Huberman Lab - How to Control Your Metabolism by Thyroid & Growth Hormone
Episode Date: April 26, 2021This episode discusses metabolism and how our thyroid hormone and growth hormone control our metabolism. I also clarify that metabolism isn't just about burning energy, it’s about converting energy ...from different sources into fuels for building and repairing our tissues such as muscle, brain, and tendons and mobilizing energy from body fat storage. I discuss the role of iodine, selenium, and salt for thyroid health, and how specific exercise protocols, amino acids and temperature can dramatically shift levels of growth hormone release in waking and in sleep. I also describe the current landscape of prescription compounds, peptides and other factors for changing levels of thyroid and growth hormone, and some of their risks. Throughout the episode, mechanisms and tools grounded in specific mechanisms are discussed. Supplements from Thorne https://www.thorne.com/u/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Introduction (00:06:05) Thyroid & Growth Hormone (00:08:44) Food Shapes: Do They Matter? (00:11:43) Stevia: Naming & Impact (00:13:30) Metabolism 101: Your Brain the Furnace (00:17:33) Releasing Hormones From Your Brain, Stimulating Hormones from Your Pituitary (00:21:04) Thyroid Hormone’s Real Effects: Growth, Repair and Energy Consumption of Tissues (00:22:45) Iodine, L-Tyrosine & Selenium: The Trio Essential For Thyroid Function (00:26:05) How Much Iodine Do We Need? By Food, Supplement or Ocean Air (00:28:09) Selenium For Thyroid: Brazil Nuts & Other Valuable Sources (00:33:05) Selenium For Pregnancy, Prostate Cancer Risk, Acne (00:35:20) “Clean Eating” Downsides: Cruciferous Vegetables, Leeching Iodine (00:39:00) Other Benefits of Iodine: Reducing Inflammation (00:41:00) Why & How Increased Thyroid Increases Metabolism (00:42:12) What To Eat To Support Your Brain (00:43:00) Hyperthyroidism (Too Much) & Hypothyroidism (Too Little) (00:44:35) Menstruation: Thyroid Carbohydrate & Sugar Craving (00:45:33) Ketogenic Diet & Its Effects On Thyroid, Rebound Weight Gain (00:48:39) Growth Hormone: What, Why & How (00:51:18) Growth Hormone (GH) Changes Across The Lifespan & Risks of GH Therapy (00:53:40) How To Powerfully Increase Growth Hormone: Know The Natural Triggers (00:54:49) Not Eating Within 2hrs of Sleep: Keep Blood Glucose Low(ish) At Sleep (00:55:43) Delta Wave Brain Activity Is the Trigger For Growth Hormone Release (00:58:25) LOW Doses of Melatonin Supplementation For Increasing GH Release (01:01:00) Book: Altered Traits, Binaural Beats? Delta Waves Access (01:04:35) Specific Types & Duration of Exercise That Stimulate Growth Hormone & Warmups (01:08:40) Keeping Low Blood Glucose & Ensuring A Cool Down For Two Phase GH Release (01:10:36) Sex Differences For WHEN During Exercise Growth Hormone and IGF-1 Release Occurs: Males Have To Last Longer (01:14:10) Supplements That Increase Growth Hormone 100-400% (or more): Arginine, Ornithine (01:18:20) Arginine & Exercise Together Can Be Counter-Productive (01:19:50) L-Citrulline Better For Arginine Than Arginine Itself (?!); & Blood Pressure Caution (01:23:09) Growth Hormone Changes Across The Lifespan: No One Escapes (01:26:00) Heat (& Cold) for Triggering Extremely Large Increases In Growth Hormone (01:29:20) Specific Heat Protocols For Increasing Growth Hormone: Up To 16-Fold (?!) (01:34:30) 2021 (New) Study: Heat Increases GH, & Lowers Cortisol, No Effects On Testosterone, DHEA Or Prolactin (01:36:00) Prescription Growth Hormone, & Emerging Peptides Therapeutics, Secretagogues Etc. (01:42:25) Synthesis, Summary Of Actionable Steps For Increasing GH and Thyroid Hormone (01:44:00) Zero Cost & Other Ways to Support Our Podcast; & Thank You!
Transcript
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
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20% off your purchase. This month we've been talking all about hormones, which
are these absolutely incredible chemicals in our brain and body. They impact our entire
lifespan. So from the time that we are in the womb, they are controlling the development
of our brain and our bodies. After we are born, they are still controlling the development
of our brain and bodies.
And I did say development, and that's because contrary to what most people think, development
lasts the entire lifespan.
From the time you're conceived until the time you die, you are developing, you are changing,
and hormones are constantly updating and changing the different functions of your body.
They have two major kinds of effects.
One are immediate effects, so they can actually bind to or kind of park and parking spots
on cells and impact all sorts of things like the growth of cells, etc.
They also can control gene expression.
This is the way that hormones during puberty control body hair growth and breast development
and growth of muscles and limbs and height and all sorts of things.
They are incredible. We've talked about testosterone and estrogen. We talked about insulin and glucagon and
some of the other things. Today we are going to talk about metabolism. Mainly going to talk about
thyroid hormone and growth hormone and some other related pathways. I'm going to explain to you the logic of how thyroid hormone and growth hormone work.
It will become obvious why I've paired thyroid and growth hormone together in the same episode.
And I will of course talk about tools that you can use to elevate or reduce thyroid hormone.
There are cases where people want to reduce thyroid hormone.
I will talk about tools that you can use to elevate growth hormone.
There are rare cases where people want to reduce growth hormone.
Most people are interested in increasing growth hormone.
So today is going to be rich with information, rich with actionable tools.
And as always, the idea is to spell out an organizational logic so you can come
away from this episode and in fact the entire month on hormones really
understanding at some level what these things we call hormones are and how they
work and that's really to arm you to encounter information going forward whether
not comes from me or from somebody else a book or a course someplace else online
to make sense of how to work
with these incredible chemicals we call hormones.
Before we begin to talk about thyroid and growth hormone and how our metabolism works and
how to control metabolism, I want to answer a few questions that I received from you,
from the audience.
Every once in a while someone will send me a quite earnest question about something they saw from the audience. Every once in a while, someone will send me a quite earnest question
about something they saw on the internet.
And one of the things I've heard about quite a bit in the last couple of weeks
is we've been talking about hormones and food intake and how those interact.
Is this question of our certain foods, particularly good for certain organs of the body, and can that be predicted
on the basis of the shape of those foods.
So first of all, I want to acknowledge the question as a valid one, because I see this every
once in a while out there.
People will say, well, you know, walnuts are in the shape of the brain, and therefore they
are good for your brain or a particular
fruit like the beet often looks like a heart and it's good for your heart.
And I certainly invite questions of all kinds provided there since your questions.
However, I am not aware of any science whatsoever supporting the idea that the shape of a given food or object for that matter is
relevant to its functional role in the body in reference to biology.
Now, beats contain something that we're going to talk about today.
They contain a substance called arginine, which actually can control the dilation of blood
vessels and arteries.
So it has some relationship to heart and heart health.
Walnuts contain various fatty acids that may be, I want to underscore, may be beneficial
for certain aspects of brain health.
But there's no evidence whatsoever that the shape of the food itself is relevant.
And I think what's happened is that people have gone out there and found foods
that contain certain substances like carrots and vitamin A or walnuts and particular fatty acids
or beets and arginine and they've selected the foods that happen to be in the shape of the thing
the organ that the particular substance like vitamin A or fatty acids and so forth might benefit or support.
But of course, there are many, many other sources of these nutrients that don't come from walnuts
or from beets or from carrots.
And so I guess the short way to put it is that the idea that the shape of some food is
an indication of whether or not that food would be healthy for
a particular organ in the body is absolutely unfounded.
I don't know of any evidence for it, and I'm not out to quash anybody's great love of
these foods.
I enjoy all the foods I just described, but the shape of things in the physical universe
bears very little if any relevance to the nutrients that
it contains and therefore the organs that it supports.
So thank you for your question, but if you see that out there, I don't even think you
need to tell the person who's putting that information out into the world.
I would just, you know, back away slowly.
One other thing before we move into today's material.
Last episode, I talked about the problems with emulsifiers in highly processed foods,
and the way that they can strip the mucosal lining of the gut, and they can limit the signaling
of hormones like CCK that can signal to the brain's satiety, the signal to stop eating.
And then we got into a discussion about artificial sweeteners.
And I threw out stevia as an artificial sweetener and several people reached out to correct
me that stevia is not an artificial sweetener.
It is a non-chaloric sweetener and you are correct.
I lumped artificial and non-chaloric sweeteners together.
And thanks to many of you that also sent me some references, it does not appear that
stevia can negatively impact the gut microbiome.
It does seem unique among non-chaloric sweeteners.
There are probably others out there.
The other thing that we discussed is how stevia can lead to slight increases in blood glucose,
but can also improve insulin management just slightly.
Probably cancels to zero in terms of its impact on blood glucose provided.
It's not at concentrations that are super, super sweet.
Ingestion of anything that's very sweet, whether or not contains calories or not, artificial
or not, will create an insulin response.
In fact, just walking past a bakery and smelling delicious baked goods can increase your insulin secretion. And so, I just want to point that out. Thank
you for the information and the references that you found. Please send additional ones
if you do find them. And I appreciate that you allow me to make corrections every once
and a while. I must speak here and the opportunity to make corrections keeps us all on the same
page. And please do keep any feedback that you have about particular things I cover here coming my way.
There is so much interest in metabolism. We hear about having a high or a low metabolism.
There are some people out there who would like to reduce their metabolism. They simply can't
eat enough to maintain their weight. Most people, however, struggle with the opposite issue.
They struggle to maintain a healthy weight
and or their metabolism is too low.
Now, there are a variety of reasons why metabolism can be low.
Today, we are going to talk about two hormones,
thyroid hormone and its related pathways
and growth hormone and its related pathways, which
arguably are the two hormones and two systems in the body that are most
significant for setting your overall level of metabolism. Before we dive into
those, I just want to cover a little bit of what metabolism is, and I want to
talk about which organs in your body use the most energy.
So metabolism is the consumption of energy, not necessarily eating, but it's the use of
energy in the cells of the body for growth of tissues, for repair of tissues, and also
just for day-to-day maintenance of function.
