Mark Bell's Power Project - Enhance Muscle Gains And Speed Up Weight Loss With Sunlight - Dr. Alexis Cowan || MBPP Ep. 1114

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

In Episode 1114, Dr. Alexis Cowan, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how sun exposure can aid in muscle gain, weight loss and TONS of other amazing health benefits.   Follow Alexis on IG: https://www.instagram.com/dralexisjazmyn/   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   🥜 Protect Your Nuts With Organic Underwear 🥜 ➢https://nadsunder.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 15% off your order!   🍆  Natural Sexual Performance Booster 🍆 ➢https://usejoymode.com/discount/POWERPROJECT Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎 ➢https://emr-tek.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶 ➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Become a Stronger Human - https://thestrongerhuman.store ➢ UNTAPPED Program - https://shor.by/JoinUNTAPPED ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Podcast Courses and Free Guides: https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz/ ➢ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

How can we utilize some of this information to get Jack and Tan? Have you seen anything like in terms of people being able to gain a little bit more muscle mass quicker from interactions with the sun, blocking out blue light? Have people been able to lose body fat easier? Just by being in the right light environment with sufficient near infrared light in particular, we're already supporting energy production at the level of the tissues. In essence, what your body is saying is you need to eat less because you're getting free energy already, like Jimbrose, let's say. We'll take nitric oxide boosters. That's like a thing that people do.

Not realizing that a primary stimulus of nitric oxide production in the body is UVA light. Some people might be thinking, well, I'm already taking 30,000, 40,000 IU of vitamin D a day. But what are the different aspects of taking vitamin D that people need to think about? Vitamin D supplementation trial that showed that we didn't actually get any clinical benefits. So what that is telling me is that if you're supplementing with vitamin D,

you're not going to get those benefits. If you guys have been enjoying the content we've been bringing here on The Power Project, consider leaving us a review on Spotify and Apple. We've had podcasts with people from Functional Patterns to Ben Patrick to Jack Cruz who roasted us on air but we did that for you to bring you some of the best information in fitness we're learning along with you and leaving a review with how you dig the podcast is really going to be something that helps the podcast move forward so if you can leave us a review there and enjoy the rest of the show. Let's maybe

start off talking about that because I think people sometimes are so fearful of the sun. What level does a UV index need to get to for people that are really fair skinned, for them to sort of maybe have some concern over? Well, this is highly dependent. I mean, I know you had Jack Cruz on. If you have that solar calis built where you've kind of gotten that graded sun exposure over time and built up your melanin, you can tolerate way more intense sun. I have friends who are Fitzpatrick 1, very fair, who built up their solar callus, can go to the Dominican Republic and not get burned.

And Jack also lives in El Salvador, of course. He's also Fitzpatrick 1 and he doesn't burn. He looks very tan. He looks tanner than I do. And so depending on how diligently somebody is building up that melanin in their skin, they can tolerate a very high UV index and a lot of sunlight. People who have darker skin naturally, they need more higher UV index sun in order to harness the photonic energy of that sun and actually reap the benefits from it.

I'm sure we'll get into that. Vitamin D status is something a lot of people think about with regards to UV light. The more melanin you have in your skin, that melanin is a sponge for light in general for all of the electromagnetic spectrum. If you have more melanin in your skin, more of that UV light is going to be sponged up by that melanin. There's going to be less available to synthesize things like vitamin D and pro-opio melanocortin or palm C, which I'm sure we're also going to get into. Basically basically, the shorter it is, the more melanin you have in your skin,

the more sun you need in order to be healthy. Can I ask you this just for our pale listeners? Because I actually, I watched the podcast of yours and I have a friend who's very pale who has had some cancer issues in the past, right? A lot of people are scared of going out into the sun because of like, their parents have told them be careful out in the sun. They're used to wearing all the sunscreen, they're used to their health professionals telling them that, hey, going in the sun too much isn't good for you. What is the process of slowly increasing your sun exposure so you know you're staying safe and responsible.

Yeah, I mean, so if we think about the literature, I'm getting a little bit of an echo. I don't know where that's from though, but it sounds okay right now. If we look at the literature around skin cancers, in particular melanoma, which is the most lethal of the skin cancers, it's actually really interesting and nobody talks about this in the mainstream narrative, but chronic regular daily sun exposure is associated with lower incidence of melanoma severity, and also just total incidence. If you're getting sun every day and you're again, not going out and blasting yourself, because we think about and contrast that with intermittent sun exposure, which would be

like you work an office job and then you go on vacation to the tropics and blast yourself for a few days and get fried, that's intermittent sun exposure. That's associated with melanoma incidence and severity. Regular daily chronic sun exposure is not. It actually has an inverse association with melanoma incidence and severity, meaning that you're protected against melanoma if you're getting regular sun exposure. That's also kind of accentuated by the fact that vitamin D status is a strong predictor of melanoma incidence and severity as well, where people who are deficient in vitamin D have more aggressive melanomas and they're more likely to get melanoma.

And so when it comes to kind of sussing that out, especially somebody with fairer skin, especially if they live at lower latitudes, there's a lot that we can do to prevent burn risk and also maximize the benefits of sun exposure. So one of the most important things in this realm is the circadian biology. So the circadian rhythm being these 24-hour cycles within the body, the skin has clocks in it in the same way that like our brain does and that master clock in the brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus or the SCN, which is set by the blue light in our environment. We're supposed to be getting that from the sun. Midday sun is about 25% blue light, about 50% red and infrared light. That'll become more important why that's important in a little bit.

But for getting that blue light from the sun, we're telling our bodies and our brains that it's middle of the day and that allows our certain processes, let's say, to be engaged, which would include things like digestion, let's say, to be engaged, which would include things like digestion, cognition, movement, but also things like melanin production in response to the sun. We know that people who have disrupted circadian rhythms are more likely to burn in response to UV light. That should make perfect sense because if your body thinks it's daytime at inappropriate

times of day, like in the evening, for example, then those clocks within the skin are becoming dysregulated because they can't actually tell what time of day it is. If you have a healthy circadian rhythm and you're only getting that blue light during the day, ideally from sun exposure and getting dark darkness at night and blocking blue light at night, then your skin is able to get into a rhythm that's in sync, it's synchronized with the rest of the cells in the body. And now when you go out in the sun middle of the day, your skin can actually mount a melanation response. It can make new melanin more easily than somebody who blasts themselves with artificial light

at night that's highly enriched in blue light. Blue light just by itself as is in the artificial form from our device screens, our LED bulbs, our fluorescent bulbs already has an impact even independent of the circadian rhythm on melanin production as well because this blue light actually impairs mitochondrial function in the skin, the eyes, and proximal brain regions. Because blue light is short wavelength, it can't penetrate too deeply, so it's not necessarily directly harming mitochondria deeper in our bodies, but in the surfaces of our body that are directly exposed to that blue light, they do become impaired mitochondrally speaking.

Because mitochondria are required to make new melanin, that is setting you up to also be more likely to burn in response to the sun. Diet also plays an important role and I'm sure you guys have talked about in the podcast before, like omega-6 to omega-3 ratios, seed oils, like over-consuming omega-6s, how it can foment inflammation, especially in the absence of sufficient omega-3s. So this is actually a topic that I want to look at in my future light lab, but I think I've had just so many people, dozens and dozens of clients and students and people reaching out to me saying like, hey, I cleaned up my diet and I stopped burning.

That's like a story I just hear so often that like we just need to do the studies on it. It wouldn't really be that difficult at all. And we could very easily look at the actual cell membrane composition of skin before a dietary intervention, let's say processed food diet versus after and eating more whole foods, even more saturated fats and animal fats versus like processed seed oils, for example, because the skin turns over so quickly. It's the sacrificial layer that's meant to interface with the environment and it can basically slough off and it can renew and that means that the fats that you're consuming through your diet are directly impacting the fatty acid composition

of those cell membranes. So it's no surprise to me that your diet and the fats in your diet in particular would have an impact on your propensity to burn. In addition to that, one other important thing that a lot of people do that a lot of people also don't know about is that if you're blocking UV light into your eyes wearing sunglasses, prescription lenses, or UV blocking contacts, then you're actually missing a part of the response that will help you to make melanin in response to UV light. So I mentioned POMC earlier, we can just kind of dive into it a little bit now. POMC or Probiomelanocortin is this complex prohormone that's synthesized in response to UVB light in the skin and also in the brain via the eyes.

And so, POMC gets cleaved into 10 different hormonal products. Three of them are alpha, beta, and gamma MSH or melanocytes stimulating hormone. As the name implies, these hormones are responsible for triggering the production of new melanin by melanocytes. So as I just stated, if you're getting UVB light on your skin and your eyes in a coordinated response, you're going to synthesize way more palm seed than if you're, let's say, wearing sunscreen and just exposing your eyes or you're blocking UV light into your eyes and you're just exposing your skin. You want to expose both at the

same time in order to maximally stimulate new melanin synthesis in the melanocytes, both on your surface but also in deeper parts of your body like the substantia nigra in the brain which is defective in Parkinson's disease, also the locus cereleus is another part of the brain that's enriched in melanin. There's also melanocytes within the oral mucosa, the nasal mucosa, the inner ear. So melanin is all over and it serves really important roles and we can talk about the biology of melanin and its importance in a little bit. But suffice to say for now that if you're blocking UV light into your eyes, and again, I don't mean like stare at the sun, I just mean getting ambient light into your eyes, then you're not going

to mount a melanin response that would help to protect you from sun burning, especially if you're pale. So that's a mistake that a lot of people make is they'll wear sunglasses while they're sunning. And then on top of that, you know, they'll also wear sunscreen, which both of those are blocking that palm sea response, which is actually going to help you make that melanin to protect you. Not only protect you actually from UV light, but also I think one of the primary roles of melanin is to allow you to harness the photonic energy of the sun.

Because if we look at human photosynthesis, which there's papers on this in the literature, we can see that when sunlight strikes melanin, it causes melanin to split water molecules into four free electrons, molecular hydrogen and molecular oxygen, all of which are important for powering mitochondrial energy production. When you're eating food, you're really eating for protons and electrons. And so we have a lot of different ways, three different ways in particular, that we can get electrons from our environment. As I just mentioned, the one is directly through exposing the melanin in our skin to sunlight.

