MB #032: Tips For Sleep, Family Revision, and 4-year Seed Oils

Read Time:~3 Minutes

This week's highlight is the comprehensive 50-Point Health & Fitness Evaluation. If you’re feeling stuck, confused, or frustrated with your current level of health or fitness, or maybe you just want help to take what you're doing to the next level, then book a consultation where we'll review a 50-point evaluation of your health and fitness data, routines, and experiences and provide you actionable steps for how to improve your health and fitness quickly. This is like a "bumper-to-bumper inspection" to help you either take care of those pesky blind spots, or get finely tuned and race-ready! Book your call here.  

Hey friends,

Welcome back to The Mission Briefing, the weekly newsletter with the goal to equip you with what you need to accomplish your family's unique mission.

Today at a glance:

• Food For Thought: Linoleic Acid in your body for 4 years
• Quote: Ghostwealth
• Fitness Tips: 3 Tips to improve your sleep
• Book: Family Revision

🧠 Food For Thought:

Once you eat seed oils they are stored in your fat tissue and often remain there for over 4 years. Linoleic Acid (from seed oils) content in human fat tissue has increased 4x since the 1960s. Linoleic acid and its byproducts have been demonstrated to induce direct toxic effects on the endothelium (blood vessel lining). Ultrasound studies of healthy patients with high levels of 9-HODE (a linoleic acid oxidation byproduct) in carotid arteries also show signs of atherosclerosis.

✍️ Quote Of The Week:

Porn is fake sex. Media is fake news. Politicians are fake leaders. Feminism is fake femininity. Video games are fake adventures. In a fake world, embrace what's real. (Thanks to @Ghostwealth_ for this gem of truth.)

💪 Health And Fitness Tips:

3 Tips to improve your sleep

Wear blue light blocking glasses for 2+ hours before bed. Blue light has been shown to increase alertness. This is actually great during the earlier hours of the day and afternoon, but before bed, it is quite disruptive to our sleep.

Blue light exposure foils your body's attempts to make melatonin. This is due to a special group of neurons in your retina called the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs). The ipRGCs send light signals to the SCN (suprachiasmatic nucleus) to run interference with your sleep-wake cycle.

Although the primary function of ipRGCs is to promote circadian alignment, blue light exposure at the wrong time of day can lead to the opposite effect. That's because ipRGCs express the photopigment melanopsin. In the presence of blue light, melanopsin suppresses your natural melatonin production. This will delay your melatonin window, and you naturally find it harder to drift off to sleep at your normal bedtime.(1)

Drop the air temp down a notch. When you fall asleep, your body temperature drops by 1-2°F and continues to decrease. But if you're too hot, your body temperature won't drop enough and your body won't produce enough melatonin, making it harder to fall asleep and stay asleep.

65-68 degrees in the room you’re sleeping in is an ideal temp to allow your body to naturally cool. The drop in body temp allows the conservation of energy and redirection of energy towards other mechanisms in the body needed for recovery, repair, hormone optimization, etc.

Stop eating before bed. Eating tells your brain it's time to use energy and stay awake, while regular mealtimes, like a predictable breakfast, lunch, and dinner, are suggested to have many health benefits, including improved circadian rhythms, according to research.

Eating at night, when your body expects rest and there is no light out, disrupts your metabolism and circadian rhythm, as research has shown. While the occasional midnight meal is unlikely to affect your circadian rhythm, regular evening eating can train or even reset your body clock to associate night with alertness and daytime with rest, as studies have found.

I recommend having a 3-hour window between your last food intake and your bedtime. For me, this looks like dinner with the family at 6-6:30 p.m. and bedtime between 9-9:30 p.m. The one exception I would make is if you were to have bone broth before bed. The Glycine in bone broth promotes the temperature drop we just talked about, and because it’s liquid, the load on the digestive tract and time of digestion is almost non-existent.

📚 Book Recommendation:

Family Revision - If I were to recommend a single book to kickstart the journey towards transforming your marriage and parenting experience into something more adventurous, rhythmic, healthy, mission-centered, and effective at reaching the world, discipling your kids, and building authentic community, it would be Family Revision by Jeremy Pryor. This book (and the work of Family Teams) has changed my family's life over the last 5 years. As a bonus, here's the podcast episode where Jeremy and I talk about "Rhythms over Goals", one of the key topics discussed in his book and his and Jeff Bethke's other content.