What Is Your Wellness Wearable REALLY Telling You About Your Health? With Dr. Torkil Færø

In this episode, Join Adiel Gorel and Dr. Torkil Færø for an enlightening discussion about the emerging power of wearables to help us monitor and hack our health by properly interpreting the meaning all the data points wearables provide.

In this episode Dr. Færø discusses:

• The emerging industry of personalized medicine.
• Why listening to your body is not always enough.
• What does our heart rate and HRV reveal about the state of our health?
• How smart watches and fitness trackers help us mitigate our stress.
• Ways to decode your sleep and diet using wearables.

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Watch the episode here

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What Is Your Wellness Wearable REALLY Telling You About Your Health? With Dr. Torkil Færø

Wellness By Design: How You Can Make The Most Of Your Wearable

I’m very glad to be here with you again. I’m very excited. We have Dr. Torkil Færø. He’s talking about material that every single one of you knows about and using it in your daily lives. Torkil is going to teach us how to look at the measurement results of all those things that we use to measure in our lives, whether it’s Fitbit, Apple Watch, or Garmin, in a cohesive way. This could be a big step. I’m excited about it. Torkil, welcome to the show.

Thank you. It’s nice to be here.

Introducing Dr. Torkil Færø

I don’t want to bore you. I know that everybody who is interviewing you says the same thing, but I have to say it. If you can give us your background, how you got to this point, how you started, and a little bit about your book maybe.

I’m a Norwegian medical doctor. I’m an ER physician and general practitioner. I’ve been working like that for 26 years. I’ve been seeing more than 100,000 consultations with people. For the last 5 or 6 years, I’ve been using wearables to track my health, to track the heart rate variability, which is a biometric for the state of the autonomic nervous system and the general state of our body. I’ve been writing a book about that. It’s called The Pulse Cure.

In Norway, it’s been a tremendous success. It’s still on the bestseller list after more than two years and four months now. It was translated into seven languages. It has transformed my life from being a normal doctor to being a Norwegian celebrity being recognized everywhere and being in the media for two years because, in Norway, this is caught off. Everybody knows now that these variables are something you can use to get better health, better well-being, feel better, and identify energy thieves that substitute your forces below your surface without you knowing about it.

That is what I’m doing now. I’m still working at the ER. I have a lecture. Flying to another city. I’ll have three lectures, and probably eight podcasts. I know that so many people in the US have the wearables. To my knowledge, The Pulse here is the only book that tells you how to combine the best lifestyle strategies for health and then compare it with how it will affect heart rate variability. You can use these variables as a speedometer as a guide for how to improve your life.

Understanding Heart Rate Variability (HRV)

That’s a wonderful background. You mentioned it several times. Explain heart rate variability or HRV, why it is such a crucial measure of our state, and how we measure it.

The most basic vital signs, the heart rate, compared to our breath, will tell us so much about the state of our body. It was known to the ancient doctors of Greece, China, India, and so on for centuries but it’s still like that. How our heart rate will respond to any stressor will be revealed in the heart rate. The heart rate variability is in relation to heartbeats. Not the pulse rate in itself, which could be 70 in a resting heart rate or 120 when you’re running and so on, but it’s the variation between heartbeats.

The importance of that is it shows us the state of our autonomic nervous system. The system is divided into the parasympathetic rest and digest part and the sympathetic fight, flight, and freeze part. That would be at the extreme. This system is always operating even in between those two extreme states. In the parasympathetic restful state, when we are calm when we breathe in. the heart rate will go up a little bit. When we breathe out, it will go down a little bit to save energy now that there’s less oxygen in the lungs when you’re breathing out. If we are in a stressful state, the heart will be like a metronome, regardless of us breathing in or out.

Our body is our ancient system because this system was shared with all vertebrates. It’s hundreds of millions of years old. It’s still working pretty much in the same way. When we’re in the stress state, it beats like a metronome. It’s like our organ is saying, “This organism is in danger. We need to use all available forces and we cannot save energy even when there’s less oxygen in the lungs.” The wearables can track this around the clock. While we are busy living our lives, it will keep track of the intensity of the pressure on our system.

With artificial intelligence and comparing it with measurements from millions of users, it can tell us whether our strain is sustainable enough or compatible with health. These are some of the most important metrics we can have as doctors. As people or patients, we have it available in our hands, literally, any time we would wish to see it. The apps that belong to Garmin, Apple Watch, Oura Ring, and all the different devices will give us the numbers in a way that makes this actionable. You can take appropriate steps towards a better stress balance so to speak.

