Mark Bell's Power Project - Sleep, Peptides & the Gut Health | Joel Green Explains What Actually Moves the Needle

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

In this episode, we go deep on the real drivers of aging, performance, and long-term health.We break down why poor sleep becomes exponentially more damaging as you age, how oxygen saturation impacts recovery, what “sleep burden” actually means, and why tracking O2 might be one of the most important metrics after 50.We discuss senolytic cells, mitochondrial function, hyperbaric oxygen, creatine and energy substrates, and why blindly experimenting with peptides can be riskier than people think.We also dive into gut health — restoring Bifidobacteria and Akkermansia, rhythmic pulsing vs daily supplementation, breast milk components, resistant starch, and how microbiome balance affects immunity, fat loss, and inflammation.Follow Joel Green here:https://linktr.ee/joelgreene?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bioSpecial perks for our listeners below!🥩 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/TRT/PEPTIDES! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com and use code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off Self-Service Labs and Guided Optimization®.🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 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🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!

There's the pop culture belief system, and then there's the research. I'm not in this bucket of saying the only way we can know truth is the research. I don't buy into that. Common sense tells us a lot. Dairy increases inactive fat loss. Dairy speeds that up. Dairy actually prevents weight regained. You could take any one macro to zero, and you'll get fat loss.

Or peptides have become a religion is like, how dare you speak against peptides? The number one thing you have to be tracking is you get around, you know, 50-ish is you've got to track your O2 sat. After poor night's sleep, the reason you feel like, almost feel out of breath? is because the body's trying to catch up. It's trying to make the ATP that you didn't make while you were sleeping. Remember the old Metrix bars? And the steel bar?

How about the steel bar? I don't remember that one. Oh, come on. Chocolate covered. I mean, they were talking about like 1992 maybe. Oh gosh, man. It was American Eagle, the company. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. What I remember is, the protein sources were so bad back then. Like, I used to, especially weeders, like I used to buy their protein, and it would nearly explode my stomach. I remember, I think it was Champion nutrition, had heavy weight gainer 900 or something. Champion was, they were. They were unbelievable. They were 15 years ahead. They were way ahead.

But their heavy weight gainer killed my stomach. Did it? Yeah. That was brutal one. Do you remember their Metabolol 2? Mm. That was, so Metabolal 2 had MCTs in it. And they were the first guys to figure that out.

Wow. That MCTs were a thing. Oh, I thought it was Perillo. I don't know. I'm not sure my gates. John Perillo. But like the first commercial, I mean, I was just a fanboy nerd. So I was just trying stuff around that time.

The first guys that I saw that stuck stuff into anything was champion with the Metabol L2, which was the forerunner of Metrax. So Metrex, Metrex came out as the first meal replaced. meant before that there was this whole thing on quote unquote metabolic optimizers and the metal and so there was that you might need to scoot that way a little bit just so you're a little bit more on the care you do you remember Chris Duffy yeah okay that dude was huge yeah right remember that guy um he did a contest on just metrics and water oh shit yeah and um he uh wouldn't experiment yeah yeah that original metrics thing i remember it would like it would break the bottles it would

break my uh my blender my blender would like start smoking smoking almost from it because it was so thick. Oh yeah, yeah. Mix it up with like water and ice. And then the blender would start out like normal, but then once it kind of took whatever was in there, those plastics or whatever in there that would expand. The blender would like bra and just have the bubble up with giant bubbles.

Like, what's going on in there? That's, I... The science experiment. They had that guargum and they had multidextrin in there. And so it formed that like super thick, pasty stuff, like whatever it was. And that stuff plugged my, plug my, plug my poop shoot up. Like I, I was on a, I was in sales at the time. And I was on a sales call.

And I was with a girl who was on, and I'm like, I got to go to the bathroom. And I was in the bathroom. I was about 45 minutes in there and just like, nothing coming. She sent someone in to look over the thing out. And I've got like sweat dripping down. I'm like, women. I need some more time. I had a, I had a protein shake.

I'm sorry. Yeah, that was crazy. Super brutal. I wanted to ask you about, I heard some recent things about glyphosates and I've heard some people talking about gluten allergies and how, you know, the glyphosate is maybe a, or the gluten allergy is like a cover-up for glyphosates. I don't know. What are some of your thoughts about, you know, things like that?

Do you think that something like glyphosates that are used on some plants and things like that is a much more harmful thing than the gluten? And is gluten like a real? Gluten allergy is a real, is it a real thing? It is, but it's, which blows my mind, it seems to be correctable through just bifidobacteria levels for the most part, for most people. I'm not saying like, I'm not saying it's a cure.

I'm not giving medical advice. I'm just saying that I've seen enough people come and correct their bifidal bacteria levels and they seem to no longer have gluten issues. It's not 100% like anything else. I would rank the glyphosphate way worse in terms of like a problem because it's you know it's not it's not just plant foods it's the groundwater the animals everything's got it everything's got the glyphosphate in it and I've been thinking a long time on like what

happened you know why are people so universally fat now and it's not just people it's all mammals all species are getting fatter so so that is really alarming and I've been trying to figure out like what do what I have some theories but um even a species that we're not feeding yeah just stuff in the wild everything's getting fatter um and goes back to like when we've looked at people in the 70s you know everybody was skinny going to like rock concerts and no t-shirts and you can go pull up pictures on the web and everybody's skinny and um it seemed to be about the mid 80s early 90s you started to see it creep up and I so I think glyphosphate is a component I don't think it's the only thing, but it's definitely in the mix. How, like, what kind of impact is it having

on our body? Well, I think it's a range of effects. Um, gut dyspiosis, uh, oncogenic, cancer promoter. I mean, it's not good at all. Does it does it have potential like change our DNA or like things of that nature or? That's a good one. I don't, I don't know if it could cause reverse transcription. I don't think that it could, but I could be wrong. I might be wrong on that. But it's just, it is something that just shouldn't be out there. You know, it just shouldn't be in nature. It shouldn't be in the mix.

Yeah, it's pretty bad. I know that you're a fan of dairy, and I have a really off the beaten wall, off the beaten path question to ask you. I've heard that the Chinese have cows that produce human milk. Have you heard about this before? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you believe that's a real thing?

