In this episode of Chip Talks Health, we take a deep dive into the fascinating endocannabinoid system (ECS) and its critical role in regulating overall well-being. Host Chip unpacks the science behind dietary fats, particularly omega-3 and omega-6, and their profound impact on inflammation, immunity, and long-term health. If you’ve ever wondered how your diet affects your body’s natural regulatory mechanisms, this episode is a must-listen!

Key Takeaways from This Episode:

• The Four Types of Dietary Fats 

• The Endocannabinoid System, Diet, and Inflammation (12:14)

• Cannabis Can Safely Inhibit the COX System (16:25)

• The Endocannabinoid System: The Body’s Master Regulator (18:29)

Hello, everybody; welcome to another exciting version of Chip Talks Health.

Today, we're going to talk about the endocannabinoid system. Oh boy, oh boy. Now, if most of you just immediately thought, gee, Chip's going to try to talk to us about marijuana, then, ha, I gotcha. That's exactly what I wanted you to think because we're going to try to do this without talking about marijuana at all. We may reference cannabis a little bit; we're going to have a little bit; for the most part, we're going to talk about this system, how it applies to you now, how it applies to the food that you eat, how you drive it, how you build it, how it can go wrong.

We will discuss all those things today on Chip Talks Health. Are you guys ready? Are you excited? Here we go.

All of this has to do with understanding our function. Why aren't we taught this stuff in grade school? It can get very difficult and very complicated, and it certainly can be extremely nuanced. At the same time, a third-grader could understand the logical concepts.

We can handle it and disseminate the information; I wonder why it isn't taught in our education system from kindergarten through university.

What I'm going to teach you guys today is what I will tell you guys to talk to you about today. No PhD knows this information unless they've independently found it out. No doctor knows this information unless they've independently found it out. No dietitian knows this information unless they've independently figured it out.

Hopefully, one of the nice things is that you guys have all found chat GPT or things like that. GROK is pretty good on X. There are several good AI platforms; I would encourage you to download one of those platforms and begin to ask it questions about what I tell you, what your doctor tells you, what researchers tell you, what anybody tells you. Because these AI tools now can go out, they can crawl PubMed; they can crawl research; they can crawl all types of information and pull that all together into a look that we've never really been able to have.

In the past, we've had to trust Ph.D. Bill or Dr. Joe should be the authority experts. Well, not anymore. Honestly, thank God because my Ph.D. Bill and Dr. Joe don't have the information. They don't have the information I will give you today.

We must re-emphasize retraining our people, certainly our professional class, with the information. Why would anybody teach them wrong information? Well, that's not necessarily wrong. It's just a box. It's just a little box. If I know the big box, I can look like God in the little box world, right?

I can dole out discoveries and help push people along in my system. So, Ph.D. Bill, he's a smart guy. Maybe I'll give him a little tidbit from the big box that he doesn't have in his little box yet; he can go to town on that. So, maybe it works that way or doesn't, I don't know. All I know is this. No physician yet is taught about the endocannabinoid system at a PhD level. No researcher has yet been taught about the endocannabinoid system at a PhD level. That's wild. It's our master regulatory system. This system regulates our central nervous system. It's pretty important. If you're a neurologist, you would want to know about the endocannabinoid system. It regulates your whole world.

I think it'd be pretty important to know about, don't you? It's worth more than two hours of lecture in an overall three-hour class on pharmacology, probably given that it's our master regulatory system.

There are four types of dietary fats.

Let's talk about how this works. This is cool. As we eat dietary fats there are four dietary fats: saturated fat, which we all get from animal products and avocado. Monounsaturated fat, which is olive oil folic acid, creates monounsaturated fat. Or is it monounsaturated fat, olive, or avocado, or can it come from animal products? Those are the two fats our bodies deal with; cholesterol is part of that whole system.

We kind of back-and-forth ping those guys around. We can do all kinds of alterations with those two types of fats. They are the two most important fats. Omega three and omega six fats are the most important daily things you eat. Why are they important? Your body can't make them.

Why are they important? You need them to build your entire immune system. They constitute what makes up cell walls. They are an integral part of your function, omega three omega six fats, the two most important for the endocannabinoid system. As we eat dietary fats, these fats build endocannabinoids as soon as they hit our intestinal lumen.

By building endocannabinoids, we signal through our vagal afferent nerve to our hypothalamus hippocampus to set a nutritional state. Do we have enough? Are we getting enough omega-3 fat? Are we getting enough omega-6 fat? Are they balanced? Are we getting enough saturated monounsaturated? If the answer to that is no, it is for most of us now because none of us eat enough Omega 3, then what happens is a decision has to be made to allow a gut biome to develop. The gut biome has several purposes; it helps us digest food.