We also get free electrons from putting our bare feet on the earth via grounding and earthing. Only one third of that equation is really food. And so I really see melanin as this really crucial mechanism by which we can harness free energy from the sun without putting a single bite of food in our mouths. Yeah. One third of the equation being from food is super interesting. This show is about being jacked and tan. In fact, I wrote a book years ago called Jacked and Tan.

How can we utilize some of this information to get jacked and tan? Have you seen anything like in terms of people being able to maybe gain a little bit more muscle mass quicker from interactions with the sun, blocking out blue light? Have people been able to lose body fat easier? What are some things that you're seeing? Yeah, great question. So I talked about the MSHs.

Well, one of those, the alpha MSH is actually really important from a body composition standpoint. So when alpha MSH interacts with the hypothalamus in the brain, it results in a decrease in appetite and an increase in resting energy expenditure. Which if we just stop right there, like that would be a holy grail in the weight loss space. Everybody's looking for ways to make them less hungry and burn more calories at rest without even having to like pick up a weight, let's say. So the body has these natural homeostatic mechanisms in place, especially within the hypothalamus, which is this thermostat for the body, for body temperature, for appetite, for energy expenditure, et cetera.

We can really think about a healthy body is very able to sense the environment and then adapt accordingly. For example, like I mentioned, if you're getting UVB light, you're getting this alpha MSH is suppressing your appetite. Well, I also mentioned you can get free energy from sunlight via water splitting by melanin. So in essence, what your body is saying is you need to eat less because you're getting free energy already. You don't need to be as hungry. And so that kind of makes perfect sense if we think about that mechanistically with regards to putting

on muscle and let's say athletic performance in general, there are huge gains to be made from working out outside in the sun, bare feet on the earth. Number one, red and infrared light. I said midday sun is about 50% red and infrared light, sunrise, sunset over 80% red and infrared light. This long wavelength light is able to penetrate all the way through the body in the case of near infrared light and directly stimulate mitochondria to make new energy and metabolic water, so ATP and metabolic water, which keeps the tissues hydrated, which keeps them working well, which keeps them healthy, essentially. So, just by being in the right light environment with sufficient near-infrared light in particular,

we're already supporting energy production at the level of the tissues, including muscle and working muscle in the case of working out outside. In addition to that, we can consider the effects of UVA light as well. So UVA light is a primary stimulator of nitric oxide production in the body via the skin. So the caveat here is the more skin you have exposed, the more nitric oxide you make because it's made locally in the skin and then it diffuses into the bloodstream where it can have these vasodilatory effects which increases nutrient and oxygen delivery to tissues, which increases waste removal from tissues. For example, let's say lactate or acid buildup in the muscle during intense workouts and exercise. And we already know like people who are like Jim bros, let's say, will take

nitric oxide boosters. That's like a thing that people do. Not realizing that a primary stimulus of nitric oxide production in the body is UVA light. It's meant to be that because we as a species lived outside for the vast majority of our evolutionary history. It's only really in the last 150 years that we've moved indoors as creatures when the electric grid rolled out in the late 1800s. Prior to that, the primary sources of light in our environment were the sun, number one, and then firelight would probably be second. But fire is highly enriched in red and infrared light. Again, this light that bathes our tissues in energy and water that helps to

facilitate tissue metabolism. If you contrast that with modern humans, we're sitting inside behind glass windows that block 100% of UVB light, 30% of UVA light, and all of near-infrared light because these windows are seen as energy efficient. By energy efficient, I mean if we want to keep our indoor temperatures stable, we don't want heat coming in from the outside. Infrared light is also known as heat. So that heat is blocked so that we can maintain lower energy costs.

But the problem is energy efficiency in our technology and our devices screens and our light bulbs and our windows is creating an energy crisis in the human body because near-infrared light is an essential nutrient that our tissues require in order to function. If we think about the evolutionary past and the ancestral history of our species, we always were bathed in an abundance of near-infrared light no matter what season, any time of day that the sun is up, there is an abundance of near-infrared light interacting with our mitochondria. Even if you're sitting in the shade like I am right now, there's grass and there's trees around me. So those green plants reflect a ton of near-infrared light, which allows you to get access to that

light even if you're not sitting in direct sun. So when it comes to getting jacked and tan, I mean, the tan part is really a UVB story. Midday sun has the highest levels of UVB and UVA light. So if you're working out, let's say in the afternoon outside barefoot on the earth, you're getting red and infrared light to support mitochondrial function in the muscle. You're getting UVA light to stimulate blood flow to the muscle and the release of acid buildup in the muscle so you can get a better pump in. You get a better nutrient delivery to the tissues.

You also get pain relief. So three of the other products that we have from Palm C are alpha, beta, and gamma endorphins, which are the endogenous opioid molecules. These are the molecules that are very similar to the drugs that a lot of people gravitate towards and we see the opioid crisis in our country. I really, really see this direct relationship between gravitation towards opioid-like drugs and deficiency in sunlight because this UVB light allows our bodies to make its own drugs. We're literally supposed to be addicted to the sun, but in the absence of the sun, we

gravitate towards these substances to give us a quick hit. But in addition to that, so we get these pain-relieving effects from the opioid, the endorphins, and so that could also help you to get some extra reps in. If your pain tolerance is higher, now you can actually work a little bit harder if you're getting that workout outside. It also increases our baseline dopamine levels, these endorphins, which dopamine is extremely important

from a movement quality perspective. That's why, again, in Parkinson's disease, we see tremors. That's really due to the failure of the dopaminergic neurons in the brain and that's why we also see melanin is being degraded because melanin can be broken down to make dopamine. They're very tightly linked to each other. We're increasing baseline dopamine.

That's not only improving movement quality and we're getting these pain relieving effects, but we're also getting improved learning, memory and cognition and likely motor learning as well. I also want to do some studies on this in my future lab where we're basically are comparing the adaptive response to different workouts or different tasks when it comes to neuroplasticity and whether people can learn new motor patterns better if they're under natural light and my hypothesis is that they would. I want to quickly rewind.

We've been talking about sun and inherently we mentioned vitamin D quite a few times. And some people might be thinking, well, I'm already taking 30,000, 40,000 IU of vitamin D a day. I get my vitamin D levels checked. They're great. You know, so not that, not that it's bad, but what are the different aspects of taking vitamin D that people need to think about when it comes to getting it from the sun or even when you're in places that you don't have as much sun as like somewhere in California, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So this is a great question. I really like to think about vitamin D as a biomarker of your sun exposure habits. That becomes abundantly clear when we look at the more recent literature such as the vital study, which is a large scale vitamin D supplementation trial that showed that we didn't actually get any clinical benefits, meaningful clinical benefits from vitamin D supplementation despite the fact that vitamin D deficiency is associated with a whole host of diseases including neurodegeneration, multiple cancer types, diabetes, autoimmune diseases.

We didn't see any benefits on any of these outcomes. So what that is telling me is that if you're supplementing with vitamin D, you're not going to get those benefits. The benefit of your vitamin D status being adequate or optimal is that that means that you're getting enough sun, which means that you're stimulating all these other pathways. When you're in midday sun, you're not just making vitamin D like we talked about, but 12 plus, like a dozen other vitamin D-like molecules are made in the skin in response to UVB light.

So, that's just one part of the story. We're making way more molecules than just simply pre-vitamin D in the skin from 7-D hydrocholesterole in response to UVB light. But in addition to that, of course, we already talked about we're getting the benefits of red and infrared light. We're getting the benefits of UVA light. We're getting the palm seed production. So, you're getting all of these benefits at one time in synergy when you're

in, especially midday sun, versus if you're taking a vitamin D supplement, you're only affecting one singular marker that is really meant to serve as this indicator of your sun exposure habits. So my main beef with vitamin D supplements is that it's blocking your ability to see what your vitamin D status is without the supplement, which means you don't know if you're getting enough sun for your body. There is one exception here and I would say if you have severe vitamin D deficiency, we know that vitamin D plays really important roles in calcium homeostasis within the body and rickets which is like severe vitamin D deficiency is associated with bone abnormalities in bone and teeth and calcium balance in general. And So, if somebody has rickets or they're severely deficient like under 20 nanograms per mil,

there can be a time and place to supplement to just get them back up to some sort of a baseline that's not dangerous. But from that point, we really need to talk about optimizing sun exposure habits in order to actually reap the benefits of having an optimal vitamin D status, which I would say is anything at minimum greater than 50 nanograms per mil, but ideally between vitamin D status, which I would say is anything at minimum greater than 50 nanograms per mil, but ideally between 60 and 80, which is what our more outdoor living communities will experience if you look at their vitamin D status. I want to ask a quick question for clarification.

Does this mean that if somebody who's supplementing a lot of vitamin D, they get their labs done and they see a level that is optimal or something, they're having a bunch of other host of health issues, could that supplementation of vitamin D be masking some other things because they might not be getting a lot from the sun? Yeah, that's exactly what I think. I think vitamin D supplementation is really only good for rickets at this point. There may be some acute benefits in the context of respiratory illnesses. There may be some specific context in which it can make sense to supplement in the short term. But for long

term supplementation, we now have the data and the literature from that vital study showing we're not going to be receiving the benefits we think we are via just supplementing. So that's my perspective on that. I really think just getting into a more outdoor style of living, like now basically, I used to be a big supplement girlie, like I would spend a ton of money on supplements. And now what I do is, and what I recommend to my clients is instead of spending money on supplements, spend money building an outdoor space that's functional, that you enjoy spending time in, that allows you to get more of that out time space. Like, especially if you work from home, building time in, that allows you to get more of that out time space, like especially if you work from home building an outdoor office, that

allows you to have shade to see your screen, but also gives you the opportunity to get some sun during the day, maybe get some grounding in, being barefoot outside more on the earth or pavement. There's so many things that we can do to improve our exposure to natural light. And for people who, let's say, work jobs who aren't able to get out midday, like even just taking a lunch break outside is way better than nothing at all. We had a study that came out in January of this year by Glenn Jeffries, who's a big red

light researcher. He showed that 15 minutes of 670 nanometer deep red light exposure on the upper back resulted in a 30% lower total glucose response to an oral glucose tolerance test compared to people who did not receive the light exposure. My main takeaway of that is like, okay, we're getting many different wavelengths of red and infrared light from the sun, not just 670. But if we look at this isolated wavelength effect on blood sugar response to an oral

glucose tolerance test, which we can of course extrapolate to a higher glycemic meal, that's a huge response. Having a 30% lower glucose response to that is huge. And so if we just simply take our meals outside when we can, or getting some sun before having our meal, that could be a huge benefit to our glucose metabolism and our overall health because we know that having elevated glucose levels consistently is very damaging to our cells, to our microvasculature, and to our nerves. What you got over there, Andrew?