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Doesn't surprise me. I mean the least. What are some of your thoughts on milk? Like why do you think milk is advantageous for us? And I kind of think, when I think about milk, I'm sometimes like, who is the first

guy that tried this? Like, hey, come try this milk from a goat or whatever. And then other people were like, yeah, sounds like a good idea. Like it seems like a weird thing to even try. But I guess you're trying to, what, utilize the whole animal. So it's understandable, I guess. Yeah, that's a good one. I don't know. You know, I've been a fan of, I've never changed. I've always been a fan of dairy going back to the mid-2000s. It's just because if you look at the research on it, there's the pop culture belief system and then there's the research. And I'm not in this bucket of saying the only way we can know truth is the research. I don't buy into that. I think that common sense tells us a lot, you know, equally so. But you can't ignore, you know, just the sheer bulk of evidence showing all the benefits. beneficial effects of dairy.

Like it's it's a lot of it is counterintuitive. So dairy increases when you're in caloric deficits inactive fat loss dairy speeds that up. Dairy actually prevents weight regain. Dairy causes calcium soaps to form in the guts. You pass more fats through. Depending on the the amount and type of dairy in terms of the fat, you know, it can be an anti-inflammatory. I mean it just it's it's it stimulates the the, the The Sincretins, the GLP-1s, GIPs. I mean, it's just, it really has a ton of benefits

and it has a place in the human diet. It's one of the best ways to stimulate the phythodacteria, which tells you a lot. So the way you set the human immune system is through mother's milk. And dairy is a close analog, so it can play a role in setting the human immune system. A lot of what happens with food in general nowadays

is a conflation problem. So all food comes in grades, you have like low grade, low tier grade food, you know, and then you have really high grade stuff. And so what you can see with all low grades of food, it doesn't matter if it's meat, doesn't matter if it's dairy, it doesn't matter if it's plants. All the low tier stuff, you know,

can potentially present issues where it's not the same with the high tier stuff. And so we see this big conflation where people think about dairy and they just associate everything with the low grade dairy, you know, that's, you know, this is paste from cows fed, who knows what, and,

blah, blah, blah. And then when you find the higher tiers, the higher grades, we really don't see those types of things to the degree that you weigh with the lower tier. So I think a lot of it with dairy is a conflation issue, but in terms of like, it's role in human health. I think it absolutely has a place. Do you think it might be important for consumers

on that same note of quality? Is it important for consumers to maybe kind of shop locally and try to know where their milk comes from? So there's some of these, you know, factory farming practices. Because I mean, I imagine they're doping these cows up with all kinds of stuff to really produce these large amounts of milk. Yeah.

And then I don't really know what the effects of that are, but it's probably not, maybe it doesn't have the best outcomes. Totally. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, you know this. You live in Davis. Like the closer you can get to what's going on, the better for sure. I mean, the stuff that is going into cows feed now, like terrifies me.

I mean, you know, it's, you've got rectopamine. What's that? I don't know if I've ever heard that. It's a synthetic adrenaline. I think bodybuilders used to use it. I probably still do, but it's a synthetic adrenaline. And they give it to, it's a beta adrenogenic stimulator. And they give it to cows to just to get a better body composition out of the cows.

And then it concentrates in the organs. So it concentrates in the liver, concentrates in the kidneys. And so you can get some residual ractopamine just through that. A large amount of Trenbolone in cows as well, right? I don't know about that one. Yeah. Is that true? Maybe Ryan can look it up a little bit, but I think I've heard that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 or 90% of the cattle are given Trenblone.

Why isn't everybody yoked? Yeah, how come these cows aren't coming in in better shape? Wow. But I think maybe because they're offseason, they're off season and go, maybe they didn't do their cardio. Yeah. You know, maybe that's some of it.

Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting, you know, I personally like dairy a lot, but I hear a lot of stuff about it, you know, and then sometimes you're like, do I get raw? Do I get grass fed, grass finished? What do you think people should do?

Just try to do the best they can that goes along with their beliefs? I think high-end one is just, you know, the notion of like balance, like probably should have some in the diet. You know, it doesn't mean you have to kill it and overdo it, but some is better than, I think on a U-shaped curve, you're going to be better off with some. And the next is just the quality. Like so, you should aim for the highest quality that you can find, like, you know, grass-fed. And, you know, there's several levels above that.

And then if you want to, you know, really go nuts, then you get into all the, you know, the differences between holsting cattle and then other types of cattle. to that and that's a I mean I think I talked about this once with you it's it's a it's a pretty interesting story like the the way that the whole stains were bred for milk production the milk that you get is very different from what you get in other cows it's because they were bred like a normal dairy cow is going to make like maybe a gallon or two a milk a day and these whole stains are bred to do like 10 gallons so all the nutrients are very different so you can go down that rabbit hole and you know but I just think like getting some in the diet's going to be good

and then trying to aim for good quality is a big deal and find out how much trend these guys are taken Ryan is that right I knew they weren't natural wow is that right so one more question can you find out if that is if that is transmissible through yeah I hope so oh wait are we know It's probably not good. Through milk or through meat? Oh, let's see. Yeah. Residues?

Yeah, does it get? Yeah. I mean, it must a little bit, right? Because what do they say? Like if people are using cream, testosterone cream, that it could affect other people in the home and things like that? Have you heard, you must have heard that before? If somebody's using like a testosterone cream and then they're getting and they have, you know, their wife and kids and so forth, they're not like washing their hands after they use testosterone. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's how delicate some people think that some of these things can be sometimes. Or the receipts, you know, you've heard the receipts having the, I don't know what's in the receipt, but there's something in the ink of the receipt that's supposed to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just, I don't know, the more that we do this stuff, the toxic fishbowl. Weirder, this. So I saw salmon recently. They say it's most toxic, farmed salmon, the most toxic food on the planet.

Wouldn't doubt. I mean, it's transgenic, so it's got spider. DNA in it. It's got two or three types of DNA in it that are mixed. And nobody knows what's the long term from that? I've heard recently too that cheese has like RNA in it. Have you heard that? You're talking about the rennet? I believe so. Yeah, the GMO rennet. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I sent you a link to it the other day. Yeah. Because you were saying maybe there's not as much of that as I think it's kind of slightly overblown. It's it is a real. It is a real thing, but I was at the, do you ever go to the natural product show?

