The Truth About Chronic Illness: How to Reset Your Nervous System & Slow Aging

We’ve all had patients struggling with chronic conditions like long COVID, fibromyalgia, Lyme disease, and chronic fatigue. Despite all the tools in our functional medicine toolkit, there’s still something missing. How can we truly help them? I’m excited to have Ashok Gupta back on the New Frontiers podcast to offer a new take on healing from chronic illness. He explains that many chronic diseases stem from a malfunction in the brain’s threat detection system, where the body overreacts to perceived threats, triggering immune, nervous system, or mood responses, creating a vicious cycle. Ashok shares how retraining the brain and calming the nervous system can reset the body’s response to chronic stress and presents the growing body of research supporting the Gupta Program, including objective biomarkers like CRP showing its impact. What excites me most is the potential for this approach to help some of my toughest-to-treat patients. With more studies emerging, I’m increasingly hopeful this could be a game-changer. It’s a conversation you won’t want to miss! ~DrKF

The Truth About Chronic Illness: How to Reset Your Nervous System & Slow Aging

In this episode, Ashok Gupta, creator of the Gupta Program, explores how neuroplasticity can be leveraged to treat chronic conditions like long COVID, fibromyalgia, and chronic fatigue syndrome. He discusses how retraining the brain can reset the body’s stress response, alleviate inflammation, and break the cycle of chronic illness. Gupta shares compelling research and clinical data supporting the program’s effectiveness, including improvements in health, sleep, mood, and cognitive function. We also delve into the importance of nervous system regulation, the impact of environmental stressors, and the role of daily meditation in healing. For practitioners looking for an integrative approach to chronic illness, this episode provides valuable insights into the mind-body connection and offers actionable tools for improving patient outcomes. Tune in to discover how you can incorporate these innovative practices into your clinical approach.

In this episode of New Frontiers, learn about:

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Hi everybody, welcome to New Frontiers in Functional Medicine where we are interviewing the best minds in functional medicine and of course today is no exception. I’m thrilled to be back again with a friend and colleague, Ashok Gupta, who is the creator of the Gupta Program. We’re going to dive into the amazing research that they’ve conducted over the last 20 plus years. So, his background– Ashok is a speaker, he’s a filmmaker, he’s a health practitioner dedicated to advancing research on chronic illness. While he was at Cambridge University, he experienced and recovered from ME-CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome), sparking his research into neuroplasticity and brain retraining. He’s since published multiple papers and leads a global stress management clinic focused on conditions like ME-CFS, fibromyalgia, long COVID, and other neurological-centric conditions.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: He recently published a randomized control trial, actually June 2024, showing significant improvements in sleep, mood, and cognitive function in older adults. An international audit in 2024 also found enhanced health and daily function for 14 chronic conditions over three plus months. His mission is to bridge the gap where mainstream medicine falls short, offering evidence-based integrative solutions for chronic illness. Ashok, welcome again to New Frontiers.

Ashok Gupta: I’m delighted to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah absolutely and by the way, in the show notes folks, we’ll link to all of his publications and we’ll link to our original conversation if you want to do a deep dive into Ashok’s work. So you published, I think, at least ten papers to date. You’ve got at least a couple randomized control trials, and as we were talking offline, your first publication was in 2002, but I think you published a white paper in 1999. You’ve been at this a long time. So what is it? And give me a little bit of your background. We covered it in depth on the first podcast so people can get it there, but give me a little bit of just how— I mean, you were an engineer, right? Weren’t you training as an engineer? Anyways, talk to me about it and how you made this jump into developing what is now the Gupta Program.

Ashok Gupta: Sure. Well, like many of us who’ve come into this arena, it’s from our own suffering, our own pain, our own challenges. I was studying as an undergrad at Cambridge in the mid-90s, living life to the full and I got a virus. And the virus seemed to get better, but my symptoms got worse, like supreme exhaustion, tiredness, fatigue, gut problems, the whole range of symptoms that we often see in clinical practice. And I would go from doctor to doctor and they would say, don’t worry about it. It will go away. Or, maybe you’ve got depression, or we don’t really understand this. And eventually, as I was sick for then six months, then a year, they would say, well, we don’t know what you have, we have no diagnostic criteria, we have no treatment, we don’t even know what to call it, and you might have this for the rest of your life. Goodbye.

Ashok Gupta: And for a young man, that was like a brick wall and I said to myself, you know what? If I can just get myself 10% well, 30% better, 50% better… I almost made a contract with the universe. I said, if I can just improve my symptoms, I will dedicate the rest of my life to helping others with this condition because there are hundreds of people I met, we know there’s thousands, millions around the world who suffer from these terrible conditions. And it was one important moment, this was a pivotal moment in my life, I was in a bookstore in Cambridge trying to research my way out of this. It was the late 90s and in those days we actually went to bookstores to read books and research and there was self-help section and next to it was a neurology section.

Ashok Gupta: And there was one book jutting off the shelf and it just called to me and I can’t explain it. I picked that book off the shelf. It was called The Emotional Brain by Professor Joseph Ledoux, who was the foremost expert in those years in the amygdala. And I read that book and I said, this is it. This is what is causing my condition. And in an ad hoc way, I came up with a hypothesis as to what caused this condition. I published that hypothesis in 1999 and then, in an ad hoc way, I retrained my brain, I got myself 100% well, and then set up a clinic to treat others. And since then, as you say, we’ve published many medical papers, actually, four randomized control trials, two clinical audits, more RCTs on the way, and it’s been my life purpose and lifelong mission now to support.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s extraordinary. God, what a commitment. I applaud you. You know, just having some experience in conducting research, it’s a huge commitment. It’s interesting, many people have those sort of foxhole prayers, if you will. If I can survive this, I will do…. You know? But I don’t know that people actually actualize them to the extent that you have. It’s really pretty extraordinary, Ashok, from that original commitment. Yeah, yeah. It’s big.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So you realized that what you were experiencing physically was manifesting in your body with all sorts of remarkable changes and it was really sourced to your brain, you know, back in the day and you put together what was probably, relative to now, a rudimentary program that began to resolve your symptoms. Can you just give me just a little bit like, what did you first do that changed what you were experiencing enough to know that you were on the right track?