A good example of maintenance of function would be your brain. Most of your metabolic
needs, your so-called basal or resting metabolic needs, are for your brain, for thinking. If you
were to just sit in a bed all day and do nothing but think, that consumes about 75% of your metabolic
needs. Now, there's also moving around. If you have a job that requires a lot
of heavy labor or lifting things or you're a new parent and you're carrying kids around,
you're going up and down the stairs or back and forth to the refrigerator for formula,
etc. Well, then you're burning more energy, burning more calories, but even if you are
very physically active, unless you're an ultra marathoner or a marathoner, chances are that 75% of your metabolic needs
are coming just from your brain.
And that's because neurons consume a lot of energy.
Neurons, of course, are just the nerve cells of your brain.
So these two hormones, thyroid hormone and growth hormone,
we think of as related to metabolism of things in the body,
keeping body fat low and keeping muscles strong and tendons strong, and repairing themselves, etc.
But they are also key for brain function, for the ability to maintain cognitive function
throughout the lifespan.
So the big theme I'd like to introduce is that metabolism isn't just about losing weight,
but having a high metabolism provided it's not too high
is great.
It means that you will have more lean tissue,
more bone and muscle, unless adipose tissue, fat.
We know that that's healthy.
How much fat and how much muscle?
Well, that varies and the numbers on this
are always shifting, but in general, muscle and it's related tissues,
burns more energy than does adipose tissue or fat. And the water in your body doesn't consume any energy.
So metabolism can be increased simply by adding muscle to your body and reducing fat or adjusting
the ratio of the two.
But regardless, even if you're not interested in changing body composition, these two hormones,
thyroid hormone and growth hormone are super important for metabolism of all kinds, including
tissue repair after injury, including maintaining cognitive function and well-being, and the
ability to think clearly as you age, offsetting dementia and so forth.
So the big scene here really includes the previous episodes.
You don't have to have seen those episodes,
but for the last three episodes and today as well, we've been talking about hormones,
these substances that are released from one location in the body that go and act other
locations in the body. I'm going to tell you how that works for thyroid and growth hormone,
but now that you've heard about testosterone and estrogen and you're going to hear about
thyroid and growth hormone, I want you to realize that there's a repeating logic.
First of all, there are neurons in your brain in an area called the hypothalamus, which
just means it's below the thalamus, hypothos.
It's at the base of your brain in the front, it's part of the forebrain.
So it's more or less above the roof of your mouth, maybe about a centimeter or so, and
then about a centimeter forward in most people.
And neurons in the hypothalamus release hormones that are called releasing hormones.
So we've talked in previous episodes about, for instance, ganadotropin releasing hormone.
So those are little neurons that then signal another brain area called the pituitary to release other hormones.
Today we're gonna see this again. In the brain you have neurons that release
thyroid-tropin or thyroid-releasing hormone. You also have growth hormone-releasing hormones.
So anytime you hear releasing chances are those are neurons that are in your brain and the
extend little wires we call axons into your pituitary.
And the pituitary releases a bunch of hormones into the bloodstream and the pituitary releases
things that most often have the name of stimulating hormone because they stimulate organs.
So in keeping with the theme of thyroid hormone, you have thyroid releasing hormone in the brain, tells the pituitary to release thyroid stimulating hormone.
And then the thyroid, which we'll talk about in a moment, releases thyroid hormones.
In the testosterone and estrogen episode, we talk about how you have ganatotropin releasing
hormone.
There's the releasing again up in the brain.
Remember releasing hormone comes from the brain.
Then you had things
like luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating
hormone, which were in the pituitary
and those traveled to the ovaries or the testes
and acted on those tissues.
So please try and embed this logic.
If you hear the word releasing hormone,
it's coming from the brain.
And that makes it actionable in certain ways
that we'll return to later.
In addition, the pituitary is letting go of all these hormones into the bloodstream that are
stimulating different tissues. So for thyroid, it's thyroid stimulating hormone,
and then it goes to the thyroid. And the thyroid is a little butterfly shaped gland that's right
around the Adam's apple. If you want to see yours, not directly because it's got skin over it,
what you would do is you'd take a sip of water, you'd look in the mirror and you'd swallow.
And the thing that moves up and down, that is your thyroid. Now, some people call it your Adam's
apple because it sits right near this protrusion in the trachea, which is the Adam's apple.
No matter whether or not your male, female, or regardless of what your chromosome or background is, everyone has an Adam's apple. It tends to be more pronounced
in people that got a surge of testosterone early in development because it has a testosterone
sensitivity to it and that actually controls the timbre, the so-called deepness of the voice.
So the thyroid gland sits right there and it's got four little bumps behind it called the
parathyroid gland and it releases two hormones into the blood to stimulate different tissues
and their metabolism.
And those hormones are called T4 and T3.
So if this is already sounding like a lot of information, it's really easy.
I promise releasing hormone comes to the brain, stimulating hormone comes from the pituitary.
And in this case, we're talking about the thyroid binding up that stimulating hormone and saying,
oh, I need to release something that releases T4 and T3.
And guess what? You can basically forget about T4.
T4, it's not completely inactive, it has some roles, but T3 is the one that's more
less active. Now, what does thyroid hormone do?
A lot of people think, oh, thyroid, it's like metabolism.
And people who are hypothyroid all have bulging eyes and are real thin.
And people who have hypothyroid are overweight.
And they have like their eyes are like half-closed or something.
And indeed, thyroid hormone controls a lot of the features of the face and the eyes.
And it can control amounts of adipose tissue and so forth.
But the main role of thyroid hormone of T3 is to promote metabolism.
And that doesn't just mean the consumption of energy.
It means the utilization of energy, including the buildup of tissues.
So it acts on all sorts of target tissues in the body.
It acts on muscle. It acts on the body. It acts on muscle.
It acts on the liver.
It acts on the cartilage.
It acts on the bone.
And it's not just involved in using energy.
It's also converting energy.
I do realize I said that twice.
It's involved in taking fats and breaking them down into fatty acids
and converting those into ATP,
which is an important thing for cells to use
energy.
It's also involved in taking sugars and turning those into energy.
And yes, it goes to adipose tissue to fat.
We have different kinds of fat that we'll talk about today, but it goes to white fat and
it liberates or helps liberate some of the fats from those fat cells and use them for energy.
And this is why higher thyroid is associated with leaner bodies, lower thyroid is associated with less lean bodies.
So one thing that's absolutely key and is actionable, we're right there already in discussing tools is iodine.
is iodine. Iodine comes from things in the ocean, right? And here are a couple interesting facts about iodine. And then we'll talk about whether or not you should be supplementing
iodine or not. First of all, iodine is most common in sea salt, in kelp, and in seaweed. And most people can get enough iodine
from the food they eat and or the table salt they consume.
Almost all table salt from all over the world,
regardless of where you are, contains iodine.
The thyroid needs iodine in order to produce thyroid hormone,
and you need sufficient levels of thyroid hormone, not too much, but you need it.
So chances are you are getting enough iodine, although you might not, especially those of you following a particularly,
quote, unquote, clean diet, might not be getting enough iodine.
Here's the deal with iodine.
Iodine combines with an amino acid that we've talked about before called L-tyrosine.
L-tyrosine comes from meat, from nuts, there are some plant-based sources as well.
It is the precursor to dopamine.
But in the thyroid, iodine combines or works with L-tyrosine to produce T3 and T4, the
thyroid hormone.
So you absolutely need sufficient iodine, you need sufficient
altyrosine, and then you also need something else which is called selenium, and we'll talk
about selenium in a moment. So there's a condition that shows up in little pockets in the
world. It's not super common, but where it, meaning it's not very widespread, but in
certain areas that are far away from the ocean.
At one point, this was historically in the Midwestern states of the United States, in some mountain
regions of other countries, in some areas of Africa that were far from the ocean.
People would get extremely swollen bulges in their necks. And this was called goiter. And the reason they were getting those swollen bulges
is because the thyroid itself was hypertrophying.
It was growing in an attempt to churn out more thyroid
and because it was getting a lot of stimulating hormone
from the pituitary, but, and I don't wanna go
far off track here, but as you recall, the brain and the pituitary, but, and I don't want to go too far off track here, but as you recall,
the brain and the pituitary are paying attention, in a cellular sense, to the levels of hormones
in the blood, and when those hormones get too high, they shut off the stimulating hormone.
They shut down the signal to make more, kind of like a thermostat.
When the levels are too low, like there's not enough testosterone in the bloodstream, or
there's not enough estrogen, the brain will continue to push out the signal
to make more.
Similarly, if there's not enough thyroid circulating
or there's not enough iodine to make thyroid,
therefore not enough thyroid hormone circulating,
the thyroid gland itself is not getting shut down.
There's tons of stimulating hormone
and releasing hormone coming from the brain,
like release, release, release,
and there's no way they can make thyroid hormone and so the gland just the brain like release release release and there's no way
They can make thyroid hormone instead the gland just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and so people get goiter
This is one of the reasons why table salt has iodine in it
Although there are other foods that have iodine in it as well. So
How much iodine do you need? Well, you don't need a whole lot some people who are hypothyroidal
Well, you don't need a whole lot. Some people who are hypothyroidal might,
and I want to emphasize might,
you absolutely should talk to your doctor.
This is a serious matter anytime you're talking about hormones
or manipulating levels of thyroid.
You absolutely won't talk to your doctor.
Some people benefit from supplementing iodine.
It is contained in most salts.
It's in Himalayan salt, not always, but often.
I know these days there's a lot of excitement
about pink salts and sea salts,
but the kind of artisan salt thing has kind of taken off
in the foody land, which is great.
Some of them are actually quite tasty.
You can just take it directly if you like the taste of salt.
But iodine can be supplemented through things
like kelp and seaweed and kelp tablets.
Now, if you are hyperthyroidal, you make too much thyroid, that actually can be a problem.
So really the best way to figure this out is to get your blood levels tested of thyroid
hormone.
But there's so much iodine in the ocean that believe it or not, people that live near the
coast can actually just absorb it through the air just by breathing ocean air. So that gives you a sense of just how little iodine you
actually need to consume in food or in salt. So if you're within a few miles of
the ocean or you visit the ocean from time to time you're probably getting plenty.