Yeah, I was really curious about this because we did talk about the sun hitting the eyes when we first started talking. The blue blocking glasses are getting more popular, but the ones that Mark and Ensema are wearing are significantly less common than the ones that I'm currently wearing. And I didn't want these. I really did not want these. I told my eye doctor, like, no, I just want straight lenses. No added anything. And I think he maybe was like trying to give me like a discount or something. He's like, I threw that in and I'm like, I didn't want it. But anyway, these are the

ones that just look clear. But then when light hits, they kind of reflect a blue like tint to them. So I have no idea what the heck they're doing, if anything. But because these are more common, are these a problem to be wearing every single waking hour? When the sun is out and I'm out in the sunlight, am I still blocking the good blue light that I want? And then at night, is it even blocking the artificial blue light that I don't want? Yeah. So great question.

You don't have to worry because those glasses don't work at all. They're blocking like 2% of blue light. It's not doing anything. The best test for your blue blockers is if you have any sort of a device screen or any blue LEDs anywhere. Sometimes they'll even send you a blue LED, just like a little push button so that you can test it. If you can see the blue light through the glasses, they're not working.

If you have a pair of daytime blue blockers, they will typically have a yellow lens. If you have a colorless lens, they're not doing anything basically. The daytime blue blockers block about 60% of blue light. They have a yellow tinge. If you look through them at a blue light, blue will look more greenish. The nighttime blue blockers or the 100% blue blockers have a dark orange lens like the ones that Mark is wearing right now. Those will block 100% of blue light and if you look at a blue LED, you should not be

able to see it at all. It should look gray. So that's a good test for your blue blockers that you can do to see if there's- Can see shit's work. Yeah, so they're great. I personally use Bonsharge. Raw Optics is really good. Block Blue Light makes some as well.

So there are good options out in the market. You can also get prescription blue blockers too. So either daytime or nighttime. If you're somebody who wears glasses and you know you're going to be on screens a lot during the day and you work, let's say, under like a lot of fluorescent bulbs or LED bulbs and you're on screens at the same time, popping on blue blockers can be very beneficial. You can also use native filters on your computers and your phones. So Iris is really good. IrisTech.co. They make a good

software for computers to automatically block a percentage of blue light during the day and then it's fully blocked at night and goes into a red mode. There's also F-Lux is another option for Android phones and computers. For Apple devices, I have a pin post on my Instagram that shows you how to put a filter on naturally on your screen and make like a hotkey for it as well to make it really easy to turn on. I personally keep my phone on amber all day long. And at nighttime, if I'm going to be on a lot, I'll make it red. So that's an easy trick that anybody can do. It's relatively inexpensive. But again, the more that you can just work on screens outdoors, you're going to be much more benefited by that balanced light spectrum versus just being on any sort of artificial lights, devices, and light bulbs indoors is already going to be pretty harsh, especially

because the skin is also sensing your light environment. It's not just your eyes. So the skin contains non-visual photoreceptors that are sensing the light environment, including melanopsin, which is a blue light detector, and neuropsin, which is a UVA light detector. Both of those are also expressed on the cornea. Melanopsin is also expressed in the retina, so that blue light detector in the retina is really responsible for sending the signal to the master clock of the brain to tell it when there's blue light in the environment, which is telling the body whether it's midday or not essentially.

And so that's why blue light and blocking it at night is in particular very, very important because that's the signal that's telling our bodies that it's the middle of the day. So we obviously don't want that signal at night because that signal is then going to suppress the response of our bodies to dark darkness, which is what's required in the evening to get us into the state of regeneration, repair, tissue turnover, wound healing, et cetera. Blue light is also directly suppressing melatonin release from the pineal gland. So if you want to fall asleep easily and stay asleep, get good quality sleep, we need to have that melatonin

rising in the evening in response to dark darkness. And as long as you're exposed to even small amounts of blue light in your environment, unfiltered, that's going to suppress that melatonin response and it's going to harm your sleep quality and duration. For years on this podcast, we've been talking about the benefit of barefoot shoes. And these are the shoes I used to use back in like 2017, 2018, my old Metcons.

They are flat, but they're not very wide and they're very stiff and they don't move. That's why we've been partnering with and we've been using Vivo barefoot shoes, these are the modus strength shoe, because not only are they wide, I have wide ass feet and so do we here on the podcast, especially as our feet have gotten stronger, but they're flexible. So when you're doing certain movements, like let's say you're doing jumping or you're doing split squats, or you're doing movements where your toes need to

flex and move, your feet are able to do that and perform in the shoe, allowing them to get stronger over time. And obviously they're flexible. So your foot's allowed to be a foot. And when you're doing all types of exercise, your feet will get stronger, improving your ability to move. Andrew, how can they get the hands on these? Yes. Head to vivobarefoot.com slash power project and enter the code that you see on screen to save 20% off your entire order. Again, that's at vivo barefoot.com slash power project links in the description as well as the podcast show notes.

I want to ask this real quick. I asked it for like the pale folks, but now for black people that are living in places that don't have much sun. I also know, I know people who advise their kids not to get in the sun as much because you don't want to get as dark, et cetera. And it's just one of those things where it's like, eh, okay, what do they need to be mindful of

when they're living in places that don't have as much sun because you're from Africa? And if you're someone who avoids sun and you're darker skinned, right? What do you need, what should they be careful of? Yeah, so for context, anybody who's not watching, I'm mixed. So my dad's half the family's black. My mom's half a Scandinavian. So we can talk about mitochondria in a little while, but depending on your maternal line, your mom's side of the family, that's where your mitochondria

come from. So in my case, my mitochondria come from Scandinavia, which means my mitochondria kind of expecting cold environments part of the year and then better quality sun the other part of the year. Somebody who has a maternal line from Africa for more equatorial regions, they're really expecting high quality UV light year round. We can think about the mitochondria as both electromagnetic or light detectors and emitters. So if you get an infrared camera, you can look at somebody on it because we're making a bunch of infrared light, aka heat. So that's how our body temperature is maintained.

But the mitochondria also make UV biophotons alongside some other parts of the cell as well. So our bodies are also making UV light and that gets ramped up like crazy in response to cold, especially in people who have more northern haplotypes or northern uncoupled mitochondria from Scandinavia and like northern regions. The more equatorial haplotypes are really expecting more of this UV light year round. You can make some in response to cold, but people with more equatorial mitochondria tend to do better in warmer climates. They tend to be kind of cold averse. They don't necessarily make as much of this infrared light and UV

light in response to cold, though I do think that can be trained to a certain extent. But anyway, what I wanted to get at is that for people who have darker skin or have ancestors from equatorial regions, there's a lot of white culture that has kind of worked its way into the recommendations that are made for even people with darker skin who don't necessarily have ancestors from North America. Most of the US states, at least the continental US states, are at a northern latitude. So sun quality is much lower with regards to UV index than places like Nairobi, Kenya, which is at both a high altitude and an equatorial latitude, meaning its UV light is just off the charts. And actually that

is why if we look at the marathon runners, the top marathon runners in the world come from this region of the world because their mitochondria are so efficient. They are what's called coupled mitochondria, which means that they are much more efficient at making energy and metabolic water in response to energy demand, let's say. So like a marathon running competition. And so if we think about energy efficiency, we really think about these people who have super, super dark skin that have these physiques and this capability of just running so fast for so long, just incredible

efficiency. And so to think that people that have a background like this need to wear sunscreen, like I literally saw a brand called like Black Girl Sunscreen and I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream because I'm like, you don't understand. It's somehow like we've shamed melanin and it's a bad thing. Meanwhile, it gives people superpowers. We can look at those marathon runners. We can just look in general athletic performance. There are so many melanated folks that are in sports and they're at the top tier and

it's not a mistake that that's the case. So we really need to be embracing that and not like just listening to white man's propaganda around sunscreen and blocking sun because we actually need that sunlight in order to thrive physically. Got you. You mentioned red light having a positive impact on glucose and blue light, I believe, has a negative impact. What have you light, I believe, has a negative impact. What have you seen with that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So exactly. We know that the more blue light you're exposed to, like I mentioned, this blue light directly impairs mitochondrial function. We also know that blue light is able to stimulate POMC production in a subset of neurons within the brain that don't unlock the full repertoire of cleavage products So it makes palm see but it doesn't give you that alpha beta and gamma MSH and the endorphins instead It gives you a CTH, which is an upstream product that can get cleaved into alpha MSH But it doesn't when it's made in this part of the brain But a CTH when it goes into the circulation it triggers the release of cortisol from the adrenal glands

So simply being under a lot of artificial lights that are enriched in blue wavelength light when it goes into the circulation, it triggers the release of cortisol from the adrenal glands. So simply being under a lot of artificial lights that are enriched in blue wavelength light is enough to stimulate cortisol production, which then in turn increases your blood glucose levels. It's a mild stress response, which cortisol is not bad. Cortisol is a circadian biosensor, I like to refer to it. So is melatonin. Cortisol is supposed to peak early in the morning.