Ashok Gupta: Yeah, so in those days, there was a lot of controversy about chronic fatigue syndrome and ME. Is it in the mind? Are people just making it up? Is it yuppie flu? And I realized that it wasn’t in the mind, but it was in the brain. And what led me to that was, I had attended a conference and there was every branch of medicine represented at that conference, the endocrinologist, the gut experts, the brain experts, all of these people, and I thought, for the entire body, all the organs to be affected, even the mitochondria, there must be something central in the brain that is sending out inappropriate signals to the rest of the body. And of course, traditionally medicine has been focused on what can be measured. We can measure certain things in the body, but the brain was a black box. We didn’t really know what the brain was doing or how it was functioning. And only in last 20 years or so are we getting a much better understanding.

Ashok Gupta: So that led me to the understanding that, or the hypothesis, that it’s in the brain but not in the mind. And in an ad hoc way, I started recognizing, just sitting there and going, okay, what is actually going on in my brain that’s on the periphery of consciousness that I’m not aware of and picking up on those subtle cues. And so we might think we’re not in control of our immune system, let’s say, but actually there are little signals going on in the periphery that actually bring us to awareness that our immune system is about to kick in. As an example, how do we feel when we have flu? We feel depressed, down, demotivated. Why is that? Well, the immune system is telling us, stop everything, stop running a marathon, let me heal.

Ashok Gupta: So if we pick up on those subtle cues on the periphery of consciousness, we can retrain things which are unconscious and automatic in the body and bring our health back. So that’s what I started tuning into with that supreme self-awareness and then coming up with this hypothesis. So it was over many weeks and months, but once I got into the hang of what was going on and started seeing improvement, I realized it’s the brain. The brain can be retrained.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And we are starting to get those data in our wearables now, like really early. To your point, I had influenza this Christmas. I was hit really hard and my ring was telling me early on with my readiness score and so forth, to go back to sleep. You you need more rest. Don’t do a hard workout. And it was pretty compelling. Actually, my body temperature was rising, not into the realm of what we would consider a fever, but just like a low grade change. So that’s interesting. I think this validates what you were discovering. And so, when you picked up those cues early on? I mean, you must’ve been sitting in some extent of a meditation process, I’m going to guess, but how did you shift out of them if you had some sense that your immune system was turning on?

Ashok Gupta: Yeah, exactly. There’s a process of self-awareness that I went through and our clients go through first. And then after that process of self-awareness comes the next stage, which is this process of recognizing those signals and then training the brain that it is no longer in the presence of the original pathogen. So obviously our hypothesis is we are exposed to so many pathogens, so many threats, viral, bacterial, toxin— Essentially those three areas are the main ones, but there’s many others and when the body is under threat, it normally deals with that virus or that pathogen and comes back to reset, comes back to normal. But what happens if the brain is not convinced that the pathogen has been dealt with and then continues to fire off and continues to defend? That’s what I recognized was going on in my brain and my body. It still felt like the very first day that I got that virus. The brain was still responding in that way. So it was training the brain that we are no longer in that danger state, or in that survival state, or protectionist state.

Ashok Gupta: I think that’s how I kind of started experimenting, starting becoming self-aware and then training the brain, we are safe. Let’s come back to our normal state of being and persuading the brain of that. And remember that these are survival instincts. We take pathogens for granted, but actually many people die of viruses every year as we know, flu every year. And so when we have flu, the brain thinks that that’s essentially a threat to survival and therefore it will throw everything at it. And if we look at COVID, people didn’t pass away from COVID-19 because of COVID-19. They passed away from the cytokine storm where their own immune system overresponded and took their life out them essentially and didn’t allow the airways to breathe. So in a similar way, if there can be acute overreaction that can cause mortality, there can be chronic overreaction that then causes chronic illness. And that is essentially the basis of this.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s very interesting, and of course, allergies. That’s another sort of classic example of profound overreaction to what should be a benign substance.

Ashok Gupta: Exactly. And so, this is so exciting. I’m really glad that you’re on the same page here that we have so many modern illnesses. The infectious diseases, we’ve kind done really well with that in terms of medicine and we’re doing well with other types of conditions. But most modern diseases, I think 60% to 70% of diseases that someone comes into a doctor’s office for, are what I call malfunction in the threat detection systems of the brain where the body itself is over responding to something in terms of an immune overreaction, or a nervous system overreaction, or indeed a mood overreaction. Even anxiety and depression are over defensive responses to threats.

Ashok Gupta: If we can find the right keys to the right lock, we could unlock so many different neuroimmune pain conditions, inflammatory conditions, autoimmune conditions , because we can tell the brain that we are no longer in danger and to reset that. And we might ask, well, why does the body do this? Because our systems are trained for survival, over defense. And the brain will always err on the side of caution when presented with threats versus well-being . So essentially, brains care more about our survival than they do our well-being.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Sure. Okay. Why would it cycle for years and years? I mean, the area of research that I’m engaged in is epigenetics and so we know remodeling can happen actually, pretty quickly and our brain could be rewired towards that hyper response. So what are your thoughts around why it would go on and on and on. I mean, chronic fatigue by definition, long COVID, you know, the other like SIRS, I am thinking of, you know, these chronic illnesses that we really see, you know, chronic Lyme, etc. Yeah, yeah, yeah, these things are just relentless, even after the exposure is no longer measurable, as is the case so often. Why?

Ashok Gupta: This is the million dollar question. So to put this in context, if I can go through the initial principles of this hypothesis, and then we can get to that ‘why’ of what is the precipitating factor and what is the perpetuating factor. So the way I start off this is saying, what is the reason we are here? Why are we here? You can answer that from a philosophical response, but actually from a scientific perspective, we are here because over millions of years of evolution, this brain, this nervous system, this immune system has evolved and adapted to survive, procreate, and pass on our genes to the next generation. So we are survival machines and we contain the adaptations, not only as human beings, but all animals and even plant life. I love this statistic: we contain 40% of the same DNA as a banana. Isn’t that incredible? And so we are survival machines.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, right.

Ashok Gupta: That worked well whilst we lived according to our genetic inheritance in terms of living outdoors, having non-threatening food, etc. Now, certainly in last couple of hundred years, we are eating more toxic foods, more pollution around us, we are living indoors, not exposed to daylight and sunlight as much, more stress, and sitting in front of screens. So suddenly the system feels a lot more under threat continually than it ever did and so therefore, more likely to err on the side of caution.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.