It does have to come together as I mentioned with L-tyrosine and this is why
foods that contain L-tyrosine and provided that you have sufficient iodine in your diet.
And if you have sufficient selenium in your diet, does serve to increase your metabolism.
And that is, again, is for the growth and repair of tissues.
And that's really important.
It's not just about keeping your metabolism high so that you can be on the leaner side
of things or just your body composition
ratios the way you like.
Repair of injuries, repair of brain tissue, clearance of any damage from neurons, clearance
of any damage to the body is also going to depend on thyroid.
Again, metabolism being this kind of rate of fuel consumption and use in the body generally
not just about body mass indexes and things of that sort.
So let's talk about selenium because it's really important.
And even though most people are getting a lot of sufficient iodine, and most people are
probably getting enough altyrosine, I'm guessing most people may not be getting enough selenium
if their goal is to increase thyroid hormone.
At least that's what the literature says.
Without going into the biochemistry, selenium is important in order for thyroid hormone to be made
because of the way that it allows altiracine and iodine to interact. And the thing is, most people
aren't getting enough selenium because they don't eat foods that
are high in selenium.
Now, how much selenium you need will depend on where you live.
It actually varies country by country.
Some countries I found say that you should get 100 micrograms, some say 200, some say
155.
The average was about 155 micrograms the countries I looked at.
People who are trying to increase thyroid levels might want to consume more selenium. And if you consume a vitamin, of course, you want
to make sure if it has selenium that you're not overdoing it by consuming a lot of selenium
rich foods either. But nonetheless, I think it's fair to say that most people probably
could do well by ingesting slightly more selenium than they currently are, although of course
always talk to your doctor.
Brazil nuts are the heavyweight champion of foods
to get selenium from.
It has very high concentrations of selenium.
In just six or eight, Brazil nuts contain something
like 550 micrograms of selenium.
It's also present in fish.
So certain fish like yellow fintuna, although Although nowadays whenever I mention tuna or shellfish, which is the other rich source of
Selenium people
Will tell me immediately there are all sorts of issues around farm not farm mercury etc
So I've never particularly liked eating fish because of the way it tastes
So that's why I avoid it
But for those of you that like it, I'm sure you're much more skilled in knowing
which fish to buy and which fish not to buy ham of all things,
contains a lot of selenium for whatever reason pork does.
I'm not a big consumer pork.
Beef has some selenium, but what's interesting,
if you look at the sources, pork, beef, turkey, chicken,
cottage cheese, eggs, brown rice, what you want to understand is that Brazil nuts,
six to eight Brazil nuts has 550 micrograms of selenium
and all the other foods I mentioned at much greater portion size
than equivalent to six to eight Brazil nuts,
either by volume or by calories,
they have something like 30 to 50 micrograms of selenium. So if you're not eating Brazil nuts, either by volume or by calories, they have something like 30 to 50 micrograms of
selenium. So if you're not eating Brazil nuts, and I'm guessing most people aren't, then
and you're not eating a lot of animal-based foods, which I know many of you aren't,
then you're probably not getting enough selenium. And again, you can have these levels measured,
or you can just check what you're consuming and figure out whether or not you're meeting the ration that you need in order to get healthy levels of thyroid.
It is present in things like mushrooms, but again, in that bowl of mushrooms, what is the
equivalent to a bowl of mushrooms?
Twelve micrograms of selenium.
If the daily ration is something in the 100 to 200 range, again, look it up for the area
you are.
You can see really quickly why,
think even though things like mushrooms and spinach
and milk and yogurt and lentils and cashews,
and hour into the vegetarian segment
and the list that I constructed,
you're probably not getting enough selenium.
So, it's kind of an interesting thing.
If you're an expirimenter, you and you get the clearance
from your doctor, you could try increasing your selenium levels
and see how that impacts your metabolism.
Again, Brazil nuts are probably going to be the most direct way to get sufficient selenium
levels, but because levels are so high in Brazil nuts, it also means that you could overdo
it as well.
I'm not really aware of what the consequences are of getting too much selenium, although
you can get too much of anything, and I'm guessing
those consequences aren't good.
I also want to mention that for children, there are daily requirements of selenium are much
lower, as low as 30 or 40 micrograms for kids 14 years or younger.
And in some areas, I really want to underscore this, the amount of selenium that's recommended
daily is as low as 55 micrograms. areas, I really want to underscore this, the amount of selenium that's recommended daily
is as low as 55 micrograms.
So it's not that you should be shooting for thousands or even, you know, high levels
of hundreds of micrograms of selenium.
And again, that's micrograms, not milligrams.
So again, look into what you need.
But if you're somebody who's interested in keeping thyroid function healthy and productive, then you certainly want
to make sure you're getting enough iodine, you're getting enough selenium, and you're
getting enough L-tyrosine.
And it's interesting when you start looking at the various foods, especially highly processed
foods, then you start to realize that perhaps many people, maybe you are not.
Not incidentally, selenium has some other effects on health that can be quite
positive. And even though these don't relate to thyroid or growth hormone function specifically,
I think you might want to know about them given that we're on the topic of selenium.
The first is that there are three studies all of which showed very high efficacy for reducing the risk of something called preeclampsia. Preeclampsia is seizures
that are related to blood pressure issues during or around the delivery of a new baby.
And it actually, it's a rare-ish condition, but it actually can be quite deadly. And so
the fact that selenium is important for offsetting pre-clampsia risk is interesting.
I don't know the exact mechanism, and I'm guessing there are only a few of you out there that
are either pregnant or thinking of conceiving soon, but that's worth noting obviously
anything related to pregnancy or lactation, especially talk to your doctor.
I'm guessing that selenium is probably in a lot of prenatal formulas,
but that's one clear benefit of having sufficient selenium. The other is a reduced prostate
cancer risk. There's a study showing that having sufficient selenium can reduce prostate
cancer risk. And there is some evidence that if you consume foods from areas with soil
that's low in selenium, that can be a problem.
And last episode we talked about all these issues related to soil quality, things that
are making their way into food, they're disrupting hormones and so forth.
But having sufficient selenium from food could offset the low content in any soil.
And so that apparently can reduce prostate cancer risk.
It's a minor effect, but it's a statistically significant one.
And the other one is a reduction in acne, which is interesting.
I'm guessing that that probably has to do with the thyroid hormone pathway,
because of the weight thyroid hormone can impact the liver,
and it turns out that the liver and various biochemical reactions in the
liver can impact acne.
And that's probably an episode all into itself, but those are just some additional benefits
of getting sufficient selenium.
Okay, so we're already deep into tools related to making sure that you have sufficient selenium,
iodine, and L-tyrosine in order to make enough thyroid hormones that can support
your metabolic processes in your liver, your muscles, your tendons, for whatever purpose.
Keeping your metabolism high, for body composition reasons, or for healing,
for keeping your brain working well. Earlier I mentioned there are people who are following
very clean diets. So these are people that consume no processed foods.
You know any starch they might eat is going to be maybe a ricerigrain or any protein they
might consume is going to be either from, let's hope from humainly raised animal sources
or maybe they're pure plant-based.
Believe it or not, those folks are actually
very susceptible to low iodine because it turns out
that diets that are very meat-rich
and don't have many vegetables,
as well as diets that are very vegetable-rich,
but don't have many meats or salts,
are at risk of lowering thyroid hormone
by way of the iodine pathway and other pathways.
And so let me try and simplify this for you.
Chances are if people are doing the all meat diet,
they're not sprinkling,
they're not wrapping those steaks in seaweed,
and they may or may not be supplementing with iodine.
Chances are they're probably consuming iodine salt,
but their requirements go up if they're not consuming vegetables.
People who are consuming vegetables, it's kind of interesting. We always hear that we should have our cruciferous
vegetables and those are so important, but there are actually substances
compounds within
high quality
cruciferous vegetables that can interfere with thyroid hormone function.
So if you're eating a lot of that stuff, a lot of cabbages, and you know, just look up
your other, I think, broccoli is a cruciferous vegetable, and I won't read off the whole list.
You could just put into the internet.
But if you're, you know, we're always told to eat a lot of the dark leafy green stuff.
Well, unless that dark leafy green stuff is kelp or seaweed,ances are that we're not getting enough iodine
unless we're adding salt to our food.
And chances are that we may be lowering
the total amount of thyroid that we're making,
as well as the fact that in plant-rich diets,
it's hard to get enough L-tyrosine.
And I don't want, you know, I'm not here to inflame
any of the vegans or the carnivore folks.
I don't take a stance either way on any of that.
I'm just learning, trying to report the science.
The point I want to make is your health is important.
So if you are purely plant-based and you're eating a lot
of cruciferous vegetables, make sure you're getting
enough iodine.
It does seem like the cruciferous vegetables can increase
the need for further iodine.
And same thing, if you're purely, and you're on this all- this all meat diet or your keto and you're not ingesting many vegetables.
So I always thought that the cleaner the diet, the better, but it turns and probably that's true from the standpoint of,
you know, hormone regulation, you know, estrogen and testosterone and other hormones.
The highly processed foods really are terrible.
There's so much evidence for that. estrogen and testosterone and other hormones. The highly processed foods really are terrible.
There's so much evidence for that. They thalates in plastics and the processed foods and the emulsifiers, all the stuff we talked about previous episode. But it does seem to be that people that
are not getting enough iodine for whatever reason really need to check out whether or not their iodine
levels need to be increased because of the fact that they're consuming so many plants or so many meats and in some cases plants that actually lower thyroid hormone.
And not to be to dead horse or cabbage, but there are a number of things that iodine can do that are positive that are sort of, they're related to thyroid, not directly. They're kind of offshoot to the thyroid pathway.
They're downstream of it, we would say,
in terms of how they impact metabolic function.
One of those is to reduce something
called C-reactive protein.
Some of you may have heard of CRP or C-reactive protein.
C-reactive protein is something that you want to keep
at modestly low levels.
It's associated with inflammation and various forms
of heart disease and even eye disease, macular degeneration. So it does appear that iodine supplementation or getting
sufficient iodine from food either works is associated with reduced levels of C reactive
protein in the blood and an anti-inflammatory effect. And the anti-inflammatory effect brings
us back to our old friend, Interleukin 6.