Let’s drill a little bit deeper into heart rate variability. If we construct the spectrum from 0 to 100, is it better to have lower or higher, what’s better, and why?

It’s better to have a higher heart rate variability, which shows that you have a capacity, that you are robust, you’re resilient, and you have tolerance towards stress. The better your heart rate variability, that is the sign of good sustainable health. The lower the heart rate variability, it’s a sign of a stressed system with less capacity for your immune system to work. If you are stressed, you’re drinking alcohol, you’re eating the wrong food, you’re overweight, you’re undertrained, your body is working at full speed the whole time to keep you going.

There will be not enough forces that will be prioritized by your body. Your immune system will always be lacking. That lays the ground for all kinds of diseases, which is why also if you google research papers and compare heart rate variability and almost any disease you can think of, there will be a connection. The lower the heart rate variability, the more probability that you will contract one of the lifestyle diseases. That is what we are dealing with as doctors. This is all lifestyle now.

If somebody wears an Oura Ring, which by the way, I notice you have two of them.

I have one Oura Ring, one Samsung ring, and a Norwegian-inspired ring. I have a Garmin watch. That is because it’s my job to keep track of the different devices that people use. If I only needed 1 or 2, I would probably use the Garmin and Oura Ring. If I had to have just one, that would be the Garmin watch.

What To Do If Your HRV Is Low

Suppose you got your measurements and the news is not good. Your HRV is low. What are actionable things you can do?

When I started doing this, I had no plans of writing a book. I’m just a normal doctor, finding out accidentally that there is an instrument that can do this. I used a heart rate monitor, an ECG device that I was taping on my chest and finding out. I had no guidebook. I only got this reading, a 24/7 graph of these. I thought that I was calm because mentally, I’m never in the fight, flight, and freeze mode. Probably as an ER doctor, you’re very calm. You’re trained to deal with stressful situations in a calm way. I was expecting to see the parasympathetic mode.

I was surprised when I saw that I was in a stressful state almost all the time. It was not the mental stress. It was the food I was eating. It was the alcohol I was drinking. It was a lack of sleep and it was eating at the wrong times of the day, and such things. It could be the heat if it was too hot while I was sleeping compared to turning the temperature down, these kinds of things. Most people will find out that they are more stressed than they would wish to see. Eighty percent of the diseases we doctors treat these days have a relationship to too much stress. Eighty percent would expect to see a lot of stress in their lives.

When I saw that, then I had to do detective work to detangle what is this dress. That is how I wrote the book so that you don’t have to do the same job yourself. You can see that my stress is high in the evening, maybe I’m eating too late. Maybe I should stop eating at 7:00 PM instead of 9:00 PM. Now I understand that is terrible for the health, for the stress levels, and so on. Most people would find out that they are too stressed.

I’m quite interested in your book and I know that I’m going to get it. I didn’t have an opportunity to read your book before our show, which is a shame, but I will. The things you mentioned sound like the low-hanging fruit. To eat well, probably not a lot of processed food but eat good natural organic whatever you want to call it. Not to eat too close to bedtime, not to sleep in a bedroom that’s too warm. Not to drink alcohol. Some people now say don’t drink it at all.

It used to be that a couple of glasses a day was good, depending on your gender and size. Now, there’s a new trend where people don’t drink at all, but then maybe move their bodies. People talk about meditation. People talk about those kinds of things. To me, these are the low-hanging fruit in the community of people who are watching this show. That would be the first place to start, but what would be more that we can do?

Most people would find out that those things will affect stress levels. What is nice is that you can see how it affects it. It’s also motivating, for example, to do a cold shower or a cold plunge when you see the calming effect on your system. It’s more motivating to skip the drink when you know how it will affect the stress system. It’s like having a speedometer so you can see these effects more. It’s more obvious.

The menstrual cycle is a big factor. For women in the fertile age, the week before menstruation is a physiological load on your system. It’s not just a feeling or a mood, you can see it in the heart rate variability. That is the drop is as big as having a strong COVID infection. Many women will have cravings for processed food, chocolates, a glass of wine, and so on to comfort themselves. When you see the stress that adds to the system, you skip that. You will be able to mitigate this down tip in the stress levels. You will also, to a large degree, lose the PMS symptoms that go along with it. I would add that as well.

For most people, when they do that, they will find that they have a good balance and they will not need to pay so much attention to it. Once in a while, they see that they are overworked and they should they should skip the hard exercise and so on. All the people can find that they’re not capable even with those strategies you mentioned. They are still not getting into the parasympathetic mode.

