Danny Jones Podcast - #226 - Neuroscientist: Most UNUSUAL Way to Improve Brain Function in Days | Louisa Nicola

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Louisa Nicola is a neurophysiologist, CEO of NeuroAthletics, & host of the Neuro Experience podcast. SPONSORS https://ver.so/danny - Use code DANNY to save 15% on your first order. https://betterhelp.com/dannyjones - Get 10% off your first month. EPISODE LINKS https://www.youtube.com/@LouisaNicola https://www.instagram.com/louisanicola_ https://twitter.com/louisanicola_ FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Australia 03:21 - Neurophysiology 06:01 - Brain health 07:48 - Geographical differences with alzheimer's 09:43 - How alzheimer's disease appears 13:56 - Optimizing the brain to be faster 14:56 - How super athletes use neurophysiology 20:49 - Working with NBA & MLB athletes 25:09 - The correct way to use a cold plunge 30:24 - Aerobic affects on the brain 34:25 - BDNF & reversing brain age 42:02 - Effects of weight lifting on the brain 44:16 - Myokine affects on the brain 47:44 - V02 Max 51:01 - How muscle mass affects health 54:04 - Carbs vs protein vs sugar before workouts 01:01:15 - Mucoid plaques 01:04:12 - Cholesterol 01:14:03 - Sleep 01:23:40 - Creatine monohydrate 01:28:49 - Omega-3 fatty acids 01:32:52 - Nicotine 01:42:51 - Charlatans & fake gurus 01:46:56 - Gary Brecka 01:54:57 - Deep sleep 01:57:58 - Alcohol 02:00:14 - Testosterone 02:05:40 - Sports Concussion affect on the brain 02:12:34 - Sauna Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi Louisa. Hi, Danny. Nice to meet you. Oh, it's nice to meet you too. So you're a Greek-Australian, is that right? I am. Wow, that's a unique combination. Greek, Cypriot, I should say.

Living in Australia, born and raised in Australia, but I live in New York. Wow. I know. It's insane. So you said you were born and raised in Australia? Yeah, I was born and raised in Australia. My parents weren't, and all my grandparents were born in Cyprus. How long did you live there before you moved in New York?

Well, I moved to New York in 2017. Oh, wow. Yeah. Not that long ago. Australia is a crazy place. It's, I, people might hate me for saying this. I think it's the best country in the world. I love Australia.

I think, like, a huge percentage of our listeners are from Australia, too. Oh, perfect. Yeah, it's great. I say best country because of A, health care, B, education. But it's very hard to move forward in a population of 22 million as opposed to America. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, they have also some of the best surf.

in the world. Oh, yeah. You serve? I love, yeah, I have a lot of friends who go there, like, all the time, multiple times a year to surf, like Kira and Snapper Rocks and a lot of the cool places they have out there. Yeah, I spent around a month or two months in doing an internship around Snapper. Oh, really? That was back in my, I was very young. Yeah, I got to get out there. Well, Australia also was, like, one of the craziest places during COVID, too. I saw some of the videos on social media of, like, people being, like, locked down and concentration camps. And, and like getting their asses beat by cops and stuff. I was one of those people.

Were you really? Yeah. So what happened was I was on the plane coming back to Australia. And I was really excited. And it was while I was in the plane that the government decided, well, the prime minister decided to say, that's it. Anybody who lands from here on out is going straight into lockdown.

My phone wasn't working on the flight. We landed and here I was thinking, great, I'm so excited. I'm going to be able to go and see my family. As soon as we landed, we had cops, We had everybody just like stopping us. I thought we were in trouble. We weren't allowed to talk. We weren't.

It was as if we had committed a crime and we just got sent straight into a room and we're locked in this in this room for 14 days. That sounds terrifying. It's terrifying. There was no, I didn't have any like air. I had no idea what was happening. I just got off a 24 hour flight. I was hungry. I was tired.

I was scared. I had no idea what was happening. So what did they do after that? How long did you stay in that room for? And did you have to like go quarantine in a hotel or something? Well, that's, no. That was the hotel. Oh, that was a hotel.

Yeah, 14 days in there. And then they set us free. That's bizarre. And now when you look back into it, and we're not going to get into the whole COVID politics, it's like, how insane? How insane is that? It really is crazy. I mean, we thought it was bad here. Florida wasn't bad.

I mean, I guess relative to every other state, like everyone says Florida had it the best. I don't know. I didn't really travel that much out of Florida during those two years. But, yeah, man, some of the videos just really, really shocked me. And I mean, there's, I don't know if it's like, because I know Australia, if I'm not wrong, they get like, they do the most of their imports come from China and they do, they're really tight with China. So maybe that had something to do with that. But yeah, I don't know. That was, that was insane. And so, okay, so you are a neurophysiologist. Correct. When did you get into this kind of stuff? So I, so Europe, first of all, let's define. what it is. It's a subspecialty of neurology. So you know a neurologist, you go and see neurologist, maybe you have a headache or maybe is suspected of having some sort of trauma from the neck up,

let's just say. A neuropsychologist is a subspecialist. So you go into a neurophysiologist if you may have had suspected of having multiple sclerosis, for example. Neurophysiologist will hook you up to an EMG, an electromyalography, maybe test your nerves, do a nerve conduction study, or bediet test for epilepsy using an EEG scan. And I became fascinated with the EEG scans. So that's my primary modality. Those electroencephalograms, you know, you put the cap on your head. You've got all these leads coming out. What they do is they assess the functionality of your brain. So we've got different brain waves. You've heard of them, alpha, delta. So we've got these brain waves and we can figure out what's happening in your head and how well your brain is functioning with an EEG. It's the first

point of call if you've had a seizure. You go and see, you know, a neurophysiologist, see what's going on in your brain. And so that's pretty much what a neurophysiologist is. And I got into this. I started off as a triathlete, actually. So I was racing for Australia. Loved it. My favorite. It was the best thing in the world. My parents told me, you know, you may want to have a backup plan because this may not be what you want to do for the rest of your life. So I went and studied, I did exercise physiology, and then studied mathematics and then I went and studied medicine. Exercise physiology. Yeah. Huh. What is that? Well, it's like the study of the science and physiology of movement. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I remember I used to read like back in the day, I used to like hear these, this is like 10 years ago. I used to read

these Tony Robbins books and he would talk about how like, if you do, you say yes and you throw your arms in the air, you can change your brain. Your movement changes your brain. And, like, you know, jumping up and down or doing jumping jacks and all this stuff will put you in a whole new brain state and make you change you from being depressed to super confident. Yeah. And that kind of stuff really works.

Yeah. I remember when he used to say that, changing your state. Your state, that's the word he used. Yeah. I mean, to an extent, it's like, well, yeah, if you're feeling down and you get up and you get a jolt of blood flow to the brain, yeah, you're going to feel a bit different, right? He just, he had a way of saying it. So, like, what is the main thing when you're studying this kind of stuff?

What is, like, the lowest hanging fruit of issues people deal with that you can help them with? So what I specifically look into is Alzheimer's disease. It's what I'm currently researching and publishing right now. And I fell in love with that because I did around 1,000 brain scans. And I was picking up on early onset Alzheimer's disease. And we can pick up on that, right? So we can pick up on a brain who, you know, somebody makes. come into the clinic and say, look, I'm 50 years old, I'm 48 years old, I'm having memory

difficulties. I just, my long-term memory is fine, but my short-term memory, I just can't remember this. Sometimes people's names or the street I live on, or I can't remember where my car keys are? Can you test me? And, you know, we take them through a number of different tests. And one of these tests would be a neurocognitive test where we'll put the cap on and we'll take them through a series of cognitive drills and we'll assess their brain function. And we're picking up on early onset Alzheimer's disease. So after around 1,000 of them, I started to question, why do we have so many people in the world who currently have Alzheimer's disease? Because I don't know if you know the stats, but 50 million people worldwide currently have Alzheimer's disease. Or maybe

it's about 55 million people. That number is said to triple by the year 2050. And if you really dig into the research, what you find is that out of that 50 million, only around 3 to 5 percent, got there through genes. So the other 95% why are they getting Alzheimer's disease? Why are we getting mild cognitive impairment if you don't possess the genes that are responsible for getting you there? Why is that? That's what we're going to talk about today. That was the birth of my, you know, really what I do now. Was there a disparity of people who suffer from Alzheimer's or early onset Alzheimer's, like a disparity between different countries? Really great question because we know that in Africa, there's a certain part of Africa where they actually have two copies of these genes called APOE4.

If you have one copy, you get one from mom, one from dad. If you have one copy, we know that it raises your risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. If you've got two copies, we know it really increases your risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. We know that in these populations, in certain groups in Africa, they have two copies, but they never get Alzheimer's disease. Wow. Yeah. Interesting. And that's all got to do with epigenetics, which is why here in America, or in other parts of the world as well, why people don't have these copies.

Maybe they don't have the APOE4 gene, but they're still getting Alzheimer's disease. Isn't that insane? That's wild. And I assume that that has a lot to do with, like, diet? It's got a lot to do with many things. risk factors such as sleep deprivation, diet, lack of exercise, lack of social connection, believe it or not, inflammation, neural inflammation coming from the foods that we eat. Right, right.

That's wild. Yeah, that's something you don't really hear about a lot, especially around here. You never hear, like, something, you hear people, like, complaining about being forgetful and people talk about all kinds of things that you can do to improve your health, like exercise and diet. but no one really talks about how that connects to your brain or how that affects Alzheimer's. People don't really worry about that until they get older. How young, what's like the youngest person you could find that has this stuff?

Most people, you're right. Most people don't worry about it until they're, let's say, 70, then they go in and they're diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. But we have to remember that Alzheimer's disease and neurological conditions like this, or dementia's, I should say, is not a one-time stamp. or a one-time point in time, it is an accumulation of the previous 20 years. So you could be developing Alzheimer's disease in your 30s, in your 40s, and in your 50s. And because it takes a long time to actually come into fruition, by the time you get your first symptom at around 65 or 70, you've already got it. It's already too late.

Wow. It's like, you know, I don't know too much about pancreatic cancer, but I've lost two people in my life from that. And it's the same thing. It's like, they're fine. And then out of nowhere, oh, I have this pain. Oh, you've got stage four pancreatic cancer. You've got two weeks to live. How does somebody keep track of their brain health like that?

And I mean, other than getting basic blood work that checks like your lipids and all that kind of stuff, like how would you determine how far down that road you are? Well, you said basic blood work. And so I have a practice right now. So my company is called Neuroathletics. I've got 10 people on my team, a combination of exercise. physiologists and physicians. And we do comprehensive blood work. And this is because you will go to your doctor and they will, they'll order you just some, your routine blood work, right? And what they're detecting in a doctor's office, which they'll probably give you 15 minutes to really deconstructed,

they're just making sure that you're not dying today. Right. They're not picking up on trends. And so we have to be mindful to pick up on trends. And a number of different biomarkers from brain chemistry and different blood chemistry biomarkers that can be suggestive of what way, where you're trending, right? We can look at lipids, you know, we can look at cholesterol, we can look at B vitamins. But the first point of call, in my opinion, is to look at genes. You can do a DNA test. Okay. From like 23 and me kind of stuff? Correct. You can look and see if you actually have these genes. Okay, there's three genes that are, like if you've got these genes, you're going to get familial Alzheimer's disease, right? So these genes are pre-Sanel in

one, presenolin-2, and amyloid precursor protein, right? But then you've got the APO-E4 genes, and you can test for all of these. And even if you have these APOE4 genes, it does not mean that you are destined to get Alzheimer's disease. But I think we need to have a conversation around getting your genes tested because I didn't know this, but there is a lot of people out there who are scared to actually get their genes tested. Did you know that? No, but I imagine there's probably a big barrier to entry to doing something like that because it's, I'm sure it's expensive. And it's not like, no? No, it's actually not. Isn't, I mean, look, I haven't done it. I did my jeans somewhere else. I didn't do it 23 in me, but I think it's under $100. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting.

So it's actually not that dear. You can get this. You can ask somebody who does it. We do it with everybody at our practice, and we're really testing for that. We're testing for a number of different things, but that's the main thing we're testing for. So that's the first point of core, right? Then we have to go through figuring out lipids, and you can also go through and look at neurocognitive scans. You know, we do a brain scan on most of our clients as well. I need to do a brain scan.

I have a feeling that the waves will be very mild. But here's the thing. I use the exact same hospital grade EEG on a mild cognitive. impairment patient as I would on an MBA, an All-Star NBA player. What would be the difference in the brain scan from like a super athlete compared to an average person? Well, I'm picking up specifically on areas of dysfunction first and foremost, and we'll go into what that is. But what I'm picking up on specifically this brain scan looks at information processing speed

and reaction time. So reaction time, we have to remember things like your eyes, you don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain. You don't hear with your ears, you hear with your brain. So if you have a well-functioning brain, you're probably going to see faster and hear faster, right? But what if your brain is even better functioning, and we optimize that? You're probably going to see faster, right? And hear better. Therefore, reducing your reaction time. So we can measure reaction time. We have a stimulus that measures neuronal reaction time. Really? Yeah, so we can actually measure the speed at which you, so you have a stimulus,

there's a computer, so you've got this EEG scan on, there's a computer, maybe a ball will come up, and you have to click the button, okay, measures reaction time over a 20-minute period or a 10-to-20-minute period. So we can measure that. We can measure visual acuity, how well you are seeing the ball

coming onto the screen. So an NBA player, this could mean the difference between one or $50 million, right? because we increase their reaction time, we increase their speed, and we decrease, no, decrease the reaction time and increase their information processing speed, meaning at what time do I know that that is a ball in front of me? It takes your brain, you know, 0.5 milliseconds. If we can get it to 0.3, they're going to be able to get the ball, pass it more accurately,

and in a faster way. Therefore, making more points in the game, more points in a season, therefore becoming an all-star. So you're saying, is it possible to improve these types of things? Oh, yeah, that's what we do. Yeah. Like right now, you know, we were talking offline and I brought some stroke goggles here with me. Oh, did you really? Yeah, because you said you were really interested in visual acuity.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm obsessed with it. I actually had a vision scientist doctor in here probably six months ago, and he was explaining. and he wrote a bunch of books on this stuff and he's done this research his whole life. But he's... What's his name? His name is Dr. David Cook. Okay.