Remember, there are these inflammatory cytokines.
There you have many, many names,
because there are many, many of them.
Interleukin 10 is the one that's anti-inflammatory.
Interleukin 6 is the one that's inflammatory.
Anytime you see IL-6, that usually means
that there's an inflammatory response, there's a wound.
There's inflammation
of the brain, somebody is either sleep deprived or had a brain injury or they're dealing with
some sort of infection.
IL-6 is kind of a catch-all for inflammation.
It does appear that iodine supplementation can reduce circulating IL-6 associated with
inflammation.
In that sense, iodine can have an anti-inflammatory effect.
So by now, it should be abundantly clear if you care about thyroid hormone, if you care
about the pathways that it impacts, like having a high level of metabolism, which I guess
if for no other reason is attractive, because then you can eat more and still maintain a
healthy body composition, but also for brain health, cognitive function,
tissue repair, all that stuff, keeping C-reactive protein low, keeping IL-6 low, make sure you're
getting enough iodine, selenium, and L-tyrosine.
If you're curious how thyroid actually increases metabolism allows you to eat more, et cetera,
it relates to something we covered last issue, which is glucose.
Remember, when you eat something blood sugar goes up, insulin is secreted
from the pancreas, and it makes sure
that blood glucose doesn't go too high,
which can damage tissues or too low,
which make you hypoglycemic.
Thyroid increases glucose uptake by various tissues
in particular muscle and bone.
It actually can increase bone mineral density,
which is a really good thing as you get older
injuries. And when I say older, I mean basically 30 and older. The reason you can recover more quickly
from injuries if you have a healthy thyroid and healthy thyroid pathways is because you can consume
energy that energy is diverted toward bone repair and muscle repair and cartilage repair. And so the way it does this again is by increasing ATP.
But the whole idea here is that iodine,
selenium, eltyrosine allow thyroid to be at healthy levels so that
thyroid then can take glucose in the blood and divert it to tissues
for it to be used. In particular, your brain and that's why
these things that we're talking about supplementing
or getting from food can actually improve or support brain function.
People are always asking me what is the food that I should eat for my brain?
Like our blueberries good for your brain or they do ask me our well that's good for your brain
because there looks like a brain.
We talked about that earlier.
The fact of the matter is that what you need are nutrients that support hormones and
biological pathways that support the brain.
That's the way to think about it.
And I realized when people ask, what should I eat to support my brain?
That's basically what they're asking in short form.
So keeping your thyroid hormone healthy at healthy levels that is is going to be terrific for
your brain because 75% of your metabolism is from your brain. The ability of your brain to use glucose or ketones for that matter is going to be terrific for your brain because 75% of your metabolism is from your brain,
the ability of your brain to use glucose
or ketones for that matter is going to be aided
by having healthy thyroid.
So do the things, take the things,
eat the things that are gonna allow you
to have healthy levels of thyroid hormone.
I'm sure a number of you are out there wondering,
do I have healthy levels of thyroid hormone?
Those can be measured from the blood.
There's some telltale signs of having really high thyroid or really low thyroid.
And I could start listing those off.
They're easy to find online as well.
Things like bulging eyes, inability to maintain weight, shaky anxiety, that's kind of hyperthyroidal,
thinning of hair, this kind of thing.
I don't want to get into diagnosing hypothyroidism and hypothyroidism.
It's just impossible because you're there and I'm here and we're kind of shouting back
and forth through a tunnel of video and comments.
If you're concerned about having excessively high or excessively low levels of thyroid hormone,
absolutely.
Look up what the symptoms are.
Talk to your physician.
There are a number of good treatments.
I didn't talk about prescription drugs that can improve symptoms related to hypo or
hyperthyroid.
Of course, they have synthesized thyroid, so if you don't make enough thyroid, you can
take thyroid.
It's by prescription.
If you have too much thyroid, sometimes they'll take out the thyroid gland, or they can
administer drugs that will either block receptors or will interfere with some of the pathway have too much thyroid, sometimes they'll take out the thyroid gland, or they can administer
drugs that will either block receptors, or will interfere with some of the pathways from the brain
to the pituitary, or from the pituitary to the thyroid, in order to adjust thyroid hormone
that way. So there are the big guns in terms of the treatments for different thyroid disorders,
but we're not talking about thyroid disorders.
We're talking about how to get and maintain
thyroid levels in healthy ranges
and some straightforward ways to do that
through diet and supplementation.
There's also a lot of evidence that for people
who menstruate, levels of thyroid hormone
can fluctuate dramatically across the menstrual cycle.
So that's really gonna be a process of experimentation.
I don't know that you could, in theory, take blood at different phases of your cycle and
figure out whether or not your thyroid hormone was excessively high or low at different phases
of the cycle.
That's going to be pretty tough to do if you have an endocrinologist that's willing to
do that with you, terrific.
I think most people are going to have to figure out how supplementing the sorts of things that
we talked about before or getting them from foods
relates to different aspects of their cycle. In general the first half of the cycle before ovulation, people
create carbohydrates and sweets more related to the and that makes total sense
based on the biology of the menstrual cycle.
Thyroid hormone is going to go up as you as anyone
thyroid hormone is going to go up as you as anyone, male or female menstruating or not,
increases more starchy carbohydrates.
This is interesting because ketogenic diets have been shown
to slightly lower thyroid levels,
and that makes sense because in ketogenic diets,
blood glucose levels are very low,
and thyroid hormone is secreted in large part
in proportion to how much glucose is in the
bloodstream and how much that glucose glucose, excuse me, needs to be regulated.
So I'm not trying to demonize the ketogenic diet.
I think it definitely has its place.
There are 22 studies now showing that it can dramatically reduce blood glucose.
And about a third of those show that thyroid hormone levels
are slightly reduced, sometimes significantly, if not more, in the ketogenic diet, that
may explain, I want to highlight, may explain the fact that when people go back to a more
traditional diet, if they've been on a ketogenic diet for a long time, that oftentimes they
will gain weight very quickly as they
bring carbohydrates back into their diet.
Some people are cycling between ketogenic and non-ketogenic every three, four days, so
called cyclic ketogenic diet.
Some people are staying ketogenic for a long periods of time.
Some people six days on when they're off, so there's a huge variation there.
The point is that carbohydrates, starchy carbohydrates in particular support the healthy production
of T3 and T4.
And so if you're very low carbohydrate, you're going to have a reduction in T3 and T4.
And so if you're going to bring carbohydrates back into your diet, then you might want
to do it more gradually.
And for those of you that menstruate and are craving carbohydrates in the early part of
the cycle, that is actually associated with having a healthy cycle.
If any of you have had a healthy cycle on a ketogenic diet,
that would be interesting.
Maybe let me know through the comments
or point me in the direction of some research
if you're aware of it.
So as you can start to see,
there's this really beautiful interplay
between the different hormones,
between insulin and glucose,
between estrogen and thyroid,
between thyroid and blood glucose and the ketogenic
diets.
It all starts to fit together in ways that make a lot of sense once you understand just
kind of the core elements of what the hormones are and the variety of tissues that they work
on.
The simple version of this is if you haven't had a carbohydrate for a year, then your T3,
T4 levels are going to be pretty low.
And I'm sure there's some ketones to this out there.
They're going to say, wait, no thyroid hormone levels go up with keto.
That might be true for other reasons, indirect reasons related to hormone pathways that are
cascade from being in ketosis for long periods of time.
Great.
But for most people that don't consume any carbohydrate, T3, T4 are going to go down and when they start to consume foods
that require thyroid metabolism in order to work with,
to metabolize, then weight gain can sometimes happen
more quickly.
So it's just something to consider
and it's something to work with carefully
if you're going to be cyclic ketogenic, long-term ketogenic,
and if you're not ketogenic and you're consuming carbohydrates, and the three things that we talked about earlier, selenium
tyrosine and iodine, chances are, unless there's an underlying condition there, that your
levels of thyroid are going to be in healthy range.
Next we're going to talk about growth hormone.
Growth hormone has received a ton of attention in the last 20 years. I actually
remember when it was first sequenced. This was a huge deal. There was a huge patent drama.
I won't mention the universities or the people involved. There were companies and monster
patents and payouts and it was really interesting. You can look that up online if you're interested
in some of the scientific history. Growth hormone is a pretty straightforward one for you to understand
now because it follows the exact same logic as thyroid hormone. In fact, their functions
are so closely overlapping on the, you know, when we first look at the face of it, that
you're probably going to think, you know, why do you have these two systems? So just very
briefly, growth hormone, releasing hormone. So remember, releasing means it comes from the brain, comes from the brain, and tells the pituitary to release growth hormone releasing hormone. So remember releasing means it comes from the brain,
comes from the brain, and tells the pituitary to release growth hormone. And then growth hormone
is released into the bloodstream where it goes and acts on a ton of tissues, muscle,
ligaments, bone, fat, etc. to increase metabolism. It sounds just like thyroid hormone.
And they do work in parallel. And that's why we've lumped them together in the same episode.
They increase metabolism and repair and growth of tissues.
A conversation about growth hormone would be incomplete if we didn't talk about the kind
of extremes.
There are certain people who are born that don't make enough growth hormone, and they end
up very short in stature.
There are certain people who make a ton of growth hormone, and they end up very short in stature. There are certain people who make a ton of growth hormone
and they end up very, very large.
They tend to have very large appendages.
They have something called acromagally.
It's kind of like a ridging of the forehead.
It's actually a bone ridge.
They are giant.
And it used to be called giantism.
And most people, of course, are in a range of height and a
appendage length that doesn't imply that there's a growth hormone disruption
there. Growth hormone received a lot of attention after it was sequenced
because that meant the opportunity to inject growth hormone and replace
growth hormone that was lost. And there was actually a lot of cases of people
taking their kids and trying to get them to be taller
for whatever reason by injecting growth hormone.
Today we're gonna talk about the things
that anyone can do to increase growth hormone.
And there are reasons why certain people would wanna do that.
People who overproduce growth hormone
certainly would not want to do that.
People who underproduce it would probably want to do that. People who underproduce it would probably want to do that.
People that make normal, quote unquote, levels of growth hormone might want to do that as they age
because during puberty and development, the pituitary is churning out tons of growth hormone.