Ashok Gupta: And secondly, we are exposed to far more threats in our environment than we ever used to be. So of course, there’s toxic threats, so that’s pollution, cleaning products in our homes, those toxic chemicals, but then also more viruses and bacteria than we ever were. So because of international travel, and COVID being an example, our system is constantly being buffeted by infections that we wouldn’t normally be, certainly the absolute number of them. I mean, I’m not an expert in that area, but that’s my kind of gut feel.

Ashok Gupta: And therefore the system is always in this kind pro-inflammatory state. It’s always just on a hair trigger. When’s the next threat? When’s the next threat? And because we live in this more toxic environment, we have this pro-inflammatory bias. So the system’s already in that state of stimulation and then along comes a threat. And normally the system goes into the on position and then deals with the threat and goes back into the off position. But if the system is under threat, and that could be because it’s dealing with another virus or bacteria, or we’re stressed, or we’re drained, or we’ve been working for 12 hours a day, the system now feels more vulnerable. So when the threat comes along, the system thinks as a precipitating factor, oh dear, I may deal with this threat, but what happens if this threat is still present?

Ashok Gupta: And what then happens, and this is the key piece of brain neurology that sums up what goes on, the brain, when it is managing threats, if it over responds and believes you are vulnerable, it will create new conditioned responses to otherwise meaningless events. Let me explain what that means, because this is a very common event.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, I can give an example.

Ashok Gupta: Yeah, let me give you an example of this. So we take COVID, because we all know somebody who suffers from long COVID. I mean, it’s crazy the numbers of people. So when the COVID virus comes along, the system normally, for most people, turns on, deals with the virus, goes back to reset. But often, because it was a very stressful time in terms of society in general, plus people have their own vulnerabilities, genetic vulnerabilities, epigenetic vulnerabilities, along comes a virus, but this time, for about 10%, 20%, 30% of the population, they deal with the virus, but the system is not convinced that it’s fully fought off. So it continues with a period of post-viral fatigue, essentially, where the immune system thinks it’s vaulted off, but will just err on the side of caution.

Ashok Gupta: Now, in the brain, specifically in the amygdala and insula part of the brain, our hypothesis says that if there is a prolonged period of post-viral fatigue, the symptoms in the body that are a result of the immune reactions— such as fatigue, tiredness, sore joints, aches in the body— those become conditioned stimuli. Those become proxies for the presence of the original pathogen. So the brain makes a mistake here. Ah, symptoms in my body indicate that the original threat is still here, so I need to stimulate the immune system. And that’s how a precipitation of these symptoms then turns into a perpetuation of symptoms, where the brain stimulates the nervous system and immune system to defend. This creates symptoms in the body. Those symptoms loop back to a hypervigilant brain. The brain thinks, aha, the original threat is still here. I must stimulate the immune system and nervous system, causing the symptoms in the body and around and around we go.

Ashok Gupta: So then an acute assault turns into a chronic condition and this can happen for mold, for Lyme, for any kind of virus or bacterial threat, even a toxic threat. And you mentioned the epigenetics and we do believe that one of the core vulnerabilities here is if someone has an over- or dysregulated nervous system, and that could be because of past trauma, that could be chronic stress for a year or two before the invader comes along. And then secondly, it can be other kinds of threats. Has someone had more exposure to viruses, bacteria, toxins, et cetera, which then makes their system more vulnerable? And then the third factor… So it can be genetic vulnerability, other stress vulnerabilities, and then finally, the third being the arrival of the pathogen. Those three factors then causing dysregulation in the amygdala and insula, then causing this vicious cycle of illness.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right, right. So the baseline is lowered. It’s easier to move into that feed forward cycle when these underlying changes are present. So maybe chronic stress exposure or even an epigenetically inherited bias towards a stronger stress response?

Ashok Gupta: Exactly. And one of the risk factors we see time and time again, and this is where the whole circle completes in terms of connection between physical and emotional, is if people have had a background of trauma— we know there was a study by Kaiser Permanente where they looked at chronic illness and trauma— it increased it by a factor of two or three if you’ve had a background of trauma. And trauma essentially is your brain recognizing that you’ve been in a threatening environment during childhood and therefore the environment around you is potentially more threatening.

Ashok Gupta: Now we see that as PTSD or potentially psychological threat response, but the brain does not differentiate between a psychological threat response, a biological, immunological… It says if there are threats in the environment, how do we respond? And that is the key piece of brain neurology. The amygdala and insula traditionally were thought of in terms of emotional responses, but they are also responsible for pain and immune responses and therefore, that then completes a circle and we understand why people with trauma have a higher chance of these conditions.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: There was a study that really influenced my thinking. It comes to mind frequently and Dr. Moshe Szyf was one of the investigators in the study. He’s a mentor of mine and we actually have a podcast with him where he talks about it. It was called Project Ice Storm and it was in Quebec. There was a two week long intense ice storm and women who were pregnant during that ice storm, whether they experienced the literal stress of absence of heat, et cetera, just because it was a really bad storm, or the emotional stress of the storm– So maybe you still have heat, you have all your physical needs met, but just the stress of being in the storm in whatever way. They gave birth to kids who had higher rates of asthma and autism, so there was a real immunological modulation that occurred just really validating your experience. It didn’t matter if it was a physical stress, you know, a “real” stress, or the emotional experience of the stress. Both of them were the same in outcome.

Ashok Gupta: Exactly. I think it’s a fascinating study. I’m going to quote that study now. I think that’s amazing. And I think it does start— We know there’s intergenerational trauma. We now know that the gestation period and the stress of the mother can impact on the factory setting of the amygdala and insula in the brain. Then the birth experience itself and in our view, then the first five years of life and how much nurture the child receives, then really determines how sensitive the nervous system and immune system are to potential threats in the environment.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes. You know, I think that the science is moving forward where we’ll be able to diagnose these things. Another podcast was with somebody who’s mapped out the placental methylome, so DNA methylation, the epigenetic changes, and is working on really being able to diagnose neurological changes in utero. And then just going back to Dr. Moshe Szyf, they’ve got animal studies where they’ve corrected PTSD using really simple interventions, vitamin A and I think alpha lipoic acid, in an animal model and show the changes to brain function. They show the changes to the brain epigenome. I feel like we’re learning more and more tools will be available to us to diagnose these vulnerabilities that you’re talking about now and to tweak them simply before they present as long COVID or as chronic fatigue syndrome or the overreaction to mycotoxins or maybe even allergy. I mean, I think probably the sky is the limit.