No. I went, you should come this year. I'll check it out. It's in March. Yeah. It's insane. I mean, it's like 10 football fields worth of, like, everything's essential. Everything here.

Really? Everything? But I talked to a guy that runs a big, big farm. You'd know the name if I told it to you. I think it was Applegate maybe or one of those. I forgot. Don't hold me to it. Yeah, they have the bacon and all that stuff.

Yeah. But they do cheese. And I asked him about that. And he said, no, no, we make sure that we make sure that we, and on GMO rennet and then I asked quite a few guys and they made sure that they didn't use it so I don't know if that's just what they told me but it's out there but I don't think it's is maybe it's prevalent like in you know you go to a pizza joint and but I think you can avoid it I know it's a tough question and I know it's like I guess it depends on how far back we go

but I mean what what is the human diet and I understand like okay well It might depend on where we were in our culture and where people lived and so on. But I've heard you talk about people eating large amounts of like prebiotic fibers, getting them from root sources and like kind of almost basically chewing on what sounds like like roots from the ground and things like that. What do you think is the, what kind of got us here? Like how did we survive? What did people used to eat?

Well, it's definitely regionally specific. Like it depends a lot on latitude lines, I think, of where your ancestors are from. And then there can be some genetic predispositions towards, you know, foods that are in that region for sure. I think that's definitely a thing. But generally speaking, I think most – and I've looked also for my last book, I spent a lot of time in the research looking at ancestral diets, looking at all kinds of research on, you know, what people ate and what they used to eat. And the through line is, generally speaking, they had pretty diverse diets between plant matter and animal matter. They were pretty well balanced between them.

And when you look at like super healthy indigenous populations, there does seem to be a through line. And I know a lot of the carnivore guys would disagree with this, but that's okay. That can be whatever. We can debate that one until we're dead. there does seem to be like roughly 50, 60% like kind of, you know, fibrous carbs, kind of the insulin sensitizing carbs. And then usually roughly 30% protein, 20% fat, 7 to 11% saturated fat. Those numbers seem to hold when I've looked at like different populations.

And then there's always like the skewed, what about the mammoth hunters or what about like, you know, the, you know, somebody always comes up with that one like you know but but just generally speaking um another one i heard too was like well the the hong kong diet the hong kong people you know they they live forever and they you know and so i went and looked it i went and broke that down by percentages and it pretty much followed that it pretty much stuck to those ratios the percentages again it's roughly they were eating roughly 50 60 percent carbohydrate from you know like kind of healthy sources And they vary, depending on where you're at. Like in Hong Kong, it's a lot of rice, a lot of like stuff like that.

But roughly 30% protein, 20% fat, 7 to 11% saturated fat in there. That kind of seemed to be a thing. And then when I looked at longevity studies of who lives the longest, generally that seems to also be the thing. There seems to be this magic ratio of carbohydrate. And it's somewhere right around 57 to high 60s that seems to confirm maximum. And that's like that's bodybuilders. talking about that forever. It's Mike Menser, right? I think our lights are going out again.

Yeah, Mike Menser, I think they'll come back. There we go. Yeah, Mike Menser talked about some of that ratio that you're talking about. And maybe you would skew that ratio a little bit more for bodybuilding, especially as you got closer to a competition, you'd probably ramp the carbs up and bring the fats down even lower. Yeah, that's a really good point too. It gets to like stuff that people knew going back into the 70s that, you know, you wasn't today it wasn't codified so it wasn't like yeah we already know that you know but like Mensner used to talk about something really profound which gets to the sugar diet and he used to say basically you could take any one macro to zero and you'll get fat loss okay so we we know that's true

for like fat like if you take fat to zero on your high protein high carbs yeah you're going to lose fat we know that's true for carbs take protein high take fat high you're going to lose yeah if you bring fats down really low, you're going to get really lean. And you're probably lose weight pretty quickly. Very fast. Anyone that's thinking about trying that, like, please pay attention. You can't do that very long. We're talking about just a couple days. You got like six days, max. I did that. And I got to like seven days and I couldn't think straight. And I was just mean. And like my wife was like, you're going off that like today. Yeah. Oh yeah. Because you can't think. Now that might not be a bad strategy to maybe do that for a certain amount of

hours, like to do that for half a day, just not eat any fat grams, right? And maybe just have kind of protein and carbs and then go about your normal day later on. Or maybe have a day where you're like, you know what, I'm just going to just chop the fat out completely on this particular day. Do you think practices like that or? Yeah, I think it's decent ways for somebody to try to stay lean. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

I think just getting back to Minceners point, which is just you can take protein low, to zero and you're gonna lose fat, which most people would be like, nah, that's, dude, that's it down, don't go that rough. Yeah, it is true. So any macro taken down will drop you fat. And then you can just kind of rotate those different practices in here and there periodically and it just helps you stay lean. And it's not a bad idea to do.

Something I've noticed and it's a truth that nobody wants to hear. But in my opinion, you have to lower two macronutrients quite a bit to really be burning fat. That works too. Yeah. And you can mix them up. Yeah. So you can- You can toggle them.

Yeah. So you're not getting like adverse negative effects. You can bring the fats up and the carbs down and so on. You can kind of, you know, titrate that around it. And now, you know, now that we have learned some more stuff about protein, I think that, I think the idea of one gram of protein per pound of body weight when somebody's like within a decent body fat rate. not talking about someone that weighs 500 pounds or something like that, but I think one gram per pound of body weight was a decent suggestion. I just think it's really, it's, in my opinion, it's way overkill. I could understand doing it for periods of time. I did it for many years.

You mean it's too much? Yeah, I probably still, I probably still end up there just out of like training myself to kind of eat that way and being surrounded by everything that has like protein in it these days, but I think you go one gram maybe per pound of lean muscle tissue is probably a little bit more along the lines of what people should be shooting for. And then I would even say that I still think that you can probably make progress and do quite well with even less than that. Interesting. Interesting.