When you wake up, it gets, you know, substrates liberated, glucose and fat into the bloodstream to allow your body to get up and at it for the day. But it's not supposed to be elevated consistently throughout the day, it's supposed to gradually go down. And as it goes down, melatonin starts rising and this is a healthy circadian balance between the two. But if you're on unfiltered screens and under under fluorescent bulbs all day or LED bulbs, now you're giving yourself this harsh blue light that's directly stimulating that cortisol to stay more elevated. As a result, that's creating more insulin resistance in muscle because cortisol has

that effect. It's also elevating your circulating blood glucose levels without even putting a single bite of carbohydrates in your mouth. That is absolutely something that we can mitigate, but it's something that a lot of people are experiencing without even realizing it. Is there other ways to mitigate blue light? Like are there supplements and like other things we can do other than just like throwing on glasses and trying to shut the lights off and stuff like that? Yeah, I mean, so the best things that you can do are to either get new light bulbs,

put filters on your screens, and if you can't do those things, that's when you want to resort to blocking it with glasses, whether it's daytime glasses, if you, you know, we do want some blue light during the day, it's important from a circadian perspective, but we don't want all of it. So that's where the yellow lenses come in. And also if you're going to be under harsh light environments, also considering wearing some long sleeves, long pants, because again, our bodies do also have these receptors that are sensing blue light. But you know, we're meant to, like I just said, we are meant to get blue light, but it's always meant to be received with an abundance of red and infrared light because that blue

light has an inhibitory effect on mitochondria, whereas that red light and infrared light has the stimulating effect on mitochondria. So nature always provides it in a perfect balance, but the way that we've crafted our energy efficient indoor environments, now we're getting this very unbalanced blue enriched light that's actually having a net negative effect on our mitochondria overall. So the more we can do to just mitigate the actual sources from the screens and the lights directly, that's going to be my number one recommendation and then blocking would be second.

So, Jack Cruz took a pretty big dump on us and we had him on the podcast, called us a bunch of clowns and all that good stuff. I do love that guy. He's given me some really good information. But one of the things that he just totally crapped on me for was I was referencing my mother who I said was Mexican and he was like, there's no such thing or whatever. We got into that. But what I'm curious about is, that's what he said, right? He was like, there's no nationality or something like that. So what I'm curious about is when she was pregnant

with me, she lived in San Diego at the time. Really, really awesome weather. Good chance there's a lot more sunlight than there is here. We moved to Northern California where we have a mix of everything. I get cold in the winter time. I cover up. I get what I would consider seasonal depression and that sort of thing. But what I'm curious of is, is it possible to quote unquote like adapt, right? Because like we talk about being cold adapted and that sort of thing. But I almost without it like clockwork, like you

see Mark and Encima, they're in t-shirts right now. Encima is just wearing an actual like vest even. But me, I'm like, I'm over here in the same room and I'm like, my hands are cold. I can barely write because my hands are just, you know, they're really frigid right now. Is it possible to kind of like adapt into this like region for someone like me who, again, who knows where the heck I'm supposed to be from at this point? I don't know. Is it possible for us to kind of change what that like, I guess I'll say like homeostasis as far as what temperature is? Yes, absolutely.

Especially for somebody like you. So when we talk about mitochondria, it's really a spectrum. So I kind of introduced the idea of coupled versus uncoupled mitochondria. The coupled mitochondria being very efficient at making energy coming from more equatorial regions. The uncoupled mitochondria being less efficient at making energy but more efficient at making heat in response to the cold coming from more northern regions, which should make sense because if you live somewhere that is getting cold in the winter, the ground freezes, that's associated with low levels of UV light.

So the body has this really beautiful compensatory mechanism whereby if you're getting... Sorry, my neighbor's going by on a motorbike. He's having way too much fun. Oh my God. So what nature is telling us is that if you're not getting UV light from the sun, you need to get cold because when you get cold, you stimulate your mitochondria to make their own UV light via the UV biophotons as well as more infrared light. So it's actually a really beautiful balance we can see that occurs. He's going to go by again. One moment. Wow, that thing goes. Oh my God, I'm going to have to ride that one. So what nature is telling us is that UV light and infrared light are essential nutrients. And if you're not getting them

from the sun, you need to make them yourself. But you cannot make them if you're not getting cold in the wintertime. So the biggest win or the biggest way to combat seasonal depression is by getting cold because not only are you going to be making that light internally, but you also get a major bolus of dopamine and norepinephrine production from cold exposure, in particular from cold water immersion. Because water has what's called high specific heat capacity, which means that it absorbs heat really well, that means when you get into cool water, it really wicks heat away from you very quickly, which allows your body temperature to drop more rapidly versus, let's

say, just going for a walk in the cold in like t-shirt and shorts. Both are beneficial, but the cold air takes a bit longer to have those adaptive benefits versus the cold water. So if you're somebody who gets seasonal depression or you're somebody who lives where it gets cold, the best solution for you is to surrender to the dictums of your environment and immerse yourself in that environment, even if it's just for targeted periods of time. Like you don't have to live outside in the cold in the winter, but even just doing some targeted cold water immersion could be immensely beneficial. There's also a really important axis that exists within the endocrine system called the thyroid brown fat axis.

And brown fat is stimulated in response to cold. Brown fat is a very mitochondrally dense form of fat tissue that is actually when we're born up to 35% of our fat is brown fat because it allows us to maintain our core body temperature when we're infants. But as we grow up and if you're not exposed to cold, I think only 7 to 10% of adults are walking around with active brown fat now because so many people are just cold diverse. They're told to bundle up. They're told to avoid the cold. You'll get sick or whatever. Couldn't be further from the truth. And if we look at more northern cultures we see in Scandinavian and Russia, they have practices

where people embrace the cold and people will go jump in frozen lakes and then they'll go into the sauna or the geothermal pools. And this is a cultural thing that we're just completely missing here in the States, even though it would be immensely beneficial for us because most of the US does experience some form of a winter just because of the latitudes that we're at. But this brown fat thyroid axis is involved in the maintenance of thyroid hormone signaling and thyroid hormone health. So what happens is the thyroid spits out T4, which is the inactive thyroid hormone. Brown fat is actually able to take up that T4, convert it into T3 and spit that back out. T3 is the active thyroid hormone that allows your metabolism to be stoked. Stoking the fires of metabolism helps to keep you warm

in response to just everyday life. So if you're somebody who sits around with cold fingers and toes, that's a sign of poor circulation. That's a sign of poor warmth. There's not enough vitality being spread into your extremities. And so something I noticed because I'm very similar to Andrew in that I always used to have cold fingers and toes. I started my cold plunging journey in August. I have a morosco at home and I've been doing it, well, I did it for like every day for a month and I do it about every other day.

I do two long sessions a week between 25 and 45 minutes and then I'll do a couple 10 minute sessions at 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Now I'm somebody who walks around with warm. I feel hot at rest now. And it's like a dramatic change that I've seen in myself. That also makes perfect sense with regards to this thyroid hormone signaling adaptation and augmentation that occurs in response to chronic cold exposure via the amplification of brown fat and also the generation of beige fat, which is when the subcutaneous fat starts to look more like brown fat because it's building more mitochondria to help make you warm. And so even people with melanated skin who come from more equatorial regions can harness

the benefits of brown fat and beige fat because all babies are basically born and they're going to be radiating more heat just because they have smaller bodies. And no matter where you are, ultimately, most places will have cold bodies of water. Even if you're somewhere more equatorial, you can tend to find something at least in the 60s, maybe even in the 50s. So I think cold water immersion is kind of like a human birthright that we can all harness to improve our health in many domains. Just making me think of holding my children when they were really young and I would just

all of a sudden just be pouring with sweat because they're like little furnaces. Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. If it's cool, if we can kind of go down the seasonal depression route for a second, because I mean, I'm sure there's still people that will just write it off. Like it's not a real thing. Even though like I would experience these lulls when the winter would come, I would still be like, it's not a real thing. It's just, you're getting in the routine of being sad cause the sun's not out, but maybe I'm getting sad because the sun's not out because when the, you know, the overcast days, the rain and all this stuff, I'm just not outside as much. So what, what can we

do, um, when it's cold outside, right? It's raining, I'm having to bundle up. What are ways that I can start getting some of that natural light that's probably just going to make me feel better? Yeah. So, I mean, doing the cold water immersion allows your body to make the light that it's desiring and also gives you this huge surge in dopamine and orpinephrine, which makes you feel good, makes you feel accomplished, and overall just improves mood. So that's one. The other thing you can do is get something like a Spurdy lamp, which is like a UV light for indoor use. So they have a vitamin D light,

which is about 80% UVB, 20% UVA. And they have a Fiji sun lamp, which is about 80% UVA and 20% UVB. For people who have seasonal depression, I would err more towards the vitamin D light because you're going to get more of that UVB that will stimulate the production of the endorphins, which are these natural mood boosters, anxiolytics, they help to improve depression, they help to improve your overall outlook, dopamine status, etc. So if you want to combine, let's say, targeted cold water immersion with like a 15-minute session with the spurt light a day, that would be an absolute game changer when it comes to seasonal depression. And then one other thing that you should certainly look into is the fact that we need actually

bright light during the day to have circadian health. So most indoor environments don't get over a thousand lux in brightness. If you're outside on a sunny day, you can get upwards of 300,000 lux. So we're talking like orders of magnitude, more light brightness in nature versus indoors. So if you can get some full spectrum bright lights for your indoor space, I think that would be also a huge win from a mood perspective, from a focus and cognition perspective in order to boost serotonin production by the pineal gland, which is also important for later in the day because serotonin is synthesized into melatonin in the evening when the light goes down. So we actually need to have that bolus of bright light during the day to stimulate serotonin

production, which makes us feel good, more connected, and then later in the day it's going to help to improve our sleep quality. So there's a lamp by Chroma called the Sky Portal that clamps onto a desk and it has adjustable brightness and adjustable redness. So that's something that we have indoors if I'm going to be working inside in the office. I try to open the windows to get some natural light in that way, but then I'll also have this full spectrum sky portal on that helps to make the environment more bright that helps you to get in the zone more with regards to like working in an office

space. And so that's why I'd say on that front, I think those are three things that I would recommend if somebody is either actively suffering from seasonal depression or just wants to optimize their workspace. Yeah, just really quick on the Sky Portal. They came out with a brand new one that does have a different type of like violet or cyan color. Incredible stuff. I've only been using it for about two or three weeks now, and I can already tell a huge difference at the end of my day. I actually find that I'm not completely run down and I kind of have a little bit more

like mental energy because he's about to be four years old, so he never gets tired. So if I'm just a little bit off my game, it's like, oh my gosh, it's going to be a struggle. So yeah, the Chroma Sky Portal has been a game changer for me. Yeah, it's great. Also, they got a lot of feedback because we have a model from a year ago and they have the adjustable redness on that one. I heard the new models, they only go to an amber tone, not red. And apparently they got a big backlash about it, so they're putting it back to red, which

I think is personally better. I prefer to have it at red at night anyways. If you're going to use it at night, it's better to have red bulbs on versus amber just because the amber does have a little bit more brightness and cool tonedness compared to red. So I think, I don't know if they've made that switch yet, but just for people who are in the market for it, you could probably reach out to them and ask when the red ones are coming out or they may already be out. I'm not sure.