It could be that they have a food intolerance, for example. It could be a vitamin deficiency, B12, vitamin D, or iron in the case of women. It could be that they are discovering the first signs of a disease like Atari disease or even cancer. For example, cancer will be shown in the heart rate variability. There are several examples that people have seen that there’s a drop in HRV over time. They cannot explain it. They do all the things that you mentioned and more, and there’s no improvement. They go to the doctor and see that it is cancer. It was a lump in the breast or so on. Everything that will put a strain on your body, like fighting cancer or an infection will be visible in the heart rate variability.

Wearables As Dashboards To Your Physiology

My next question to you was measure. You see that you’re in a good state and you make it even better by doing all the good things that we mentioned, then you say, ”I happen to be a very disciplined person. I continue to live my life like this. I can shed the measurement. Why would somebody want to shed the measurement? Because all of these devices are connected to some extraneous electromagnetic spectrum.

That’s another whole issue that people say, “I would rather minimize stuff on my skin that is connected to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, especially when I sleep at night.” If I got to a steady state and I know I’m disciplined, what you said is a counter to that argument that I made. What if something is developing inside of you, God forbid, toy’re not going to see it for maybe decades.

That’s true. Part of the reason is that we are not equipped. We are very poor at sensing the state of our own bodies. That is from nature’s side because it needed to prioritize the senses against outdoor threats. We have excellent eyesight, excellent hearing, excellent smell, excellent taste, and a sense of touch because that is how we find what threatens our life and health throughout history. All the threats came from the outside, other animals, foul food, and such things.

What threatens our health now is stress levels out of balance. For example, if our blood sugar is high, we don’t feel it. If our blood pressure is high, it needs to be very high for you to feel that because we don’t have a kind of alarm system for these modern-day problems. That is why people get into a burnout situation because they cannot feel it before it’s too late and there has been too much stress on the system. It will be visible in the heart rate way before you feel the symptoms yourself.

The ones that shed the watch and think, “I found out things,” and put it away, it could happen that something comes up and they will not discover it. It depends on how you look at it. How I look at it is that this is like a dashboard to your physiology. Just like in your car, you want to know your speed, you want to know how much fuel is left, you want to know the outside temperature, and you want to know if all your lights are working, the temperature of the engine, and so on. This is like having a dashboard for your physiology. You have to choose, “Do I want to see that dashboard or not, or do I want to see it sometimes or all the time?”

That could be a happy medium because the dashboard doesn’t come for free. Some people will talk very loudly against having EMFs on our bodies, especially at night. That could be an excellent solution. People will say, “I’ll wear whatever.” It’s a certain frequency usually in the daytime and sees what’s going on. Maybe it’s a happy medium. Most people don’t care because we are swimming in the sea of electromagnetic waves anyway.

I don’t see much effect on the variables anyway. Usually, all the variables can be put in the flight mode. They can register that they are using the lights to register inside the ring or the watch and you have it in flight mode. Once a day, you take it off the flight mode, let it synchronize, and then put it back again in flight mode. You can be out to the room, you know that you do that. As you say, it’s probably just a drop in the ocean. It is a little way in the storm.

Most people you can see on the street walking with their phones. That’s not even in the same league as what we talked about. To cover that, I remember not too long ago. Somebody was trying to talk me into getting a PEMF mat. A newer version of a good one that supposedly everybody likes. One of the compelling arguments that someone made was, “I went to a clinic right next to where I live in LA and I measured my HRV, and then I used the mat for months, twice a day, and I didn’t change anything else in my life. My HRV was much better.” That was a very compelling argument for this device. Of course, PMF has pros and cons, and people say that it’s an arbitrary wavelength that somebody else chose. In this particular example, because it’s so new, somebody was using HRV as a tool to market it.

These things can have an effect even if you don’t see it in the heart rate variability. If it does show in the heart rate variability, you know that there is an effect on your system. That is also part of the success behind The Pulse Cure. The practitioners that until now have been regarded as this alternative practice Suddenly, their customers can see that there’s a difference, and they’re the happiest ones. They’ve been looked at like weird people, but now that they can see the effect on the autonomic nervous system, then of course the customers come back because they can see that it has an effect. Not just a placebo effect or whatever.