I wouldn't think that I'll hear that from you. Interesting. Wow. Where do you think that now you wind up at on average? You know, I weigh about 220 and I think, you know, maybe like, maybe per day it probably averages out still where I'm still getting like 180 to 200 grams of protein. Okay, so you're still eating a lot of protein. I'm just saying like I don't think the numbers that we were initially thinking, I think

there were a little bit on the higher hand. Oh, interesting. And maybe it didn't need to be launched up, you know, quite that high. I heard Dorian Yates say something recently about his competing days where... Now, that's a different scenario. I think when somebody is... So I take steroids. I'm on TRT.

And people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you're on your cycling or whatever. Whatever people want to say. But I take testosterone. And when you take testosterone, we know that your protein synthesis is going to be better. That's different than when you're competing in bodybuilding or when I was competing in powerlifting. I do think that you have more access to that protein. My understanding is you're basically working on muscle protein breakdown and muscle protein replenishment constantly back and forth between eating and between training. and that is causing muscle protein synthesis.

But what also can cause muscle protein synthesis is steroids. And when you take a lot of steroids and you mix that with a lot of protein and the breaking down of protein, I think you end up with a, you end up in a scenario in a situation where you can grow abnormally large. That makes sense, yeah. I think what Dorian was saying is that he used carbohydrates as his lever. So he kept his protein right around a certain level, fat right out of a certain level, fat right at a certain level. And then he just, to get big, he would increase his carbs.

To get lean, he would decrease his carbs. And for him, that was a simple lever that worked really well, which I could totally, totally see that working. I don't know, I would be curious, like, was someone not on steroids over time multiple years, if that would still work the same? I'm not saying I know the answer, but I would be curious to see. For you, you haven't decided to go that route.

You haven't used steroids. or you have used some performance enhancement. I think we've talked about like BPC and maybe a couple things like that, right? I've used, I've used, well, BPC 157, TB 500. Any success with those? Did you feel like they did anything for you? They don't do anything anymore,

but the first couple of years they were mind-boggling. Oh, I saw your, mind-boggling. That post was legendary. The post that you did, it's probably about eight months ago or so. where you talked about like this worked but only for this much time. Oh yeah. This worked but only for this much time. Yeah.

I was like, oh my God, that is really well said because I think that defining, you know, to say something works or to say something worked, I don't think, I don't think we define it. I think we end up leaving it very vague. Like, oh, I did that and it worked. And it's like, well, okay, if it worked, how come you're not still doing it? Yeah. I know a lot of people that tell me about things they've done for pay. and things they've done for this or that injury,

but they're still in a lot of pain or things that they've taken for sleep. Like, oh, it works great. And I'm like, you just told me that you still have trouble sleeping. So I think trying to define what someone means by works, and I thought you did a great job because you said, this worked this way,

the first time I did it, when I went back to it, didn't do shit. That pissed so many people off because I insulted their religious totem, which was like, we know peptides were on a shot. you know and I had to come back like I'm saying that it worked worked fast-dense worked I'm just in year 10 now and it doesn't work at all for me anymore okay so you would expect that with anything I had a I've had several conversations about what

about the people that are older than us we got to respect that like you've been through it I don't know if that plays into anything as people like man but you know I've talked with I've talked with several doctors at length just behind the scenes and what they'll tell you is that yeah most drugs don't work after about five years it just stops working and we need something new so I just think that's a truism of the body just adapts to stuff but for me that's the training oh yeah totally well that's that's the easiest first five to seven years of training yeah it's just incredible beautiful results and then and you

could see it too like people how much have people really changed yeah people who are new to training you know and he really go all in. They get these incredible pops in the muscle bellies. You know, it's just a, there's a height to the muscle belly, there's just sort of a fullness to it, and then you track them down the line and it just the muscles look different because it's not responding the way that it was initially. So that's a thing too. But yeah, I've used that. I've used, I've done recently in the last year I did sloop and I combined that with MK67. So I think that's an interesting one to

talk about SLU P 332. Yeah. This is how crazy the peptide, the peptide industry and the peptide stuff is. That went from 100 micrograms to 100 milligrams, nearly overnight. Yeah. Yeah. And I had some friends that were like, hey man, don't don't don't, don't mess, don't mess with this. And I was like, oh, actually that, I'm glad you sent me that because I was actually hearing a lot of good things. and I wanted to try it. And like if you ever try it, make sure you only get the 100 MCG, not milligrams. And man, I just, I feel bad that there's,

there's just so many of these compounds out there and they're so easy to get. I'd hate to see people get hurt from. I mean, all people are trying to do is they're just trying to exercise a little bit better, feel a little bit better. Maybe cosmetically they want to look a little bit better. And then here they are having something that could potentially cause some really serious harm.

Yeah, in general, I don't use peptides just in general as a general thing. I don't use them for that reason because we just don't know. I mean, you don't know. You have no idea really what you're taking or what the long-term effects are. These rejected drugs that have been sitting around for a long time and been researched quite a bit. But for some reason, somebody decided to stop researching it. And then, of course, what's always sold to us is like, oh, Big Pharma doesn't want you to know

because this is gonna save your life. Yeah, yeah. If you try MOTC or whatever, the different ones are. Anyway. Well, those, so the mitochondrial peptides really scare me. So I wanna just say, you know, like I've tried, like to try something means like I'll, you know, I'll try it, I might try it for, you know, a week, two weeks,

and then I'll, okay, that's what that's like, and then I'll go out. Because then I just don't, on a regular basis, want to do peptides because I don't want to like be, 20 years down the road and go, oh yeah, we've discovered these give cancer. Oh my gosh, we didn't know that. Sorry. Whoops.

But and that's hard for people to digest going to go like, oh, you've tried something. It means you're using it. No, I'm not. I've tried it. But I don't, in general, and we're in this, we're in this thing right now where peptides have become a religion is like, how dare you speak against peptides? How dare you speak against peptides? You know, but I think that it's kind of nuanced.

I think that there are some that merit like, okay, like GHKC, you, GHK, I think that makes a good case. I think if you're new to BPC and you have injuries, it makes a really good case, you know, because I had a shoulder injury that BPC completely healed the first time around. I've seen it firsthand where even saline solution has worked for people. Really? Just shooting.