He's based in Atlanta. Yeah. And he has a bunch of exercises people can do to increase visual acuity. Yeah. And to even like people who have poor, poor vision, like say like 2040, 2050 vision, they can do things like throwing their...

There's a bunch of crazy exercises he has, but he's proven that doing these things for a long period of time, you can actually improve that stuff and get yourself out of glasses. So if you can do that, then you can also improve, even if you have great vision. The best vision I've seen is in baseball players. They've got like 20 over 8. Yeah, that's crazy. And the information processing speed of hitting a fastball going 100 miles an hour is insane.

And what people still think is, yes, you do have to have to have something. level of skill. Yes, there is physiology involved at, you know, the trajectory of the bat, the velocity at which you hit. But what is telling you to swing the bat in that way? It's your brain. Right. And I realized this very early on. So in 2016, when I was still studying, I had a professor, and he's Australian. And at the time, he was actually the Red Bull. This was back, 2016, Red Bull was completely different, but they had a high performance. gym, if you will. I think they've still got one. It's in Malibu, or it was in L.A. They were hosting an event, a high performance event. This is back when no one was really

talking about high performance, and he actually said, you should come to this event. It was 2016 in April. I'd never been to America. I said, what is this event? He said, you're going to love it. He said, and I want you to talk to people about reaction time. There's going to be elite athletes that I went there. That's where I met a lot of these motocross drivers, Formula One drivers, and NBA players had no idea who they were. And I gave this talk and that's when everything started for me. There was an NBA player who said, can you help me with my reaction time? And I said to him, yeah, well, what are you doing in terms of, you know, brain training? And he said, I'm not doing anything. I said, well, okay, then we can work together. Wow. That's wild. Yeah, I mentioned to you

on the phone, too. It's funny if you look at like some of the most famous successful athletes, like even Michael Jordan or Tom Brady, even for that matter, if you look at like their photo, photos of them. It looks like their eyes are almost pointed outwards, especially if you're basketball players because they have to, they're on this court and they have to have full court vision as well as maintaining acuity on like a ball coming right at them, but they have to see what's going on way over here and their peripherals and all that stuff. And I was like, wow, I wonder if that's something that they have inherently or if that's something that's developed from playing basketball for so long. Yeah, peripheral vision is a really great field. So we can, you know,

we can train it with these specific strobe goggles, right? So, they're cut into four quadrants and we can black out just the outer portions of it. Okay, so you can just see in this pathway or we can black out the inner portions of it so you can see on the outside. Whoa. Yeah. Or we could just do one quadrant up here. So if we test you, okay, and we're doing all of these different visual acuity, depth perception,

all these different types of tests, and we figure out that, okay, in the top right quadrant of your right eye, you just don't seem to see the ball as well. So we're going to black out every other part of your left eye and every other quadrant of your right eye. And we're just going to keep the quadrant up here free. And we're just going to get you to throw the ball for an hour a day. So then you're strengthening that. Remember, just like you strengthen your biceps, we're going to strengthen that specific part of your eye. That's fascinating.

Yeah. And it's, look, it's not what everyone should be doing, evidently. Right, right. But when millions or tens of millions of dollars is on the table. No, the guy was telling you about David Cook. He actually has a lot of, I don't know about basketball players, but I know he has a lot of baseball players that come in there and they do visual therapy training where there's like,

he was saying they're like swing balls and they wear like different color glasses and they try to like see what's going on and read it while it's swinging. Yeah. All kinds of crazy stuff that you would never imagine those kind of guys do. Yeah. So I, what I really love doing, and this is what we teach as well, I love doing things such as working on the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is, you know, we've got four lobes of the brain, and the frontal lobe houses

the prefrontal cortex. It's right at the frontal part of the brain. And that's involved in all of our executive functions. Reaction time, focus, attention, inhibition. So if we can train that, you're probably also going to be a better athlete. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. You said you brought these goggles with you?

I brought them with me. There's somewhere in my carrier. on. We got to test them out. Later on, we're going to test it. Yeah. Let's do it. So, what kind of, are you currently are working with athletes doing this kind of stuff? Yeah. So I personally, I have got 20 clients on my roster, eight of which are elite athletes in three sports, major league baseball, tennis, and NBA. They're all ball sports, right? And it's working on mainly vision is what you're working on with them? No, actually, it's working on human performance. So we do everything from blood. We do blood,

urine stool sweat. We do all of that. We do brain scans and then we have the exercise physiology component where we're doing V-O-2 max tests. Then we're doing the brain scans and we're doing the complete vision, visual acuity and everything. Yeah.

Funnily enough, the rest of my clients, the other 12, are CEOs and high-level executives. And you would think, oh, are you doing the same thing? I'm doing the exact same thing with them. Yeah. When it comes to, is it true that the visual cortex is responsible for like 90% of the neuron activity in your brain or like the neural

what is the word it is like uh like the you're talking about the occipital lobe at the back of the brain well like from what i heard i think i heard Andrew Huberman say this but he said that the as far as like the the energy that's produced that it takes to run your brain 90% of the energy it takes is taken up by the visual cortex most likely I mean I'm not I'm not I'm not Sure about that because I think about, I mean, if he said it, then that's probably true. And he's a vision scientist. Oh, yeah, he is, isn't he? Yeah, school of, I think, ophthalmology. And he's published a lot of research in vision science. We know that the, you know, you've got your eye and the optic nerve goes into your brain.

And then you process the visual information back here in the occipital cortex. It then goes into the frontal lobe. But the frontal lobe is the biggest and houses the most amount of neurons. the frontal lobe, which is not associated with vision. To an extent it is, but most vision is in the back of the brain. You know, I think Andrew Huberman mentioned that he used to not be able to see in 3D, and he like acquired 3D vision doing like visual therapy and stuff like that, and that's why I got so interested in it. Oh, really?

That was his, yeah, he was a skateboarder as well. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because before he was big and famous, I had him on my podcast. Did you really? Yeah, very early in 2020. and he said to me. Was he just as handsome as he is now? Yes. I think so. I didn't see him with his shirt off. I mean, I just post a photo. He never takes his shirt off. He always wears the long

sleeves. Yeah. But no, I had him on my podcast and he was great and we were chatting and he said to me, you know, there's going to be some big things coming my way soon, Louisa. And I was like, really? And then like next minute he's on Rogan. Yeah, that guy's a powerhouse. The amount of like podcasts and videos that he puts out in his channel is insane. He's a workhorse. You know what he's done? He's actually gotten the world to be excited about neuroscience. Yes. Yes. And science and, you know, performance protocols and how to really improve performance. However, because of that, what I think is happening as well as people are becoming, I think, there's a lot of dumb things that are happening on the internet as it relates to human performance.

Okay. We can talk about that. Just some things that. are just false information, misinformation. But what's also happening is people take things to the extreme and become heroic. You know, and we can see this with cold water immersion. You know, people are getting, jumping into these freezing cold ice baths. It's like that's really not what you have to do to get the effect. And you also don't have to get into an ice bath for 50 minutes. 50?

Well, people are getting in there for crazy amounts to try and be this hero to try and take away from, you know, to be the best. I did the best. I did the coldest and I did it for the longest. It's like, but that's not really in line with science. No. That's funny because I did mine. When I got my ice tub, I put it at like 35 degrees and I was like, I was dying and I texted Dom. And I was like, Dom, I'm not feeling too hot, man. My chest hurts. I've been doing this every day for the last two months. He's like, he's like, what temperature is it at? I'm like 35 for 34. I forget what it was, something like that, mid 30s. He's like, yeah, that's way too fucking cold. He's like all the science, all the studies are done between 48 and 58 or something like that.

You've got to up the temperature. Yeah. And I usually say if you can get into a bath for three minutes minimum, seven minutes maximum, and do it at between 45 to 50, that's all. Remember. Wait, say that again? 45 degrees. Yeah.

Got it. Okay. Remember what you're doing is you're trying to produce a stimulus like a hormetic stress. You're trying to stress your body to create these cold shock proteins, which do many different things which we can talk about the science of that. But if you get accustomed to that, you're not going to get the same effects. Like if you get a, if you get cold adapted, you're just like, you're going to get into the cold and your body's going to be like, oh, know what this is like. So it's not going to produce the effects that you want it to produce. So don't do it every day.

You can do it every day just to just be, just be, you know, non-heroic, just getting there, 45 degrees, getting for three minutes, get out. Right. Yeah. And then when you want the big effects, maybe you can crank it down super low. Yeah, I always bring mine down by one degree every like four weeks. Oh, really? Yeah. But then I travel, right? I've been in Miami and I will be here.

It's like five days in total, I think. That means I haven't done an ice bath in that long. So when I go back, it's going to be a bit of a shock to me. Right, right. Well, that's like with anything, right? You build up a tolerance to any kind of, whatever, even if it's a supplement. But getting back to like the vision stuff, have you ever, do you guys do anything with red light therapy? Not really, not in terms of vision.

But I have a red light therapy, like panel. Yeah, I heard that that literally can rebuild the neurons or like in your eyes or in your vision, your visual cortex of your brain. I'm not sure about that. However, I will tell you that adult neurogenesis doesn't exist. Neurogenesis is the creation of new neurons. And we can't really grow new neurons despite what anybody thinks. where you can grow them, though, is in deep within the temporal lobes, so the temporal lobes sit here, and deep within the temporal lobes behind your ears sits these little sea horse-shaped

structures called the hippocampus, and that's where most of our memory consolidation happens. Memories are formed in there, and we've got neurons in there, and they can grow. They can grow. Grow? Yeah, we can grow new neurons in the hippocampus. Okay. Okay. So we can get better connectivity of neurons in the sub-regions of the hippocampus through exercise, okay, making your brain be able to fire better. But we can't grow, you can't just go out and think that something is going to grow a new neuron in the prefrontal cortex, for example.

because I'll tell you why. Think about what happens in a stroke. A stroke is pretty much an embolism, right? You'll get a somewhere in an artery or a vessel, you'll get a clot. Okay, that clot will stop oxygen from going through and delivering oxygen into that part of the brain. Essentially what happens is you kill off neurons. Those neurons don't grow back. Once you've had that infarct, it's an insult. You have to go and you have to go to the, you have to go to the, you have to go to the, you know, the emergency room and they have to, you know, get blood flow going back into the brain. You kill off neurons. You can't grow them back. What happens is the areas around that infarct will strengthen. So you don't grow new neurons. Okay. So like the areas around it will try to compensate. Correct. And they can strengthen. Is there any kind of like cutting edge research or science being done to figure out how to grow new neurons in these parts of the brain? Oh God, yeah. I mean, look, For example, let's talk about exercise. Do you want to go down the all exercise field?

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Isn't there, like, math you can do, like your age divided by, something is like what your heart rate should be? Yeah, it's a really easy way. It's 220 minus your age will be your maximum heart rate. 222.20 minus your age is your maximum heart rate. So let's just say arguments like you're 20 years old. That means your maximum heart rate should be 20. So we should be 200. Yeah. So then you can say, well, okay, great. Well, if I want to look at 65% of my maximum heart rate, you do 65% of 200. All right. But we're becoming more savvy now. We've got heart rate monitors. We've got ways of measuring our maximum heart rate, right? So your aerobic training is you're running, you're long running, you're long cycling,

you're long swimming. This does amazing things. One, we have a lot of blood flow. Now, I think that's the key here. We have to remember what's good for the heart is good for the brain. So every time we are getting more blood flow to the brain, we're getting oxygen and nutrients. That's what we want, the survival, right? And I have a theory that dementia is just a disease of the vascular system. That makes sense. Okay. Or Alzheimer's disease is a disease of the vascular system. So we want, so we have, you know, let's just take a bit of an anatomy course right now. We've got our heart and we've got this big chamber called the aorta. From the aorta, we've got these two branches that go up into the brain.

We've got the corroded arteries. Let's sit right here. Then we've got the vertebral arteries. Okay, they sit here. They go up. Obviously, we've got two on one on each side. They go up into the brain. Then we've got branching off of that. So they're the two main arteries that go into the brain. There's a lot of blood flow that happens. It gets delivered in there. And then we've got these little capillaries as well. They're about a hairline thick, one cell thick. These arteries have these walls around them that are made of muscle. Right. So it's important for them to stay healthy and strong, to deliver. liver more blood. When we are doing aerobic physical activity, we are strengthening the arteries through blood flow. We're strengthening the heart. We're getting something called cardiac remodeling. You can remodel your entire cardiac system through exercise. But what we are getting the most beneficial effect is we're getting the release of something called BDNF, brain-derived neurotropic factor. So it is a growth factor for the brain. And that is the specific growth factor that will grow new neurons in the hippocampus.

So these studies all came out first using mice. So in around 1999, they did some of the first studies on mice. They got them to wheel run. And they were determining what this does in terms of brain health. And they found, oh my gosh, these mice grow new neurons in the hippocampus of their brains through 20 minutes of wheel running per day. But what they also do is they grow new neurons. in all of the areas in the brain.

Wow. This was just on mice, right? We're not rodents. But that was 1999. So they thought, scientists were like, this is unbelievable, right? So then they fast-tracked. Then in the early 2000s, they wanted to replicate this in humans. So they replicated the exact same study.

And what they found was that humans can't grow new neurons, only in the hippocampus. Only in the hippocampus. But they did find that they can get better connectivity in the hippocampus. sub-regions. So just better connectivity of the neurons in the areas around the brain. I thought that was good. So this was all from aerobic training, specifically around 65% of maximum heart rate. So that's when the 2000s were all about BDNF. Everyone was talking. I even remember back in the early 2000s, there was news articles coming out saying BDNF. Everyone loved it, right? And ever since then, This gets back to your question earlier.