That makes it very popular. I will also say that a lot of the stress-related diseases will not show up on our lab tests. Many people who have been plagued by autonomic nervous system dysregulation have not been believed by doctors. They didn’t have anything to measure. Doctors are weird in this way that what I don’t know and what I can’t measure cannot exist. It’s probably something you’re making up. It will show in the heart rate variability and in the stress system. When I’m talking about micromanaging this stress system like I’m doing, I’m mainly talking about using the Garmin watches.

It does this so far, the only one that comes close to the ECG system that I had is the Garmin watch. The reason is that they are implementing the system from Firsteat Analytics, a Finnish company with more than twenty years of experience in physiological measurements. Garmin has bought the company and put the system into the watches. You wouldn’t necessarily be able to micromanage your chest levels like that with a Fitbit, an Apple Watch, an Oura Ring, or other devices, but they may have other advantages. The other one

As a point of general interest, correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t a lot of the Oura Ring company based in Finland?

Finland has been at the forefront of this. The Oura and Fitbit are Finis. Garmin and WHOOP are American.

What does WHOOP do?

They have a band so it’s a bracelet. The advantage of WHOOP is that you are putting into a daily journal. You are checking off the things you have been doing that particular day. WHOOP uses that information to give you a weekly and monthly report and of course, a daily report and your recovery state and your strain level. It’s less intrusive. Maybe people don’t like to have to see a screen. They want to check their state in the morning to see how much energy or physiological reserves they have to spend that day. WHOOP will then, along the day, measure the strain, and then they will reach a spot that says, “This is enough for today,” or it will say, “That’s okay for today. Why not go for a run now? You have more energy and so on.”

Managing Obsessions With Wearables

I’m not sure if you’re into soccer but Cristiano Ronaldo, the soccer player, uses WHOOP and says it’s like having a doctor on the wrist. I would agree with that. This is like having a lab on your wrist because what do these trackers use? It’s your heart rate, it’s your oxygen level, it’s your temperature, it’s your pattern of movement. From that information, they can tell you so much about how you’re living, what is happening that would be impossible to feel yourself, particularly while you’re living your life and particularly, if you’re living a stressful life. I know this is a question that you get a lot.

It’s not a question that comes from my heart because I understand what you’re talking about. I like it. I’m an engineer from Silicon, Valley by background. If you say dashboard, I’m in. I want to see a dashboard, especially about my life. I bet you get the following question all the time, and I’d like to see what you say to it. I split it into two.

One, sometimes people don’t play golf because they’re very competitive and the numbers drive them crazy and the handicap is exactly one thing they want to get better and they go and they’re obsessed with it to the point that their life is maybe not as full so to speak. That’s one thing. The other one is what about fun people? I’m sure they ask you. What about fun? I want to go to the pub. I want to have drinks with my friends. I want to relax. I don’t want to be an obsessive. I know you get those questions every day. What do you say to those questions?

For the obsessive part, I would say that usually, the way you obsess about this instrument is the way you obsess about everything. You can use the specific example of how you relate to this instrument, and you can learn how to relate to things in a better way so that golf will not be as painful as you described there. That would be a learning experiment because so many psychologists, for example, say to their clients that would have this kind of problem, “Just throw away the watch,” but the problem will not go away by throwing off the watch that shows the dashboard that you’re too stressed.

That would be like going to the doctor and you have a fever and the doctor says, “Put away the thermometer.” The disease will not go away. I would say that this is a chance to use this. I quoted to say that how you do something is how you do everything. Use it as a learning experience. Of course, you can throw it away. I don’t care what you or people do. My responsibility is only to make them aware that this is a possibility.

If I was writing a cooking book on how to make Asian recipes, it would be for the people who want to make Asian recipes. If you say I want to make hamburgers, fine. Buy another book or listen to some other people. I’ve written the book and these are devices for people who would like to have this dashboard to help them to make better choices and feel better. The other question, please refresh my memory.

Just fun. Come on. I drink with my friends.

We are supposed to put stress in our system, particularly good stress in our system. If you save energy, you will become weaker. You’re supposed to stress. You’re supposed to workout to push yourself. You just have to find the balance with the recovery. We’re not necessarily overstressed but we are mainly undercovered. We haven’t focused on recovery. When you cannot measure your recovery or even get rewarded for having done it by seeing it on your wearable, then it’s easy to skip recovery but there will be a price to pay for that. We are not made for that kind of intensity.