It's responsible for the growth, not surprising, of the body and all its features. Height just being one of those.
And so as we age, we make less growth hormone
and that is one of the reasons why we recover more slowly
from injuries.
It's one of the reasons why we accumulate body fat
and it's one of the reasons why our metabolism slows.
And so growth hormone replacement therapy
has been tremendously popular in the last 20 years,
which is not to say it doesn't carry its problems. It does. Here's one of the major problems with
injecting growth hormone. Not saying people shouldn't do this if the doctor has approved it or it's
in keeping with their particular life goals, but growth hormone, if it's in levels that are too high,
will cause growth of all tissues. So not just muscle, not just reduction in body fat
by metabolizing, by allowing fatty acids
to be pulled out of storage and used for ATP,
but it will also cause increase in growth of the heart
and the lungs and the liver and the spleen.
And so this is the concern with abuse of growth hormones.
So we're not going to be talking about abuse of growth hormone.
We will, however, talk about tools that anyone can use to increase levels of growth hormone.
Some of them are behavioral, some of them are supplement based, and some of them interact
with behaviors and supplements.
What's cool about the discussion about growth hormone
is that the tools that exist out there
to increase growth hormone are very actionable.
Most people can do these without the need
for any equipment or even any supplement,
although there are some supplement related themes
for tools for growth hormone increase.
And also the increases that one can get
in growth hormone are substantial.
So normally, when you talk about the difference between taking something as an exogenous
substance like testosterone or estrogen versus using supplements or behaviors to increase
them, you're talking about 10-fold differences from, you know, administering the prescription
compound.
In terms of growth hormone, there are things that can increase growth hormone three, four, five hundred percent or more. And even though that's a short-lived increase,
they can have very powerful effects on metabolism and on repair of tissues. So let's talk about
those. Okay, let's go step by step in terms of the things that anyone, perhaps everyone
should be doing in order to maintain healthy growth
hormone levels or increase growth hormone levels. Unless you have overproduction of growth hormone,
chances are these things are going to benefit you. However, as always, I want to emphasize
talk to a doctor before you do anything, including remove any treatments, so anything you would add
or take away, that's
responsibility of you and your healthcare provider.
Okay, I don't just say that to protect me, I say that to protect you.
First of all, growth hormone is released every night when you go to sleep, and it's released
in the early part of sleep during so-called slow wave sleep.
So the two conditions that have to be met in order for growth
hormone to be secreted regularly for tissue repair, etc. are you need to get into slow wave sleep,
that's so-called deep sleep, and you need blood insulin and glucose to be relatively low. So
eating within two hours of sleep, excuse me, eating within two hours
of going to sleep is going to suppress growth hormone release. That's very clear. However,
some people are going to have problems falling asleep if they are too hungry. So you have
to work with that and decide what you're going to eat and when you're going to eat that
thing so that you're not so hungry that you're having trouble falling asleep.
The episodes on sleep that were covered in episodes 2, 3, and 4 of the Huberman Lab podcast
as I believe more tools there than you could ever want or make use of in terms of how to
optimize sleep.
You can refer to those if you like.
So don't eat too close to sleep and then get into slow wave sleep.
And as I talked about in one of those earlier episodes, the first half of the night,
slow wave sleep and deep sleep predominate.
The second half of the night,
it's another kind of sleep, we call REM sleep.
So what is special about this early phase of sleep?
This is how you should be thinking,
if you listen to this podcast,
you should be thinking, okay,
I hear that something is important,
it's related, it's in the pathway,
but mechanistically when we say, get into slow wave sleep, get into deep sleep, that's when growth hormone
is secreted.
The question you should be asking yourselves as scientists of yourselves is, wait, why
slow wave sleep?
What in particular about slow wave deep sleep allows the pituitary to release growth hormone?
Like what is it?
Because if you can understand that, if you can understand a little bit of mechanism,
there are actually ways that you can increase the amount of growth hormone that you release both in sleep and out of sleep.
So the answer is it's delta wave activity in the brain.
Delta waves are these big, giant waves of activity in the brain
that correlate with slow wave sleep as opposed to faster waves of activity that associate with
rapid eye movement sleep. So slow wave sleep and the delta activity actually triggers the neurons
in the brain, the releasing hormone, growth hormone releasing hormone neurons to signal to the
pituitary.
Now, how do I know this is true?
And what can you do with this?
Well, we know this is true because researchers
have taken people and sleep deprived of them
and they just asked, well, is it just one period
of time every 24 hours
and then the pituitary releases growth hormone?
If that were the case, that would say
that growth hormone is just released
in a so-called circadian dependent way.
Every 24 hours is the pulse of it, but no, it's always relating to slow-wave deep sleep
and delta waves.
And this is cool because what it means is that even if you're not measuring your brain
waves during sleep, which most of you probably are not, you might be measuring slow-wave sleep
or deep sleep using a device like a whoopfer and aura, and even if you're not,
what this means is that during the day,
there's the potential to also increase growth hormone release
if you can get the brain into the so-called delta waves.
And it turns out there are things you can do in waking
as well to increase growth hormone release.
So we're gonna talk about those next,
but as a tool, and to just really make sure that
we put brackets around this, try and have blood glucose not too high.
So if you do need to eat close to bed, you wouldn't want to eat anything that would
increase blood glucose too much.
Try and not eat too close to bedtime.
Get into deep sleep early in the night.
Get the growth hormone release.
And understand that it's the delta waves of activity, these sweeping big waves of
activity in the neurons that stimulate the brain to stimulate the pituitary.
Because once you understand that, then you have something to anchor to in terms of thinking,
what are the things I can do in waking that will allow me to release more growth hormone,
which for most people is going to be a good thing.
Several times before on this podcast, I've talked about the fact that I'm not a big fan of
melatonin supplementation for most purposes. It might be helpful under conditions of jet lag.
However, there are a lot of reasons why I personally don't like melatonin. It interacts with
the reproductive hormones, testosterone and estrogen, and that whole axis in ways that are unattractive,
at least to me, it suppresses puberty during development. It's present in much, much higher doses
in most supplements than one would normally make, like 100 fold, 300 fold, however.
Today I'm going to talk about an instance where very low levels of
melatonin supplementation might actually be advantageous.
And that is aiding the transition
to the Delta wave, slow wave, sleep, I just described,
because that's the pattern of sleep
and brain weight of activity
that triggers growth hormone release.
So whereas most melatonin supplements
are 1 milligram, 3 milligrams, 12 milligrams,
this kind of thing.
That is super physiological.
There are some data showing that microgram, maybe 500 micrograms of melatonin.
So half a milligram can be beneficial in shifting the pattern of early night sleep toward more
of the slow wave deep sleep, delta activity, and improving growth hormone release.
Not a lot of studies, but the ones that I saw are quality.
They were done in subjects that both sexes,
sufficient numbers, et cetera.
So this is interesting.
So if you're interested in melatonin supplementation,
you might think about it just in terms,
at very low levels, you know,
hundreds of micrograms as opposed to the milligram dosages.
Most of the ones out there are going to be
in milligram dosages.
So that's one way that some studies have shown
that you can increase the amount of growth hormone
that's secreted in early phases of sleep.
Now, the delta wave activity and the slow wave activity
in the brain being very important for growth hormone release
and growth hormone release being so important
for metabolic functions and peeling away unwanted body fat
and repairing tissues, et cetera, forces us to ask,
well, what other things can we do in waking
in order to increase growth hormone release?
So let's start with the ones that have a potentially big effect,
but are a little bit harder to access. And for that, I want to point toward a book, which is really
kind of interesting. It's not focused on growth hormone, but the book is called Altered Traits.
This is the book. It's an excellent book. Altered Traits by Goldman and Davidson. Science reveals
how meditation changes your mind, brain, and body.
Very interesting book. For those of you that are interested in meditation, and perhaps those of you who are not, but are considering it,
what they talk about in this book is the fact that meditation has two separate lines of effects.
One of those lines of effects are things that change your state.
So your stress, you sit down, you meditate, and you relax, and you go into a particular
state. The other are the changes that occur over time, and those are changes in trait.
So personality can actually change with long bouts of T.M. meditation or repeated meditation.
In any case, the reason we're talking about alter traits today is because certain types of meditation can get people's
brains into states that very closely mimic slow wave sleep. If you hear snoring in
the background, Costello is, it sounds like he's in slow wave sleep. He's big
oscillatory snores that he's in 23.6 hours per day.
So what this means is for people
that are interested in increasing growth hormone,
a meditation practice that allows you to get into
these slow wave delta type frequency activity in the brain
may be very beneficial because as I mentioned before, that's what's
gating growth hormone release. It's not just a circadian phenomenon. It's actually controlled by
these brain waves. I did look up binaural beats. I get so many questions about binaural beats and
it's a really attractive idea, right? Binaural beats for those of you who don't know, you listen to one frequency of tone, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do or maps onto. There are a lot of apps there claiming that you can get the brain into delta waves using
BINORAL BEATS. I could not find quality peer review studies supporting that, but I know there are a lot of
fans out there of BINORAL BEATS. If you know of any literature that's independent of the company that makes the BINORAL BEAT
technology, so unbiased research, please send it my way. But in Alter Trates golemen and David's in talk about the fact that people who do 20 minutes of
sitting meditation per day can access these slow waves sleep-like brain
states. Now I've talked a lot on here about non-sleep deep rest, things like
Yoganidra and hypnosis. I'm not aware that those will put people into
slow-wave sleep per se or delta waves per se. So we're really talking about 20 minutes of more traditional type meditation. Okay, so we talked about very low doses of melatonin as a way to trigger delta waves and more growth hormone release and sleep.
They're science to support that. We've now talked about a waking behavior of 20 minutes of
sort of what I would call standard meditation or just sitting there concentrating on ones breathing to try and access
Delta waves, Bynorobites, no science yet, who knows maybe their science to support it if you're
aware of it. Let me know. Now let's move to the things that one can do that have been shown to have
what's let's just be honest,
a pretty enormous effects on growth hormone release
in waking.
And these are things that are very actionable.
One of the things that can have a dramatic effect
on levels of growth hormone release in waking,
as well as in sleep the following night is exercise.