Could you believe it? Salt, you know, and water. It makes sense, though. That actually makes sense. Yeah, well, so that was utilized at Westside Barbell quite frequently. The guys would be like, hey, can you shoot me up? and just shooting people up with saline solution. And if you kind of think about it,

it seems really dumb and it seems very meatheadish. And of course it is. It's actually quite scientific. But yeah, it does have a little science to it. And if you just kind of think of acupuncture, like okay, put in a needle in an area, dry needling, putting needles in an area that's injured. And then now you're also dumping some solution in there,

causing a little bit of pressure, a little bit of swelling. And now maybe you'll get more, I guess the idea is you might get more blood flow to the area. Yeah, that and just the localized salt helps. So vitamin D and myostatin, or vitamin D and salt are your natural myostatin inhibitors just naturally. So that combination together, just by itself, because cell volume has a lot to do with cell growth. And so just by getting cell volume up like you do with saline and then a little bit of vitamin D in the picture and you're actually activating growth by doing that. You know, it's not a drug. But, you know,

anybody can prove this to themselves just just do some salt water prior to a workout you know we have water plus and just like wow okay that works you know but um so yeah sly pv um i have i'm currently actually right now the last week taking a c 262 um what's that one ac 262 it's kind of a testosterone mimic in a way um it's making me break out though and um and it and it does it makes my hair fall out so I think it's not going to be something I, I just feel like I, um, it's a good thing you got a thick head of hair. Well, it's, um, so you can afford to, you can afford to lose some. Yeah, well, I'd, I, all the name of being jacked. Come on, let's go.

Jackton, Dan. Yeah, next time I see it, you're going to be like huge and a giant bald spot. Yeah, right. Yeah, that scares me. Well, uh, uh, so that, so that, so that, um, but yeah, it's, it kind of makes me nervous. So I think I'm, I was going to go on TRT right about 60, because, uh, There's a wave of aging that hits right about it hit me at 58 like a truck like a truck and along with that what happened was I started I'd never had sleep apnea or snoring I got I got these snoring issues I got these sleep apnea issues it was really really a big deal and I finally got it fixed through some mouthpiece devices that I had and all that but I was really feeling it right about 60s so I started doing hyperbaric to counter mouthpiece device I got to stop you just for a second was this something they had to get from like an orthodontist you're getting you? Yeah, okay, so I went through the same procedure and I have one and I don't love wearing it all the time, but it's effective. Does it, a jaw ad dancer? Yeah, it kind of pulls my bottom to fall, like forward a little bit. And it causes this crazy suction for my tongue to stick to the roof of my mouth.

Yeah. It's weird because when I wear it, I'm like, there's got to be a better solution to this damn giant mouthpiece being so big. There's several now. Yeah, that's a, the funny thing about that too is that this whole area. of this, like this one thing will sink the whole ship, the whole ship of aging. Like, here we go. It's somewhere a degree into that. It's pretty cool.

I'll just wait. But, um, come on, Pete. You think that those sleep devices, you think they could really. It's life-vaulting. Life-alt, I mean, it's the number one thing. The number one thing. Have you tracked, or do you track stuff? I go in and out of tracking it.

The number one thing you have to be tracking as you get around, you know, 50-ishers, you've got to track your O2 sat. I first started hearing about transcriptions from Thomas to Lauer. Yep. And, you know, Thomas is somebody that's an animal with working out. You got a chance to work out with him. I worked out with him. And he's kind of always on the front lines of like, you know, finding out about these new companies that have cool things. But I didn't really realize that proscriptions was the first company to put out methylene blue.

And now look at methylene blue. It's so popular. It's everywhere. It's one of those things. If you guys listen to this podcast, you know, I'm very iffy with the supplements that I take. Because there's a lot of shady stuff out there. You've got to be careful. The great thing about transcriptions is that when people want to get methylety blue, usually they'll go on Amazon.

They're going on there on these other sites. It's not third-party testing. It's not dosed. A lot of people end up with toxicity from the blue that they get because there's no testing of it. Transcriptions, they have third-party testing for their products. It's a dose so you know easily what exact dose of the product. methylene blue you're getting in each trokey. So you're not making some type of mistake. There's not going to be anything in it. It's safe. You can have it dissolve and you can turn your whole world blue if you

want or you can just swallow it. They have two different types of methylene blue. They have one that is, I believe, dose at 16 milligrams and they have another one that's dose at 50 milligrams. So make sure you check the milligrams. I don't recommend anybody start at 50 milligrams, but the 16, I feel, is very safe. You can also score the trokeys and you can break. come up into smaller bits. Yeah, so I do. And in addition to that, on top of the methylene blue, they have a lot of other great products of stuff as well.

They got stuff for sleep. They got stuff for calming down, all kinds of things. I got to say, I use it about two or three times a week. I use it before Jiu-Jitsu. And the cool thing that I've noticed, and I've paid attention to this over the past few months, is that after sessions, I don't feel as tired. So it's almost like I've become more efficient with my, with just the way I use my body. in these hard sessions of grappling.

And it's like, cool, that means that, I mean, I could go for longer if I wanted to, and my recovery is better affected. It's pretty great. I know Dr. Scott, sure, we had him on the podcast, and he talked quite a bit about how he recommends methylene blue to a lot of the athletes that he works with. And they're seeing some profound impacts. And one of the things I've heard about it is that it can enhance red light.

So those are you doing red light therapy, or those of you that have some opportunities to get out into some good sunlight. it might be a good idea to try some methylene blue before you go out on your walk or run outside or whatever activity is that you're going to do outside. And this stuff is great, but please. First off, they have stuff for staying calm. They have stuff for sleep.

But remember, this stuff isn't a substitution for sleep. This isn't a substitution for taking care of nutrition. This is supposed to be an add-on to all the things that we already should be doing, and it's going to make things so much better if you're doing everything else too. And I think this is just a little different, too, than just adding some magnesium to your diet.

I think this is a little different than, you know, treat these things appropriately. Make sure you do some of your own research, but. Oh, if you're taking medications. It's SSRIs. You better talk to your doctor first. Don't, don't be popping these things. And if you're taking any medications at all, it would be good to double triple, quadruple check and make sure that you're safe.

