ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Pete McCall is a NASM-CPT (Certified Personal Trainer) and NASM-PES (Performance Enhancement Specialist), and a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS). NASM (National Academy of Sports Medicine) is the world leader in fitness certifications, education, setting the industry standard in those fields. Pete's credentials also include a master's degree in Exercise Science.

Pete hosts the "All About Fitness" podcast, writes a popular blog, and the author of several chapters in "Smarter Workouts, the Science of Exercise Made Simple." He serves as a consultant to the fitness industry, and he is a content creator for Core Health & Fitness, Terra Core Fitness, and 24 Hour Fitness. Mr. McCall is frequently quoted in a range of media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Men's Fitness, SELF, Glamour, Shape Magazine, and others.  

His podcast, All About Fitness, covers a range of topics related to athletic performance and fitness. In this episode, he hosts Dr. David Minkoff.

This episode covers the following subjects:

• 5:13 – Dr. Minkoff offers insight into his lifelong love of the ideas and applications related to helping people and how a medical education covered very little related to nutrition, vitamins, and minerals. He explains that traditional medical education leans towards a "disease model," with a pharmaceutical approach to resolving health conditions, and focuses on a drug solution for most health conditions.
• 6:51 – Dr. Minkoff discusses the value of modern medicine to treat acute emergencies, but how issues such as obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, hypertension (high blood pressure), and heart disease continue to kill more than 600,000 people each year. These, along with a similar number dying from cancer, continue with the underlying cause not identified or treated in traditional medicine.
• 8:09 – He covers that most people go to the doctor when they are fatigued or in pain and how traditional medicine takes a pharmaceutical approach without addressing the underlying condition. They omit the necessary steps to restore the body to improved health. The average person Dr. Minkoff treats has already been to about 13 doctors attempting to resolve a physical illness or condition.
• 10:00 – Dr. Minkoff explains how it is necessary to discover the cause of the condition, such as toxins in the body, missing nutrients, and other problems that could cause a serious health condition. Discovering the underlying cause is critical to be able to restore the body to a healthier condition.
• 12:56 – Dr. Minkoff discusses mercury toxicity as it relates to dental work and what happens to the system when the mercury in fillings is released. He covers the critical necessity of removing these fillings correctly and how his wife had fillings removed incorrectly and then suffered several dangerous and debilitating health conditions. He discusses how his personal experience with his wife's condition inspired an investigation into mercury toxicity treatments and how the treatments restored her health.
• 18:04 – A discussion about how his functional medicine practice's natural expansion began through word of mouth while he continued as an ER physician.  His functional medicine practice mushroomed to the point where he devoted himself to it full time, and how he has now focused on this approach for more than two decades. 
• 20:00 – An explanation of homeostasis and how it is the body's "set points" that allow for life and optimum performance, freedom from pain, and the production of energy. Achieving optimum homeostasis means you have plenty of energy, your organs work, food is assimilated, and your cells can detoxify naturally. He covers thyroid hormones and how vibrant, healthy, alive people fall into a specific thyroid hormone range.
• 23:10– Dr. Minkoff explains how fatigue is tied to your thyroid function. Improving thyroid function from the lower to middle sections of what traditional medicine calls "normal" into the 98^th percentile will allow the body to burn calories and produce higher energy and vitality levels.
• 25:00 – An explanation of the bio-energy testing process developed by Dr. Frank Shallenberger, which measures the quantity of oxygen breathed in during 20 minutes at rest, and how this test reveals the current function of your body's mitochondria. He explains the process of reaching optimum homeostasis for your age to restore the body's cells, allowing them to produce energy.
• 29:48 – An explanation of how Dr. Minkoff can tweak the performance of high-end athletes who compete at a world-class level. He explains that a single cell has 100,000 enzymatic reactions per second, accessing fuel, making energy, eliminating waste, producing proteins, and other jobs, with 100 trillion cells in the human body all busy performing these functions.
• 33:07 – A discussion of how a person may not experience the effects of massive cell death until it is critical. He covers how this relates to cell mitochondria that should be making a specific amount of energy per second but often produce 25 or 50 percent less due to poisoning or missing nutrients. This results in symptoms such as lack of energy, anxiety, inability to sleep, little change in the body from workouts, feeling, weak, or lack of motivation.
• 36:35 – Dr. Minkoff explains how he got into marathons, triathlons, and Iron Man competitions, competed in 43 Iron Man competitions since then, and how his whole family is invested in health and fitness as a shared activity.