But the key is the type of exercise and the duration. Now, there's a logic to this.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of studies, measuring growth hormone, both during or sometimes after exercise or the following night.
And the conclusion that one takes away from all of these is that exercise has to be of
particular duration and intensity in order to get growth hormone release.
So first I'm just going to tell you what I found to be the maximum amount of growth hormone
release as it relates to a particular form of exercise.
The particular form of exercise is either weight training or it can be endurance training,
but the endurance training and the weight training
actually have to be limited to about 60 minutes,
not much longer.
Now this is important because it's been shown
over and over again that if one exercise is too long
with weights or endurance exercise,
that cortisol levels go high enough
that it starts to inhibit
the testosterone and even the estrogen pathways. This is why I believe people who overexercise
or exercise a lot can lose their menstrual cycles. They stop menstruating. It's why you get
suppression in testosterone if people train too long and too hard. The cutoff has always been,
you know, 60 to 75 minutes of the hard work part. It's
going to vary a lot from person to person. But in terms of growth hormone, the conditions
that seem to lead to the greatest growth hormone release are one, get warm. This is interesting,
we're going to talk about temperature. So a proper warm up seems to accelerate the release of growth hormone once the hard work phase starts.
So, 10 minutes of warm-up or so was the number that I extracted from all these studies.
There's a beautiful review on this, by the way. Growth hormone responses of varying, excuse me.
Growth hormone, arginine and exercise. We'll talk about arginine in a few minutes. That's by Cannelli, K-A-N-A-L-E-Y.
It was published in current opinion
in clinical nutrition and metabolic clear.
The current opinion journals are generally
of pretty high quality in terms of the reviews,
just because they tend to be pretty recent.
And then the references there in are also quite good.
So what does this mean?
This means warm up.
And when you say warm up, it doesn't mean just warm up the limbs and tissues that you're
going to use so you don't get injured, actually warm the body.
So there was actually some discussion about whether or not in cold winter months people should
wear like a stocking cap, bringing the conditions, making the room warm.
So getting the body warm as a warm up
seems to be important because temperature of the body
seems to be an important condition
or prerequisite for certain patterns of exercise
to maximize growth hormone release.
So it's really interesting to me,
I have an obsession with how body temperature
light exercise and food interact.
We're going right there with the fact that if you get warm,
you bring up the body temperature degree or two,
or maybe three, and then start exercise,
it does appear that high intensity exercise,
but not again, as in discussed in a previous episode,
not exercise that brings muscles to failure, but close to it.
So if it's weight-bearing exercise, it would be getting close to that final repetitions
where you can't complete them, but not pushing through those or even going to failure,
but getting close leads to anywhere from 300 to 500 percent increases in rest and growth
hormone levels.
And 300 to 500 percent increases in growth hormone
the following night when you go to sleep, which is incredible.
Now, I want to dissect this properly.
So, one of the other conditions that seemed to be important, again, was to have relatively
low blood glucose.
So, it looks looking a lot like the conditions you need for sleep in order to get maximum
growth hormone release in sleep.
So not having blood glucose too high or too low.
That's a discussion unto itself.
You want to have sufficient energy to do the exercise, but getting warm, not having blood
glucose too high or too low, so probably not eating too close to exercise or not ingesting
a lot of sugars during the exercise.
That was supported by the fact that ingestion of a sports drink that contains caloric sugar
immediately flatlined the growth hormone levels.
So really interesting relationship between insulin glucose and growth hormone.
So then doing the training for anywhere from 60 to 75 minutes to maximize growth hormone
release.
And then the other interesting thing was that even after the exercise, taking body temperature
back down to normal levels relatively quickly seemed to be associated with these big spikes
in growth hormone.
Otherwise what would happen is get these big spikes in growth hormone, but if the exercise
went too long or if body temperature remained too high for too long, then you didn't get the second increase in growth hormone the following night.
Okay, so I hope I made that abundantly clear.
Warm up well, get body temperature up, exercise 60 to 75 minutes.
Don't go to absolute failure if your interest is in growth hormone,
release both during the exercise and later that night.
And if you can bring body temperature back down to normal levels by cooling off maybe cool
shower, or maybe ice pack, or something, or maybe just turning off the heat in the room
or going outside, whatever it is, then you increase the probability that you're going
to increase growth hormone the following night as well.
And again, these are big increases, 300 to 500 percent.
It's almost like you're getting a second sleep during the day.
But if the exercise is too hard, if body temperature stays too high for too long,
you disrupt the whole process and you don't get the effect of increased growth hormone.
Growth hormone is really powerful, but it doesn't work alone. In fact, a lot of the effects of
growth hormone are mediated by its effects on the liver. So growth hormone is released,
goes to the liver, and then the liver releases something
called IGF-1, insulin growth factor-1.
Insulin growth factor-1 was popular in the neuroscience community as an area of focus
because of its ability to trigger improvements in memory and learning after exercise.
And indeed, exercise triggers both the release of growth hormone and IGF1.
IGF1 seems responsible for a lot of the effects of improved memory.
Some people report that that is due to increased number of neurons or neurogenesis, birth of new neurons.
It's pretty clear that in humans, that's not what's happening. Yes, in animals, not in humans.
IGF1 nonetheless has positive effects on memory and cognition, and a great way to trigger
IGF1 release and growth hormone release is through exercise.
Now the interesting thing and the reason I'm bringing up IGF1 here is that certain patterns
of exercise, actually duration of exercise, have different effects on IGF1 and growth hormone
depending on whether or not the exercise is done by men
or women.
There's what we call a sex-dependent effect.
And the sex-dependent effect is as follows.
In this particular study and several others, what they did is they had people exercise.
They measured growth hormone and IGF1 levels from the blood before, during, and after exercise.
And they could see when the greatest increases occurred.
This was standard sorts of resistance exercise.
So some squats, there was a sprint-like activity.
It doesn't really matter what the specific exercises were.
None of them were to failure.
These were in kind of the 10 repetition or less range success.
So kind of standard weight training stuff
that anyone might do.
But what was interesting is that women were able to access
the biggest peak in growth hormone in IGF1
early in the exercise, so in the first 30 minutes.
So what this means is even if you just have 30 minutes, at least for women,
there's going to be a big increase in growth hormone and IGF 1 in the first 30 minutes.
For men, the biggest increase occurred later in the exercise, which was 60 minutes or
so total. And so the sex-dependent effects are interesting. They point to the fact that
things like cortisol, testosterone, and estrogen, which of course,
vary in different levels and men and women, are going to impact the release of things like
IGF1 and growth hormone.
And yes, they did control for all sorts of things like diet and they controlled for weight
and prior experience.
It's actually a quite nice study.
If you'd like to check it out, it's by Pierce et al.
A growth hormone insulin,
glow factor one molecular weight.
Ize of form response to resistance exercise are sex dependent
in frontiers in endocrinology,
fine journal in 2020, so it's quite recent.
So what does this mean?
This means if you're exercising and you want growth hormone
release, warm up,
do the type of exercise we've been discussing. Women in the first 30 minutes is when you're exercising and you want growth hormone release warm up, do the type of exercise we've been discussing.
Women in the first 30 minutes is when you're going to get the maximum benefit in terms
of growth hormone and IGF1.
Men, you have to keep going for the entire 60 minutes, so don't tap out early if you're
interested in getting the growth hormone and IGF1 release.
And the same conditions apply about then cooling down and not making the exercise last
so long that you don't get the increasing growth hormone the following night. My experience thus far
in doing this podcast is that people fall into one of two categories. There are the just tell me
what to take people the people that are really eager to try supplements and maybe even prescription
compounds. And then there are people who are a little bit more shy about supplementation.
They are more focused on what they can do with diet and behaviors and things of that sort.
I don't have a bias either way. I try and offer tools that are supported by the scientific literature.
And I always point to safety margins.
There are supplements that can increase growth hormone to a considerable degree, and know
these aren't growth hormone itself, although that, of course, will increase growth hormone
to a considerable degree.
We will talk about prescription drugs at the end, not just growth hormone, but some other
things that are quite prominently in use right now, in particular in the entertainment
industry.
They're pretty interesting compounds. But first, that's pretty interesting compounds.
But first, let's talk about supplements.
So, this has been known about for some time,
but arginine, the amino acid arginine,
as well as the amino acid ornithine,
can increase growth hormone levels substantially.
Now, arginine has a number of effects.
You can get it from food, you can get it from supplements.
Some people take it in pill form or capsule form, some people will actually take it by IV,
but intravenously.
The levels and the amounts of arginine required to get big growth hormone release increases
is pretty substantial.
Some people will take arginine before bedtime, some people will take it before exercise.
The prerequisite again is low blood glucose.
Blood glucose is high, it's going to quash the effect.
The amounts of arginine that people take are anywhere from three grams to 10 grams or
sometimes even more.
Although this is definitely a case of more is not better.
There is a threshold at which growth hormone release is actually blunted by taking more
than nine grams of arginine.
Now nine grams of arginine orally is a lot of pills.
It's at minimum nine pills and it can cause some GI disturbance.
Right? People can feel nauseous. Some people will throw it up. Some people get
some constipation or diarrhea, etc. or just stomach aches. I'm certainly not
suggesting people do this. They're not that they take arginine, but that's the
reason why most of the studies that looked at the role of Arginine on growth hormone levels
did it by IV intravenous infusion. So what's interesting, however, is that whether or not
it's by mouth or by vein, taking Arginine can dramatically increase growth hormone release. And the levels or the amount of increase raised was anywhere from 100
on the low end, but anywhere from basically from 400 to 600 percent above baseline. So these
are huge increases in growth hormone. Now I've never tried Arginine. Arginine is out there for a
number of different purposes. One of them is to increase growth hormone and some of the supplements out there
To increase growth hormone include arginine and ornithine
Arginine does have the effect of
dilating
arterials and
It basically increases blood supply
Argin the arginine pathways involved in vasodilation. It's actually the pathway that's downstream of a lot of
drugs that are used to treat things like erectile dysfunction. And anytime people have problems
with peripheral blood flow of any kind, they focus on compounds that will either disrupt
the enzymes or will adjust the levels of amino acids to get more vasodilation.
So taking arginine for the purpose of increasing growth hormone will also have the effect of
dilating blood vessels.