Pharmaceutical companies are trying to replicate BDNF to try and bottle it up, because if you go, right, if we go into a mouse and just inject BDNF into their brain, they're just going to grow a bigger brain, right? Likewise, if we can inject BDNF in a pharmaceutical grade agent into your hippocampus, you're going to have a bigger hippocampus. We can see that because the more you're going to have a bigger hippocampus, we can see that. because the more you exercise, the better your hippocampus. But what would the downside be of just injecting it or taking a supplement?

We can't. Well, we're never going to be able to do that, which is why exercise serves as medicine. Exercise is by far, and I want this like to really go out there, it is by far the best therapeutic agent that can starve off neurodegenerative diseases and the aging process. Now, what if you're somebody who has neglected this your whole life? And now you're in your mid-30s, mid-40s, whatever it might be. If you start doing this, is this something that you can reverse if you have some sort of... There is no reversal, right? Okay. But we have to keep in mind, around 25 to 30, that's when your brain fully develops. Around 30, then, your brain begins to atrophy in small amounts. No, atrophy is decrease in muscle cell size, right? Or decrease in cell size, if you will. So you start to get, you start to kill off neurons at the age of 30. It's just due to the natural brain aging process. We can see, right, we can see the MRI of a 25-year-old brain and it's nice and thick

near the skull, right? There's just a thin layer of fluid between the brain and the skull. And then you can see the brain of a 90-year-old and then that space is really thick between the skull and the brain because the brain atrophies, right? If you love diving into culture and comedy, like on Danny Jones podcast, playoff hockey is right up your alley. NHL on T&T has the best coverage, making every game feel intense and unpredictable. Playoff hockey is a different level, overtime, big hits, and no one coasts.

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and sleep, of course, can slow the progression of these age-related diseases. You're not going to reverse it. You can't reverse Alzheimer's disease, unfortunately, but you can slow the progression and prevent Alzheimer's disease from occurring.

But you would think with like the heart remodeling and getting those arteries that go up to your brain by like opening those up and making your heart stronger that that would, you would think that that would help, no? Yeah. I mean, it would for the time being, but you would think that that would sort of help like repair. Not exactly. But that's not the case. Because let me tell you something else that happens. These arteries, so we've got arteries, which are the big ones that have got the muscles, then we've got veins, which are just one direction. directional pumps, then we've got these little capillaries, or you say in America,

capillaries. These little capillaries are the first things to go in any type of insult, or they're the first things to go in hypertension. So if you've got blood pressure, high blood pressure, right, what happens is your high blood pressure over time ends up killing off these tiny little blood vessels, these tiny little capillaries. They end up dying. So what happens if you'd kill off the capillaries in your brain? Over time, you've got less oxygen and less nutrients going to the brain. You and I have probably killed them off. I know, like, you know. Yeah, I didn't start paying attention to any kind of exercise or health. I mean, I worked out, went to the gym when I was in my teens and 20s, but I never paid attention to I ate shit and, like,

never did cardio until like recently, honestly. Well, cardio, like I said, it's absolutely phenomenal. And back to this whole chamber of the heart, what you want is to be able to with each, you want to increase your stroke volume. So with each pump, right, let's just say your heart contracts and then it pumps blood. With each pump, you want to, with less efficacy, so you want to be able to have as much blood flow as possible, right? That's if you've got a strong chamber. If that chamber, which is the aorta and all of the other arteries, if they weaken, every time you do that one pump, maybe not enough blood will go up. Right. So it's about efficacy as well. So the more you train that chamber of the heart, the stronger it gets. The walls of the artery become stronger. Therefore, it can push more blood more forcefully with each contraction. And that's what we want because we want less heartbeats with greater volume of blood. Right. Right. So that's what aerobic activity does. And it's really devastating that 30%

of Americans don't meet the necessary requirements of cardiovascular fitness, which is 150 minutes a week. Yeah, no way. Not even close. Sorry, I should say, no, that was only 30%. So 70% of the U.S. population don't meet. How many minutes per week? 150. 150.

I only do like 20 minutes every other day. So like 80 minutes a day. on the I have just one of those assault bikes, you know? Mm-hmm. I only do that for like 20 minutes every other day. That's pretty short of the quota. And by the way, an assault bike, you're probably actually getting out of the aerobic zone. That's it.

That's hard. No, I stay right at like 1.30, 135. Okay. Well, depending on your... I try to take it easy. If I go normal, like, I'll get up to like in the 140s, but I try to keep it kind of low, like zone too. Well, for everyone listening, if you're thinking, okay, well, Louise, I don't know what my... what my thresholds are, right?

The way to think about it is the best training zone for this, this aerobic zone, is when you know that you're working out, right, you've got a bit of a sweat, but you can have a conversation with somebody. So your heart is pumping. You know, you're working. It's like when you're working on an incline of a treadmill, right? You can feel it, but you could still have the conversation with somebody. That's where you want to aim to.

20 minutes a day. Yeah, that's interesting too. I've noticed that like when I'm doing something like walking or like riding the bike slow or doing anything else that requires some sort of physical exertion. I notice like I'm quicker. My mind is quicker because I'm not I'm not thinking about what I'm going to say. I'm not thinking about anything. I'm just like talking but part of my brain is occupied doing something else. It's a weird.

It's a weird thing. It's like the opposite of sitting here not doing anything. I'm just sitting here talking to you. It's like all my energy is going into talking. But when I'm like only giving 30% of my energy to talking or having. a conversation or talk, you know, having, whatever. It seems like it flows easier. There's more of a flow there. Yeah, you're also activating your sympathetic nervous system, which is that final flight aspect of the nervous system, which is pretty much telling your body to really hone in

and focus, okay, on something in front of you because you're under attack per se. Oh, yeah, yeah. But that's, you know, Danny, that's a, that's a really interesting field, this aerobic activity, right? What I think is actually more exciting, if we fast forward to 2012, there was a really great study that came out by Harold Atal, really great team who thought, you know what? What's the effects of resistance training on the brain? Because all of the studies have been done on aerobic physical activity. What are the effects on resistance training? So what he did was, it was a systematic review. They went and pulled together all of the randomized control trials that have been done on. resistance training and what they found was that resistance training produces way more benefits than aerobic training in my opinion like anaerobic training

yeah well not anaerobic resistance so weight training okay yeah yeah isn't that the same thing as anaerobic depends on how fit you are so anaerobic is when you're reaching that threshold of you know above 85% okay got it yeah which you need that as well and we can talk about that so this is why wear my area. So I'm about to publish a study, like the most up-to-date study that's done on the effects of resistance training on mild cognitive impairment patients. Interesting. Yeah. So what happens is you will, you know, if you contract your biceps, for example,

you're doing a weight. Within the cells of your muscles, you have these little things called myokines. They're muscle-based proteins. So they're just tiny little proteins and they only live in the cells of your muscle fibers. So when under tension, once you contract these muscles, what happens is these myokines spurt out. We've got around 500 of them, right? 500 of these tiny little bad boys, they're in your muscle. They get spurt.

500 mild kinds in your whole body? Well, 500 that we know of. Hopefully I'll find another one and call it the Louisa. But, you know, I would say 500, but we really only have studied around. 50 of them, right? And they're really beneficial. What happens is once they go, once they, you know, you contract your muscle, they spurt out of the muscle and they go into the bloodstream. Once there, they have, they go and lodge in different receptors. So you actually have receptors.

Imagine a receptor just like this and a myokine coming and lodging like that. You've got receptors on your pancreas, on your heart, on your liver, on your spleen and in your brain. And these receptors are absolutely phenomenal. They are, what they do is once these myokines go into them and lodge into them, they have beneficial effects on the prefrontal cortex, on the occipital cortex. They have, they basically help your brain function better, and it can change the structure of your brain. Whoa. Yeah. So jacked people are smarter. I mean, I don't know about smarter. A level of intelligence wasn't really measured. However, we know that these myokines are actually having an effect on helping with the proliferation of BDNF. So it actually, so there's one specific myokine.

I love it. It's called Eurison, right? It was founded not long ago. And it was probably 2012 as well, but ERISN comes, they named it after the Greek god Iris. Iris was a messenger to the god. Irison does this. So when it goes out of the, into the bloodstream, out of the muscle, it goes up. And remember BDNF, that, you know, the growth factor, it actually helps BDNF express itself. So you create more BDNF in the presence of ERISN, which then helps with the proliferation of new neurons in the hippocampus.

But then you've got other ones, you've got Cethepthepson B, you've got lactate, and then you've got this really wonderful one, which was founded, by the way, by Benta Peterson. She's incredible in Copenhagen. Isle 6, have you heard of? IEL6, it's a pro-inflammatory cytokine. So we used to be scared of aisle 6. We didn't want it, right? If we, you know, when we got sick, if we secreted more aisle 6, it would make us even more sick. It was a bad thing. We didn't want it. We didn't want to secrete more IL-6.

What Ben-de-Peterson found was that aisle 6 is also living in the muscles. And when it's secreted from the muscles, it acts as an anti-inflammatory cytokine. So instead of it creating more inflammation, it creates less inflammation. It helps dampen inflammation. So it becomes anti-inflammatory instead of pro-inflammatory. And this is when it comes out of the muscles? Yes, when it comes out of the muscle cell. And why would it do that?

That's just what it does. and it lodges in nearby organs. And this is this new phenomenon called the brain-body cross-talk. They're now doing studies on myokines. And it's a great study. I put it up. I did a presentation yesterday. It was published in cell press.

They're showing that these myokines can inhibit tumor cell growth in the prostate. Wow, that's fascinating. Yeah. So that last study you were telling me about that came out when? Not too long ago. It was around five years ago. Published in Cell Press journal, Cell is a very high stringent journal.

And they're showing the effects of these myokines inhibiting these tumor cell growth in prostate cancer. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Which means that, sorry, I just have to say it one more time. Exercise can serve as preventative medicine. Do you notice any sort of, has anyone ever done any sort of like, study or analysis of like an NBA player as far as like their how how healthy their brain is

towards the end of their life compared to somebody else because as far as like aerobic exercise I can't think of anybody else who puts themselves through that much like 90 minutes of straight sprinting back and forth on a basketball court I don't know in terms of specific brain health however I mean I would argue that at tour de France in that concept do you know why because Tour de France have the highest recording V-O-2 maxes. Yeah. We've got like, you know, V-O-2-max scores of like 90 for these tour de France guys. What exactly, I mean, I see it like on my watch, my V-O-2 max, but what exactly does it mean?

It's a measure of cardio-respiratory fitness. Basically, how much oxygen you can uptake and utilize per kilogram. So how old are you? 36. 36. I mean, I don't know the cutoffs. I had this graph up yesterday, but we can determine, you know, your V-O-2 Max. I wouldn't determine it using an Apple watch. We can get more intelligent and sophisticated machines for that, which we do use. We, you know, we have a VO-2 Max device that we use and you put it on and you perform a 12-minute running test, if you will. It's horrible. Really? Yeah, you basically have to go into your gas out, which is go into you almost, collapse. So it has something to do with your respiratory rate and your heart rate, like the combination of the two? And the amount of oxygen that you uptake. So how the hell would a watch be able

to figure that out? Well, that's exactly why. I would tell you not to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, it's probably calibrating your, you know, when you get to your highest heartbeat, I guess. So we've got aerobic training, we've got resistance training. We both know that they're beneficial. cave it with resistance training, right? Because I have to tell my mother this every day. It doesn't work. You don't get the effects of these myokines unless you're really pushing heavy. Really?

Yeah, so you have to be pushing 80% of your one repetition max. 80% of your one repetition max. So if you can deadlift 100 kilos, right? I don't know what a kilo is. Oh, okay, 100 pounds. Okay, whatever. Okay. We're in Florida.

If you can deadlift 100 pounds, you want to be doing 80 pounds. Got it. Right? When you're working out. You want to be generally doing resistance training four times a week. Again, going back to what the government says, their recommendations, is three to four week, four times a week of resistance training.

That's interesting. So you would say that the resistance training or the weight lifting is equally as, if not, probably more important than the aerobic stuff. I mean, both are important. However, I am biased towards resistance training just because of the multitude of studies we have now showing its beneficial effects. And I've heard that muscle retention or that like muscle mass has some sort of benefit as well. Like somebody who can like hold on to a lot of muscle versus somebody who has none. Oh, yeah.

Like for instance, like for an example, like a female in their 30s who is like super skinny and like, you know, the typical Vogue model. fashion type girl or compared to somebody who actually like lifts weights and like retains muscle like what are the actual measurable health benefits between those two people well muscle mass is first and foremost it's an endocrine organ so it is it can it muscle mass is a storage ground for glucose right so if these two girls right you got the skinny one and then the one with muscle let's just say arguments say they're both the same age and we give them both a candy bar. Okay, that's full of glucose. You will see, so what happens when you eat, you get a spike. You know, you've ever worn a glucose monitor, you know, you get that spike and then maybe depending on how well you can tolerate that glucose,

that spike may come down, your post-perandial spike, it may come down or it may just stay up there. The person who has more muscle, that muscle will uptake that glucose. It's basically, their muscle is like a sink so it can take in all of this glucose. So their post-perennial spike will come straight back down. Whereas the person who doesn't have any muscle, their glucose is just going to be floating around in their bloodstream because it's got nowhere to go. It's not getting uptaken. And why is that bad? Well, we don't want excess glucose because that can lead to insulin resistance because what happens is once you get, so insulin is a hormone, and it's pretty much the only hormone that is there served to bring down glucose.