Ashok Gupta: Oh, definitely. In terms of allergies, a lot of our patients who use our program to heal from the condition we’ve talked about, they’ll say, oh, and I happen to use it for hay fever and now my hay fever has gone down. Isn’t that fascinating?

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow. That is so cool. You’ve got quite a few publications. I know you’ve committed yourself and your team to conducting good randomized control trials. Just talk to me about some of the outcomes in maybe the most recent couple of publications.

Ashok Gupta: Yes. So we’ve done a study on fibromyalgia and this was a controlled study where we compared the Gupta Program to a relaxation program, resilience program. And we found that just after eight weeks, there was a 40% reduction in fibromyalgia and 0% in the control group, and there was a halving of pain, halving of anxiety, and halving of depression, and very low scores in the control groups. That was an interesting study.

Ashok Gupta: And then we did a randomized control trial on long COVID and this compared this program to a wellness program and that wellness program had diet, supplements, activity levels, sleep. So all the good things you’d normally get if you had long COVID. And after three months, the Gupta program was four times more effective at reducing fatigue and exhaustion and twice as effective at increasing levels of energy and we had a 97% increase in energy levels. And so that was a really exciting study because it’s very rare in a clinical study that you’ll get a 400% result compared to control groups. That’s a published independent RCT that people can see.

Ashok Gupta: And then we did an  independent clinical audit of our patients, a company came in and assessed them, and across 14 different conditions, there was significant improvement, everything between around 60% to 100% improvement. So 84% improvement in long COVID symptoms, 70% in chronic fatigue syndrome, and this was before we had the app and we had the daily sessions. So, something I forgot to mention, the game changer for a lot of these patients is they find it difficult to be motivated and regular with brain retraining. But we have daily Zoom calls for nervous system regulation and brain retraining and that has been so great for patients because they just come on, we take care of them, take them through the exercises. There are about 200 people coming on a day and that’s really improved some of the health outcomes as well. And then recently we’ve just published on older adults and found that we’re able to reduce depression, improve sleep by 56% and improve working memory by 26%. So that’s some direct effects on cognitive function.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Interesting. So these were otherwise healthy older adults.

Ashok Gupta: Yes, that’s right. We were just assessing, as they get older, they were having increases in depression or pain or these kinds of things. Can we improve some of those generalized outcomes? And a new study we’re just working on that hasn’t been published yet, but hot off the press— A lot of people have said, well, Ashok, this is great for subjective outcomes. But what about objective outcomes? What are you measuring? And that’s a legitimate assessment, so we are doing some studies now using objective markers. For instance, heart rate variability, in a study on long COVID, we’re showing that we are doubling heart rate variability. So we know not only are people saying they’re improving, but actually we’re regulating the nervous system. And CRP levels in that study are halving so we are actually seeing considerable reductions in inflammation, which of course there are higher levels in long COVID. And that’s in addition to then reduction in autonomic symptoms, improvement in overall symptomatology. So once we have these objective markers as well, I think the mainstream medical profession will sit up and say, okay, you have actual evidence.

Kara Fitzgerald: Take notice. So that was going to be my question and how you were measuring these. So you’re using a suite of validated subjective questionnaires for your previous research, but you’re now moving into objective biomarkers.

Ashok Gupta: Exactly right and even wearables. Those wearables can track heart rate variability, depth and levels of sleep, activity levels, so we’re going to have objective data in some future studies as well and that’s an important piece of this. But as you know, the key thing is there’s so much research for pharmaceuticals, but not much research for this area. So we rely on donors and various people who come forward. So it’s been a struggle to get these studies done, but ultimately, we have to do this so this is where our focus is.

Kara Fitzgerald: That’s incredible. It is. It’s so expensive to conduct research. Well, maybe if there’s a link to where people can donate, if they want to, we can make that available to our listeners who want to support this work. Awesome. Well, I look forward to that study coming out that you’ve just mentioned. I mean, having CRP is very impressive and I’ll look forward to seeing more studies coming out. So I think we’ve already touched upon this, but you’ve been at this for 20 plus years. 1999 was your first publication, so you were figuring it out for yourself back when you were an undergrad at Cambridge. Do we seem to be in this more strongly? We’ve sort of changed, phenotypically, as humans as we are continuing under the relentless stress and toxin exposures are increasing. How has it changed and how has your program, perhaps, responded to this? Or have you seen changes?

Ashok Gupta: Yes, and I think, as we’ve already touched upon, the number of chemical exposures and pollution we’re exposed to is much higher. So first of all, that means that the system is now wired to be on-edge, sensitive. But I think the biggest effect has been since 2010, 2011, social media being available on phones.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow, interesting.

Ashok Gupta: And I will specifically target this and say that we’ve seen increases in anxiety and depression since 2012, 2013 which are off the charts, especially amongst young people and I think that that is also a contributing factor to why we’re seeing more chronic disease. Because before we would be outdoors more, we would be in sunlight, we’d be getting our vitamin D, we’d be detoxing, getting our red light from the sun, and we would be interacting, we would be socializing more. Now, as human beings, we’re staring at a screen which in and of itself is keeping the nervous system dysregulated, and we’re not sleeping well. We have this blue light exposure, all the things we know about. But on top of that, we are constantly in a state of comparison to others.

Ashok Gupta: So what that means is, traditionally for the vast 99% of human evolution, our sense of comparison was based upon the people in the tribe around us, but we were part of a community. So we never felt so jealous or envious because they were our brothers and sisters and tribe. But now we compare ourselves to millionaires and billionaires and the best looking people so our nervous system and our amygdala are on constant state of high alert to feel that we’re not good enough. And that we see now in the stats of anxiety and depression, spiraling. We did a survey recently and 80% of young people were experiencing strong to extreme anxiety regularly in an average week, which was just crazy. And so therefore, that has been a factor that over the last 10 years or so, we’re seeing more people diagnosed with these conditions. We’re seeing more stress and anxiety in the population and that’s spewing over into, then, these chronic illnesses.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow. That’s really powerful. So part of your intervention must be some of these behavioral changes like backing off of social media.