And for people who will be, excuse me, with heart conditions that actually can be a serious
issue.
Now here is something really important and interesting to note, which is that increasing arginine levels with the specific goal of increasing growth
hormone release can actually short circuit the effects of exercise on growth hormone.
Several studies I looked at looked at the interaction of taking arginine and the exercise
or just the arginine or just the exercise alone.
And so you don't, unfortunately, if growth hormone increases your goal, you don't unfortunately
get to increase growth hormone 800% by taking arginine and exercising.
It always seems to be clamped at about 300 to 500% increases, still large increases.
So I make that point for several reasons.
First of all, be aware that arginine has these other effects on vasodilation.
Take those seriously if you have a heart condition or take them seriously in any case.
Second of all, you can supplement with Arginine, not exercise and get these big increases in growth
hormone by taking them before sleep. But if you're taking the Arginine before exercise,
you are going to short-circuit or clamp the effects of exercise on growth hormone.
Okay, so it's something that one could use,
but it doesn't have a synergistic effect with exercise,
the two more or less cancel each other out.
Not to zero, but you end up with the same effect you would had you done one or the other.
So hopefully that's clear.
The other thing is, if one's goal is really to increase
arginine in the blood for whatever reason, arginine may not actually be the best way to do that.
Because of the way it's metabolized in the gut, it doesn't have access or get access to the
tissues that you're most interested in in terms of increasing growth hormone or vasodilation
for that matter.
In that case, there's something else called elcitraline, which has powerful effects on
vasodilation, powerful effects on potentially on growth hormone levels via the arginine pathway.
But basically, elcitraline acts as sort of a donor, or it's kind of a biological prerequisite for
arginine and can lead to even bigger arginine increases than you would get if you took arginine
itself.
And so, el citrulline is out there.
Keep in mind that anything that dilates the blood vessels will lower blood pressure.
So el citrulline, yes, will lead to increased blood flow for whatever purpose you want
to use it for, whether or not that's pumps in the gym or whatever
It also can lead to big increases in arginine and growth hormone, but it will lower blood pressure
So be aware of that but and understand that the biology isn't so straightforward
El citralline may actually be the better way to get arginine increases than arginine itself and
better way to get arginine increases than arginine itself. And ornithine can also increase growth hormone, although that's also through an indirect pathway.
And nowadays there isn't a lot of focus on ornithine as a way to increase growth hormone.
That was kind of all the rage in the 90s, not so much anymore.
Nowadays the people who are really in the know for this stuff tend to focus on L-siturline. And if you're interested in L-siturline or Arginine,
I highly recommend you go to our old friend,
goodfriendsexammon.com,
because there you can put it into the list,
you can just put search and it's totally free.
And it will tell you that blood pressure
will be slightly decreased,
power output in the gym will increase.
There's very strong effects on blood glucose, fatigue is reduced notably, big increases
in nitroxide.
That's also related to the increase in vasodilation, plasma arginine, very high, excuse me, notable
effects, very high support for studies, which allow people more training volume, aerobic
exercise, arterial stiffness
is brought down.
There's a huge list of things,
increase in growth hormone.
So two studies showing this was done double blind.
Great, you always want to see double blind placebo controlled.
This was only done in males, not in females.
Unfortunately, just have data from males,
but increases in growth hormone.
It's a small but a real significant effect.
And again, from quality studies.
So there's a huge number of effects there.
And some of the other kind of more interesting ones
about L-siturline that you might not have thought about
are things like muscle oxygenation, as we scroll down, decreases in C in C reactive protein. So a lot of
the same things that you might affect from expect excuse me from the same
sorts of compounds we saw before. The takeaway here is if you want to increase
growth hormone think about the arginine pathway but arginine itself might not be
the best direct route to get there. Else citrally might be a better option but
please do consider and take very seriously
the effects on blood pressure.
So we've been talking about big effects
from supplementation or exercise on growth hormone,
this extremely powerful hormone.
And one thing to note is that the profile
of growth hormone as we age changes,
I mentioned that earlier, but it's important to understand
how it changes.
One thing that's particularly interesting to me
as somebody who's in his 40s is that it's actually
between ages 30 and 40 that the amount of growth hormone
that you release each night is reduced by two to threefold.
That's really incredible.
We hear so much about testosterone levels going down
as we age or estrogen levels going down,
but if you recall from the testosterone
and estrogen episode,
talked about the fact that if you really look at the data,
just for instance, on testosterone,
there are men in their 90s,
and they are not rare, it turns out,
that are making as much testosterone and DHT dihydrotestosterone
as they were in their 20s.
Okay, so we hear so much nowadays about how testosterone levels are dropping, sperm levels
are dropping, et cetera, and I don't dispute that.
I talked about that in that episode, but it's clear that testosterone levels vary tremendously
from person to person, and just getting older does not necessarily mean that testosterone levels very tremendously from person to person and just getting older
does not necessarily mean that testosterone levels are dropping.
Growth hormone levels, it seems, are dropping when people are in their 30s and 40s and they're
dropping substantially and that seems to be the case across the board.
You're just not going to find people in their 40s, 50s and 60s that are making as much growth
hormone as they were in their teens and 20s. And as somebody who, I feel really good,
but as somebody who definitely noticed that
as I got into my 40s that even if I slept
the same amount, I wasn't feeling quite as,
I would say able to recover from exercise or wound healing,
even with the same amount of sleep
and I was trying to optimize a great number of things.
This business of growth hormone became a particular interest to me and since the ways to manipulate
growth hormone in men and in women are so straightforward and since everybody goes through
this age-related decline very dramatically, it seems to me that the things that we're
supposed to be doing anyway like exercising, like trying not to eat too close to bedtime,
trying to optimize sleep.
All of these are wonderful tools that we should be pursuing
and perhaps using, and they can actually offset
the two to three fold decrease, right?
If we're talking about a two to three fold decrease
for people there in the 30s and 40s,
and then we're talking about increases from exercise
or from maybe from supplementation,
but certainly from exercise of 300 to 500%.
Well, then all of a sudden, we're in a position
to actually offset the age-related decline
in growth hormone completely just through behaviors.
And I think that's quite interesting and quite powerful.
Now I'd like to discuss a way that anyone can increase
their levels of growth hormone dramatically.
And when I say dramatically, I mean dramatically.
I'll get to the numbers in a couple minutes.
But we have to remember how growth hormone is released in the first place.
Remember, it all starts in the brain in the hypothalamus.
The hypothalamus is a brain area that controls things like sexual behavior, temperature regulation,
circadian behavior, meaning when you want to be awake and when you want to be asleep, aggression, all of that.
There are other brain areas involved too, but it has a rich collection of different neurons involved in all these very basic functions.
Now, as we talked about the releasing hormones, the growth hormone releasing hormone comes from neurons in the hypothalamus.
Those then communicate with the pituitary and the pituitary releases growth hormone and then the growth hormone acts on all these different tissues, muscle, liver, cartilage, etc.
Body fat makes them use energy. That's why you lose body fat when growth hormone levels are high. It makes you grow muscle, strengthens bones, etc.
Now, one of the things that has a profound effect on growth hormone levels, growth hormone
release is temperature. Now, the data on this are very strong, and the data come from both
animal studies and human studies.
So there are a number of studies that have explored how making animals cold or hot can increase
growth hormone.
And if you're dressing which direction this is going to go, you can probably imagine that
making animals or people warmer is the way to go if you want to increase growth hormone.
Now anytime you're going to increase temperature of yourself, or anyone else, or an animal,
it is risky.
I want to be really clear about this.
Not everyone should engage in the behaviors I'm about to describe.
But, and I should just say, the reason it's risky is it doesn't take much of a temperature increase in the brain to cook the brain, to cook neurons.
And after that point, neurons can't come back.
And people can die from hypothermia.
We have a much greater range in terms of cold.
You can also die of hypothermia.
You can freeze to death.
But you have a much greater range of getting cold than you do warming up the brain. However, there are really strong data pointing to the fact that sauna, aka deliberate hyperthermia,
not too high, however, that sauna can increase the release of growth hormone and other hormones.
And what's so dramatic about this literature is the size of the effects that are reported.
So first of all, let's talk about these
temperature increases. And yes, I will refer to things that people can do even if
you don't own a sauna, because I realize not everybody has a sauna in their
backyard or has access to a sauna. So first of all, recall our study about
exercise where warming up a few degrees before the exercise led to bigger and quicker
increases in growth hormone during the exercise bout itself.
So that already point in the direction that temperature was important.
Now the degrees, no pun intended, that we're talking about increasing body temperature
is by entering sonas that are somewhere between a hundred and seventy six degrees Fahrenheit
So that's eighty degrees Celsius
um and all the way up to
Like 210 215 degrees Fahrenheit. I personally know people that go even higher than that
But they've trained themselves to deal with with very high heats and again high heat is dangerous
You must clear this with your doctor.
Now, what happens in high heat?
Couple of things happen in high heat.
First of all, you start getting bigger stroke volume
of the heart, kind of like an exercise.
Once you get well-trained and endurance activity,
your stroke volume, the amount of blood
that your heart can pump each time gets larger.
You dilate the blood vessels, right?
There are a lot of things that happen also.
You're sweating, your body's trying to unload heat, dilational blood vessels, arginine,
increases in heat.
We're starting to see and hear a common theme, but it appears that getting into, I'm not
saying getting the body up to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, I want to be very clear, not talking
about getting the body up to 100 degrees Celsius. That would be terrible. You would die. But entering environments where it's very hot for short periods of time,
anywhere from 20 minutes to 30 minutes, where the temperature is 80 degrees Celsius to 100
degrees Celsius or 175 degrees Fahrenheit, more or less to about 210 degrees Fahrenheit, more or less, to about 210 degrees Fahrenheit, more or less,
has been shown to increase growth hormone release 16-fold.
That's right, 16-fold. That's 1,600 percent. Now, there are also effects on other hormones,
prolactin, cortisol, etc. So the pattern that was described in this study, and there have been many studies now,
Endocrine effects of repeat a sauna,
where we're done in 17 humans,
this was from doing this repeatedly,
so it wasn't the first time they did this,
they had to do this three days in a row,
and the pattern was to get into the sauna for 20 minutes
followed by a 30 minute cooling period.