We don't want glucose floating around in our bloodstream. What happens over time is if you keep having glucose and you keep, you know, you've got your pancreas that just keeps shooting out this insulin, right? Over time, it becomes weak, okay? So over time, there's more glucose, insulin has to, like, if it's doing it at a one-to-one ratio, like glucose to insulin, that's okay. Then it becomes a two to one, so glucose is coming up, and it's like, okay, I'm more tolerated

to insulin now, so insulin's like, okay, I'm going to double myself. So insulin's coming out and trying to dampen it down. Then it comes up even more, and it's like a three to one, right? And that's when you become more resistant to insulin. Got it. And that leads to diabetes, type two diabetes, when you become insulin resistant. Okay. So to prevent this from happening, you don't want a lot of glucose in the bloodstream.

So glucose, A, you either don't have the sugar, or B, you can have a lot of muscle mass, meaning that you don't necessarily go and eat all this candy. But if you did, it is a storage ground and a sink for all those glucose molecules to go in there. Therefore, insulin doesn't have to work as hard. So you starve off insulin resistance. Now, why do some people, bodybuilders specifically like to eat tons of glucose and carbs before workouts versus some of them, like Dom, they like to work out and lift weights fasted after like hours of being fasted? Oh my God, there's just so much research around that. Dom's a keto guy, though, isn't he? Yeah.

He's just hardcore keto guy. Yeah, he's hardcore. Yeah, I know. Very hardcore. I mean, look, he's done most of the studies on ketones. Mm-hmm. But mainly because it's the best place for when you are doing a, when you want to lift heavy and contract your muscles and be able to lift harder, you need the carbohydrates. Yeah.

You do need the carbohydrates. Yeah. Well, you don't need the carbohydrates. But I'm guessing that bodybuilders, since that's not my world, are ingesting carbs. Maybe like, I think it's like maybe 10 to 12 grams. Right. Yeah. Yeah, because I was talking to Dom, like I went down like the keto rabbit hole, a couple of things.

years ago and I did it for a couple of years and I felt great and then I stopped and I started eating just regular you know the regular amount of carbs I went like probably 50% carbs 50% fat just like a normal diet and I did that for about a year and I just recently started like really nukeing the carbs and cutting them back a lot and like right now I'm kind of going through like the fatigue of my body adjusting to that the quote unquote keto flu or whatever you call it it's a keto flu yeah yeah I'm suffering from that right now and I was talking to Dom just yesterday about that and I was telling them, I'm like, look, I'm like the only carbs I'm eating your before workouts. I'm only eating like bananas and

fruits and stuff before workouts. He's like, drop that. He's like, you don't need any of that. You cut out all that before the workout. Go in, fasted. And he's like, you'll feel much better. You'll recover quicker. As well as like this stuff, this keto start that he has, it's like

it's like exogenous ketone supplement that you can drink that basically kicks your body into ketosis. But he's using fat as fuel or ketones as fuel. remember you have to use, you know, the primary fuel source for the brain is glucose, but when glucose isn't present, it will use ketones. Right, which is better, right? Well, I mean, it's not better or worse. It's just depending on who you really speak to. It's if you want to use fat as your fuel, then you'll probably do a fasted workout because

you've already got a storing of fat and ketones built up. But if you want to use carbohydrates is fuel then you're not doing the ketogenic diet. Where I see that having a problem is if you're doing the keto diet and then you then go and ingest a bunch of carbs. Right. Yeah. Then you can have problems. Then you can screw up your system. You've got to be really strict. Like don't, like I can't just, you know, right now in my career like today. I'm like, I'm just traveling so much. I don't think I could ever do a kid. I've tried it though and I felt great. Yeah, I feel better than ever when I do it. Especially like if I'm doing stuff like this, I want to be like able to talk and produce coherent vocabulary.

It helps a lot. And even like drinking these exogenous ketones, it helps a lot too. But like I always thought that ketones, like when your body is running on ketones and using that for energy, that I always thought that was the optimal way for us to burn energy and for us to work and for our bodies to burn energy. Like if you even think of like animals, right? Like animals that have to go for days and weeks without eating, they're burning ketones, right? They're not burning fat. So they have to be like super quick, super reactive, like a cheetah.

I actually was starting to have exogenous ketones, right? When I was during my, I did some exams for intraoperative neurophysiology. And during those, it was last year. And for a week, I was just having these ketone shots. And what I found was that I was able to, it suppressed my appetite, for starters. Second thing is I had, I felt like I had brain fuel that lasted me all throughout the night. Whereas if I switched over and I was having, you know, arguments like some bread or sandwiches or something, my fuel would run out fast. Yes.

And then I have to reload. Yes. Yeah. Have you ever done like a long fast? Yeah. I've, I mean, the most I've done long fast, the most I've done is two days. Oh, really? Yeah.

die? I did five to six days once. I think like five and a half days was the longest I ever did. Only water? Well, I made this like lemonade. It was, uh, it was water and maple syrup and lemon juice. And I would drink like close to a gallon of it a day. Why maple syrup? That sounds like the Beyonce drink. Um, no, it maybe it's, it might be similar. It, what was the name of it? There was, uh, I heard this guy Kelly Slater talking about it and he was explaining. Exactly what you think. Kelly would have gotten it from, I know Kelly, he would have gotten it from. You know him?

No, I mean, he's a surfer. Right, right. I know Kelly said, I don't know. I've met him a few times, though. Oh, really? Yeah. He probably would have gotten it from Beyonce. Was there a bit of pepper in it as well?

Yes, cayenne pepper. That's the Beyonce drink? Yes. Imagine that. Well, I drank the Beyonce drink for the whole week. Wow. I felt better than I'd ever felt like in my entire life. On day two, three, I felt.

miserable, but on like four or five and six, I felt incredible. Like it was indescribable how good I felt. I was even able to go to the gym. I could play, I could play like an hour of full court basketball without getting cramps. I could do like three times the amount of pull-ups I normally did. I had like insane energy. You'd think that that's weird because of maple syrup. Isn't that just pure sugar?

Right. What was the point of having the maple syrup? It's because it was Beyonce's. No, there was some sort of. science behind it, like, because your body's not getting any kind of sugar that you need some sort of sugar to help maintain energy or something? I don't know. I know, but I think that that's going to be a really great thing to look up. I'm going to definitely look that up. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by BetterHelp. What are some of the things you want to keep the same about yourself

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Now back to the show. And Kelly was talking about that there's this plaque that develops inside, like people that just never fast, like over your lifetime. There's this plaque that builds up inside of your gut. and like inside of your intestinal track. And then when you fast for a certain amount of time, like four or five days at minimum, that stuff starts to like come out of your body. Because when you have this plaque lining the inside of your digestive track, when you're eating normal foods,

you're not getting all the nutrients you need from those foods. Yeah. So by expelling that from your body doing a five day fast, now after you come back to eating, you're going to ingest some more of the nutrients and vitamins that you get from your normal diet. Yeah, that's, Not unlike what David Sinclair, the longevity scientist, who's also Australian, says a lot, even though in the past few months he's been widely discredited.

But when he does speak about this, we know, and Peter Rottier does this as well, when you fast, it basically clears out all of the dead cells that accumulate over the time. We've got programmed cell death apoptosis. It just happens. We know cells die, right? it just happens and they just sit there and by going in and fasting you're you're inducing autophagy you know basically going in and cleaning up all of those dead cells right but let me tell you I think I do you know this is not my area fasting is not my area however I do

think that it works even in a small period of time like even if you're doing a 12 hour fast overnight. You know, 18 hours. You know, I generally stop eating at around 8.30 p.m. I'm not eating until 11, 12 the next day. I just, I'm not a morning eater. It's called what intermittent in fasting? Call it what you will. I don't call it anything. It's just when I just naturally eat. Yes. What I know for females, though, who are trying to optimize for performance, I know that females actually work better in a fed state when they exercise. It's got to do. with like hormones and you basically, because we also have something very different to men, which is a menstrual cycle, we do have to cater for that. And in the absence of, you know,

food and if your body believes it's starving, it goes into this fight or flight mode and you may not ovulate for a month or you may not, you know, menstruate. And I think that that's a, depending on where you are and if you're optimizing for kids or not, you have to be cautious of fasting. Right, right. And I know like one thing with people who indulge in the ketogenic or carnivore diet where they're reducing carbs, like one of the things that they have to deal with is high cholesterol too. And that's something that happened to me when I did it was I got my blood work done and my cholesterol. Like my general practitioner saw my cholesterol. He was like, bro, you need to do something. You're like, stage 10 heart disease. Like you're going to die. Yeah. And, you know, I talked to Dom and I was showing it to him. And, you know, what Dom was basically saying was like, yeah, you can get really high cholesterol from this, but like, it all, it all boils down to like the plaque in your arteries. Like, if you have high cholesterol, LDL or whatever, it's not necessarily a bad thing. And there's,

he said there's a lot of athletes, like a lot of very like, like high performance athletes that have very high cholesterol. So let's just, you keep using the word cholesterol, right? We have to understand that we've got total cholesterol, we've got LDL, then we've got the HDL. I'm talking about LDL. Yeah. And that's another thing that's wrong with general practitioners,

where they don't give you the full story, right? So this is what we know. If you've got a high, what you want is ratios. Again, like I said to you, at my practice, we're focusing on ratios and trends. I basically want to say to you, this is where you are right now, but in 10 years you're trending towards cardiovascular disease. I don't want to say that, but that's what we're trying to pick up on.

Whereas the doctor will just tell you, you're fine now, and then you'll eventually go back in 10 years. They'll be like, okay, great statin. Right? It's like they're optimizing for a statin. When it comes to LDL, right, think of LDL, right? You have saturated fat, which is present in animal-based products and, you know, dairy products as well.

So you have your saturated fat and you don't end up getting rid of it. Okay, when it breaks down, it leaves these, eventually leaves these little breadcrumbs, if you will. These breadcrumbs are your LDL, right? Your HDL is basically the janitor. Okay, so your HDL comes in and sweeps up all of the LDLs and you get rid of it. That's why we have our HDL. That's the difference between LDR. So if LDL ends up building up, right,

and there's not enough HDL, that means that all of these little breadcrumbs are everywhere. And there's not enough janitors to go in and clean it up. Now, if you have a really high LDL, right, but you've got an even higher HDL in the ratio of 2 to 1, that's still okay. I think my HGL's like 40. which is like the low end of normal.

Yeah. And so, I mean, again, if that is 40, but your LDL is 150, right, then that's a problem. Even, we can even see. I'm like the 200's LDL. No. Yeah. All right. So that's where the problem is, right?

Because, and you also want to look at APOB, right? Yes, yes. A lipoprotein B, which is, you know, we really want to look at that. But let's just say you're even at a one-to-one. That's even not sufficient enough, right? It's so funny because the guidelines, you know, when you go to a doctor, the guidelines actually for LDL are it just has to be less than 100. Whereas if you really want to be optimized, it should be less than, you know, in my book's 80, right? And you want to be sitting at a two to one with your HDL, right?

Your LDL should be about double what your HDL is. Yes. Or even another measure is getting total triglycerides to HDL ratio. Yes. Which should be a three to one. So it's all about ratio. So if you have, do you understand? Tricill should be triple what your HDL is?

Yeah. No more. No more. Okay. So just think, right, you said you've got a 200, right? If I said to you, okay, great. But then if you had a 400 HDL, okay, it's, look, it's high, but it still means that you're at the correct ratios, right? However, this is where things get tricky.

We now have, like, hundreds of studies that show that a HDL over 80 is a risk factor for cancer. Really? Yeah. So you want to be really maintaining that. And then when it comes to arterial health once again, right, if we are building up plaque within the walls of the artery, what are you doing, really? You're narrowing the artery.

So what does that do? Blood flow. Yeah, it gets it there slower. Okay? So we don't want that. And then eventually what happens, if it just keeps lodging in the same place, that's what that happens,

and then it stops the blood flow, and that's an infarct or an embolism. You know how you have a, You've got an embolism in your heart. We just call it a heart attack. Embellism in your brain, it is called a stroke. Embellism in your lung. Same thing.

Yeah. Yeah. That's weird. Yeah, cholesterol is something I just really never understood. But cholesterol is good because the reason why I wanted to just get the Normanclature right is because we hear so much. Cholesterol is bad. It's like we've been around for how many millions of years. Right.

You know, cholesterol is a nut. We need it. We actually need it to synthesize testosterone, right? You actually need it for the synthesis of hormones. So cholesterol is not bad. However, it becomes bad and troublesome when your LDL is at a certain place. And we really want to clean those arteries out. And exercise and like aerobic exercise increases HDL, right?

But there's, you know what? It doesn't exercise increase HDL. It increases HDL, yeah. But it doesn't necessarily decrease LDL. Correct. That's why I was like, I didn't know where you're going with that. So, yeah, unfortunately, but you know what it does do? There is a really great relationship. You can actually, with better arterial health from exercise,

there are studies that's showing the relationship between you're better able to metabolize LDL better. Right. Yeah, and that's actually probably my next task after I put this myokine research out there. I'm probably going to look at the relationship between LDL and exercise. Because for me, me, I mean, I don't eat terribly. I used to, when I was a triathlet, I was 40 pounds lighter than what I am now, but I was training 45 hours a week. I have a great relationship with, I've got a great relationship with LDL, and I think it's because I've spent most of my life

exercising. And I still spend a lot of my time doing something, yeah. Right, right. And there's people that take, like, injectable L, the meta. I know Peter Atia mentioned that he takes some sort of, like, crazy injection that like reduces your ApoB or like people take it like once you take a couple shots a year or whatever and it's supposed to like it's the one thing that can actually suppress and downregulate the Apo B. He's taking an injectable form of that? Yeah. I thought he was taking a little staten. No, he was saying that he I forget the name of the the drug but I looked it up and it was like $15,000 for a year's worth of it and it was injectable. Okay. Look great because we actually want if you could.

People are like, but what should our APOB, if you can get it to zero? It's the one thing that's useless, right? Like we use LDL, but APOB we don't have any use for it. It's like one thing our body produces that just hurts us. But if you bring down LDL, it'll bring down APOB, right?