Just a note on the Fiji lamps. I have the spurty lamps. The Fiji lamp and the vitamin D lamp, I think work better when you have red light as well. Those lights will be potentially less harmful in terms of potentially burning your skin because the way that I do it is totally naked. For guys, I think both of those lights can be beneficial. So I want to give it a try. I agree. What I typically do is I'll either use my panels outside in the winter months so I can

get the natural light from the sun in combination with the UV light. So it's kind of just like adding, supplementing back the UV light into the solar spectrum. Or if I can't go outside because it's wet out or whatever or too cold, then I'll do it with my red light panels indoors and I'll basically just have them both angled at me. I like to channel the vitamin D light or the Fijisan lamp on my abdomen because the nerves under the skin of the abdomen and the abdomen skin and calves especially as well will synthesize more palm C per unit time. So you can kind of get more bang for your buck if you expose your abdomen and or your calves, you can do it separately or like

in concurrent sessions or whatever to the UV light to get that palm C and the endorphins and MSH benefits. So for like weight loss, body composition, for mood, cognition, then I would err on the side of the vitamin D light. I personally have both as well. So I'll use like the Fiji sun lamp on my back and then the vitamin D light on my front with the red light panel running and then I'll like switch them. So that's what I personally do. And because I have more melanin in my skin, I'll typically do like 15 minutes in the front, 15 minutes in the back and I don't burn. But somebody who has very fair skin may want to start with only just like three or four or five minutes maybe and just kind of feel it out. You can also adjust your distance. So I do about maybe

12 to 16 inches away from the panel. Somebody who's fair skin may want to start a little bit farther away just to gauge the response. But I have super, super fair Fitzpatrick one clients who use it who've worked up to doing 15 minutes as well. So you will adapt to that over time. It's just the same as like building that solar callus. How did you get into this? I know on some podcasts, you mentioned that you listened to Jack Cruz on that podcast where he was talking to Andrew Huberman on Rick Rubin's show. That was an amazing podcast, so people need to check that out. It's like hours and hours of just outstanding information. But you're a long time doctor and you've been researching and you've been studying and you've been learning things probably in a pretty

conventional way I would imagine. And then, you know, all of a sudden some of this information comes and a lot of times if I post about this information, I get a lot of blowback. And I think a lot of other people are still getting a lot of resistance because where's the science, where's this, where's that. But yeah, how did you start to adopt this? And then what a lot of other people are still getting a lot of resistance because where's the science? Where's this? Where's that? But yeah, how did you start to adopt this? And then what are some of the changes that you made?

Because you're doing a podcast, you're outside, it's probably kind of cold where you're at. So you have- Honestly, it's almost 80 degrees somehow. Oh, wow. Wow. That's pretty good. I know. You've made a lot of changes.

So for some people listening, maybe they won't make a change as quickly as you have, but the information must be really compelling for you to change your entire life for it. Oh yeah, for sure. So, before this, I was at Princeton. I was primarily a food guru, as Jack would call me. So, I was looking at the difference between how dietary inputs shape metabolism, ketogenic versus high carb, fasting versus feeding. That was in the Rabinowitz lab at Princeton and one of the top metabolism research labs. And then I started my business and I was primarily microbiome focused.

I fell down the microbiome rabbit hole when I was at Princeton and I really thought that that was like extremely important and like wasn't being discussed enough and I thought it was like the thing. And so that was the path I was on for up through April of 2023 when I came across some person, I actually don't know who they are. I've been trying to find them, but somebody DM me the podcast. They're like, let me know what you think of this. And I listened to it and my life just forever changed in a moment. It was the Huberman and Jack and Rick Rubin podcasts. And so first of all, I was just stunned at the information. One, because I hadn't heard any of it podcasts. And so first of all, I was just stunned at the information. One, because

I hadn't heard any of it before. And two, because it was just like, you know, kind of almost infuriating to a point because I was like, this is amazing science. Like, how would I never hear about this? And then of course, I went down the rabbit hole and I found out there's actually a ton of centralized literature on this topic. It's not like he's just pulling the stuff out of his ass. So that was like, okay, clearly this information is being gate-kept or like just shielded from the public sphere in some way, even though you can just go into PubMed and find literature dating back decades that's in support of these points that he was making in that podcast with regards to melanin biology and palm seed and UV light

is an essential nutrient and how sunlight is so important in shaping health in so many ways. So that was when I jumped down the rabbit hole and I really just started by dipping my toes and all I did was started blocking blue light at night. Like the first night I bought blue blockers and I started wearing them starting at sundown. And magically I just got tired really early. I was like, this is wild because I was always a night owl before this. Like I would stay up until 2-3 a.m., wake up at 11 a.m. And so, I started doing that. One, two days, I started getting sleepy earlier, going to

bed at 10, waking up naturally at 6-7 a.m. And I was like, who am I? This is crazy. Why am I being a morning person suddenly? I did not know this was even possible. Literally, my entire life, I had been a super night owl. And then I was like, wow, I think chronotypes are actually kind of BS because if we didn't have tech, we wouldn't be staying up late because there's like, you know, no stimulus to keep us awake, we would just naturally get sleepy. And so that was kind of just how I started just blocking blue light at night. And then in the morning when I got up, I would go outside and get like 15-20 minutes of natural light in my eyes. And that was just basically set into place this momentum that just made me change every

aspect of my life essentially because I felt the proof of work immediately that like, wow, this is not only making my sleep quality better. Prior to that, I'd been waking up in the night. I would wake up like a couple hours after going to sleep and just toss and turn and not be able to fall back asleep. I was sleeping like a rock. Felt so refreshed waking up. Then during the day, I just spent more time outside.

I'd always been somebody who enjoyed the sun. I wasn't ever a big sunscreen user, but I never necessarily thought of it as essential for my health and life. Maybe for a little bit of backstory, I had been on my health journey for a while. I lost 100 pounds when I was a sophomore into junior year of high school. I got really into lifting weights. My PR for deadlifting a couple of years ago was like 300 something pounds. So I've always been into it for a long time, like 13 years I've been lifting heavy, I've been really into working out and eating clean, eating locally

seasonally. But the light piece was just not on my radar for whatever reason. I heard about Sachin Panda's work when I was in grad school and circadian biology, but I don't know, it just didn't seem that important the way that it was presented. And it's just the way that Jack laid everything out into this best story that's never been told. It just really resonated with every cell of my being. And I went down the rabbit hole and now my entire life has changed, my business has changed, the people I've connected with and my relationship quality and just so many aspects of my health

and life are just completely a 180 and it feels, you know, it's just incredible. I think Jack would call it like quantum entanglement and when you optimize your quantum biology through light, dark water and magnetism, you start to actually just naturally get onto the path that's intended for you is what it feels like to me. Now, I'm curious because I've never delved down the rabbit hole, but you know, Mark's been talking a lot about this water piece and this fourth phase of water. And I have no idea, right? Can you explain to us how that ties into this topic and why it's something that we might

also be missing out on in terms of understanding it? Yeah, absolutely. So we kind of laid the groundwork a little bit because when it comes to fourth phase of water, we really need to be talking about UV and infrared light. So, the primary wavelength at this point from Gerald Pollock's work, who's the guy who discovered the fourth phase of water at the University of Washington, it's also known as exclusion zone water or gel state water. Essentially what it is, it's water that has its positive and negative charge separated

and it literally has a higher viscosity, like it's more jelly-like, and it is a battery. So whenever we think about positive and negative charge being separated, that is literally how a battery works, and same in our bodies. So when we're exposed to, in particular, 3,100 nanometer light, which is in the far infrared range, it stimulates the production of easy water, exclusion zone water, from the bulk water that's in our cells. So in our bodies, the gel state water actually does work. And what I mean is that it's actually running metabolism. So a lot of people will think about ATP. And I remember

being wholly unsatisfied in my undergrad when we learned about ATP and how it's creating free energy to run metabolism because I was like, what is free energy? This is so nebulous, it doesn't make any sense. But then when I fell down this rabbit hole, I learned that what ATP is doing is actually, so ATP, adenosine triphosphate, there's three phosphate groups. One of the phosphate groups can get removed and put onto enzymes, let's say, that changes the shape of the enzyme, which allows the water to go in and actually do the work. So it's the exclusion zone water that's actually facilitating metabolism, not the ATP directly. And when we look at our modern environments, we can see that there's no infrared light in our indoor environments whatsoever. So

we're losing this primary stimulus to produce gel state water in our cells that's required to effectively run metabolism, also related to the thyroid hormone piece. So we know that if you're deficient in this fourth phase of water within the cells, thyroid hormone signaling is impaired. So things like the dots just start to get connected here when we think about how our environment is deficient in key wavelengths. UV light also plays an important role

in exclusion zone water. And actually the experiments need to be done where we look at deuterium depleted water and the effect of UV light on structuring that into exclusion zones because our cells, our mitochondria are making deuterium depleted water that is, it's special. We can kind of maybe talk about it a little bit here. So deuterium is a heavy form of hydrogen in the mitochondria. The way that ATP and metabolic water are produced is through the flow of electrons. So we talked about when you eat, you're eating for protons and electrons. The electrons are what flow through these protein complexes within the mitochondria and the

protons, so the electrons are negatively charged, the protons which are H plus hydrogen atoms, ideally within mitochondria, they're light hydrogen, also known as proteome, not deuterium. Mitochondria hate deuterium, so mostly not deuterium in the mitochondria. These proteome ions, which are positively charged, they get pumped out of the inside of the mitochondria into the space between the two membranes because mitochondria have a double membrane system. So that is in effect separating negative from positive charge, which again creates another battery. Then the last protein complex in the mitochondria that facilitates the production of ATP is

called ATP synthase. It's an actual nanomotor that has a rotor that spins and as it spins, it makes ATP. The thing that makes it spin is when protons come in from that intermembrane space and come back into the inside of the mitochondria. So the important piece here is that only proteome can fit very well through that rotor. Deuterium doesn't fit. And that's why if you've heard the word deuterium or deuterium depleted water, the notion is that, and the research suggests that the more deuterium that gets trapped within the mitochondrial compartment, the more the mitochondrial engines become more inefficient and they can

start to break down because that deuterium doesn't fit through that last piece that actually allows the water and the energy to be produced. And so if you're on a deuterium depleted water protocol, which we have literature showing in the context of diabetes and cancer, a very significant benefit to patient outcomes in these two populations. I think I also use it with like athletes for performance optimization. There's a lot of different contexts within which it can be used.