Ashok Gupta: Yes. Yeah, especially in the evening. What we say is we want people to reduce their use of social media and their phones and screens, spend more time in nature, if possible, but also if they are going to be on screens, can it be in a healthier way? So if you are on a screen, you limit the time, but also what kind of content are you consuming? You know, if you’re watching television, that’s, in my view, better than being on a screen, but then making sure it’s something fun and uplifting and makes you smile versus a hardcore horror movie or something that’s going to trigger your amygdala. So I think it’s all about the use of these screens.

Ashok Gupta: And the most important thing is after a meal, for those who have a sensitive nervous system, the wind down for sleep is super important because sleep ultimately, I believe, is a big part of healing. That people are not healing because they’re not detoxing, they’re not cleaning out their brains because the sleep is not at that depth that is required. So the wind down, just like a baby winds down or a toddler winds down after dinner towards sleep, that’s what people with sensitive nervous systems really require to heal.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Are there other elements to your program? Are you recommending a certain kind of a dietary pattern? Do you involve supplements?

Ashok Gupta: Yes. And so it is a holistic approach, but we don’t focus on it too much. So what we say is that essentially there are ways of having what we call an anti-inflammatory diet. And I think, this is not too controversial in terms of following, perhaps, a closer Mediterranean diet, but we say there’s no one diet that’s right for everybody, but intuitively feel into, you know, if you have a plate of French fries and a burger, how do you intuitively feel versus having a plate of something healthy. And tune into the foods that give you the energy.

Ashok Gupta: So we do talk about an anti-inflammatory diet, but we call it the 80% Diet. Because if you try to stick too strictly to a diet, you’re going to stress yourself out even more, which is counterproductive. And we also talk about general supplements, which we know are good for the body, that are missing when a system is overstressed and overstimulated. Your Omega’s, your turmeric, all the good things that can support the body. Then we also talk about sleep and how we can deepen our sleep and pacing our activity levels. And also heliotherapy, the power of sun exposure and the red light exposure that our ancestors had for a lot of the day that we don’t have.

Ashok Gupta: And so those components are definitely there, but most of our patients have come from a background of having been through the diet, the supplements, and changed so many different things, but not having the full recovery that they require. So a lot of them already know this, but they’re looking for the brain retraining as the core component. And I think that also another important point here is that it’s not just about retraining the brain and getting well, but it’s about staying well. Because the brain thinks it’s under threat so once you retrain it that we are no longer in the presence of the pathogen, it does calm down and people heal and recover. But then when they try to go back into normal life, they find that they overstress the system and then the symptoms can come back.

Ashok Gupta: So the latter half of our program is about how do you stay well, or you need to become aware of your stress triggers, you need to become aware of your paths and your personality traits that may make you overdo it and push beyond your limits. And that is an important part of our healing process as well, because we believe the brain considers overactivity as a threat to survival. Just like when you have a cold or a flu, your system demotivates you deliberately to stop you engaging in too much activity because the immune system needs the energy and the space and the time to heal.

Ashok Gupta: So there’s a step-by-step process of rehabilitation back into normal life and that’s an important part of what we do as well. So there are actually three R’s of the program. So the first is preparing the brain for neuroplasticity. So that’s regulating the nervous system, calming it down so it’s more neuroplastic. The second stage is then retraining the brain. And the third step is what we call re-engaging with joy. And that essentially is preparing your brain for the rest of your life to not have these dips or relapses, but how you maintain your health in the longer term.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me. There must be a component of the program– I spend some time and attention thinking about what I’m choosing to think about, basically, and this often happens on my bike, which I’m on every day and I ride to work, it’s right over there. But I’ll have this moment to see, you know, am I choosing to engage in positive thinking or do I find myself… It seems those ruts towards thinking in a way that’s not productive or really healthy is easy and there has to be an intentional movement out of that rut that takes some consciousness. That must be a piece of the program. I would imagine somebody suffering with a chronic illness, God, any of these are so, so, so, so brutal, a fatalistic attitude has to develop.

Ashok Gupta: Yes, and you’ve hit the nail on the head in terms of our system is designed to err on the side of caution. So in order to enable survival, the brain will say, if it’s a 50-50, it will still magnify the downside. And we know from psychological studies that we have loss aversion, so we’re more averse to losing something than to gaining something so that shows you we’re erring on the side of caution. And in retraining the brain, this is not just about negative thoughts, because people think, oh, you’re saying it’s in the mind. It’s not negative thoughts. You’re retraining a survival instinct.

Ashok Gupta: So it’s almost like if you’re walking down a dark alley at night and you hear a sound behind you and you’re by yourself, your brain will fixate on that. It won’t care about what you’re going to eat tomorrow. It’s going to be like, your heart’s going to thump. Your brain’s going say, you’re in danger. What are you going to do about it now? All your survival instincts are there in that moment. Now imagine you were to train your brain that actually you’re completely safe, you’re on a beach, it’s not a threatening environment. Now of course, we’re talking psychologically, but imagine you’ve got to train your brain that thinks you’re in the presence of a full-on COVID infection, that it isn’t actually there anymore. That’s going to require repetition, and it’s going to require some very specialized tools.

Ashok Gupta: But the amazing thing is, once you’re able to learn these tools, everything else is a walk in the park. Because then if you have negative thinking about something else, or your brain is biasing something that’s negative, It’s super easy to retrain that because if you retrain the survival instinct, you can retrain these day to day fears and worries that we have.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s pretty interesting. I would imagine that people could use this ultimately to live their best life, right? So you come out of the survival mode and then you can go into an expansion, you know, achieving dreams, and kind of use it, you know, to live their best life. Have you seen that with your patients? Have you seen that kind of transformation?

Ashok Gupta: I would say, if you ask any of my patients, most of my patients have been through the full program, they will say this isn’t just about healing from this condition. It’s a full transformation of stepping into who you choose to be at an authentic level. Because inauthenticity comes from living from fear. And it’s essentially a journey from fear to love. That’s the spectrum that we talk about, that our core instincts and our survival instincts are all about fear. Fear is prioritized and that stops us from doing a lot of things in life, stops us achieving things, it stresses out our nervous system. And when we are able to tame that and turn fear into just a normal caution, then we can recruit all of that energy to live our best life, as you say.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s really cool, Ashok, I love it. I want to make sure we touch on… It’s funny I have two thoughts. In our clinical rounds we were talking about a patient who’s on a microdiet. So many people come to our practice who are struggling with some sort of chronic presentation that’s difficult to nail down with classic diagnostic tools and for him, a piece of this has been whittling down what he’s consuming. So at this point, he’s malnourished and other things are going on and he’s super anxious about consuming anything because he’s been miserable for so long. And we were moving through his case, soup to nuts, at our rounds and I’m realizing this program could actually be a real gateway program for him.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I think in functional medicine, or at least in our clinic, we’re focused on the biochemistry and the mechanisms. We have a lot of really good tools, and obviously, people come to us, and I think we’re successful. But we need to lean on this program more and I will bring that forward in our next rounds and suggest it for this particular case, and just remind us that we need to be thinking about these things and when we can layer the program in.