The thing that's scary is the LP little A. Yes. The lipoprotein A, which is great LLP little A. Yeah, me too, which is great because you only have to test that once in your life. And it never changes? And it never changes. And you've got But, you know, it's great because that's great for you and I. But you know when you used to hear like five, six years ago, even 10 years ago, you know, you'd hear about a tour de France, 35-year-old cyclist, healthy as just dropping dead from a heart attack.

You know, people never knew why. We now know that it could plausibly be because of LP Little A. Really? Yeah. Don't you remember like 10? I remember back when, I say 10 years ago, but it was around then. Oh, I did my last race in 2013. You know, I know that there were so many athletes who were so fit and I was like, why on earth are they dying?

They're so healthy. Yeah, there's so many of them. I mean, there's not really so many of them, but like recently, even like LeBron James's kid had like a really, like a lifting weights had like a. But what was that from? Some sort of a heart attack. I don't know, but it's scary. Well, that's an extreme. Like I don't know whether that was drug induced by any way.

I don't know. Nothing was released. But that's a bit scary for, I think he's 19, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's super young. And then there was last year that guy that played for, he played on defense for the Buffalo Bills. He just literally dropped dead in the middle of the field.

They had to cancel the game. Yeah. He's still playing right now. It's crazy. He was able to come back. Yeah. His heart just like stopped beating for a while. Yeah.

That's terrifying. I don't think that that was an LDL or I don't think that was a cholesterol problem, though. A cholesterol problem? I don't think that that was a cholesterol problem, no. No, people say it's. Yeah. But, you know, you never know. They don't, they, they never, he never came out and, like, talked about it.

I think there was an interview where they asked him, like, what the, his diagnosis was. And he's like, I don't want to talk about it. You know what? I want to know. Why do you think if all of this education is out there, right? Don puts education out. I do. You've got great guests on here.

They put great education out. Why do you think we still have an obesity epidemic or a Alzheimer's disease epidemic? That's a good question. If we now know. And like people like Uberman too, becoming more and more popular and getting millions of views on three-hour YouTube videos about vision or cholesterol. I know. It's hard to believe that they're really, I mean, I don't, and it's, I don't see a lot of people in like my daily circles, like, that are obese or overweight. I mean, I could probably think of maybe like three people I know that are like really overweight, but, but yeah, I don't know the answer.

I don't know the answer to that. Let's look at sleep because I think sleep is super. super important as well. Sleep is something that we spend a third of our lives doing, right? And we know that sleep deprivation can increase your risk of all cause mortality. And yet a lot of us are still sleep deprived. Why? It's, it's, I think that that's really interesting. That is very interesting. Do you measure your sleep? I do measure my sleep. I have one of your aura rings. Yeah. I only wear when I sleep though. Um, Rookerara. But it, uh, I don't know, there's a weird placebo effect with my aura ring.

Sometimes I'll wake up and it tells me I slept like shit and I feel great all day. And then sometimes it tells me I slept great. Best sleep I've forgotten and I just feel like dead all day. Yeah. And that's a, there's an actual phenomenon for that. People who are getting stressed out over their devices. Yes, I suffer from that.

Yeah. I've got clients who ring me. They're like, oh my God, Louisa. My, my HRVs, this. What do I do? It's like, just listen to your body. You know? What is HRV and why is it?

that important? Heart rate variability. So basically it's we let's look at the nervous system, right? The nervous system comprises of two branches. You've got the central nervous system, which is just the brain and the spinal cord. That is the hardware. Then you've got the peripheral nervous system. The peripheral nervous system is all of the nerves that come off of the spinal cord, right? They come off the spinal cord, and then they go into our muscles and all of our organs, right? And these relay messages from the brain to the body and then also, you know, the other way, which is we get messages that come up into, you know, from the body up into the brain. So as part of this peripheral nervous system branch, we've got an autonomic branch, and within that sits the sympathetic

and the parasympathetic branch of your nervous system. You've probably heard of it. Sympathetic is the vital flight, and the parasympathetic is the rest and digest. So at any given time, this is where we are. It's like a seesaw, right? Is that what you call it in America? Csaw? Yeah. Yeah. We're trying to maintain homeostasis, equilibrium, right? If we get a bit stressed, right? We've activated the parasympathetic nervous system. So we're in this, this fight or flight. Your body, remember, stress means there, you know, you've got to run away from danger. Your nervous system is still, evolutionarily, it's there to fight off danger. That's what it was there for.

So if there was a tiger coming, right? Or a lion, you'd have to activate the sympathetic nervous system, which means we're going to shut down blood flow that goes to places where it's not needed, and I want you to dilate your pupils, and I want you to run fast and run away from danger. That's what you're telling your brain every time you get stressed. So you activate the sympathetic nervous system when you're stressed.

So you're in this, you're not balanced, right? And you're activating this when you're even exercising, because your heart rate is pounding. So we're like this. Then what we want to do is we basically want to breathe a lot to bring us back down into equilibrium. That's what we're always trying to do 24-7. We're trying to, if we're asleep, right, we're like this.

The parasympathetic nervous system is activated. We wake up because cortisol gets released, which is our stress hormone, which wakes us up. So we know that we've got these two branches. to maintain a healthy HRV, what heart rate variability is, it's basically measuring the variation between these two branches. Okay, so if you exercise heart rate, you know, we know that our heart rate has gone up, but then if we also sleep, our heart rate has gone down.

But then if we come up, you know, basically HRV, so the higher, the more variation that you have between these two branches, the better. for the higher the HRV. If it doesn't have a lot of variation, HIV is low. Interesting. Yeah, so it does not want you to be, 24 hours of the day,

it does not want you to be in the parasympathetic zone. Right? It does not want you to be in the sympathetic zone. It wants you to be in both. And it also wants you to be able to get into sympathetic and then get out of sympathetic. It doesn't want you to stay in sympathetic for tanning. hours straight. Okay? So the reason why it's a good predictor of recovery and also health is because

it knows that you have a smart nervous system. You know how to get into sympathetic and then when you're in sympathetic, you know how to get out of that sympathetic zone and activate the parasympathetic zone. That makes sense? So it's basically, well, I think the way it's measured, right, is like the gap between heartbeats, right? So you don't want this. same amount of time between each heartbeat. You want a little bit of a different time between heartbeat. Yeah. So like if you have a low HRV, what would be the best way to improve it? But just by exercising and sleeping well, can you actually improve it or do you have some sort of genetic ceiling? No. You can, look, you, everybody is individual. Okay. So my, look, my,

my average HIV is about 180. That's my average. For real? Yeah. Jesus. I've got a high HRV. But now I've been traveling this morning, my HRV was 98, which is like me. That's like death zone for me. That means it's like I'm critical. I remember I got really sick. I got the flu. I think about six weeks ago. HRV went down to like 52 and I thought, okay, well, this is my last. I'm on my last leg today. Oh my God. I don't want to tell you what my HRV is. But it's everybody, it's, it's your HRV is for you. and mine is for me. However, you can increase it. You can increase it by 10 points, like to your average.

What's your average? My average is like 45. Wow. Okay. Yeah. If I drink, if I get drunk at dinner and I go to sleep, like, and I wake up the next morning, my HRV will be in the 20s. Yeah. Oh, especially if you have wine. Yes. Yeah, wine is terrible. The best HRV I've ever had is like in the 60s sleeping. You can do this. What I've seen,

because we do this with our clients, you've got to be on a good streak. You've got to raise it. You can't just have a good HRV for four days and then just plummet it, right? You can raise your HRV by becoming better, like becoming fitter, cardiovascular wise. So remember that cardiac remodeling, so you can get stronger ventricles. But also, I know that sleep really increases HIV because it's a measure of recovery, right? So if you get your resting, heart rate down, which should generally be below 50. Resting heart rate should be below 50. You'll be, have a bet you'll be on the track to getting a better HRB.

What's yours? Mainly, so if I'm not sick, but mainly it's around 48. 48. 48? 47, yeah. Is that bad? So people in their 30s or 40s, if they have a resting heart rate of 60, is that necessarily always bad to have a kind of a raised resting heart rate?

heart rate. Yes. It's always bad. I mean, it's not always bad. But if it's constantly that way, we want to look at measures of bringing it down, which is again, basically, it's basically saying that at rest, your heart has to work really hard to pump the blood out. That's what it's just saying. So the reason why when you're rested, your heart shouldn't have to work that hard to pump blood. It shouldn't have to work that hard. If it is working hard at a rest because you're not using it. You're not running. So you don't need the excess.

You're just at rest. Your brain isn't really. I mean, your brain's working, but it's shut down. Your senses are shut down. You're not looking at anything. So you don't need that much blood flow. But therefore, your heart rate shouldn't be at rest. It shouldn't be high.

We want to bring it down. We want to try and have it below 50. Below 50, no matter what. And then if you see some sort of like intermittent spike up in the the 60s, like, what would you estimate the cause of that would be? Stress. Like, if it goes up to, like, 10 beats per minute, say. Yeah, and it's happening at night, it definitely, like, stressed or sick.

Mine does. Even if I go to bed, so my favorite hours for my body to sleep is 10 a.m., 10 p.m. till 6 a.m. So if I sleep at midnight, my resting heart rate's going to be shot. Really? Yeah. Interesting. And you can test this with, you know, different types of supplements as well.

Like to calm down your mind, you may want to take GABA, gamma amina, bututeric acid. I started taking magnesium L3 and 8 a couple months ago. Love, but also, I mean, I love it. I take it too, and I feel like it really helps me get into deep sleep. However, the research still isn't there on the absolute effectiveness of L3 and sleep. even though No. No.

I mean, we still don't know if it can truly penetrate the central nervous system which is what the big selling point is. The blood brain barrier. How it can get into the blood brain barrier and help calm you down and put you into more of a deep sleep zone.

Yeah. It's still very early. We've just got minor studies there. When it comes to supplements that you like to research or when you are working with athletes and stuff, what are some of the main supplements

that these people are using to enhance their brain or their processing power? Well, first of all, if we do a blood test, right, and we see that they are deficient in something, remember everything has a chemical pathway. If they're vitamin D deficient, we need to investigate that, right? Let's just say we have plugged the holes and they're not deficient in anything, which has never happened, right? Zinc, everything.

Where to from there? Well, I think that every single person, I don't care what, age you are. I really don't. I don't care what pathology you have. I think everyone should be taking creatine. Really? Creatine monohydrate is the most widely studied supplement. It is the cheapest and most safe supplement on the market. I've interviewed some of the best people that are world-renowned for creatine who have done their PhDs in creatine. They all say that you can get creatine from dietary sources such as meat, liver, eggs. We know that. But we also know that. But we also know that It's not as bioavailable because of just the way we're living, right?

So we should be supplementing with it and starting at five grams per day of creatine monohydrate. That's one of the big things Dom got me into as well. It's taking creatine monohydrate every day. Without a doubt, I've got my parents on it. Kids can have it. Really? Women, yeah, the PhD, Darren told me that there's no cut off with kids. I mean, if you are over the age of 45, you should be having it.

My parents are in their late 6. My dad is 72 and my mom is 69. Like, I've got them having it. I had to convince them. They thought it was drugs to start with. I said, it's not drugs. Why is it the cheapest stuff is always the best for you? Because it's the, it just is.

It's the most widely studied. So what specifically does it do? How does it help? So first of all, it's a naturally occurring molecule. Okay, we already have it in our body, but we don't have, we don't produce enough of it. It helps with ATP regeneration. Okay?

So ATP is the fuel source, the source of energy production in all of our cells. We have it in the brain. So we need ATP to create energy, to produce anything, just to even be awake, right? So when we take creatine, it can help produce ATP. helps with cell energy metabolism, right? So it can actually help with so many disorders as well. If you're anxious, it can help you with that. If you want to produce more neuronal energy, it can help you with that. My father, he had a stroke a few years ago and I've got him taking it just to help with better neuron energy in his brain. It can actually help be neuroprotective

against concussions. It can help be neuroprotective against Parkinson's disease. There's so much research happening now in the neurodegenerative phase.

And just today, actually, I put up on my story on Instagram a really great study that came out to show the effectiveness of creatine monohydrate on Alzheimer's disease patients

because Alzheimer's disease patients can't produce energy in certain areas of their brain. Really? Of course, because their brain now is full of, you know, plaques and tangles and these tau proteins and they've built up and they're blocking, you know, certain areas of the brain. So you can give them,

you know, creatine, five grams a day. Five, how much is that like a spoonful? Yeah, generally they're coming in a spoon. And you just drink it in water? Yeah, you can have it however you want. You can have it in yogurt if you was got no taste. And you can, you know, you can go up from there and have 10 grams, if you will. Really? Yeah. You can't overdo it. You can't, and I mean, you don't have 100 grabs. There is no science or evidence that shows that it can actually cause hair loss, which I know people are really scared about that, or that it can cause kidney damage. Why would people think it causes hair loss? Oh, so many, just because of the DHA, the DHT pathway. Oh, like androgens? Yeah. So people think. Oh, okay, because it increases testosterone,

doesn't it? Yeah. So it, there is no, no, no, there is no hair loss. There is no kidney damage. There's been so many studies. There was actually one great study on bone density and women, and they tracked them for two years. And they got them taking, I think, seven and a half grams of creatine every single day for two years. There was no stopping. There was no cycling. There was no loading. They increased bone density, right?

But they also said in the study there was no heart defects. There was no kidney damage. There was no liver damage. There was no hair loss. These are women taking it for two years. So these are just myths that are out there. That's fascinating. Creatine.

That's the first one. Second one is EPA DHA, which is omega-3 fatty acids. Say that again, it's lower. Omega-3 fatty acids. Okay, EPA-D-H-A? Yeah. Okay. So omega-3 fatty acids that come from fatty fish, like Simon and mackerel,

they contain three parts. They've got, there's ALA, there's EPA, and then there's D-HA. The brain is fat and water. It's around 60% fat. Okay, 40% water. That's what your brain is made of. In that fat zone, in the 60% fat zone, around 30%, 20% to 30% is DHA. Really?