But the ideas of that is that when you drink deuterium depleted water, it lowers the deuterium levels in your bloodstream. The bloodstream is where the body holds most of its deuterium away from the cells because the cells with mitochondria do not like that deuterium. And so when you lower your blood levels of deuterium, your body will then pull deuterium

out of the tissues in order to maintain the right concentration of deuterium in the bloodstream. So in effect, you're depleting the deuterium in your tissues and your mitochondria by drinking the deuterium depleted water. And so the reason that I bring that up is because from the deuterium standpoint, when we're thinking about optimizing mitochondrial function, we can see that in the chronic disease state, no matter what it is, essentially, whatever disease you want to pick, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune disease, neurodegeneration, you can look at different tissues, we can see mitochondrial dysfunction and whatever tissue compartments we're interested in depending

on the disease, we see deuterium builds up in the tissues in these states and we see that mitochondrial function is impaired. We can also see another aspect of this process is called mitochondrial heteroplasmy, which refers to the levels of mutations within mitochondrial DNA. So we talked about, actually I don't think we talked about this yet. So Dr. Doug Wallace, who is the godfather of mitochondrial biology, he's the guy, he's at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, he discovered, he's the guy, he's at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, he discovered, he's still there, discovered that you inherit all your mitochondria from mom.

And that's why I mentioned earlier, you inherit down the maternal line. So if you want to know where your mitochondria are from, you have to look at mom, grandma, great grandma on the mom side, et cetera. So this other aspect to mitochondrial DNA that you've inherited from mom is this mutation burden, which can either be dealt to you as a baby. So depending on how mom and grandma live their lives, you could be dealt a better or worse hand of mitochondria. And these genes within the mitochondrial DNA encode the proteins that allow those electrons to move through the mitochondria and make

energy and water. So you can imagine that if you get mutations in these genes, that process becomes less efficient. It doesn't work as well because now those proteins are being changed in their shape, let's say. And so, heteroplasmy, higher levels of mutation are associated with, again, all of our chronic diseases. So we see that heteroplasmy and deuterium content of mitochondria are both linked to pick your chronic disease of choice. But the important thing about this is it's very actionable and that's one of my favorite parts about mitochondrial medicine is that there's very actionable recommendations that we can give to people or we can use ourselves to help improve our state.

It's not just like in the world of nuclear DNA, it's like you got this mutation, you're screwed. That's not the case at all in mitochondrial medicine. In mitochondrial medicine, we can say, hey, you know, we got some issues here. Now we need to optimize mitochondrial biology through optimization of mitophagy and mitochondrial biogenesis. Mitophagy, similar to autophagy, which is when the cellular cleanup crews come in, get rid of the garbage essentially and can repurpose the components into new cellular parts. Mitophagy is when the damaged mitochondria are preferentially depleted from the cellular

environment. Mitophagy is activated in response to ketosis and fasting, which we're all supposed to get into a good fat burning state by the time we're in REM sleep. If you're eating in a more circadian manner, your first meal of the day is large and it's going to be less carbohydrate rich and your last meal of the day is going to be small and more ketoish or carnivore-ish because that's going to allow you to get into that state of ketosis overnight. And then if you combine that with sunrise in the morning, ketosis and red and infrared

light supercharge mitophagy like no one's business. And so if you're doing that every day, you're getting into that fat burning state overnight and you're seeing the sunrise every day, you're turning on the processes that allow your body to deplete the damaged mitochondria from its cells. And so in effect, what you're doing is you're purifying that colony. And then we can engage things like mitochondrial biogenesis or the production of new mitochondria from the good ones. And now in effect, you actually can reverse age because aging is really dictated by the levels of mutation within mitochondria. If we look at the research, Doug Wallace's work shows that you gain about 10% mutation burden per

decade of life. And what that's doing is by the time you're 80 or 90 years old, now your mitochondria look like they're 80 or 90, but you could also be 20 years old and have mitochondria in your liver that look like they're 80, depending on what hands you were dealt and the lifestyle factors and environment that you spend a lot of time in. And so it's very actionable to literally reverse age in order to optimize health. And when we're thinking about this mitophagy and mitobiogenesis, we really need to also think about the implications here. So if you think about the aging process, we can generally think about it as a dehydration process. You see a baby, it's plump, it's glowing, and then you look at a 90-year-old

person, they're like desiccated, they're dehydrated, they're withering away. That's because the metabolic water, that deuterium-depleted metabolic water made by mitochondria is what hydrates the tissues. And then if you combine that with the right light environment, you're creating that gel state that gives the cells a plumpness, a healthiness to them. And so the more mutation burden you have in your mitochondria, the less energy and water you make, the more dehydrated you become at a cellular level, the more aged your tissues are.

And so, aging, biological aging, I really think needs to be thought of as a reflection of mitochondrial state, mitochondrial health. We have so many levers to push on when it comes to improving the health of those mitochondria that I just think it's a very empowering area of science and medicine that we kind of need to shift to because the focus on nuclear DNA is completely disempowering in my opinion and it's doing a disservice to people who have chronic diseases that don't know that they could actually reverse them. And you can purchase deuterium depleted water, but it's super expensive.

What are some other routes people could go? I've heard people basically just recommend spring water. There's a lot of different ways to get your own water tested, but I don't know how far people will go with some of these things. So what are your recommendations on drinking water? Yeah. So the deuterium content of your drinking water depends on your latitude. So if you live in Scandinavia, you have very low deuterium in your water, generally speaking. So it's about 130 parts per million. If you live near the equator, your drinking water is going to be around 155 parts per million. However, this should actually make perfect sense because near the equator, the mitochondria are receiving high quality sunlight year round, which means I actually have a better ability to deplete

deuterium from the environment that's coming into the body. So sweating is one of the major routes that you can deplete deuterium. Most people don't do a lot of sweating in the wintertime, so you're not getting as rid of as much there because again, that deuterium is housed primarily in the bloodstream. So any water that you're generating through sweat is coming from the blood. So that's deuterium-enriched water. Urination is another way. But if we have high quality sunlight in the environment, we're going to be sweating more. We're also going to be consuming more deuterium from the water, but also foods that are enriched to deuterium include roots and fruits and basically plant-based foods. The exception being the

green parts of plants are lower in deuterium because the chloroplasts, which make the plants green are similar to mitochondria and that they are kind of racist against deuterium. So if you're eating a lot of starches, fruits, things like this, that's a high deuterium load coming into the body, which is fine if you're in a high quality sun environment. And that's also why this is where seasonal eating comes in, because if you're eating mangoes in Boston in the middle of December, you're eating a food that is essentially a deuterium bomb in an environment that you can't deplete deuterium in that well. In combination with the fact that most people's light environments are really bad to begin

with, so you don't even have the ability to structure the water that's there, let alone if that water becomes more deuterium enriched and it becomes more challenging to create that fourth phase water, then we're running into problems there. If you're in a high quality light environment and you live near the equator, let's say, you can grow plant foods year round. The ground doesn't freeze there. Your body can actually handle more deuterium coming in through the diet because it's in an environment that allows it to process it more effectively and to support mitochondrial

function directly through that high quality sunlight that's available. So when I think about seasonal eating, I'm really thinking about deuterium in the food. If you're eating a more animal-based diet, let's say in the wintertime, if you're somewhere where the ground freezes, that's not only going to lower your deuterium load because animal-based foods are the lowest deuterium foods, but you're also going to be supporting metabolic heat production in brown fat. We know that ketogenic style diets and low carb diets are activating to brown fat and metabolic heat production within brown fat.

So it's very synergistic when you think about eating a lower carb diet in the winter, getting cold and supporting mitochondrial energy and water production, but also infrared and UV biophoton production as well. So, it just kind of makes perfect sense. If you're living somewhere where the ground freezes, try to eat a diet that's kind of local and seasonal to your area. With regards to plant foods, ferments are fine, some root vegetables probably good too, but you're not going to be eating tropical fruits, you're not going to be eating a lot of starches because they actually wouldn't be available to you outside of our global

food supply chain, which I personally feel is unsustainable. And actually, I get a real kick out of the idea that like cows are causing global warming while we're flying our foods halfway across the earth to feed people who don't, you know, you don't need to eat tropical fruits in Boston in the winter. It's not a requirement for your life. It's just a convenience. And if that convenience is externalizing harm to the environment and to your body, then maybe it's something that we should think about letting go of a bit. I think we've just become very entitled as a species. And the worst part about that is like we're actually cutting out the foods that would help us the most,

which would be the animal-based foods. You're trying to get healthier and you're probably eating chicken for every meal or the same beef cuts for every meal. And trust me, I know how good some cuts can be. You can make anything taste good. But good life protein is the place that you want to go if you want to start adding some different types of meats into your rotation. They got picanha, they got chorizo sausage, which is still great on the macros because they're using Piedmontese beef. They have lobster, they have all different types of fish. They have actually a bunch of different types of chicken too.