Remember, you don't wanna spend long periods of time
at high heat, you can cook your brain and other tissues.
Be very careful as you approach this if you decide to.
But 30 minutes, excuse me, 20 minutes sauna,
followed by 30 minutes of cooling,
followed by 20 minutes sauna again,
led to a five-fold increase in growth hormone.
And then by doing that day after day after day,
on the third day, you would see these huge increases
of like 16-fold, up to 16-fold.
And there are now many studies like this.
This was described a few years ago.
But since then, there have been a number of other studies
that have pointed in the direction of deliberate hyperthermia,
but not too hot that you kill yourself
in order to increase growth hormone.
And I know I keep highlighting the dangers there,
but again, anytime you're going to mess with heat,
you have to be cautious, you have to be careful.
So standard sauna can be useful.
If you don't have access to a sauna,
one way that people do this, we have to look to our friends the wrestlers, right?
They wear plastics, which are basically body suits that are fairly inexpensive that you can buy on
any online purchase platform, I should say.
Some people in the old days before they had these plastics things so readily available.
I actually knew people that would wrap themselves in garbage bags and then
throw on sweats and a hoodie and then go out for a jog. Again, you have to be
really careful, especially on a hot day overheating, can equate to death, but that's
another way to heat up. You don't actually need a sauna. I've known people who
will do this in hotel rooms while they're traveling. They'll turn on the heat, you know, make a hot bath.
They won't actually get in the bath, but they'll fill the room with steam and heat, and they'll put on a hoodie and some sweatshirt,
sweatpants, and they'll sit there with wool socks on, and they'll get warm for 20 minutes.
Then they'll take a cool shower, and then they'll do it again.
I guess when the hotel's playing the water bill, you don't worry about it too much.
Some people, of course course own saunas.
There are a lot of ways to do that.
I have friends who were in the military
who made saunas out of cars while they were overseas,
all sorts of things.
You do have to be careful.
I know I've said it many, many times.
I just don't want anyone to hurt themselves.
But these increases in growth hormone are tremendous
and what they probably stem from
are increased activity of neurons within the hypothalamus
that stimulate growth hormone release from the pituitary.
And that's probably because the growth hormone releasing
hormone neurons in the hypothalamus
sit very closely and may even be intermixed
with some of the neurons in the hypothalamus
that regulate heat and body temperature.
Remember, metabolism is in part a heat.
It's like a furnace of how much energy
you're consuming and using for building or for energy usage purposes. So, sauna can be very,
very interesting and again it's 20 minutes, 30 minute cooling, 20 minutes again, proceed with
extreme caution. But nonetheless, these are pretty extreme effects in terms of their abilities to increase growth hormone levels.
Along the lines of temperature and hormones, I just want to mention a very recent study just came out.
March, April 2021, Endocrine effects of repeated hot thermal stress and cold water immersion in young adult men.
Unfortunately, it was just in men, they didn't look at women, but nonetheless nonetheless I think the data are relevant to everybody as a general theme. This is Pod Strauski at all. I will put a link to the study
in the caption and they looked at testosterone, prolactin, cortisol, etc. and what they found
was that the sauna does indeed lead to a significant decrease in cortisol, a stress hormone, a hormone
that you want to be released early in the day when you wake up, but sauna definitely led
to a significant decrease in cortisol, but did not change testosterone, DHA, or prolact
in levels.
So that's interesting.
And it turns out that the cold did affect some of these hormones, but the results there were a little bit more
mixed.
So the takeaway here is that heat seems to have positive effects on growth hormone, big
effects.
It seems to have positive effects on reducing cortisol levels, and it does not seem to have
effects on things like testosterone, DHA, or prolactin directly.
You can imagine that a shift in any hormone is gonna alter the levels of other hormones down the lines
or indirect effects, but in terms of direct effects,
just during or immediately after the sonobath,
there were no effects.
So we've talked about diet, supplementation,
behavioral tools, and of course,
we talked about the underlying biology and logic.
And hopefully you heard the safety precautions for all of those.
Now, I'd like to just briefly talk about the prescription side of all this.
There are, as we know, many people taking growth hormone because it's been prescribed to them by a doctor.
Presumably, there are people taking growth hormone, even though it has not been prescribed by a doctor, which is none of my business.
But the point here is that most all of the hormones that we make have been synthesized. So there are
versions of them in little bottles or little ampules that people can inject. Here are a couple of
important things to consider if you're going to go that route.
First of all, talk to a physician.
They actually are only legally available through a physician.
Second of all, anytime you're injecting something, you're going to shut down your own production.
That's the way that the hormone system works.
If you take thyroid hormone, you won't make thyroid hormone, at least in the long run.
If you take testosterone
you will shut down your own production of testosterone. If you take estrogen the system's
a little more resilient but eventually you will shut down your production of estrogen
and the same is true for growth hormone. So a decision to go that route of taking something
is often not always a decision to do it forever. However, if you're
willing to sustain a period of being without a given hormone, some people can do things and then take
a stop taking them and then wait out the period in which they're not making testosterone estrogen
or growth hormone and then it will come back sometimes and sometimes it won't.
There's a kind of new area that's developing now
that I think deserves our attention,
not because I'm encouraging it, but because it is happening.
And in keeping with the science,
and in keeping with trying to keep things modern,
it's worth us discussing.
And those are peptides.
So these days, you hear a lot about peptides.
I'd like to clarify a little bit about what peptides are.
Peptides is a really huge category of biological compounds.
Peptides are just strings of amino acids, right?
So, we've talked about altiracine, arginine, orinithine.
Those are amino acids.
Those are individual amino acids.
And those are put together into little small peptides, or they're what are called polypeptides, which are just longer
peptides.
Turns out that for any substance like growth hormone or growth hormone or releasing
hormone, it's made up of different amino acids and different sequences, just like your
genes are made up of A's and G's and C's and T's, nucleotides and different sequences.
It's like a recipe. Pep tides tend to be short sequences of amino acids that resemble a hormone enough, or
resemble some other peptide enough that it can lead to the similar or same effects when
you inject them.
So for example, we make growth hormone releasing hormone from our brain, which stimulates growth
hormone from the pituitary.
You're probably getting tired of me here saying that by now.
But people now will take things like Cermorolin, S-E-R-M-O-R-E-L-I-N, Cermorolin, which is
not the entire peptide sequence of growth hormone releasing hormone, but it's a subset of those.
And when people inject it before they go to sleep at night, it's typically how it's
done on an empty stomach, then that stimulates the release of growth hormone from the pituitary.
So this is not taking growth hormone.
This is taking the stimulating hormone or what's often called a secretive gog or a mimic.
All right.
It causes a secretion of the hormone that one wants.
People do this for thyroid hormone too.
Some people are doing this by prescription
with a real medical need.
Other people are doing it for just longevity reasons,
which kind of falls into that gray zone
of they wouldn't die without it,
but they want to enhance their life.
And so they're doing that because they believe
it's the right thing for them.
Prescription.
Sermorland is prescription.
Do they work?
Yes. Do they shut down
your natural production of growth hormone, releasing hormone? Well, there the
answer is yes, but some of these peptides actually have the effect of changing
gene expression. Remember way back to the beginning when I was talking about
hormones, they can actually change gene expression and they can actually set
pathways in motion for continued production of a hormone even if you stop taking the compound.
Now that can be good or that can be bad because as you recall growth hormone in big increases
in growth hormone that are short lived like sauna or I should say exercise or arginine
or sauna it seems like has these huge effects.
Or early nights, first phase of sleep early in the night,
these sorts of things. Those are transient,
but when one is injecting over and over a constant level,
you can put into action gene expression programs
that can be long lived.
And let's say you have a particular tumor in the body,
tumors will grow when they see growth hormone, even if that tumor is unhealthy for you, right? You've got growth of tissues
all over the body. So again, I'm not saying whether or not people should do these things
or not doing them. One thing I do know is that they are in very prominent use in the movie
industry, people who want to peel off body fat quickly, they do increase recovery time,
they increase healing rates, people are also injecting things like gastric peptides.
They're actually stomach peptides
that we talked about in the previous episode.
Things related to the growing pathway
and other things from the liver
that can improve the rate of tissue and wound healing.
You can bet that in the upcoming Olympics,
a lot of people are using peptides and compounds
and I'm not pointing fingers at anyone in particular.
It's just this is separate from hormone augmentation
of like injecting GH or injecting testosterone.
People are now working further up the pathways.
Other names of some of the peptides are things like
hypermoral and testimonial.
Some of these have clinical uses.
Others have just been made as compounds for people
in the kind of longevity field or the self augmentation field if you will.
So again, not promoting their use, but they're definitely out there.
And so now if you hear about them or someone's talking to you about them,
now hopefully you have a better understanding about their underlying biology
and you can think rationally about whether or not they are the right decision for you.
Okay, once again, covered an enormous amount of material.
Hopefully now you understand thyroid hormone and what it does and a little bit about its
mechanism or maybe a lot.
And growth hormone and what it does and how both of them take care of our metabolism.
They dictate how many nutrients we can eat and make use of.
They can pull from body fat stores, repair muscle, repair cartilage. They really are incredible compounds. And they're actionable.
They're things that we can do, like getting that early phase of sleep, perhaps supplementing
with arginine, maybe not, hopefully getting adequate exercise, warming up properly, not
making the exercise too long or too intense will help. Maybe sauna or things like it,
deliberate, safe, hyperthermia, the emphasis on safe might be things that are of use.
Regardless, even if you're not interested in the thyroid or the growth hormone pathways,
this brings to a close our month on hormones. Now, hopefully you understand not just thyroid and growth hormone, but the logic that underlies the thyroid hormone, growth hormone,
estrogen, testosterone. Why we eat, why we stop eating, colicist to kining,
grilling. If these names don't mean anything to you, then perhaps go back and listen to those
episodes, but regardless, I hope that you come away from this with a deeper understanding about
these hormones, which are so powerful and controlling the way our brain functions and the interplay between the brain and hormones because it is really a bidirectional conversation.
The brain is telling the body what hormones to make.
The hormones are influencing all the tissues of the body but also telling the brain whether
to eat more or grow more or think more, etc.
So I really appreciate your time and attention.
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