Yeah, so brain tissue is abundant in DHA fat. I can imagine that a lot of people are deficient in that. Yeah, so you can actually, there was, they did this great, um, all, all-cause mortality risk factors paper. They brought it out like three years ago. And basically they listed the new list of risk factors that lead to death. Hypertension, right? You know, chronically high blood pressure.

Smoking is a risk factor. They then put in EPA low omega-3 index. So we now have a low-a-3 index, which is a measure of omega-3. in the red blood cell, a low omega-3 index of 4% or less, which is what the majority of the U.S. population has, is a risk factor for all-cause mortality. So you want to be on that scale. You want to be on 8% or more. I don't think I've ever had that specific, like my EPA or DHA measured in a blood test before. You can do it. It's called the omega-3 index. But like looking at how

abysmal my cholesterol is, I eat a ton of fish, by the way. And I also take EPA. I take fish oil supplements. Yeah. And you may, you know, you may very well be up there. Even though you're eating a ton of fish, we are in America. You know, so it's not sometimes the best source of getting EPA DHA. American fish? Yeah.

Really? Well, farmed fish. Most of it's farmed. Oh, well, I live in Florida. Most of my fish is caught right off the beach here. Are you sure about that? In the Gulf. Yeah.

You're doing it? No, but all my friends do. Oh, well, then that's great. Yeah. Okay. You know, some of us who live in New York, we're going to whole foods. What about canned fish?

That's not as good. Like people who get like, because I know Dom eats a lot of canned. I'm not talking about Dom the whole time, but I know he eats a lot like canned mackerel and canned sardines. Yeah, no, you can get a lot of the EPA DHA from there too. You can.

Yeah. Then you've got to worry about the mercury content, but that's fine. Right, right. That's the mercury is in like the big fish, the big pelagic fish, like tuna and stuff like that. Yeah, correct.

So you want to be making sure that you're getting a really great dose of EPA DHA. We also know that we've now getting studies again to Alzheimer's disease. So amyloid beta, which is the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, these amyloid beta causes these plaques to build up and basically clump together like this. We are now getting early studies in humans to show that omega-3 fatty acids, EPA-D-HA,

at around five grams a day, can go through and ameliorate these plaques. So we're now even seeing the effectiveness of EPA-D-HA on the brain of Alzheimer's. The amyloid plaques? Yeah. Can reverse it? No, not reverse it. Basically, ameliorate some of the plaques in there. Break them down it better.

Okay. Yeah. Like metabolize them better. Yeah, correct. That's fascinating. And you've got to think, we've got, you know, our cells need to be moving around. We've got trillions of cells in the body. We've got around 87 billion neurons in the brain.

And you want them to be able to be fluid and move around. And that's what EPA DHA does as well. It helps with cell. membrane fluidity, the outer shell of the cell, to be more fluid. And, you know, it's just, I mean, I think I'll go to my grave telling people to take creatine and EPA DHA. That's awesome. What about nicotine? So let me give you a background on this. I had this guy in here who is a, he's a brain scientist who he does like these studies on like psychoactive drugs and the brain. He's based in the UK. He came in here and he had these little nicotine pouches. He was putting in

lip. I'm like, what is that? And he's like, how the Japanese writing on it. And he's like, it's nicotine pouches. I'm like, really? I'm like, you do that? And you're a brain doctor or scientist? And he's like, yeah, it's neuroprotective. He's like, it fights against Alzheimer's and all this stuff. And he's like, makes you more sharp when you're talking and all this stuff. And then I started buying it. I got these little zin cans.

And now I'm like, now I'm like addicted to him. So I'm like, worried. I'm like, is there any downside to this? Apart from addiction. I mean, I know it increases focus. I have good, uh, I have good, uh, I can control myself. I have discipline. So I only do like a couple of them a day. But I know like a lot of people do like a lot of like a ton of it. And they mix it with vaping and stuff like that. But are there any downsides to nicotine without the inhalation of like vape, like people chewing gum or using the pouches or anything like that? Downsides. I mean, it's again, it's not my field. I've actually never personally taken it. But there's so many people taking it. I know that even Andrew has spoken about this. And I think Peter Ritkechie. has spoken about this as well about taking nicotine to help with focus and vigilance throughout

the day. Yeah, I heard there was a guy who won like a Nobel Prize and he was when he was like studying for his research, he would chew nicotine gum all the time. Really? Yeah. No, I mean. Some guy at Stanford. Yeah, I think, you know what I think it's doing?

I think it's again, right? There is no point in doing any of these things unless you've got the three pillars of health the downpac unless you're sleeping well, restorative sleep, unless you're exercising appropriately, and unless you are getting the right macronutrients and micronutrients, there's just no point in taking any of these things. You've got to get your, you've got to get your things in order first, and everything else is an accessory. That's what I call it, cold water immersion. I'll be it, I've got to, I've got to plunge in my apartment. It is just an accessory. I can't cold plunge my way out of bad dieting. Right.

Right, right, right. You know? Is there any neuroprotective things that you're aware of when it comes to nicotine? No, but that's just me not being, yeah, because it's not my line. It could maybe, there could be early research on neuroprotection using nicotine. I mean, I would need a lot of evidence to show that that is neuroprotective. And is it, do you know about any sort of effects with nicotine on like the heart and the arteries? No.

I heard it's vasoconstrictive, a constricture. Well, why would that be a good thing? No, it wouldn't be a good thing. Yeah, exactly. It definitely wouldn't be a good thing. But I wonder if it's like, does it only do that when you are taking it? Or does that go, is there like a, does it fade away when you start? Or does it stay there forever?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think it would stay there forever because you're, you know, there'd be vasodilation in, you know, after that. However, I think if it's, if it's, if. If it is causing that, then what's a point? Like, why are you having it? Why am I taking it? Yeah. Just because someone said, it's great, I like it.

And I, like, tried it once. I'm like, hmm, this is nice. I feel like, I feel great. I'm energized. And then you sound like the rest of the population on Instagram who are like, oh, this person said this works. So I'm going to take this and it ends up being detrimental to their health. Yeah, there's lots of, like, Instagram people, too,

who, like, make funny videos about taking zins. And they'll, like, pack them, like, pack their lips full of them. And, like, it's become, like, this trend. Wow. You can just buy that? Huh? You can just buy that off the counter. Yeah.

As long as you're 18, any gas station. Oh, great. Do you ever heard of a guy called freezer tarps? No. Oh, my God. You got to look him up. He's on Instagram. He actually lives in Tampa and he is like, he's a, what would you call him?

He's a nicotine pouch influencer. He's got millions of followers. Okay. Because I guess it's like this, I guess there's a good, the good side of it is that it's like helping kids get away from the vaping stuff. So now they're doing this. I think this is probably better than inhaling all those. vap chemicals. But it's wild to see it take off in like all the young people are like

obsessed with it right now. I think like when it comes to having anything exogenous, it's like where are you getting your information from first and foremost? And do you know how these compounds and molecules, right? It takes a lot of time to study this and what it actually does in the human body. I wouldn't take somebody on Instagram and just, you know, think it's good for you. Let's, for example, arguments like let's just talk about vitamin D okay 40% by the way Steve find a video of freezer tarps you can show her vitamin D you know most of the US population is I think oh I think 40% is vitamin D deficient right right it could be more um vitamin D is a it's a hormone right so both a vitamin and a hormone but what happens is okay because I just had a I just was looking at

blood work before I came here of one of our clients Low vitamin D, right, I was looking at his report, he had a really low vitamin D, which is around 20 nanocrams per deciliter, right? And we want it to be up at around 50 or 60. What happens is most people get a vitamin D score and they'll be like, okay, I want to go through and I want to take 5,000 I use of vitamin D. My doctor told me I had low vitamin D, so I've got to go and take vitamin D tablets. Or most people are just taking it without knowing their true measurements, right?

But what we don't realize is that in the body, you have to ask your body, Every time you get any type of school, you have to ask your body, why did my body think it was a good idea to lower vitamin D? Right? And if you look at what happens in the body, if you know your cellular biology, we know that vitamin D actually gets lowered in the presence of lead or in heavy metal. So if you've got heavy metal or lead in your system, vitamin D because vitamin D binds to lead, right?

But we don't want the body smart. It's like we don't want this lead. So let's lower vitamin D in the body until we excrete this lead. So what happens is if you've got low vitamin D and you have lead in your system, but you don't know about that, you go and take a bolus of the sun pretty much. You go and take 5,000 IUs of vitamin D. So you're bringing up your vitamin D levels in your body, but you're also bringing up the lead. So you have to be really careful with just taking supplements.

Just because they're over the counter, they are there for a reason. Like they are present, they are micronutrients in the body. They are hormones that you are ingesting and you don't know what it's doing. unless you have a really, really smart practitioner. And you're not supposed to take vitamin D without K2, right? I mean, it's not supposed to. It just helps with the absorption. But yeah, I mean, I take a vitamin D supplement every day.

I don't have high lead, but I do have low vitamin D. Really? I swear it's because I live in New York. I thought, because when I got my blood work done, I had like off the charts vitamin D. What was it? I could pull it up. I was like, but like, so I was taking, I was just like taking vitamin D supplements every day just because I thought it was good.

Just because you thought. Yeah, just because I didn't want to get sick, you know. And I have two kids that are always like getting colds from school and bringing it home. And I was just trying to like keep myself from catching anything. And I was like, oh, you know, everyone says vitamin D is great. I should supplement it every day. And so I was taking vitamin D with K2. And I got my blood work done.

My vitamin T was like, my vitamin D was like through the roof. Like, what are you doing? But I get, I don't think it was ever. I don't think it was ever low. So like, do you think there's... I mean, if it was, I mean, look, it's fine. It probably wouldn't be like, I mean, if it was over 100, maybe it's like crazy. Do you think there's any negative effect of having too high vitamin D?

Probably. I mean, I know the, I know there's no cutoff limits to my knowledge, but I don't think that it's like, I don't think it'd be necessarily good to have something like maybe over 200. Right. I can't find it right now. It took me forever to go through it. But no, yeah, it was like, it showed the reference range and mine was like in like above, like in the red. Okay, for too high and you stopped taking it? I thought, well, I started taking it. I take it like now I take it like every couple days instead of every day. Okay, good. And you know, blood work's really easy. You can check it. We have a turnover of red blood cells every 120 days. You're like basically getting a new batch of red blood cells so you can check it.

And every time I get my blood work, there's like one, at least one marker that's like way, off. That's like either my liver or my kidney or my white blood cell count. There's always something that's off. Yeah. Do you find the video of freezer tarps? White blood cell count could also be. Yeah, there is.

In the presence of an infection. That's the guy. They're short right there. All right. So let's see what we got here. Yeah, go to the one below that where he's like has the hat on and the crazy face. When coach makes the fella's condition. So yeah, he makes these like goofy videos like golfing and like working out.

and stuff like that and just like joking about the nicotine he's funny he lives around here but he's got tons of followers and all he talks about his fucking nicotine pouches

that's yeah that's I mean I don't understand this whole follower generation it's like well it's because all the young all the young people now like in their early

20s I know like my young cousins and like friends I know they're all a ton of them are on those vapes like the jewels

or the little vap stick things that's so freaking scary that stuff's gotta be really bad for you. But like the fact that this stuff is becoming popular, there's got to be a correlation there. I mean, I don't know. I'm just seeing like the craziest shit on Instagram going viral for

no reason. Things that don't even matter. I actually just put up a, I just debunked some guy on Instagram. He's now part of the health crew. And he's saying like, you know, he's selling this protocol which says, you know, I can increase your life. Okay. Your life. expectancy, if you buy my $150,000 protocol, within this protocol, sits a PMF, PEMF, PEMF, PEMF, MET, which is a, you know, these electromagnetic pulses that just, you can sleep on it, and it just basically mimics you being out on the grass. It's a red light therapy bed, like just the most ridiculous things. And what upsets me is that so many people follow him, and so many people are buying

these things. And it's vulnerable people who believe that they're going to increase their life. expectancy or increase their lifespan by doing these heroic things, by just instead of doing the basic things. And I question humanity and psychology. It's like, why not just exercise? Right. Exercise will far outweigh any pempath, if that's what it's called. It's going to make money from exercise. You've got to sell something. You got to sell supplements. You know, liver king, right? I mean, he became like the most popular thing on the internet when it

come to like in like the health community for a long time. And he was saying that, oh, I get these muscles from, walking outside barefoot, getting the sunlight, eating testicles. Eating liver and testicles, right? And then everyone found out that he was on steroids. And he was taking like crazy amounts of steroids and peptides and HGH. He was spending $30,000 a month on all this stuff he was taking. Yeah, I saw a video of him a week ago, actually, and he had, you know, he was wearing these little patches that stimulate your muscles, right? We used to use them in training triathlon if, like, we're on a long haul flight or if we're

We had broken our ankle or something like that, just so we wouldn't lose any muscle mass. And he had it on his chest. But let me tell you, he looked so bad. It was as if he was dying. Really? Yeah, I've got to send it to you. He looked so bad. Maybe you can find that, Steve.

Liver King's his name. Yeah, he looked like this video of him, he was, it looked like, okay. And somebody actually shared it saying he's not going to be with us for much longer, guys. Yeah. He looks odd. He's like super, he's like super red looking. Like he's got this like, there you. Oh, there's it. There's the video. The fourth one to the right. Yeah, that's it. The Daily Mail. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he looks like he's dying. Can you play the video? Yeah, it's got to be on this. After his, yeah. His health is being questioned. That's just an ad. But look, there it is. He's very unnatural looking. He looks like he's dying, right? Yeah, he doesn't look healthy. Oh, after, after this, uh, these of this. But he, he's, he. How many people are following him?

Didn't he make $100 million from selling his ancestral diet? Yeah, he sells the liver supplements, which, like, look at him. See, look at his face. Yeah, he looks rough. I don't know what he's talking. His veins are like garden hoses in his arms. I'm also looking at his face. Yeah, his face looks weathered.