They have lamb. I'm telling you, if you give it good life a shot and try some of their different meats, which are still great on the macros, you'll start to appreciate the things that you can get from different meat. Don't think too hard about that one. But check out Good Life, because we're sure that you're going to love the taste and the quality. And it's good for your health. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at goodlifeproteins.com and at checkout enter promo code power to save

20% off your entire order. Or if you want to save even more, use promo code power project to save an additional 5% off your build the box. Again, goodlifeproteins.com. Link is in the description as well as the podcast show notes. What kind of water system or setup do you have? Yeah, so I use, well, we have a couple. So reverse osmosis, we do that and then we'll remineralize and structure the water. You can use direct sunlight exposure on the water to generate more of that gel state water in your drinking water. Because if you think about in nature, you know, water is flowing through streams or it's coming from deep in the earth where it's interacted with, you know, different minerals and whatnot.

That also helps to give it some structure and mineralization. But outside of that, I also like to cycle in spring water too. So I'll use Mountain Valley. I'll also cycle in some deuterium depleted water as well, which I can add into the spring water or to the reverse osmosis. It doesn't really matter. But if somebody wants to do a deuterium depleted protocol, the literature would suggest that drinking 105 parts per million deuterium depleted water is ideal. So that would mean if you have a 25 parts per million deuterium depleted water bottle, let's say 16 ounces, you would add that into about 32 ounces of your regular drinking water and that would give you around 105 parts per million. And in the literature for diabetes and cancer, what they would typically have you do is a three-month or 12-week protocol

where you're drinking only that during that period of time. And that's shown to dramatically improve insulin sensitivity and diabetics and help to improve outcomes in cancer patients as well. So that's something that people can look into. Also just from like a baseline health optimization strategy as well, I think anybody could benefit from it if they can afford the water. If it's out of budget, you can also just drink northern water because like I mentioned, northern water is going to be more deuterium depleted naturally. Water from Iceland, for example, could be a good idea if somebody doesn't necessarily have the budget for deuterium depleted water, but wants to get some of the benefits.

What about just filtered water? Do you have any brands or anything you can lead people to? Just trying to think of something convenient that people could maybe start out with. Yeah. I think when it comes to bottled water, not only is it very wasteful, but it's also pretty expensive. So we invested in just a countertop reverse osmosis system. It's like less than 400 bucks, but we were spending a lot of money on bottled water prior

to that and we don't want the microplastics and the plastic waste in general. So getting a countertop reverse osmosis from like Blue Vua or Aqua True, I think is a really good investment because then you know you're scrubbing the stuff out of the water that's in there, the pharmaceutical residues, the pesticides, the fluoride, all the things that people don't necessarily want in their drinking water, you can get that out. And then you kind of have control over what minerals you add back in. You can use something like concentrates mineral drops. You can use some specialty sea salts.

There's a lot of different things you can do there. And then from a structuring standpoint, you can even just like putting your water directly exposed to full midday sun for even just a couple minutes is going to be majorly beneficial. You can also vortex your water. That's another way to create some structure in it. We have the Mayu Vortexer, which is basically just like a stir plate with a magnetic stir bar in it that helps to vortex the water. Doing that for like five to seven minutes was what they recommend. You can definitely notice a change in the mouth feel. We've done blind testings with our friends where we'll have like reverse osmosis water that's structured with sun. We have one that's been vortexed and we have one with like sun and vortexing. People can actually tell the difference.

It feels creamy, almost like the way milk does versus sometimes water can leave almost like a sticky texture in the mouth. It's just more flat. It loses that flatness and it becomes more sumptuous almost when you start to structure it. That's literally the gel state that you're sensing in your palate. It's a weird rabbit hole because even what the water is contained in can matter, like the shape, I've heard of egg-shaped water bottles.

That's like Victor Schauberger's work. He was a really big water researcher, a while, I want to say maybe a century ago or more, but he found the egg shape and he basically saw that if you vortex water at certain implosion angles, like you put it through a funnel that has a very specific angle to it, that that will increase the amount of structured water that's formed. And yeah, water is just really interesting in general. There's also this whole area in quantum biology where we're learning that water is this major source of stored information and that you can store a ton of information in water. Also, of course, you can store information in DNA, but water has this immense capacity

too. I think we're only just scratching the surface on what that actually means. I think it also will point to areas like when we say trauma is stored in the body, that that's actually within the waters of the body in some way. I'm really excited about that area of research to flourish in the future. Do you follow a carnivore- or style diet or keto style diet? I don't. So I just eat more seasonally.

I try to like shop at farmers markets and buy local meats like regenerative meats whenever I can. So meat is a major staple in my diet, I would say. But depending on the season, there's more fruit or less fruit or squashes. So this kind of time of year, we have a lot of apples and pears and squashes. In the winter, it's going to be way more meats and ferments, maybe some root vegetables, some carrot, beets, potatoes, but for the most part it's way more animal-based, higher in fat. And my body just naturally craves more of these richer, fattier cuts of meat in the winter too. And I feel like that's

going to only increase now that I've been doing more targeted cold exposure, so I'm going to be engaging these pathways that actually consume a lot of fat and sugar. So actually one thing we didn't mention earlier is that when you activate your brown fat, it is a major sponge for glucose and free fatty acids from the bloodstream. So anybody who has, let's say, insulin resistance or hyperlipidemia, you can make major headway by engaging in cold thermogenesis by activating that brown fat, which then serves as this major sponge for excess substrates within the bloodstream.

So that's something that can be majorly beneficial if somebody has metabolic health issues. But I just think at a baseline, if you're eating more meats and fats in the winter, it's going to support brown fat function, metabolic heat production. And it's also just very hearty. I feel like we just tend to crave more rich foods in the wintertime that are a little bit more fatty. You know, I know you work with quite a bit of people and obviously you've probably been suggesting cold exposure.

I don't know if you have dealt with individuals who have very violent reactions to cold or very just negative reactions to cold, right? When it comes to those types of people, because the advice is that's typically given is just, okay, maybe that's just not for you or you should avoid that. But would you suggest that they try to creep themselves into getting into colder and colder water over time? Or is it an avoidance thing, should they avoid it? Yeah. So I think, well, the important thing with cold exposure and also any form of hormesis, which is like what doesn't kill you, make you stronger type of thing, exercises, hormesis, sauna, cold is also. So with any kind of hormesis, we want to make sure that people are voluntarily engaging

in the activity because if they feel forced into it, they're not going to get the same dopamine reward response to the activity, which means they're not going to be incentivized to do it again. So they have to get to a point where they're ready, they feel ready, like they're doing it willingly and forthrightly. Starting really slow is huge, especially for people who have avoided cold, like let's say their whole life, and maybe even there's somebody who have more equatorial mitochondria, so they're even a little bit more cold averse and less cold adapted than somebody who never

gets cold, but they have Scandinavian ancestors, let's say. Starting really slow is huge. So you can start by just dunking your face in some ice water for like 30 seconds and then take a break and have a breather and then do it again and maybe do it for like four or five rounds. Start by that way because there's a lot of temperature receptors in the face that can sense the environment and that can give you some of that cold adaptation at a smaller level but it helps to kind of dip your toes in.

And then from that, you can move into using some ice packs on your abdomen and just start by just adapting to getting your core cold, which is the next step there. And then from there, after doing that for a period of time, people have to figure out whatever ramp makes sense for them. But then you would want to go to cold water immersion, but you can even start at 70 degrees or 65 degrees. It doesn't have to be crazy at first. Just start where you feel like you can stay in there for a little bit. I mean, even just 70 degree water for five minutes, that's a good place to start. And then gradually creep it down if it's possible. And the goal as per Jack that I also follow is the goal will be for metabolic health and optimization of mitochondria

between 50 and 55 degree water is ideal. And that you want to shoot for a couple long sessions per week to get the biggest benefits. Because if you go in for only like two to five minutes, let's say, you're actually you're decreasing your skin temperature, but you're actually increasing your core temperature because that blood is being pushed into your core. And so it's actually creating more warmth in the deeper parts of your body. What we actually want to do is decrease the body temperature at least a couple of times a week for let's say 25 to 45 minutes. And that's going to allow your, what's called your semiconductor network to work better. So this is a little bit of a tangent, but I think it's worth mentioning. Robert O. Becker's work, he wrote the body electric, he wrote

the book Cross Currents. He was the first non-native EMF researcher in the space and he was actually a very successful researcher, but he ended up getting canceled after blowing the whistle on the harms of non-native EMFs back in the 60s. He lost his entire livelihood and his lab and everything basically overnight. This was only the harms of non-NATIV MS in the form of radio waves. We're not even talking about 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. That didn't exist back then. We can only imagine where that research would be now if it were allowed to have progressed.