In their class of bacterioid bacterioides, the bacteria in the gut biome produce very helpful short-chain fatty acids that help us offset nutritional deficiencies. How does this work? I'll give you a real-world situation. Saturated fat is inflammatory. Monounsaturated fat is anti-inflammatory. Omega 6 fat is inflammatory. Omega 3 fat is anti-inflammatory. Now, we all overconsume saturated fat and omega-6 fat, which creates an incredibly inflammatory situation in our diet.

We're programming ourselves to be reactive inflammatory. We have to have some way to mitigate inflammation. If you're not eating omega-3s, you've got to have a way to mitigate inflammation. Your body has to have a makeup system in the biome. The biome will then be asked to produce short-chain fatty acids, which help offset inflammation. We're in about the worst situation that we can be in regarding complexity now because we eat just one side of the equation. We eat all the inflammatory stuff, which creates a need for a very diverse whopping gut biome, where a lot of disease starts, has its genesis, and is allowed to rock and roll.

We don't want that situation, do we? At all? How do we begin to help ourselves now? Well, it's by understanding these fats and understanding the consequences.

You're going to hear a lot of stuff about seed oils coming up soon. Are all seed oils bad? No. Chia seed oil is really good. Cranberry seed oil, black seed oils, there's a bunch of good seed oils. The problem with the oils they're talking about when they talk about seed oils is those oils like canola oil, safflower oil, and things like that all have way too much omega 6—corn oil in particular. Corn oil is 40 to 1. Corn oil contains a lot of omega-6.

When people talk about seed oils, they talk about oils that are very heavy in omega-6 fats. Because not all seed oils are good, there are many really good ones. The ones with omega-6 fats are over-consuming now. That's setting a very inflammatory reactionary state in our body, which is just a playground for disease, pathogens, and all manner of disease. This is all endocannabinoid-driven.

Suppose our endocannabinoid system must eat equal omega-3 and omega-6 fats. In that case, we can begin to better handle our environment's food sources. We're going to be more dynamic. We're not going to die of the inflammatory diseases that we die of now. 80% of us will die of some inflammatory disease. That's how prevalent this stuff is.

I'm telling you, we don't need to, just by understanding this endocannabinoid system. Dietary fats are the king of the endocannabinoid system. As soon as they hit our intestinal lumen, they build fat endocannabinoids. These endocannabinoids give us feedback and allow us to manage our body in a master regulatory way. We can set it up in a certain way.

If we overconsume Omega 6s, we will set the overall management of our body in a very inflammatory, reactionary way. Equally, if we overconsume Omega 3s over Omega 6s, we will set a healing, uninflammatory situation. What would that look like? Well, if you got infected by something that was eating you, you might heal. You wouldn't have much immune response; you might heal behind whatever that thing was eating. We're not in that situation now. We're the exact opposite.

What happens now is that we have very little healing power and a lot of reactive inflammatory power. That's not good. It's not good for our health, and it's leading to many of these diseases.

There's a very important researcher named Dr. Artemis Somopoulos. She has become a colleague or collaborator of mine, which is awesome. I love to talk to her. She is the lady who did all the underpinning research on omega-3 and omega-6 fats, or the Mediterranean diet, back in the 90s when everything was hot and heavy. Her research underpinned all this. She has done the yeoman's work on omega-3 and omega-6.

A paleo diet is based more on a one-to-one to one-to-four omega three to omega six ratio. If you're in those ratios, you don't get sick, you don't get autoimmune diseases, you don't get cancer, and you don't have most of the diseases that we see popping up in our population now.

The endocannabinoid system is linked to inflammation in our diet.

You can go back and look up that research; her name is Dr. Artemis Semopoulos. Now we've understood the endocannabinoid system and how it works with our diet; it is linked to our diet. Let's talk about how an inflammatory event works with differences in Omega 3 and Omega 6. We won't; we won't go too deep into this stuff. I just want you guys to appreciate the importance of the endocannabinoid system. How your nerves fire, your brain works, and how you deal with your environment. All these things are endocannabinoid-driven now. The way we're configuring it is very reactive, though. What we tend to do is fight or flight, right?

The first thing you're going to do is react. You're going to react with cortisol, you're going to react with norepinephrine, you're going to react, you're going to react, you're going to react. All these chemicals are produced so we can make good decisions, run away if needed, and be stronger than we normally would.