But, like, you know, that's the thing. with this kind of stuff. Like this guy's, he's clearly a charlatan that's, you know, promoting some sort of supplement he's using to make money. And he's not telling the truth on how he gets that physique or how he gets those big muscles because he's injecting insane amounts of steroids.

But at the same time, he's also talking about, like, the good stuff, like exercise, eat organ meats, which are good for you, get outside in the sunlight, do all this stuff. So he's promoting like a healthy lifestyle. but at the same time he's also like he's just throwing in this little white lie in there that's just misleading people and people get really mad about that. How many people are doing that?

What? I mean, I think right now it's rampant on Instagram and social media. This whole notion of people selling products and not really knowing what they're doing. This, you know, one particular man who I know works, you know, with, I think he worked with Donna White. I don't know even if he's been to college or anything. But, you know, he's promoting this lifestyle that it's, he just. says the craziest things. Like, he actually said that the brain is a non-metabolic organ.

Who is this? Yeah, his name is Gary Brecker. Gary Brecker. Yeah, it's, yeah, he was actually just on Joe Rogan this week, which is, what? Yeah, it's upset a lot of people. Wow. So he is, so he helped Dana White, but he's actually got a business with, um, this dude.

Yeah. Oh, I've seen this guy. all over Instagram and YouTube. So this is the guy. Okay, so Dana White was really unhealthy for a long time. And then this guy apparently started working with Dana and like changed his diet, gave him a bunch of stuff to take and like figured out something within his DNA. He talks about some sort of DNA test.

It's methylation. And it's, it is, it is so insane because it's like he put Dana White on a $150,000 protocol. And I'm telling you, you can put anyone on that damn protocol. and they will get benefits from it. He's not doing anything outrageous. Like he didn't give him any type of magic pill or cure. And by the way, if you listen to what he says,

he's been dean bunked by scientists, by physicians, the things that he says are so outrageous. That's the thing. You know how you can get some people that it's like, okay, maybe that was an honest mistake. Can you find his website? He says the great, yeah, we can look at his. protocol. Let's see like what his main, the main thing he's saying is. There you. Garybrock.com.

I don't like giving him any air time. So he works with Grant Cardone. Oh no. Stop it. Grant actually pretty much more. He's the grifter king. So Grant and him own Tannix health and that's how he's become famous. You know, Grant comes to this town all that like every month because the church of Scientology is right down the street from here. He's a Scientologist. Oh yeah. What? He's one of the biggest Scientologists. No. Yes. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't I didn't know that. Yep. It's funny because he's married to a Greek woman.

Is it really? Yeah. Helena is Greek and I would think that she would... That's Grant's wife? Yeah, I would think that she would get him to a Greek Orthodox church. So scroll up to the top? What is it? Okay, scroll down a little bit.

No, no. Gary Brecker is a professional human biologist and co-founder of 10X health. Holy shit. Yeah. As a human biologist and co-founder of 10x health, Gary does more than just. just guide the company's global wellness vision and direction with more than 20 years of biohacking and functional medicine experience. He is obsessed with the function and performance of the human body and finding innovative ways to help people achieve absolute. Wow.

Yeah, it's ridiculous. That's a major red flag that he works with Grant Cardone. So what is he saying? Like, what is he doing that is so cutting edge? No, it's not. He's not doing anything. He's doing a basic methylation tester. For example, in order for you, once you ingest vitamins, okay, or ingest food,

they get broken down, methylated, right? And then we're able to use them for different things. Now, if you have certain genes that don't allow you to methylate certain vitamins, it's going to be detrimental, right? So if you have this one gene, okay, and polymorphism, in the gene, gene called M-T-H-F-R. They call it, you know, they call it a certain type of gene. Have you heard of it?

Mm-mm. They call it the motherfucker gene. The motherfucker gene. Yeah, okay? So if you have that, it means that you cannot methylate break down certain types of B vitamins. Okay. Okay. And we need B vitamins for brain health, for cardiovascular health.

But what happens is if you can't break those down, what you'll see in your blood test is you'll see a high homocysteine, right? And high homocysteine is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and for dementia, we don't want it. We want to bring homocysteine down. So if you have this MTFR gene, it won't allow you to methylate B vitamins. And if you can't get B vitamins in your system, okay, you can't uptake these B vitamins, your homocysteine will rise. And a lot of other complications happen. So if you find that out, okay, that's great.

A lot of people have that gene, right? So you can go through and give them methylated B vitamins, right? You can, we know how to do this. It's standard practice. So he's going out and selling this cure for disease. And this is his protocol. $7,000 10x pro plunge. But if you go down to get the whole thing, I think it ends up being like 150K.

Stop it. Yeah. Scroll down. See what else he's got? You have to go down. I think you have to go. Red lights. He's got sauna, 10x sauna. Yeah, you have to go on his actual 10X website.

There, there, go visit the partner. Click on that. So, yeah, come down. It'll give you the, there it is. Holy crap. Was that a tanning bed? Or is that a red light bed? That is a red light bed.

Look at this. Human Protocol is $102,936. And he's got his own red lights. Super Human Protocol with a red light panels, $15,000. Absolutely junk and ridiculous. That's more money than Jouv. He is selling dreams.

He is selling dreams to vulnerable people and making so much money on that. I mean, the markup on that. Who needs a red light bed? Accessories. These are accessories. People in Africa who have two April E4 genes are living, a long life.

They don't have these beds. They're spending time out nature in sunlight. They're exercising. They're not eating demolished foods. And let me tell you guys, whoever is buying into him is just making him richer. He's got like this. It's just... I mean, who the fuck's paying $132,000 for a red light bed? Danny, you'd be surprised. If you're spending that much money, it probably doesn't mean that much to you, honestly. But this is what I mean, but if you would do, if you have that much money to spend on that, anyone can push the needle for you in terms of health. Right? This is.

is, it's just bogus. Like, this is just accessories. I can't say that word enough. Yeah. And he's selling a methylation test that he's like, oh, whoopty-do. It's like any, any freaking practitioner can do, and most practitioners do do methylation tests. It's not a, I mean, I mean, we do it in our practice. It's just, it's not a, it's not the whole, like, it's not some sort of like, oh, wow, you know, it's nothing to write home about. Yeah. Anybody who has like a crazy, paywall to like learn all the secrets of you have to be there's no secrets very skeptical of that but i do know that if it wasn't for grand cardone he probably wouldn't be where he is today yeah yeah grand cardone's a whole another rabbit hole we could we could dive down but we don't have time to do

that today he uh yeah he's a he's one of like the biggest Scientologists and he's always here like in Clearwater he's always on his Instagram like filming himself being like right down the street from here going to the the big church with the gold-plated church of Scientology and and he's a wild character. Yeah. So stick to the basics, which is sleep. Sleep. Exercise and nutrients.

We actually didn't get into sleep. We did it? No. We didn't get into the, just the, I think one of the best things to touch on is the, what happens during deep sleep. Oh, okay. Yeah, so you track your sleep, you see slow with sleep. So we've got, I got like an hour of deep sleep a night. Yeah, we've got stage one sleep.

That's when you're falling asleep. We've got stage two. That's when you're in light. sleep. We've got stage three. It's called non-REM sleep. That's deep sleep. Deep sleep is so important for two reasons. One, we get the release of growth hormone. Growth hormone is where we get responsible for protein synthesis, for example, muscle regeneration, and we get testosterone released during that time frame as well. But we also get something really fantastic in the brain called the glymphatic system. So the glymphatic system,

is like the lymphatic. The lymphatic? Yeah. So if you heard of the lymphatic system in the body, it's the same in your brain. So it's actually like a sewage system. So what happens in the brain, we've got all these little brain cells, right? I said we've got 87 billion neurons. We've got a certain specialized brain cell called the glial cell.

It comes from the Greek word glue. Basically, they stick between the other neurons. And they hold them. They stick between these two neurons. During deep slow wave sleep, what happens is they shrink in size. So these glial cells get smaller, and your brain has cerebral spinal fluid, right? And the cerebral spinal fluid washes all through the brain, and it washes out the toxins and debris. One of the debris that it washes out is amyloid beta, which is the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.

So you are in deep sleep, you activate the glymphatic system, which acts as a sewage system, and a waste removal system for all of the dead products in your brain, and then you wake up and you feel fresh. And if you do this over and over and over again, you can keep clearing out these toxins. If you keep sleep depriving yourself and you don't get into deep sleep, what's going to happen? All of these little toxins are going to keep building up, building up, building up.

Just like compound interest, they build up, they accumulate, and then they rot your brain to an extent. Right. So that's the link between sleep. and Alzheimer's disease. This is why it's super important to be optimizing for deep sleep. Right. Oh, yeah.

And then we're talking about circadian rhythm and stuff and like making sure. Yeah, so like the screens and the phones are really important with that. Like when I'm laying in bed like an hour before I go to bed, I turn on my red lights and I like bounce them off the wall and I fill my whole bedroom with like red light.

Oh, really? See, you've got an optimized room. That's supposed to like cut down the blue light and help you sleep better. Correct. Yeah. Although I don't know if it helps, but I feel like it helps. Yeah. And it's interesting because sleep can be completely destroyed with one glass of wine. And we know that. But you know what I'm actually getting into now? Spreading the information about wine literally killing you. Yeah. When I say that,

let me let me not get to a head of alcohol, I should say. Alcohol is really, so what happens when you ingest ethanol? Ethanol, ethanol ends up breaking down into acetyl aldehyde. And acetyl aldehyde is literally poison. It will kill cells. So we also need to have a conversation about what is alcohol doing to you. We know that it already increases your risk of breast cancer, right, in females especially, but it's also killing off your brain cells. We've seen like numerous studies, like a UK Biobank study that showed there was like over 35,000 brains that got tested in relation to alcohol and they found that people ingesting

moderate drinkers which were seven drinks a week on average for women and 14 drinks on average a week for men they found is that the alcohol actually destroys the grey matter of the brain which is where the cell bodies of the neurons are

and it interferes with the white matter of the brain which is where all of the information processing speed happens really and there's so okay when I'm thinking about this I think about like most people who are young, like party and drink a lot. Oh, yeah. So what if they get older and they kind of stop doing that?

Is it too late? No, it's never too late. You can't reverse anything, but just keep in mind that it's, your brain is still forming until around 25 to 30, okay? So I just think to myself, I, you know, because I do love wine, but I limit. I do two glasses a month. A month, really, strictly. Mm-hmm.

Wow. Yeah. If that. That's discipline. It's discipline. But when you really understand the science behind it, it's like, why would I want to do that to my body? Yeah. I really started paying attention to it once I started tracking my sleep with the aura ring.

Like once I saw how fucked my sleep got when I drank. Exactly. That's really what, like, made me cut it back. Right. And it's not just messing up your sleep. Okay. It's messing up your sleep, okay, which is bad for you. But it's also killing cells in your body.

And it's also increasing your risk of breast cancer. and not just that, it's also downregulating so many different genes and upregulating other genes that are not good for you. Right. Yeah. Have you ever heard of a lady named Shauna Swan? No. I had her in here a few months ago. She is an endocrinologist who wrote a book called Countdown.

And she basically conducted all of these studies, like 10-year-long studies of testosterone level and so. sperm counts in men across the country. And basically what she determined is that sperm count is going down by like 2% per year in males in the U.S. Between like the early 90s up until now, or I'm sorry, the early 90s up until like 2005. And from 2005, that's when it was 1%. But now in the last 10 years it's been like up to 2%. That combined with testosterone levels have been going down in men.

And so, like, she was saying that, like, your average 30-year-old now will have, like, 50% of testosterone that a 30-year-old would have had in the 50s. And she said that it's all, it all has to do with, like, pesticides and plastics, the ballets that are in, like, the plastics, like, plastic water bottles and endocrine disruptors. Endocrine disruptors. Yeah. That scared the shit out of me. Well, we do have a nationwide deficiency, which is, I think it's classified as 350. or less, yeah, which do you, let me tell you, I am testing absolutely every single person that comes to our practice. It's standard for us. Many of the men are around 350. I've had one that

comes in at 250. It's insane. Yeah. And how, like, how, like, that is, I think, like, hormone levels are something people don't really think about a lot, but the hormone levels have, they regulate so many other things in the body. And they're like, that's been responsible for heart health, brain health, everything. Absolutely. And like, you know, you need, there's also precursors to hormones. So we've got DHEA. They call this the hormone of youth because it's really high and, you know, in adolescence and young adults.

And then it dissipates as we get older. And we need this for the synthesis of testosterone. And DHEA is surprisingly, if that is low, it's also correlated with REM sleep. REM sleep is also going to be very low. Really? Yeah, it's funny. I had a patient who had really low DHAA. We started supplementing with DHA, and she's like, Louisa, my REM sleep has increased.

I was like, that's insane. And that's when I started, she didn't even know about the study. She was taking DHA. Yeah, and then it started to increase. I thought that was something only men took. No, gosh, no. Okay. No, DHA is like, it helps create.

hormones. Oh really? Yeah. But all hormones? Estrogen and chestosterone? It can, yeah. Oh, okay. So... I thought it was just specifically for testosterone. So these guys who are getting like these, it's funny because you see like so many fertility problems, you know, which... A lot. Yeah. And it can be attributed, but attributed to low testosterone as well. Yeah, and the direct correlation between that and sperm count and like the population decline, like the growth in population is crazy scary to think about. And, and the direct correlation. And and how you would even go about reversing something like that in the world we live in

when everything is just about making stuff cheaper and getting making more profit off of consumer products. I've got cousins who are still in Cyprus, right? I've got a lot of family who still live there. And Cyprus, I don't know if you've ever been. If you know too much about it, it's a little island off Greece. No, I've never been. I want to go.