Anyway, that's an aside. When Becker was graduating from medical school, there was a guy who was a Nobel Prize researcher who gave a talk that Becker was in the audience for, his name was Albert St. Georgie. He won the Nobel Prize for like vitamin C biology and the Krebs cycle. And he said in his talk to the students that it seems like biology is encoding semiconductors, that the proteins within biological systems are actually semiconductor proteins, meaning that they can facilitate the flow of electrons under certain conditions and photons. And so that's what actually inspired Becker to go down the whole professional trajectory

that he did. But the point being is that if you look at semi-conductor labs now that are involved in our tech development, like cell phones and other things that require semi-conductors in order to work, a lot of those studies will be done under low temperature conditions because semiconductors work better at low temperature conditions. And so, when we think about our bodies that are full of semiconductors, including collagen and apatite and melanin, there's a lot of semiconductors in our system. If you cool the body down, that's going to allow those networks to work more efficiently

at transporting photons and electrons throughout the system, through the fascial network, as well as some others as well. So that's the benefit of getting longer sessions of cold exposure a couple of times a week is that you're working on that semiconductor network. And then of course you get all the benefits on brown fat and metabolism and everything else. But the fundamental aspect that you're working on is really that semiconductor network that's going to improve overall health at like a very deep level because that's going to allow

the efficient transfer of energy and light throughout the system essentially. Okay, Alexis, I need to know what's your split then for this because I'm going to start doing that because right now I'm going to I'm going to bring my cold plan job. I don't it's not like 40 something degrees. I can't be in there for 20 minutes. What's your temperature? What's your split? I'm gonna copy this shit. Yeah. So I do every other day, 55 degrees. I don't do what kind of tub you have different morasco or no, it's from a plunge. So can it? Yeah. Okay. So the benefit to the morasco not to be the morasco salesman, but I freaking love this thing. It's a metal tub and it's

fully grounded. So in the same way that like if you have your bare feet on the earth, you get that grounding force, the free electrons, the whole Morosco tub is grounded. So, the water is being grounded too because the water is conductive. That's why like if you put a toaster in the bathtub and it's full of water, you can electrocute yourself because the water facilitates the movement of charge. I also put in 10 pounds of Epsom salts in there, so it's also giving you magnesium. It's relaxing the body. It's helping to produce more ATP at the level of mitochondria because magnesium is a required co-factor in ATP production in the level of mitochondria. So when I get in that tub, it's not only cold, but it's also basically like being in the ocean because

you have that salt and you also have that conductance, that grounding force. And then I'm in there for, depending on the day, so yesterday I did 25 minutes, I'll do between 25 and 45 minutes twice a week. And then another two times a week, I'll do 10 to 15 minutes. So it's mostly every other day, like there may be a couple days in a row that I do it. And then I like to make two of those sessions between 25 and 45 and then I'll have two sessions about around 10 to 15. So that's my split right now. Do you think it matters if you get into a sauna afterwards or after you get out, do

you want to have your body? Do you want to do that on your own? Get warm on your own? Yeah. So you can do sauna before. That's totally fine. But definitely don't do sauna after because you need your metabolism to warm itself back up naturally in order to maximize the benefit of the cold water immersion. One thing that I will say though is for men in particular, there's evidence to show that if you exercise after your cold water immersion that you get a big boost in testosterone levels. Relative to women, we actually don't have to exercise to get the testosterone benefit, which is interesting. But for men, if you want to exercise and that allows you to warm up more quickly as well, that's completely fine and there will be evidence actually that's in support of that being beneficial.

Okay. Yeah, that was written in a book, but in the 1900s by George Hackenschmidt. I don't know if you know who that is. He's the guy that the hack squat machine is kind of named after because he created the movement of the hack squat where the guy holds the weight behind their back as they're doing the squat or whatever. Jack Cruz has had some conjecture against Peter Itea saying that, and there's a lot of people that are saying this, a lot of people are talking about strength training and hypertrophy being good for longevity. What are some of your stance on that?

Because I know Jack is, and I think he's mainly talking about people that are getting into like their 40s and 50s and 60s and so on. I think maybe when you're in your, between 20 and 40, you can probably get after it and do whatever the hell you want for a little while, I guess. But yeah, where do you stand on that? Because Jack is basically saying that your muscle mass is going to be kind of utilizing a lot of your mitochondria or something to that effect and it's not getting to the brain and the heart.

Great question. It's something that I'm very interested in studying more of also in the future. But my perspective on this right now is kind of like you said, I think you can really get after it in your first half of life and that's probably actually beneficial to a certain extent to building healthy amount of muscle mass that's also metabolically healthy. But as you go into the latter half of life, what we already automatically will see is like anabolic resistance is really common. And I talked about this with my friend Dr. Gabrielle Lyon quite a bit because oftentimes we think about anabolic resistance as this

threshold we need to overcome. But what if the anabolic resistance is actually a built-in mechanism to prevent us from putting on more muscle because we need those substrates elsewhere and we need those mitochondria elsewhere? And so that's where I think we need some more research. That's my current hypothesis is that if there's anabolic resistance present, it means that we probably have insufficient or unhealthy mitochondria in the brain and in the cardiovascular system. So we would want to work on, I wouldn't be surprised if you work on mitochondrial health and function in those areas, then maybe the anabolic resistance would actually be decreased

because now the system feels more comfortable diverting energy and resources to the muscle. So that's my current stance on that. I really think that you can get away with a lot when you're young, especially building a healthy muscle mass and enjoying your body. I think it's really fun to be strong. It's fun to be athletic. I have personally been athletic for basically my whole life, even when I was heavyset. I always enjoyed moving my body and then seeing what I'm capable of. So I think it's really a joy to be involved in that. Some people may not be into it, but I personally am. But then in the latter half of your life to just maybe just develop a healthy movement

lifestyle, like going for walks outside and doing functional types of movement, maybe not optimizing to put on as much muscle as possible. I think that's probably the move in these later decades where mitochondrial function starts naturally declining because I think I mentioned this earlier, like we gain 10% mutation burden in mitochondria per decade and that's inevitable. That's what drives the aging process. So, you know, you can slow that down to a great extent, but at some point, you know, we're all gonna die.

And at some level, that's because assuming it's not like a traumatic injury, that mitochondria and one or more tissues are starting to fail. And so to kind of stalwart that, we really want to work on optimizing the mitophagy, the mitobiogenesis, but then also not trying to push more mitochondria into a tissue that we don't actually require to have, we're not really required to have more of it for survival. He will point to gorillas, like gorillas naturally have more muscle.

And a lot of people will make fallacious arguments like, I hate this argument, like gorillas are vegetarian, like anybody can be a vegan and get jacked. I think it's a stupid argument because we're not gorillas and they have a completely different system with myostatin which controls how much muscle gets put on and things like this. But I think it's important to think about, we don't want to necessarily just be as jacked as possible if we're like 50, 60, 70 years old. What we do want to have is like functional mobility and ability to move, ability to play with your grandkids or take the groceries into the house or be able to just do like basic squats and things like that. I think that's

great, but to be overly muscle-bound I think can actually be an impairment to mobility and your ability to kind of live your life in a more functional way. So I think there's definitely some like give and take on it. I think we need some more research too, but I think Jack's hypothesis is a pretty good one. What are your thoughts here then with the through line with that and like hormone replacement therapy? Because you know, some people, they really need it.

Some people are using it because it'll help them more easily put on muscle, right? And as you get older, have you thought about that since you've been having talks with Dr. Lyon and Dr. Lyon, like she will sometimes help people on that realm of hormone replacement therapy? Yeah, I think the best strategy for HRT is likely to exhaust all other options before using it and waiting as long as possible.

If somebody's really miserable and has poor quality of life and they try HRT and it helps them tremendously, they have more energy, they're more vital, they can do the things they love, I don't think there's anyone that can say that's bad for them. But I think the problem is a lot of people will reach for HRT without optimizing their light environment, without optimizing their movement and their diet. And so in those cases, I would say, let's check all these other foundational boxes first, without optimizing their light environment, without optimizing their movement and their diet. And so in those cases, I would say, let's check all these other foundational boxes first, make sure they're sleeping, make sure they're getting morning light and getting some midday

light and getting their grounding in and eating seasonally. And if they're doing all these things and they're still not feeling quite right, adding in some HRT at appropriate doses, I think is fine. It's totally good. But waiting as long as possible, like holding out as long as possible, I think is fine. It's totally good. But waiting as long as possible, like holding out as long as possible, I think is probably the move to mitigate the risks and optimize for the benefits of it. Thank you so much for your time. They really appreciate it.

You're welcome. This was so fun. Where can people find you and find out more information? Yeah. So I'm primarily active on Instagram. I'm becoming more active on X as well. They can find me at Dr. Alexis Jasmine, J-A-Z-M-Y-N. I'm currently teaching a live course that's a protocols-based course rooted in quantum biology, the light dark water magnetism and across a bunch of different

areas, gut health and hormones and cognition, physical performance and a whole bunch of other areas. So that's currently live. I also have an ebook that's like the best place for newbies to start. It outlines all the basic science and action items for this light, dark water, and magnetism foundation of health. That is basically what we would call quantum biology and optimizing the quantum biology of our biology and of our bodies. And so that's a really good place for any new people to start. I've even had like middle schoolers read it. I had a sixth grader interview me for a class project on it. Like it's available, accessible rather to anybody. It's not like there's a lot of jargon and overly scientific phrasing and things like that. So I think it's a very good place for people to

kind of enter into this world, which can be very overwhelming if you don't have a scientific background, I would say. So that's the number one place to start. If they want more specific suggestions and more science, then definitely join the course. It's going to be also available as like an evergreen after the fact. So that's going to be available. And then I'm pretty open in my DMs right now. I'm almost at a point where I can't answer everybody, but I'm holding out as long as I can. And I post a ton in my stories, lots of different research articles. I post on my wall too, interesting things that people can learn and implement into their day-to-day lives. So that's primarily where people can find me. And yeah, I'm happy to answer any questions and just try to get

the word out on this because I think there's such a major focus on diet and exercise, which are important, but I don't consider them the foundation of the pyramid because if we don't have healthy mitochondria, we can't properly process the nutrients we're consuming or engage in the exercise that's going to actually support us. So I think by focusing on optimizing these basic aspects of our light environment in particular and getting that dark darkness at night, that it just starts to revolutionize other aspects of our life. And so I think we just need to kind of get the word out, especially in the face of like

the fluorescent, rather the incandescent bulb bands that are going into full effect in 2028, which is ridiculous when you learn that fluorescent bulbs are one of the last sources of infrared light in the indoor environment. So we really need to reverse course on that and just start to get people to not fear-monger the sun as much because there's just so much focus on the risks of sun exposure, but there's no focus on the benefits. Just briefly, we didn't talk about the known published benefits of getting chronic daily sun exposure, but they include protection against cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, multiple cancer types including melanoma, colon, prostate, breast, and blood cancers, protection against

neurodegeneration and diabetes. Like all of the top issues that we're facing societally can be protected against by getting regular daily sun exposure. And I think we just need to get that word out so that more people can embrace nature and regain their health. Is your hair a blessing or a burden? My hair? Yeah, I love it. I used to hate it. I used to like keep it straight all the time and I love it. Hopefully we do a part two at some point because there is a lot we can talk about. This is amazing.

Thank you. Oh yeah, we could go for hours. So I would love to come back. Yeah. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. Appreciate it. You too.

Thank you.