That's a fight-or-flight response. All of us are kind of in that fight or flight response as to any kind of infection invasion or anything; we're all just, boom, we're fight or flight. That's because of the amount of omega three omega six we eat. We're eating too much omega six and not enough omega 3. We could change that by eating equal omega three omega 6.

To be honest with you, we would be less reactive in a much better state. We're very reactive because of the amount of Omega 6 we eat. When we have that type of reaction, all kinds of things happen in our body to produce that reaction that we're configured by our endocannabinoid system and our diet. Let me give you some examples of this.

Most of us have taken Tylenol or a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, right? We've taken some kind of Tylenol or Ibuprofen. Well, those drugs work because they will inhibit a system called Cox. You have two Cox enzymes, if you will, Cox1 and Cox2. NSAIDs will inhibit those systems, usually in a not-safe way.

We'll talk about how to do it safely in just a second. They'll inhibit those systems. Why would that help you with pain? If you're eating more omega 6s, you're producing more of a type of prostaglandin called PGE2. PGE2 is the genesis of pain. It's all the genesis of inflammation.

And if you're consuming Omega 6s, you'll produce a lot more PGE2; you'll be a lot more pain-prone than somebody eating equal amounts of Omega 3 and Omega 6. Are we talking about cannabis at all? It's kind of fun, isn't it? We're discussing omega three omega six fats in your endocannabinoid system. We haven't talked about cannabis at all. We'll talk about its effects on the system, maybe at the end here; Omega 3 and Omega 6 have a lot more impact on your daily endocannabinoid system than cannabis does.

Your dog's endocannabinoid system, bird, fish, or anything with a spine's endocannabinoid system. All right, an overconsumption of omega 6s will produce more pain mediators. All right, PGE 2, you’re going to be more sensitive to pain and have a harder time mitigating pain. If we flip the situation, overconsumed omega 3s and under-consumed omega 6s, we will heal quickly.

Another prostaglandin, PGE3, produced from omega-3 fats, is associated with healing. We would heal fast; we wouldn't necessarily inflame or react.

Cannabis can safely inhibit the COX system, which is important.

Regarding COX inhibition, are there safer ways to inhibit the COX system? Yes, it turns out that this is why marijuana is important. Why is cannabis important? Well, it's almost the perfect screwdriver for this system. If about medical marijuana, if about medical cannabis, its constituents, and its pharmacology, then you can use that to impact the endocannabinoid system safely—something like CBD. CBDA is like a raw plant, cannabis plant leaf; CBDA will inhibit COX safely. You have things in the cannabis plant that will very safely inhibit the Cox enzyme system a lot more safely than any nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory device like Tylenol or ibuprofen, which are cool beans.

If you go to nature, once you understand our workings and our function, you understand the big box rather than the little box that most doctors and researchers have been taught; then you quickly understand that God built us in this kind of perfect form. He built us this perfect pharmacological system out here in nature. Nothing happens inside of you that we can't go to nature to find a solution or fix. There are certainly traumas. You could get shot or run over by something. That's when your body can heal. There are things from nature that would help that. I'm talking about Cox inhibition. There are always ways in nature to find these similar things that we've gotten all wrapped around, around the axle about in the pharmacological medical worlds. Lots of good stuff is always in nature.

The endocannabinoid system is our master regulatory system.

The endocannabinoid system is super important. It's our master regulatory system. What does that mean?

Well, it means that you are regulated, right? How does that regulation work? Well, it works at a micro level in cells—that's explainable and easy to understand. It works at a macro level, right?

So, good examples of this.

We kind of work with the sun; we all work with the endocannabinoid system. If you want to know the science behind this, you can look at the clock WNT and how the endocannabinoid system, CB1 receptors, and ion channels manipulate WNT.

If you want to dive deep, there's much to do here. Let's just say the endocannabinoid system regulates organs to the point that, in our stomach, now is a good time to eat. In our liver, now is the time to repair it. In our hearts, now is the time to repair. You're working on your heart daily between 11:00 am and 1:00 pm; if you eat lunch, guess what happens? You don't work on your heart anymore. You work on your lunch. You start working on your liver at about 7:00 at night. This is why people say it's better to eat all your food before 7:00, right? Because these things happen.

Those are the endocannabinoid systems involved. That's a bigger picture of how our bodies sync with the sun and the circadian rhythm inside of that. It is a good time to eat if you look at how the endocannabinoid system regulates your stomach. Every day, from about 10 am to about 3 pm, you'll begin to express CB1 neuroreceptors in the gut. This is what most of us think of as hunger. You can only go for 40 days without eating, right?