The problem with lifestyle diseases is that we’re not constructed for the intensity of modern-day lives. When we put these devices on hunter-gatherers, we see that they are in activity for three hours a day. Light activity, moderate activity for three hours a day. Most of the day, they are in the relaxed mode. Modern-day people are almost the opposite. Maybe they spend three hours in the relaxed mode and ten hours a day, they’re in the stressful mode. Our immune system cannot operate optimally under those circumstances. That is a problem and that is why when you take the time to recover, then you have the forces to have fun without being exhausted.

For me now, writing a bestseller is the worst thing you can do for your stress levels. Without this device, I would have no chance to keep my stress levels, but now I can see how much I need to relax between whatever I’m doing, and then I have the energy to have fun. What happens to people who have almost too much fun is they wear out, they burn out. They get stressed to have fun. If your idea of fun is having a lot of alcohol or eating a lot of cakes and candy, suddenly, you see there’s a price for this. It’s a lot of stress. People quit chocolate, they quit drinking because of the stress levels, and you can see that it costs you more than you thought.

I used to drink those two glasses of wine every day and I even thought that that was the way to calm down. Of course, when you get the variable, you see that it’s the worst way to calm down. According to WHOOP, which measures their customers or clients, alcohol is the worst stressor of all. I thought it was the best de-stresser of all. That shows me how wrong we can be in interpreting the signals from our bodies.

Benefits Of Getting A Cold Plunge

You mentioned certain modes and one of them was the cold plunge or the cold shower. The opposite that sometimes I use in conjunction, especially in the northern countries where there is almost a tradition of going to the sauna, going to snow, or going to the cold lake, Wim Hof, etc. Can you talk a little bit more about how you view the cold plunge?

I did that yesterday. I was in the sauna and the icy cold water. It’s 1 or 2 degrees above freezing here now in Norway. That is a good thing because it challenges your temperature. The problem in modern life is that we are at a constant room temperature. It’s very comfortable but we are not challenging our system. Our system is made to be challenged by temperature. Our physiology is made on the plains of Africa at some altitude where it was cold during the night there were no blankets from two million years ago.

We are made to tolerate extreme temperature differences. Now that we have this room temperature, our flexibility is compromised. Using the cold plunge and the sauna is a way to expand that temperature and make it more flexible. We have cold shock proteins. We have heat shock proteins that will be released and it will help our immune system. We will get brown fat, which will be there, regulating the temperature because there will be mitochondria in the brown fat that make up the color. There will be a lot of advantages to pushing yourself in that way.

I use the Garmin smartwatch actively then because I can go into the sauna. I see that when my heart rate goes beyond 100, then I need to go into the water. If I stay in the water for maybe two minutes, then my heart rate goes down to maybe 50. It will take a longer time to get up to 100 again, and then I go out into the water. You can use it like that also to find a good balance between the heat and the cold.

Out of curiosity and to get something useful as a reference, what kind of sauna and what kind of cold plunge do you use?

In Norway, there are so many saunas. It’s like a sauna fever. This is right in the center of town by the big Opera House in Oslo. It’s a floating sauna. They have maybe 10 or 12 saunas of different kinds, wooden, man-made, charming, rustic, and with the sauna ovens, some with wood and some with electrical heating, and then you go diving off the rafts. The son is on a raft.

You dive into the water later.

Yeah or if it’s very icy, they cut out some of the ice there, but usually, there will be ice in the port because there are boats all the time, big boats, and so on.

Brutal.

Yeah. It’s fun to see because when you are used to it, you get the tolerance or the flexibility. It’s terrible but not horrible. When you see the tourists coming for the first time like it was yesterday. They’re screaming when they get into the water.

I don’t blame them.

I did that the first time as well. You build a tolerance to the cold and heat, and also outside of this situation, you get more tolerant towards heat and cold in your daily lives as well. I know many women saying, “Certainly, I can tolerate being colder than I used to.” What you want to have in your nervous system and the point of all this is to have flexibility in the intensity of your life so that you’re able to push yourself to the maximum when you need it. You’re also able to calm down when you need that. You have the flexibility to adapt to any situation and be in control. You’re not stressed because the circumstances are stressful. You keep control even in stressful situations, then when you need to push yourself, you can also do that.

Talking Care Of The Vagus Nerves

It’s sort of an analogy in the temperature domain to heart rate variability. Again, how can you tolerate and how flexible you are in the variability of the temperatures in every facet? There’s a lot of stuff and books about the vagus nerves. Some devices are stimulating. There are many things. How do you talk about that in the context of what you’re talking about?