I've heard great things. Oh, it is absolutely gorgeous. Everything is fresh, right? Everything they just catch it. No one over there, my cousins, I've got a cousin who is 43, 2044. and she's pregnant. And she's, and it's,

you know, so many women here in the U.S. It's like 43, 44, you wouldn't hear of them falling pregnant. They're just over there just, you know, falling pregnant. And that's late to get pregnant, right?

I mean, yeah, apparently, yeah. So, but she just naturally just fell pregnant. There's no, there's no problems over there. Really?

Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, because another thing that she mentioned in that book was, um, she said, I don't know if she correlated it with other countries,

but I think it was in America. She said that once a woman, passes the age of 35, I think, that the percentage chance of her giving birth to someone with the chromosome, what is it, the Down syndrome chromosome or whatever? 21, yeah, it goes up by like 80% after the age of 35, which is crazy. Yeah, that was in her book. I mean, I'm not sure. I know a lot of people who are having, like, pretty healthy pregnancies.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's becoming a more popular thing to happen later, especially with like people focusing more on like, I mean, nowadays people, they're not getting pregnant as young as they used to generally. I think people are, especially women have like, you know, careers and they make more money than men, you know what I mean? Like in the relationship. So they're not going to be like, they don't want to be raising children or whatever until they get older. And they realize some of them that I know, they like, their biological clock tells them like, oh, it's time for me to have a baby. But, um, I think I'm finding what I see is that so many women now are having children around 38, 39. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I live in New York, so it's a bit different. Yeah, New York's way different. Yeah. I know concussions are big in lots of sports, but do you deal with people like that? Yeah, I actually... I know CTE is a crazy thing right now. Yeah, which can't be diagnosed as until... Until they're dead.

Until they're dead. Yeah, I was going to use a nicer word. Concussions are huge. I think we're not... That's another thing that we're, you know, missing the, like I'm against the NFL. I stopped working with NFL players. Really? Yeah. Specifically because I was doing so many brain scans on them, that was actually my first sport. And I was just seeing so many dysfunctions. I'm like, listen, you've, like, you need to stop.

You need to stop. And they just couldn't. They're like, I can't. They're like, I feed my family. I feed, you know, 10 people that I'm taking care of. I can't just stop. I'm like, well, it's just unethical of me to give you anything else other than telling you to stop. I know so many people who are just getting their head bashed in, okay, and then they're not properly recovering from it. To recover from a trauma like that, you'd need to heal your brain for a very long time. It doesn't take a week. And I know that these concussion protocols are just not in line with player health and safety.

I know that concussions, multiple concussions, can really damage the endocrine system. And I know there's been studies that show, like, people like fighters and NFL players, their hormone levels crash after multiple concussions. It can cause everything from depressive-like symptoms to early cognitive impairment, psychosis, even worse, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. How many players do you know that have actually committed suicide and then you find out you cut their brains up? It's like, well, they actually had CTE, which is repeated hits to the head, which end up in neuronal death. And it mimics the brain of an Alzheimer's disease patients because you see these big clumps, you know, and their brain is just, I just don't know why you would voluntarily

put your kid, especially a kid whose brain is still forming into a sport where you're actually hitting them, hitting their heads with each other. Yeah, it's a violent sport. Hasn't there been some stuff done on treatment of that with like hyperbaric oxygen chambers? Yeah, so what H-Bot does, it, you know, 100% oxygen, it helps the healing process, which is great. A, it has, it depends on when you actually got the trauma to your head, because once you get through trauma, right, you've got this 24-hour to 72-hour window to really make a difference. And there's been many people who are actually experimenting with ketones, post-traumatic insults, like within the first 72 hours, just feeding, yeah, feeding the brain ketones, ketones, so that can heal faster. They're getting

them in hyperbaric oxygen chambers to get the most amount of oxygen to be delivered to the brain. They're doing things such as cooling the brain to cool it down from injury. So they're putting their heads in buckets of ice and putting a snorkel coming out of their head just to cool it down, putting ice on their neck to try and really cool down the brain and heal it and recover it faster. However, it's just, it's like, I understand the sport and I know it brings so. much happiness to the lives of many. The Super Bowl is amazing. But yeah, you've got to think about player health and safety, which by the way, on the topic of concussions and Donna White, he's introduced this sport called slap fighting. Really? You don't know about it? How did I miss this? Are you

kidding me? He's basically, he's formed a sport. Oh, you mean where they slap each other in the face? Yeah, isn't that what it's called? It's not like fighting, but they slap. They stand there and they slap each other and so you can take the hardest slap. That's wild. Which is, you know, ending in edema all over people's faces, but not just that concussions as well. Imagine getting slapped that hard. And I don't even think the prize money pool is that great to warrant something like this. It's just unbelievable. It's like, why is he doing this? What's it called power slap? Top five. Oh, knockouts. Jesus. Yeah, you just stand there defenseless. Oh, see what I mean? Oh. I mean, you have have to be pretty desperate

to get into something like this. There's girls doing it. Yeah. Oh my God. They're smacking the shit out of each other. Okay, this is number three. Oh, do you see his head? Yeah.

Like how many? God, why do they powder their, oh, so there doesn't stick probably, huh? Yeah. He's out. At least they caught his head. Yeah, but they've just concussed them like.

Yeah, that that is bizarre. Dana White's doing that? Yeah, he's doing that. Wow. Imagine being that rich that you think, let's see how people can just voluntarily give themselves brain damage. People love violence.

Is that what it is? Is that what it is? Because I don't. I think violence is like the most compelling form of entertainment to watch. Like Roman gladiators fighting to the death. was like the first form of entertainment, right? For, in civilization at least. Yeah.

And it's like, that's the highest stakes. Yeah, I often think if you've been given the education, which, you know, we should be educating players on, you know, the health and safety of their brains and knowing that, hey, this knock to your head at this velocity, because you've got to remember as well, a concussion, you don't just hit your head and then you concussed. A concussion, you have to, you know, get it at the right place in the correct velocity. you could just get a hit to the head.

It doesn't mean you're going to be concussed, right? So it determines, you know, it comes down to velocity. But if players are aware of that, and they're also aware of the magnitude, and they're also aware of, hey, you just got hit in the head, this is what your brain is doing right now, and this is what it's going to do in the next year. If they still know, and they're voluntarily going out there,

then it's up to them. That's your, they can't tell me how to live my life. They're not going to say, you shouldn't do this. Right. Yeah, I mean, who knows how aware they are, of what actually happens before they get into the NFL, but a lot of them grow up with a dream of doing that and like getting into that and making that.

Plus you're making millions and millions of dollars. It's not saying they shouldn't be paid more. They probably should be paying more. But, you know, there's a trade-off that they're making a choice. And there's definitely lots of science and evidence and documentaries proof of the brain damage that happens to people and people going postal and committing suicide and killing people and beating their spouses.

It's a laundry list of problems that have. happens with brain damage. But yeah, I don't know. What about what I wanted to ask you, I wanted to ask you about one thing we didn't talk about was sauna stuff. Love it. You love the sauna? Oh yeah. Where, you know, the amount of benefits you have. Speaking of brain damage, can't you damage your brain in the sauna? Can't you cook your brain? I mean, depending, again, how heroic you want to be. Yeah, I mean, what's it last name, Platt, where she put her head in the oven. Who? The one who, um, is it Sylvia Platt or something? She put her head in the oven and, and, yeah, I mean, I don't know why I even brought that up, but it just reminded me of it. Is there any

evidence of, like, damaging brain tissue by being in the oven? Oh, Sylvia Platt. What did she do? Did she do something regarding a writer? Wow. Did she do something regarding an oven and putting her head in the oven? I'm pretty sure she did. There we go. Oh, wow. They found her dead with her head in the oven. Oh, having sealed the rooms between her. So, yeah, she, you don't want to seal. You don't want to Sylvia platt yourself. She felt like that in the oven, having sealed the room between her and her sleeping children. I read about this in a book, actually. She was 30 years old.

Whoa, yeah, that's dark. I don't know why. Was she evidently, she must have been depressed. Yeah. Oh, look, it says up the top, although Hughes does not know the name of the pills explicitly. Whose book did I read about her in? I think it was like Malcolm Gladwell had a book about her. Yeah, he wrote a book about

He wrote a book about like mental health And like people who commit suicide And like people who some people Don't really want to do it Or they do it to where they'll do something To where they know there's a chance of survival That there's not a 100% chance they're gonna die Like right

Like swan dive off of a skyscraper right Then you know you're gonna die But then some people do stuff where it's like I'm not really sure if I want to do this but I'm in such a dark place right now that this is like spur of the moment. Maybe I'll live. I'm like,

I'm on the fence, but I'm going to try it. And that's when like people were like putting their heads in ovens. I think it was in England where that happened. That's really sad. Yeah, it's super sad.

Okay. So. I don't know where I was going with that. That was part of the book. We got there. Yeah. We got there because you said, can you cook your brain?

More than likely you could possibly, yeah. But we're not going to the extremes. Just the same way. people actually can die from a, from jumping into those really cold rivers. And your heart rate can slow down immediately. You can actually pass out. There's actually been, I think it's made 13 deaths from cold water immersion because people jump into the cold, ice cold lakes and they get in and they're so cold that

they pass out and they drown. So it's the drowning that actually, that kills them. That kills them. Not the cold. So, yeah, again, we've got extremes. But no, let's talk about the beneficial effects of, heat shock proteins, they can, these heat shock proteins can go in and induce, you know, FOXO3, which is just like, which is like a transcription factor for, it's like a longevity gene,

if you will. And I've actually read research on these heat shock proteins going in and mimicking cardiovascular workouts. So these, you know, the same benefits you get to cardiovascular system from running and cycling for long periods of time you can get from the sauna. The main reason I like it is for the excretion of some of these heavy metals as well. Now, is there any other benefit? Like, it's obviously like a vasodilation that's happening, right? It's dilating all of your arteries and everything. But then when people do that and they go into cold, that seems like it could be bad.

Yeah. Actually, there's no, there's not that. I know that people like to do. hot and cold, hot and cold. Going from, you know, hot and then going into cold, it's not a big thing. But stressing your system from doing hot and then cold and then hot and then cold and vasodilating and constricting, it's actually not really, there's no, like, evidence to show that that's doing well. It could be just a placebo where you feel, you know, you feel the effects of one thing and then feel the shock of another thing. Right, right. I think it was like a Swedish

or Norwegian study that was done with the sonnas, the, like a 20-year study on sauna, was that only, do you know if that was only with sauna or was that, there was no cold involved in that? There was no cold involved in that, no. It was like what, like 20 something minutes or like an hour a week? Actually, there's, you know what they're doing now? There's a really great guy, a doctor named, Dr. Charles Rezaon. I had him on my podcast. He is a psychiatrist and he works with like major depression. And what he's doing and he's actually shown this, if you can get, what he did was he randomized, like I think it was like 20 patients that he had who have got severe depression who are on everything, SSRIs, everything, right?

Near suicidal people. And he got one cohort to, you know, be on drugs and keep taking their SSRIs. And then he got another cohort where he gave them like a sugar pill, okay, just a fake drug and pretended to give them an SSRI. And he got them in the sauna. And he showed that the people who weren't taking the real SSRIs, they actually mimicked the SSRIs and got them off. having... With like a placebo? Well, it wasn't a placebo because you're actually inducing the same effects, the neurotransmitter release, from getting into the hot sauna. So he showed that he can actually get people off, taking medication in depressive patients through going into a sauna. Albeit it, it was every day. And I think it was like a harsh amount. It was like two hours a day.

Whoa. Yeah. So it was a long... I don't think he did it all at once. Maybe he was doing it in like 40-minute increments. but he showed that the effects can actually help mimic an SSRI. Wow. I've heard of that with cold water, but I haven't heard of that with sauna. And cold water too. I think there's less evidence around cold water. I know with sauna, there's a lot more evidence.

And he's really working towards actually getting saunas into hospital settings. So as far as like sauna, like duration and temperature, like what do you think is optimal? It depends. It depends. Do you get into the red saunas or a dry sauna? A regular sauna, the one that gets, not the infrared. Not the infrared, yeah. Traditional.

Yeah, traditional sauna. That's even hotter. So you can get the same effects if you're getting in there for around 30 minutes. Is the infrared infrared better? It's not better or worse. Okay. I prefer the infrared, okay, but it just takes longer. It takes like you need to stay in there for around 45 minutes because it takes longer to heat up.

Whereas if you're in the traditional saunas, it's, you're already hot. You go in. you just put the water on, it's hot already. I like the traditional because you can just pour the water on the rocks with like the little scents or a little whatever and like it steams it up and it makes it smell nice. What temperature are you getting to? Like 160. I was going to say, yeah.

And these, the infrared, 160 is great. 170. The infrareds are getting up to around 170 as well. Some people do like 200. I don't know how the hell you do that. Again, why? I don't know. Yeah, just to impress.

everybody. Exactly. It's heroic. Is there a level of or a temperature of diminishing returns that you know of? Not diminishing returns, but you don't. There's no, I mean, unless you're doing it every single day and you're becoming adapted to the heat, then you can increase it a little bit. Because remember, it comes down to your core body temperature, not the temperature of the ambient temperature. So the best way to actually do it is if you've got a thermometer and you're measuring your own core body temperature while you're in the sauna, get it to a specific temperature and then stay in there for 20 minutes. And you can release these heat shock proteins that are just so beneficial for you. Wow. Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Danny. This was fun.

I'm doing this. I really appreciate it. This was fascinating. I haven't done a podcast like this in a long time, so this was a refreshing. Tell people that are listening and watching where they could follow you and watch your videos or whatever you got online. Yeah, I've got a podcast called The Neuro experience. I have a YouTube clip, albeit it's a small YouTube, a YouTube channel, Louisa Nicola, and I hang out on Instagram quite a bit, Louisa Nicola. Okay. Yeah. And you did a podcast with Dom a while ago, right? I did. I've had all the great scientists on. That's amazing. Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks again. Thanks, I really enjoyed it. Goodbye, World.