Ashok Gupta: Just on that point, will say that, in my humble opinion, I think every patient that is healing from whatever type of condition can at the very least benefit from nervous system regulation, which has so many impacts, obviously, on the gut and the rest of the body and how the body functions. And recently, we were exhibiting at the Integrative Healthcare Symposium and it was so interesting because as we were meeting lots of clinicians, so naturopaths, functional medicine doctors, they were saying to us, yes, we’re recommending your program in addition to the work we’re doing.

Ashok Gupta: And they said to us, a lot of us as practitioners have gone on this journey where we first start out with chronic conditions and we’ve done the medications and this and that and we’ve then got disillusioned with that because we weren’t getting long-term effects. So then we move on to the kind of supplements and diets and we see some great results with that. However, when we bring in your program, we actually find we get longer term outcomes. We get the chronic illnesses then gradually dissolving away and people aren’t coming back after a year with the same thing or after two years. We’re getting the longer-term effects.

Ashok Gupta: So, they’re saying to us, this works as a perfect complement because it truly lives that dream. We want to do integrative work. We’ve all come into this field because we were disillusioned with mainstream medicine and to be truly integrative, dealing with the mind piece as well as the gut, the sleep, all of these things, is super, super important and we love working in a complimentary way with those practitioners.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Super important. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I agree with you for the lasting change, obviously mind is absolutely central to the journey. I would say all of us living in this modern world, just to your earlier points, have some degree of reduced resilience because of all the myriad exposures that you’ve already stated. How do we take care of ourselves? What are some day-to-day go-tos, must-dos, to minimize our chances of moving into this really problematic feed-forward cycle of brain-centric chronic illness?

Ashok Gupta: I like to describe it as the bucket theory. So essentially, we have a bucket of stress we can handle. I know many people use this analogy. And into that bucket goes our physical stresses. So that’s the chemicals and toxins we’re exposed to if we’re pushing our physical body too hard, like not sleeping well, etc. So that goes in there. And then emotional stress. So that’s work stress, family stress, our own kind of insecurities, that all gets put into the bucket, and so on and so on, how many viruses, bacteria exposed to. All of this goes into the bucket and the more the bucket fills up with water, eventually the water comes over the edge and that’s when we get illness. And if the bucket is too filled and the illness itself causes the bucket to be filled, an acute illness can turn into a chronic illness.

Ashok Gupta: So we’ve got to put holes in the bottom of this bucket to drain away the cumulative stress that is occurring. And the way I like to look at it, we call it the MEND protocol. So that’s M-E-N-D. The four key pillars of health. So M is mind. And we think that’s obviously from our perspective of the most important or very important. So that is daily, how are we keeping our nervous system regulated? And the easiest way, that we know is so popular now, is breathwork, meditation, relaxation techniques. Every day in our modern world now, it is absolutely imperative that all of us do something that calms our mind. And if it’s for you just having a massage or sitting in a jacuzzi or whatever it is that helps us relax is super important.

Ashok Gupta: Then E for exercise. We know this is obvious. We’ve got to be exercising our body physically, raising our heart rate, strength training, getting the detoxification systems moving. Then N is for nighttime routine. So that’s our sleep. Getting our sleep well, at least seven or eight hours, getting the depth of sleep as long as possible at the deepest level to enable detoxification and all the good things that sleep does. And then D for diet. We all know that, obviously diet, the supplements, the good eating habits. And then finally, S. So it’s MENDS with an S, MENDS. That’s not too much of an illustration. But essentially, S is for social. We know that we are now becoming more isolated, more lonely as a civilization, which is supremely ironic given social media.

Ashok Gupta: Socializing is so important, feeling that sense of connection, feeling that sense that we are supported by people around us, that also gives us good health. And we know that the number one risk factor for all-cause mortality is not smoking, it’s not drinking, it’s not obesity, it’s actually loneliness is the number one risk factor. And so these are all things that we can do to lower the stress in our bucket. But if you want to say there’s one thing that can do it across the population, it would be for me daily regulation through breath work and meditation.

Ashok Gupta: In a 2015 study that Harvard did, that should have been front page news around the world, they tracked people for a year in terms of their usage of medical facilities, that was doctors and hospitals. They then taught the group meditation, essentially, and they did some resilience tools, but the core of it was daily regulation of your nervous system for at least 20 minutes. They then followed that same population for another year, and they had a control group. They found a 42% reduction in healthcare utilization in terms of visits to a doctor and visits to hospital. Now 42%. If that was a medication, that would now be the miracle drug of the 21st century. It would be prescribed to every single person on the planet and yet we have this massive study that was done with Harvard. 5,000 people – I’ll send you the study. And that study, you know, right now we know the political situation.

Ashok Gupta: We know that there’s potential opportunities for alternative healthcare to come into the mainstream and this is what they need to look at is that that study was absolutely definitive. Teach people meditation every day, twice a day, and you will see reductions in healthcare utilization. You will see improvements in overall health. So that is the quickest and easiest way to drain the water out of one’s bucket.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Can you give… Like, what would be a basic exercise to enter into a meditation practice in your opinion that could achieve some of what you’re describing?

Ashok Gupta: Yeah, so I think we’ve all heard of breathing techniques. We can first of all start with a few minutes of breath work. And why do we do that? We do that because if you just go straight into meditation, your brain’s like in its active mode, and suddenly says, hang on, you want me to sit here now, you it will rebel against that. So a few minutes of breathing, I’d say three to five minutes of some deep breath work and a very simple way is to simply put one hand on the chest, one hand on your belly and just breathe from your belly. So as you breathe in, your belly comes out. As you breathe out, your belly comes back in. And by doing that, you become more conscious of your breathing because most of us are shallow breathing up here, where we’re catching our breath because we’re stressed. And as we gradually bring the breath to the belly, that becomes a great way of monitoring how we’re shifting our breath work.