I’m co-writing a vagus nerve book. That will be released in Norway in June. The vagus nerve is super important and the HRV is in direct biometric on the state of the vagus nerve. You can also use these stimulators. As you’re talking about, you can have the newest sim that I have that you attached to your ear. There are things that you can put around your neck. That will electrically stimulate your vagus nerve. I haven’t seen the research results yet, but it’s supposed to be very effective against a lot of diseases.

It will be exciting to see how we can use that in the future and to use different technologies to hack our system because it will affect all diseases. The problem for us doctors is we are waiting until people get sick and then we do something. There’s a lot of money in that strategy. What we need to do is go into the root cause of things from inflammation, from oxidative stress to insulin resistance and autonomic nervous system dysfunction, and also the mitochondria.

When your mitochondria are good and your cells are good, your heart rate variability also improves. When you have these basic systems in your body in order, it will affect and reduce the risk of all kinds of diseases. That is why the vagus nerve stimulators, when they work, will affect a hundred different diseases because they’re going to regulate the autonomic nervous system.

You say more research is needed, but something very simple. You’re co-writing a book. You could let a few people. This is not an experiment. This is N equal to 1, 2, or 3, not an experiment, but you can let them use the stimulator, and then you can measure the HRV.

We have put the main author, let’s put more stress on breathwork, on different kinds of natural ways to do that. I think it’s a bit early to write in the book exactly how it works. It seems very promising what they say. When you’re a doctor and you hear about new pharmacological things, there’s always a lot of optimism, and then when the results are tested even more, it shows that it was not like that anyway because the problem is that so far, all the research, at least what I’ve seen, on this device comes from the producers themselves. That is why we’re waiting a bit to see that to put that into the book.

Staying Out Of The Sun: The Worst Medical Advice

You mentioned before about humans having evolved and having been made so to speak to withstand cold and heat and all of those extremes. Now, we spend a lot of time in similar temperatures, maybe 70 degrees, or 72 even for some people. We get soft so to speak not in a good way. What about the other way that humans were made to be, that is if you go back a couple of million years, or even a few hundred years, We spent most of our day outdoors.

Never mind hunter-gatherers. That’s for sure. I’m talking about more air conditioning. You spend most of your day out. What happens then? You get exposed to the light spectrum of the sun, which is by far the most powerful bountiful, and big light spectrum and is available in a continuity. Not like now that some people are buying a red and infrared panel. It gives you two frequencies. The sun gives you infinite frequencies, the visible and the non-visible. It’s been found more and more that we have not only receptors not in our eyes but throughout our whole body to these kind of frequencies.

How does that connect? We go back to a couple of hundred years ago, when the Sun rises, you rise. When the sun sets, you set. You go to bed. Now, especially the younger people live the opposite life. Many young people sleep deep into the day than at night. Now they get an abundance of the blue spectrum from devices. We are developing almost a generation of people who are not well. What do you say to that part of the spectrum? No pun intended.

That was the summary of my next book because I’m starting to write the book on the effects of the Sun and a short version of why sun exposure is good for us. It’s a horrible thing. It’s the worst medical error of all time that we are advising people to stay out of the Sun. Even here now in Norway at this time of year, we are advising people to stay out of the Sun. There’s almost no Sun. Children in kindergarten will get sunscreen three times a day. It’s horrible.

I think that sun exposure is one of the most important things for our health. It is also visible in the heart rate variability. At this time of year, so many Norwegians in wintertime fly to the Canary Islands, they fly to Thailand, they fly to where there’s Sun. The heart rate variability jumps up in the air. It doubles because the Sun exposure improves the mitochondria. It improves blood circulation. It releases endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, and lots of different things that happen in the mitochondria. It releases melatonin, which is an antioxidant.

It improves the cytochrome C oxidase, which will make ATP production more efficient. It will release nitric oxide stored in the skin for that purpose. Of course, everybody knows that vitamin D is also made. The loss of sunlight, the sun exposure that we are exposed to is probably the the worst attack on our health. We are developed under the sun for all those millions of years and the idea that the sun would hurt us more than it would gain us is preposterous. Who would have thought? Who could think of that idea? That is part of the mystery of the book that I’m writing. Who made this up? Where did this insane idea come from?

You also said UVB not only creates vitamin D when it comes in touch with the skin but also breaks down into those endorphins. When people have that, they have a sense of fullness. They don’t go into addictive places to get those endorphins like playing games and gambling and porn and smoking and eating cake. All these things you said. They may not need this much if they simply get the sun on their skin.

