes mutation. That causes your mitochondria to fail.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Jack Cruise just talked about how EMFs are one of the leading causes of obesity in his opinion. So for anyone not in the know, EMFs are Electromagnetic fields, for the newbies out there. So I have one more question that I like to ask all my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Ameer Rosic: Our access to clean water. Honestly, with the rate of the acidity going to the oceans right now. It’s becoming more and more acidic, the oceans. The quality of fresh water from Russia to Canada, and the access to it. Water is the life force of us. Without water, we die. So that’s the commonality among all the humans around the world. We have to start focusing on the quality of water. Not this garbage city water, this mumbi water you drink on a day to day basis. That’s not real water. Pure, high-grade natural earth water. We really need to start focusing on that. Second would be the air quality. Without the proper O2 levels, we obviously die. That’s huge. Those are the basic structures and elements of life on this planet. There are three: water, air, and light. Those dictate life.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I agree with you on the water because I always tell all of my clients only drink spring water. None of this reverse osmosis. Man can’t imitate water in certain ways and how it occurs naturally within the earth. But a lot of our ground water’s contaminated so I always tell people to just get spring water from really remote places on earth.
Ameer Rosic: Yeah, it’s hard. Reverse osmosis is good for some who don’t have access (to spring water). You can mineralize it yourself. You can use salts and crystals. It actually works to restructure the water. And saying grace, a lot of people don’t say grace anymore. If you look in the ancient cultures, and if I look at my grandma the way we used to do, we would say prayers before food. Honestly you feel better. You sense an emotional vibration to the food that actually creates better structured molecules for you to eat.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I’m definitely one for having gratitude for what we have. So can you tell the listeners a little bit more about you or where they can find you?
Ameer Rosic:Yeah. Anyone can reach me on my website, it’s ameerrosic.com or youtube. Same thing. Everything’s underneath my name. If you want more information for sleep, I’ve created a specialized sleep program which guides you step-by-step. It shows exactly how to control your environment, what foods to eat, what supplements to take, and many more. Even interviews with thew world’s experts, how hormones work, it’s the real deal. It’s a step-by-step, simple solution. You can find it on sleepsolutionsystem.com
Wendy Myers: Yeah. It’s really really good; I highly recommend it for anyone. So, thank you so much Ameer for coming on the show. I have so many questions for you about sleep but it’s hard to cover everything in one show. But I’m thrilled that you agreed to come on and help my listeners troubleshoot their sleep issues because I believe this is one of the top issues undermining people’s health today. You just can’t be healthy unless you get adequate sleep. If you want to learn more about health, you can follow me on facebook and twitter @ Iwillliveto110 and I’m also on youtube at Wendy live to 110 and Instagram and Pinterest at Liveto110. Thank you so much.
Ameer Rosic: Thank you, Wendy.
Wendy Myers: Alright. Thank you, Ameer. If you want to learn more about health, you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter at I will live to 110 and I’m also on youtube at Wendy live to 110 and you can also find me on Pinterest and Instagram. I’m all over the place, all over the net. If you like what you heard on the show today, please give the Live to 110 podcast a nice review and rating in iTunes. I need that to get higher up on the charts and to get visible on the search engines so that more people can find me and learn about health and wellness. I would appreciate that so much. Thank you listeners for tuning in. Remember life is something that happens when you can get to sleep. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 podcast.