Your body goes through these processes twice daily, so now would be a good time to eat. That's all endocannabinoid driven. Endocannabinoids manage all functions through CB1 neuroreceptors.

One of the interesting things about the endocannabinoid system is that if it is the master regulatory system, as many of us argue, it would have to have the ability to control not just every cell but organelles within cells. The endocannabinoid system would have to control mitochondria energy status. How can it control and regulate energy status in you if it can't control and regulate energy status in mitochondria? A recent development is that they found CB1 receptors on the outer membranes of mitochondria. Even these little organelles inside of cells have an endocannabinoid system expressed. Endoplasmic reticulums have CB1 neuroreceptors that would have to because you're switching how you're folding proteins, that type of thing. Even your perixone has CB AH1 receptors.

Why does your beta oxidize there? Your body must be synced up, whether burning fat or sugar or changing energy statuses. Every cell inside of every cell even responds to endocannabinoid signaling in endocannabinoid mechanizations, which is cool. This system can do anything with a cell through the endocannabinoid system. Let's talk a little bit about marijuana quickly.

Almost every talk I have is about the endocannabinoid system. I will discuss how the endocannabinoid system interfaces if I'm talking about the immune system. If I'm talking about autism, I'm talking about the issues and problems that are seen in the endocannabinoid system. Autistic people have too little circulating endocannabinoids, which means that they don't have the engineering surface that you do.

It makes sense that they are the way they are. Obese people have too many circulating endocannabinoids, which means that they've lost, lost communication, they've lost signaling, they've lost tone in their bodies.

For easy things to fix, you must understand the body, the processes, and where to go in nature to fix them. Let's talk about the master screwdriver for a second. I speak and teach about the endocannabinoid system all the time. When I do, I have to spend about five minutes usually dialing people back from marijuana because that's where everybody leaps when we talk about the endocannabinoid system. Don't do that, first of all. Second, let me explain the differences between your dog's or a bird's endocannabinoid system, the fish your lizard, and the dietary fats that drive it.

Cannabis, at least in human mammals, is a good way to get in the middle of that system, like a master screwdriver. As I mentioned, something like CBDA's action at COX enzymes will help with pain relief and inflammation control THC. At the same time, that's the thing that everybody seems to get wrapped around the axle about: psychoactivity.

The A, in its acidic form, which is non-psychoactive, has all kinds of different properties. It mimics something called anandamide, which is our main control guy in the endocannabinoid system. Just giving you more control surfaces and more ways to manipulate that control surface will result in a better system, a finer, more detailed way to control your body better.

THC can augment anandamide and give you more control. THC is psychoactive, though, that is very uncomfortable for a lot of people. We suggest that, really, for people who have depression, who can't sleep, it's got some good uses, but it's certainly not for everything. There's no need to. There are many things within the cannabis plant.

The cannabis plant will produce cannabinoids, which directly impact the endocannabinoid system in broad ways, all in fine ways. The other beneficial thing that the cannabis plant produces is terpenes. Terpenes are a way for a plant to build its immune system. If a plant is trying to defend itself from staph or strep, it will build a certain terpene profile to do that. Those terpene profiles do the same thing in us as long as they're safe. There are terpene profiles that will help fight pathogenic infections and other things. We're learning that from the cannabis plant.

In the future, I don't know what's going to happen with cannabis policy; certainly, every one of us needs access to hemp or cannabis in some way. Whether you choose to exercise that access or not is kind of up to you and your values; it's just such a medicinal tool that it's very beneficial for us all to have access to it.

Chip Talks Health will dive into the endocannabinoid system next week.

That's a little bit about the endocannabinoid system. With every single chip talk, we will be diving into the endocannabinoid system because I like to relate that to current science problems, we're discussing or problems we're trying to solve. After all, it's our master regulatory system. It's a great place to find answers and understand your work.

If you're a physician, a researcher, or a professional, professionally educated person, this system presents such a beautiful, logical construct if I teach you about it. That diet just kind of falls out, that nutrition just kind of falls out, that behavior kind of falls out. The environmental damage that we all take on kind of falls out. Allergies kind of fall out.

It's easy to teach you how you work around this system. You can't compartmentalize information. You can't silo information. You can't play all the games done with education in our current situation; we'll leave it there for now. We'll see you guys’ back next week for another exciting version of Chip Talks Health, where we'll be talking about the endocannabinoid system, how you work pathogens, your immune system, and, best of all, how you can configure your body to be the best, you can be.

All right, we'll see you guys’ next week. Bye.