You said yourself, if they go to Thailand on vacation, the HRV goes crazy up. By the way, some geniuses came up with the idea that I am very happy that the adults in the room intervened and said no. They said, “We have global warming. Let’s cover the sky and not let the sun reach the Earth.” That’s a genius idea, isn’t it? You need to be a special kind of stupid to come up with an idea like that.

I talked to a person from Japan recently and we were talking about the sunlight spectrum and all of that stuff. She told me that in Japan, when they grow up, the doctors instill into everyone, that it’s very powerful, “The sun is horrible, the sun is bad, don’t go in the sun, put makeup that has sunscreen in it.” She said, “I can’t shake it. It’s from childhood.” When you put sunscreen, the sunscreen will block certain frequencies of the light.

You’ll still get the light, but you’ll get alien lights that the body doesn’t even know what to do with it because it’s not the spectrum. I don’t even know what to say to that. If a person lives in Norway and goes to the Canary Islands, they feel amazing. Part of the reason they feel amazing is probably because they walk with their toes in the sand and they get you the electrons from the ground. Why don’t they move there?

We should all move there. I’m thinking of migrating for the winter going down to the southern part because there will be years to be gained from being in the sun in the winter time. That’s for sure. The idea is that nature has made a system in our body that gives us a tan to protect us from the Sun. The idea is to think that we can do better than that. We will just make some sunscreen that you have to put on several times a day and that will replace that. It’s impossible to understand where these ideas come from, particularly when it’s so wrong because all the research that is being done now shows that it’s exactly the opposite things that need to happen. If you get enough sunlight, the chances of you getting heart disease or cancer drop significantly by 30% or so.

Suntan also means there is melanin out on your skin. It’s visible. You got a tan. It can be looked at as a crude approximation of your vitamin D benefit. If you are tanned, there’s a likelihood that the UVB was out and you got vitamin D. The second thing is melanin supposedly exists not only in the outer part of your skin but inside of your whole body and has a lot of beneficial qualities for us. To let none be there is not particularly good.

Also, the idea is to think that we are rewarded with endorphins from being in the sun. In an evolutionary sense, an animal that would be worse off from then being in contact with the sun would not survive. Another animal would take its place.

I heard from somebody who’s going to be on my podcast, she is a researcher who specializes in sunlight and spectrum. She said, “Why don’t you use nature’s sunscreen? The shade.” When you see a cat laying in the sun, warming up, feeling amazing, all of a sudden, they step up and go to shade. They are too hot, let’s see sunscreen.

They feel that they had enough. If you don’t use sunscreen and you go out in the sun and then you feel full just like you’re eating it. You’re eating enough, then you go into the shade.

That’s a whole other thing. I’m sure you know about Dr. Jack Kruse. He’s taken a very deep dive into that. He moved himself to El Salvador. He talks a lot about how the mitochondria don’t know if you have peas, tomatoes, or chicken. It just knows the electrons, the protons, and the neutrons that it gets. When you step on the sand on the beach, the negative charge of the sand gets into you. It gives you electrons, the mitochondria. Since the electrons are the same as when you eat chicken, it’s the same thing for that. We eat from here. We eat by getting the sun, the melanin, and all that stuff. We eat by grounding. Again, I think if you go on vacation in the South, you notice you’re hungry when you’re out in the sun.

Eating food is okay. There are other advantages to eating food you get the building blocks of proteins, fats, and so on for the cells to work, but energy-wise, we can get the electrons from the Sun. We are walking solar panels. We are taking in the energy and of course, our mitochondria have found a way to use that energy throughout those millions of years.

Since we got here and since you live up north, what do you think of depleted water?

I don’t know about that enough.

That’s a whole thing with the mitochondria. When you live down south of the equator, you get excellent son and you’ve already seen all the benefits of that. When you live up north, you don’t get the excellent sun, but you get the cold. The cold has a similar beneficial effect on the mitochondria.

In the mitochondria, if it’s too cold, there are tiny amounts inside the cells.

Isn’t this amazing? We either get the UV light from the sun or we make it ourselves from the cold.

Addressing The Biggest Flaw Of Medical Society

It’s a great system. That is why the flaw of the medical society is to think that we can fix metabolic diseases by giving them medicine for hypertension, diabetes, depression, and everything that we medicate is just a substitute for living in a natural way. That is the good thing about the technology that we’re talking about. It points backward in time. It shows that if you live closer to the circumstances of our ancestors, you’re healthier and it will be shown in the heart rate.