Ashok Gupta: So that’s just three or five minutes of that can be good start and then if people find 20 minutes too long, 10 minutes of just meditation. And I would say for beginners, start with guided meditation. And so on our app, there are lots and lots of free meditations and breathwork exercises we show people. So people can just use some of those guided techniques, or you can go into YouTube and find stuff, and just start with that. And your mind will rebel and say, I don’t want to do this, or I’m just sitting here thinking for 10 minutes, this isn’t working. And we say to people, meditation is not about having a silent mind straight away. Like if you close your eyes and suddenly you don’t have any thoughts, check your pulse because you might be dead.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a really important point. Yeah.

Ashok Gupta: It’s actually okay to have the thoughts because that is training. You’re training your mind not to be lost in the thoughts, but to be aware that you’re having them in the first place. So let your mind have lots of thoughts for 10 minutes. Great. You have the awareness that they’re there and with practice, and it will take a couple of weeks, you’ll then start noticing, ah, now I’m more aware of my thoughts. I’m not so carried away. I’m more stoical about them, I’m more calm. And then you’re training, training, training until eventually you then start noticing the beneficial effects of a calmer nervous system. But it takes a bit of time first. Just like going to the gym the very first day, you can’t lift weights and go, hey, I’m done. Your arms are going to hurt. It’s going to hurt.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.

Ashok Gupta: So if people just engage with those simple practices each day they will be doing such a great service to their body. And as you all know, we know that people who regularly meditate, epigenetically, they switch off 30, 40, 50 inflammatory genes in the body as soon as we meditate and we have so many beneficial effects. So that would be a good starting point.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. Well, you know what’s cool about about meditation and some other intentional practices like yoga or Tai Chi, you can see epigenetic changes at the first experience of it, which is amazing because you are in this volatile monkey mind. You know it might even feel more stressful when you first encounter your mind. It’s like ahhhh. But it’s rather remarkable to me that some favorable change, sort of suggestions, could be noted very early on. But then, of course, people who are practiced at it, to your point, really have profound changes. And thinking about epigenetic age, biological age, they’re healthier and younger.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Another thing that you had mentioned about smoking and loneliness, sort of drawing a corollary between the two. There was another study that showed, again, looking at epigenetics and epigenetic clocks, loneliness to be as toxic, actually more so than the influence of smoking. So just really profound. So I want to underscore that.

Ashok Gupta: Yeah, we’re just not living according to how we’re designed as human beings. We are always in tribes, always in communities, having that sense of support. And I would say even with trauma, trauma may be getting worse because we have gone from living in community and villages into nuclear families. So previously, if there was something, you know, perhaps narcissistic about a parent or there was something that was abusive about a parent, it wasn’t such an impact on their child because there would be a community of support.

Ashok Gupta: It would be tribe that was bringing up a child and the grandparents bringing up a child, not just one person. Whereas now the risk factors are higher because if you have one or more people who have their own challenges in life, maybe mental health problems or just stress or just that kind of personality, all of that then gets impacted on the child and there isn’t a safety valve for people. So I think those effects are kind of getting worse in society. And as I said, the impact of social media on screens, screens in general, is actually one of the biggest health emergencies that our population is facing. It’s so urgent. We’re like a frog in boiling water at the moment. We’re not seeing how serious this actually is.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s awesome. Underline that point. So I’ve got two more questions as we just come to close. I’m curious about some of the must-do habits you’ve developed. What do you need to do? What are the things that you make sure you carve enough time out of your day? Because you’ve maintained, I mean, you’ve obviously thrived since your days at Cambridge. Yeah, just tell me a little bit of insight into your practices.

Ashok Gupta: Sure, I’ll give you a low down of my day. First of all, when I first wake up, I’ll drink some water, maybe lemon water, and then I will go straight into some cardio. So I will do 15 to 20 minutes of high intensity interval training or some strength training or some exercise, then I’ll have a shower and during that strength training or cardio, I’ll try to do it outside or be near a window, so I’ve got that morning exposure to daylight. Then I will engage in 15 to 20 minutes of breathwork. The one I learned from an organization called the Art of Living Foundation. They’re a charity and they have a very powerful breathing technique. And then I will do about 20 to 30 minutes of meditation. And I know that combination of cardio, breathwork/ meditation will sort out and regulate my nervous system for the rest of the day. So it doesn’t matter what’s thrown at me. I’ll be calm, I’ll be centered, I’ll be aware, observant and not allow myself to be essentially stressed.

Ashok Gupta: I know the days that I don’t do that morning routine are different. I’m more reactive to my environment. And then during the day, I will have that awareness. What is my brain doing now? What is my mind doing now? So it’s the ability to be the witness of your mind. It’s such a crucial process and we hear this in Eastern techniques, Eastern philosophy, spirituality. How lost are you in your unconscious thoughts and minds and patterns versus how aware are you that this is my mind, but I am not my mind. I am the observer of my mind. And that’s a key skill that meditation and breath work helps you with. Then in the evening, I’ll repeat another meditation before dinner, which regulates my gut, regulates my nervous system and improves my digestion. And then in the evening, as I said, super important to be laughing, joking, singing, and dancing, rather than stuck on a screen and re-engaging our nervous system and often our immune systems as well. And that’s kind of a low down of the things, the habits that I have that really support me.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Awesome. Thank you for that. And then I just wanted to ask you about sleep. You’ve talked about the importance of achieving good sleep, you know, the stages of sleep, adequate deep sleep. What would be your top tip or tips for making sure deep sleep is a part of our sleep profile.

Ashok Gupta: Yes, so in that day routine, first of all, we know that that morning exposure to daylight can regulate your circadian rhythms. Then secondly, people who meditate, we know that they not only find that they can sleep longer, but they can also have a deeper sleep. So morning and evening meditation can be very powerful. And in the evenings that wind down, so doing relaxing activities can support sleep and not being on screens, reducing the blue light, I think is incredibly important as well.