Transcriptions has a lot of great things that you need. So go and check out their website when you have the opportunity. Strength is never weakness, weakness, weakness, and catch you guys later. At night, you have to track that. up in the morning and just a little finger thing? No, no, no, no. It's just, you just, you just wear a ring, like the well you ring. That's the one the doctors use. And then it'll, the reports are fantastic.

What's a well you ring? It's just a little oxygen sensor ring. Okay. And it's the one the MDs use when they give you sleep tests. It's cheap. It's like 150 bucks. And its reports are terrific. So it shows you all your desaturation events and it shows you your average O2 sat. And if there was like one thing that's going to, like I would say the most important thing, that's it. What should those numbers look like? As high as possible. Like, you want that to be in the mid to high 90s. And if you're seeing desaturation events below 91, that's, that's, that's, that's catastrophic. I mean, that is catastrophic. A lot,

a lot of it probably for your brain, huh? Your brain's not healing, right? It's not everything. It's brain, it's aging. Like, I started having these desaturation events around 58, and I mean, it just, I think I probably aged like five years and one year. Does that feel like, like when you wake up, does that sort of feel like you're not breathing almost? You ever have that feeling from like a poor night of sleep? It's, well, so that's a good point. It's more that you're, what you, you feel like you, you almost feel like you, you you need to oxygenate, like you're like, like you just woke up, but you need to oxygenate.

And it gets, this gets into what I call sleep burden. And so if you look at what has to happen during sleep, What has to happen during sleep is the immune system has to do a whole bunch of work driving repair in the body. And if the immune system is burdened with a whole bunch of stuff that comes from age, it could be scented cellulitic cells, could be inflammation, could be all kinds of things, lower energy production. The raw material for that is ATP.

And that's why creatine helps sleep because you're actually helping phosphate donation. So you have more so the lungs have to work less hard. The cardiovascular system has to work less hard. So when you're sleeping, the number one thing is oxygen to create ATP to create all of the molecular machines needed to do the repair. And so as you get older, cardiovascular efficiency goes downhill, the L2 max goes downhill. You are making less raw material, it's called money. Making less money to pay for all the cellular machines, the immune cells and everything

that you need. So after a poor night's sleep, the The reason you feel like, almost feel out of breath, is because the body's trying to catch up. It's trying to make the ATP that you didn't make while you were sleeping. And so that's even lends itself into like there's actually some quick fixes for that. So it's like creatine. After a poor night's sleep, you want to mainline creatine, you want to mainline pyruvate,

all these energy substrates that catch the gap up, ribos, all these things that provide the raw substrate to make. old school supplements right there too yeah well that had been so I did have post like in 2021 ribos is like a sugar almost right it is a sugar yeah but it has a again going back to sugar still immune cells ribos has a really interesting really interesting impact on mitochondrial energy level so they actually use it for chronic fatigue syndrome so people have issues the chronic fatigue you feed them ribos it's amazing all the stuff works but if you load those substrates up after a poor night sleep, then you've got creatine, you have pyruvate, you have ribos, you have all this

stuff. You're actually helping relieve sleep burden in a way because the job of the cardiovascular system to create all this ATP from bringing in oxygen, you're kind of cheating and front-loading or back-loading a lot of it. It's really interesting stuff. Okay, I mentioned MOTC, and you ended up, you said that you're a little scared of some of these mitochondrial peptides. Yeah. What are some of the concerns people should be having? So we really don't understand how the mitochondria work. That's the first thing. Okay.

Like, you will find people that will confidently, authoritatively, like confidence goes up here and they're telling you how the mitochondria work, you know, we do not 100% understand how they work. And they're so ridiculously complex that, you know, the idea, and they are so foundational to everything, that the idea that we can come in and tweak those is, should be scary. It should be scary to anybody. I mean, just in the last few years, the morphology of the mitochondria has been completely rethought.

Like we thought they were these little M&M bubbles, you know, and now that's completely overturned. So if you just go and look at the mitochondria research over the last few years, it's the history of, oh, we didn't know that, but we thought we knew everything. All right. So just that alone for me makes me like, you know, and I've tried sloop and it does work. I also, and I've heard this a lot, made me break out in hives. I've heard this from a lot of people about peptides. That may be like an anhystamine response or something?

Total histamine response, yeah. Lactopherin completely cured it. But that made me nervous not because of the sloop, but because like, again, you know, you're just, you don't know what's in these things. like you're looking at something with a label on a bottle and just trusting that it's whatever it's supposed to be so so you know there's that and even as much as people know about nutrition and training we don't we don't know what's even going on in our own bodies and how we're going to respond to something oh gosh yeah we're not no I'm not 100% sure no I mean I think do you want to

roll the dice you know do that's something that people need to ask themselves like maybe slow down for a second like is it worth it what you're about to do like just pump the brakes for a minute is it is it worth it yeah and I only speak to my own experience with this but like I've spent a lot of money on peptides and I mean a lot and I haven't there's nothing I would say there's almost nothing that's lasting from it you know that like like still with you like like you talk to man this is this is dangerous territory for me because I'm I'm not like a, you know, I've never used steroids so, and I don't profess to be an expert.

I'm just only commenting based on what I've seen. And what I've seen is I've seen people who did a first round of steroids and it completely transformed them in ways that are mind boggling and never left them. Okay. I've seen a guy just permanently like grow and everything about him changed, you know, from just doing one round. And that was the rest of his life. It was permanently changed from that. I know some people in the same category, some people that are like,

they were kind of undersized. They were like super shy and kind of been bullied. Completely transformed. They took a little bit of stuff and confidence swelled up. The body swelled up and they got... And they were never not the same. They were always that.

So by saying that, I'm not advocating steroids. I can already see this like, Joe Green's advocating steroids. No, I'm not advocating steroids. I've never used steroids. I don't really have a position on them one way or another. You know? You've always been fascinated by them, though, because you love bodybuilding.

Yeah, I think that they're... I think guys like yourself and Ron Penn and are really fascinating to me because I'm just thinking like, why wouldn't these guys do it? Like it'd make any sense to me because I'm just thinking like, hey, it looks like it's a good time. Well, I just, you know, I lived through that era of the 90s where everybody dropped dead. Especially in wrestling, like all the Minnesota boys. You know, like Henning, Hock, like, just all those dudes that dropped dead and they probably had the same supply. and who knows what they were doing.