We don’t need to live in the total state like in Savannah, but we need to move towards that. We need to eat food that we are made for and that our immune system recognizes and knows how to handle. We need to sleep when it’s dark and eat when it’s light. We need to fast sometimes, we need to move, we need to relax, we need to get sunlight, and we need to get grounding. When we do all of that, we don’t need all the medicines and all this super expensive healthcare system or sick care system that, in some ways, is based on making money for some people.

Sometimes I pass by a television, even if I’m in a mall. I see ads. In the US, pharmaceutical companies put ads on television to tell people about their drugs, and people will go and ask the doctor for the drug. That’s the intent. Sometimes, I see an ad for a drug that is specifically for the horrible side effects of another drug. I see an ad for it on television. That’s unbelievable.

It’s insane what’s happening. The good thing is that in the posture in the book, all the strategies are free. Getting in balance set for a healthy life. It’s all free. Sleep is free, breathwork is free, sunshine is free. You can eat real foods, cold plunges are free. All the strategies are free. The problem is there’s no commercial pressure behind it. People would rather pay for something that makes them sick than doing something for free that makes them healthy.

I agree 100% that you could take the other side of that same coin and say this may not get as far and wide as it should because nobody makes money off of it.

That is also the good thing about these devices. There is money in keeping people healthy and giving them control. It’s a big shift in mentality. It is the shift from waiting until you get sick to doing something, and then doing something to avoid getting into that place. It’s also the shift of power from the healthcare system and the doctors and practitioners into your own hands at all times. In my mind, these devices are as important for modern-day inflammation-based diseases as antibiotics and vaccines have been in the old days of infectious diseases. It’s as important. It can help you avoid getting the modern-day diseases.

Dr. Færø’s Book And Social Network

How can people benefit from your beautiful and detailed knowledge? I know about your book. If you could state the name of your book once again for us?

It’s called The Pulse Cure. It’s in a paperback version, but also an audiobook. If you have an iPhone, probably a Samsung or Android as well, you can download it and there is an eBook also. It’s available. It’s a normal published book. It’s available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or whatever.

What if somebody wanted to get lazy and greedy all at the same time and say, “I want to talk to Dr. Torkil one-on-one for him to guide me in how to use the devices in the best way?” Do you do that?

Not at present. We are but we are building a social network called ThePulseCure.com, where you can also see the video lecture that I have there, which explains how to use the Garmin watches more in detail. It’s visible what I’m talking about. There’s a blog there. I’m on Instagram also.

One tiny question. All these devices live at the inflection point where AI is only beginning to search. It’s surging exponentially and it makes perfect sense because the AI itself will promote the AI, and make it more intelligent. It’s an exponential thing. The devices you talk about, in a year and a half, are going to be another universe. That book has to be followed, I guess.

The development is really fast. The incorporation of artificial intelligence. It’s giving you advice on how to train. It will probably give you advice on how to eat. It can probably, after some time, identify what kind of food shouldn’t you eat by knowing what you’re eating and identifying that when you eat eggs, your heart rate goes up. Maybe you should try to cut out eggs. Maybe you have a food intolerance, for example. It could probably give you more detailed advice that’s also connected to DNA tests and bloodwork. The possibilities that you can attach to this dashboard are almost limitless.

Thank you very much for taking the time. I know you’re going crazy. You’re very popular and rightfully so. Thank you for taking the time. We learned a lot from you and I hope to see you again soon.

Thank you so much for letting me speak about these important things on your show. Thank you for your time.

Important Links

• Dr. Torkil Færø
• The Pulse Cure
• Torkil Færø on Instagram
• Garmin
• WHOOP
• Oura Ring

About Dr. Torkil Færø

Dr. Torkil Færø is a GP and emergency physician, documentary filmmaker, author and photographer. Over a 26- year career as a freelance doctor, he has worked all over Norway, had hundred thousand consultations and thus gained a unique picture of the diseases that plague us. He learned that the cause is most often found in the stresses our lifestyles place on our bodies. When his father died at 73, he realized that he had to change his own lifestyle. Being 40 pounds overweight, under-trained, over-stressed, under-slept and drinking alcohol daily, he learned that this lifestyle could deprive him of decades. Using wearables he found a way to track and regulate his nervous system and physiology. Færø is an award-winning photographer, author of The Camera Cure, and has made TV films about his pilgrimages to Nidaros and Santiago de Compostela. An inveterate traveller, he has visited over 80 countries, and speaks eight languages. He lives in Norway.