Ashok Gupta: And then actually when you’re getting into bed, what do you find relaxing in that moment? So gratitude, thinking of three things you’re grateful for and speaking to your friend or family or partner. That can be a very powerful way of calming down your nervous system before you go to sleep. Head massage. So gently massaging your head before you go to sleep is very powerful at helping you drift off. And so I think those are some of the key components, but the sleep to me, is a symptom and a cause of good and bad health. It’s a symptom of you living a life that isn’t regulating your nervous system that then causes you bad sleep. And that bad sleep then, as a chicken and egg, then causes the problems with your health and well-being and immunity the following day and increases inflammation. So it’s getting into a good sleep cycle and habits.

Ashok Gupta: And some recent research, which I find really fascinating, has shown even the ideal times when our cortisol and melatonin levels at the time we need to go to sleep and when they then peak and they trough. And funny enough, it fits with the Ayurvedic clock. And what it tends to show is that our circadian rhythms actually appropriate to the sun and when the sun is the highest in the sky, wherever we are, even if we’re traveling. And around 10 p.m. is the ideal optimal time to be sleeping, so around 9.30, 10 PM is when our melatonin peaks and our cortisol troughs and correspondingly, 6 AM in the morning is the counterbalance in terms of waking up. And so a lot of us are not living according to that kind of level. We often go to sleep at 11:00, 12:00, 1:00 and that then compromises liver function, detoxification, etc., because we’re not living according to our body clock and therefore we’re perpetually tired. So because of screens, we’re going to bed later and if we can go to bed earlier, we’ll find that that naturally improves our constitution.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, fabulous. Good. These are great tips. I think each of us can at least adopt some of these. Ashok, it was great to have you again on New Frontiers. I’m just thrilled with the work you’re doing and the sky’s the limit with it in terms of really your exploration and how what you’ve developed can favorably influence health outcomes.

Ashok Gupta: I think that’s absolutely right. For me, it’s about the science because you can go onto Instagram now and have all kinds of people telling you wild and wonderful cures to things, but good, strong RCTs, good, strong, large scale trials, that’s what we’re aiming for and we’re raising money for research in that field. And I think, as you say, traditionally we’ve treated these neuroimmune conditions, so the long COVID, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, at different kind of levels. Now we’re doing a lot of sensitivity reactions, so that’s mold sensitivity and then food sensitivities and pain conditions as well. But there’s a whole new area of degenerative diseases, autoimmune conditions, MS. We have had people, this is anecdotal, where they’ve had MS and they’ve reversed their MS symptoms using the program, which we never expected, but we’ve seen.

Ashok Gupta: And so if we can adapt the program to a number of different conditions, it could be, as we say, like a universal tonic where we are putting your nervous system and immune system in the optimal state. Because if the nervous system and immune system is overreactive, your immunity goes down and your well-being goes down and if it’s underactive, then you aren’t as effective either. So it’s about having this optimal state and in the modern world, our nervous system and immune system is dysregulated, overstimulated, which gives us vulnerability to so many different diseases, including cancer.

Ashok Gupta: We know over inflammation is a risk factor for cancer, which once again speaks to this model. And we’re actually hoping to do some kind of study with cancer to say can we improve outcomes with having this approach on top? So I think the future is really exciting and as you say, it’s the right key, the right lock, we can unlock the healing to so many different conditions.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: On that note, thank you for joining me. And in the show notes, folks, you will find the references that Ashok mentioned, the other podcasts, the things that I mentioned, and also a link to all of the studies and articles that they’ve published. So thanks again.

Ashok Gupta: Thank you so much.

Ashok is an internationally renowned Speaker, Filmmaker & Health Practitioner who has dedicated his life to supporting people through chronic illness, and achieving their potential.

Ashok suffered from ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, around 25 years ago when he was studying at Cambridge University. Through neurological research that he conducted, he managed to get himself 100% better. He then set up a clinic to treat others, and then published the well-known neuroplasticity recovery program known as the Gupta Program in 2007.

He has published several medical papers and is continually researching these chronic conditions. Recently, a randomized controlled trial was published showing the Gupta Program was highly effective compared to a control. More information at www.guptaprogram.com

Ashok is on a mission to research and support people with chronic illness through an integrated and holistic approach.

Ashok Gupta

The Gupta Program and Research

Support The Chronic Conditions Research Fund

Study: Effects of an intervention combining physical activity and components of Amygdala and Insula Retraining (AIR) on sleep and working memory among older male adults

International Independent Audit of Gupta Program: Neuroplasticity Intervention, Amygdala and Insula Retraining (AIR), Significantly Improves Overall Health and Functioning Across Various Chronic Conditions

Study: The Relation Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Health: Turning Gold into Lead

Study: Mindfulness-Based Program Plus Amygdala and Insula Retraining (MAIR) for the Treatment of Women with Fibromyalgia: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial

Study: Amygdala and Insula Retraining (AIR) Significantly Reduces Fatigue and Increases Energy in People with Long COVID

Study: Neuroplasticity Intervention, Amygdala and Insula Retraining (AIR), Significantly Improves Overall Health and Functioning Across Various Chronic Conditions

Study: Epigenome-wide association study of loneliness in a sample of U.S. middle-aged twins

The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph LeDoux

Study: Project Ice Storm: prenatal maternal stress affects cognitive and linguistic functioning in 5 1/2-year-old children

Study: Relaxation Response and Resiliency Training and Its Effect on Healthcare Resource Utilization

Dr. Moshe Szyf

Art of Living Foundation

Podcast: The Role of Neuroplasticity in Chronic Illness & Healing

Podcast: Gene Whispering with Dr. Moshe Szyf

Podcast: Towards Predicting Autism in Utero with Dr. Janine LaSalle

DrKF Clinic: Patient consults with DrKF physicians including Younger You Concierge

Bio Age Lab Test

Bio Age Self Assessment Quiz

Younger You Group Program

Younger You book

Better Broths and Healing Tonics book

Interview: Past, Present, and Future of “Biological Aging” with Dr. Fitzgerald

Video Blog: Does Multivitamin Use Increase Mortality Risk?

Podcast: Decoding Aging: The Science Of Cellular Rejuvenation With Dr. Vittorio Sebastiano

Younger You Daily Supplements are Now Here!

What could be more convenient than having your daily supplements all pre-portioned in one pouch? Choose your level to get the combination of supplements that’s right from you. Monthly subscription available.

(note you’ll be leaving www.drkarafitzgerald.com to go to www.vitaboom.com to complete your purchase)