And now people are dropping dead left and right. So I just think that the interesting thing about that topic is, and you probably know more than me here, I've heard this. I don't know if it's true, but I've heard this. Like with HIV patients, you want to give them anivore,

you want to give them steroids because it just completely ameliorates like all of the bad symptomology of HIV. So that to me is like, okay, that's a really therapeutic case where you've got like obviously some scientists and doctors involved figuring out the right dosage and the right frequency. and so just under the realm of being objective like okay well objectively it seems to me like there

could be a real good use case there that seems to make a lot of sense or maybe even like a 78 year old woman that's just frail maybe taking a little bit of steroids or testosterone in particular or something like that just to kind of you know give them a little bit I'm not even saying I think that's a good practice I'm just proposing it as potential because why not it's going to help with protein muscle synthesis and that's a huge issue for them well see that's a good question though it's it's the use case like what so the question is what would be the use cases where it could make sense I'm not saying it does make sense I'm just saying what would be a use case to study where it could make sense another one might be to counter the waves of aging so you got

these three waves of aging you got one at 60 you got one at 78 and maybe somebody could study that someday like you know like what maybe I don't know what the right one would be maybe it's maybe it's anabar maybe it's something else you know but maybe like the this dose for this amount of time seem to counter this much of the loss from aging you know that would be a good study so i'm just objective i just am curious when it comes to sleep i'd like to kind of go back on that a little bit and we were talking about these mouthpiece devices you were thinking like man if people can figure out a way to get their sleep intact it could really it could really change it could really change everything for them what does i've heard that like one night a bad sleep you know can kind of

mess with your glucose levels and stuff like that. Like how bad is it to not be able to have repeatable good sleep? It depends at the juncture of life. So it's not such a big deal like when you're younger. You know, the body bounces pretty quick and the damage is minimal because you don't have a lot of accrued damage. But like you get around my age, a night of bad sleep is like six months of aging all in one night.

It's catastrophic. It's catastrophic. Yeah. I noticed that for myself, if I only sleep, like two or three hours, you know, only, only kind of out for two or three hours. I will wake up and be really stiff, have pain that I don't normally have chronic pain. I'll have pain, stiffness, tightness. And it's just kind of amazes me because you're like, wow, just that one night of interrupted sleep.

And then the thing I think that's interesting is there's, there's so many things that we can see, and there's so many things that we can feel. And then when we can see something and we can feel something, for some people, those are the only things that work. Those are the only things that make sense is when they actually feel the pain of something they did incorrectly or something that didn't work out the way they wanted it to work out. But what are the things that we're not seeing? You know, when we're not sleeping, what is happening in the human body when we're getting a lot of disrupted sleep and just not able to get the sleep that we need? Well, basic stuff is you're not replenishing your NAD. And then you're creating a snowball problem where less sleep, you make less NAD, and then less NAD.

You get more poor sleep. So it's kind of a feed forward circle. It's not good. But above and beyond that, the real issue to my mind is as we get older, your synolytic cells are increasing. So synolytic cells are cells that have stopped dividing, but they're hyperactive. So they're not dividing, but what they're doing is they're getting bigger. So they get enlarged and then because they're enlarged They're putting out all these inflammatory signals all this inflammatory milieu and then they go into what's called hypermetabolism So that means they go into essentially what you consider almost Warburg metabolism

They hyperconsume glycolysis and sugar and the real cost of that is in the brain So as you're sleeping you have that these these essentially useless cells that are consuming all the substrate needed to make all of the proteins needed to clear out all the gunk in the brain and do all this other work. And so it's like a tax. You have this, the old tax, so to speak, the age tax from these cells and it's taking away all the money that you need to make all of the replenishing stuff, essentially, you know, the immune system and all that stuff.

And that's a massive, massive deal. And along with that, what's happening is the cardiovascular system is not working like it used to, so you're not distributing the raw materials around like you needed to to make the energy. So the net of all of that is just you're aging much faster every night of sleep than you used to. You're just, you know, if you take a 60-year-old and a 20-year-old, and then you just, you know, you could take a bunch of bio measures.

And what you'd see is, well, the 20-year-old barely aged at all, if anything, got younger during sleep. the 65-year-old, you know, by comparison, just age six months in one night. And that's why we go off the cliff. It's one of the big reasons why we go off the cliff with age. And I think what's exciting is it's we're entering into, like I'm 61 now, I could not be more stoked. I am so excited about every day because all I'm thinking right now is like, oh man, this is like a decade of improvement. Like, I'm going to look better at 70.

I'm going to feel better. I'm just like, I'm just looking at improvements and I'm breaking down how I'm going to get them. You know, like, okay, yeah, so then I want to do this. I can do it. And I think I can do this. And I'm not 100% sure how I can get it all, but I'm pretty sure I can get most of it. Right. And so it's this thing of like, now at this age, most people are depressed because it's like,

I'm like, I'm like, nah, no, no, dude, this is a new day. I'm excited every day. Like, oh, I'm going to improve. And it's just tinkering with how to get the improvement. But it's exciting. Yeah, you get the opportunity to kind of work on some of these things, improve these things and then also you know it's kind of face the facts you know things are a little different when you're 20 and 25 years old the way that you can lift the way that you can like run and jump on some

of these things and so it's not like you're it's not like you're trying to just give yourself a pat on the back for no reason but it is a feat when you're able to when you're able just to simply do and participate in some of the things that you used to when you were a kid to me that feels amazing you know to be able to do that. Even just, I did some sprints the other day, and we just got tested on these 10 meters sprints we were doing. I could care less on the time. I could care less on the actual speed.

I was just like, how cool is this that I had this background of lifting these heavy-ass weights from so long ago. I started lifting at 12. I put my body through the ringer doing so many different things. And now, you know, a decade later from a decade or decade and a half, removed from those thousand pounds squats, I'm now sprinting. I'm like, this is awesome. And I also, I stink at it.

Like, I'm getting better, but I stink at it. And I'm excited because I know that I can improve. I know that the area of improvement is great. Well, I don't, and I might be wrong. I don't know, to my mind, I don't know of anyone that's ever gone from those two extremes. So, like, I've seen you at your stream in the power lifting days, you know, like, you know and it's like right oh okay and now where you're at now doing what you're doing now I mean that's like surfing and skiing in California in the same day I mean it's like it's like it's

pretty darn impressive yeah you shouldn't have that altitude shift right it's pretty it's pretty cool and what I've seen with you since you started this it's just fun for me now it's fun well lifting's always been fun your look though has enhanced it's it's a really lean streamlined good I think you look better than you've ever looked. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah. No, I mean it.

It's pretty cool. I'll take the compliment. As we're talking about sleep, you developed a protocol called super sleep. Yeah. What's super sleep about? Initially, it was really just about treating sleep as a job. That's what it was about. Like when you absolutely, the old American Express absolutely positively has to have to deliver

overnight so when you absolutely have to get a great night's sleep and I mean there's nothing tricky it was just stacking a bunch of things one on top the other and I recently heard another big influencer who'd swipe that from me in a thing going oh I have to try to my job it's like gee dude knock it off but um what I've added to that now you gotta make it a priority you gotta like sweep a couple things to the side you got to get rid of a couple your bad habits right and you got to dedicate yourself saying I'm gonna do my best to go to bed at this time and do my best to try to wake up around this time.

You have to get really serious every now and then. Like you just, you have to really take sleep serious and make sure you're getting, you know, really restorative sleep in. Of late, I've been breaking it down a lot more scientific and looking at the body's burden that it has to, has to, the work the body has to do during sleep. And so that gets really interesting because it's quite fixable. One example is autophagy.

So as we get older, There's more of a burden to do autophagy, but the body's less efficient at it. It doesn't do it as well, particularly in certain tissues. And there's some easy fixes. So some trellos at bedtime is a really easy fix for that. Another one is the composition of immune cells and the way they have to work. So particularly post-COVID, you know, there's a lot of autoimmune issues related to long COVID. And kind of leading the charge is this dysregulation of,

regulatory T cells there's an easy fix and that's just simply manos and so you can take manos and trailos at bedtime and then you can add creatine to that and then the net result of all of that is the burden on the body that it has to deal with during sleep you're you're just kind of helping it cheat and cheat that burden down so that what you do have can go more to restoration yeah i think that's amazing because you know i think people for a long time are saying you can't make up sleep. And I think most of us have felt that we have made up sleep. Yeah. So I think there's research years ago where they were saying you can't really make it up, but I'm like, I don't know. I think I've felt. I think I've taken a nap before and felt

like, hmm, I think I offset that a little bit. I think that's true. I think I've heard some research that's true. What about as we age, some people do like to take a nap? Yeah. What's your kind of stance on that. Yeah, no, I think the research on that's pretty clear that it's a real big lever, I think. There's something really, I don't remember what it was, but like people who nap live better, live longer. I mean, I don't know if it was, you know, there's a lot of absurd research lately that's all in percentages. It's like so, you know, taking a nap, increase something by 800%, you know, like, like 800, really, 800%? Really? I don't know anything that works like that but I think it's definitely helpful there's like a viral video that was going around I think the

guys the guy was on walking dead John Bernthal I think his name might be might be saying his name wrong but he was a guy who's like you know after taking naps I don't take any naps bro he's all like you know trying to be all hardcore but I think uh that idea of you know sleep debt like that I don't think is a great idea and even even things like training super early in the morning like if that's when you can get your training in, then that's great. But this idea, like, that you have, just to be successful, you have to be somebody who's in sleep debt 24-7, I think, is not a great idea. I'll tell you one thing that, like, really changed the game for me was I did hyperbaric

this whole last year and it was life-valtering. Absolutely life-altering. Where did you go for that? I have one. Oh, you have one? Yeah. No, it was life-walttering. So I mentioned, you know, the second wave of aging hit me around at the 8, and it really hit me.

And I started noticing like about 5 o'clock in the afternoon. Like I was just, I was like really spinning down. And I did a year of hyperbaric, and I feel like I'm 20 again. Is that just, is that giving you better oxygen saturation? Or what is that doing? Well, yeah, that is what it does. But I've just noticed, I haven't been doing it now for the last, taking a break. So I haven't done it for like probably three months.

four months, don't feel any different. I mean, I just feel the lift I got from the hyperbaric is there now. It's completely changed me. Like I feel like I'm back to my 20s again. Energy-wise. Like if we wanted to go to the gym late in the day, it's like no problem. I think you have some amazing information when it comes to fiber and when it comes to the gut. And you've mentioned a couple times now, you know, healing the gut and then being able to heal all kinds of other things, you know, a cascade of even even some, issues where that people might have like autism and these different things. How did you start to discover some of this about the gut and I know people say gut microbiome?

And you've kind of said like, you know, people don't really, we don't really know what the heck's going on with the gut microbiome, but we have some decent guesses. Yeah. It started in 2006 for me. So I went full time with this in 2006 and I was just trying to write articles. I was just trying to do good research. I came across Dr. Jeffrey Borden, who, who did the first articles on weight and the microbiome.

And so published some articles under that. And then that led into my nutrition system. And quickly, about 2009, I read an article talking about crucifrous vegetables, altering the microbiome within three to four days. And so I put all these protocols in there. And then I wound up doing these corporate wellness engagements where people were coming back,

like just dropping weight incredibly fast and energized, and they would get nauseated when they had junk food. And these were all microbiome-related things. And where it really culminated for me was I had a little brother with Down syndrome. And he, if you know anything about Down syndrome, they can go off the cliff really fast, help-wise. And so he went off the cliff. And he went from being one person to a completely different person within like a year.

And when I, he came to my house and he couldn't walk, he couldn't, everything was different. He wasn't even the same person. And pretty much what now is my gut reset is what I put him through. And within seven days, it was a completely different brand new person again. Like he was walking a half mile. His personality was back. I mean, he just night and day difference. And if you break that down and look at, well, why, a big reason,

there aren't a lot of things that are simple, like with the body. You know, unfortunately, it's not simple. but there are a couple big levers here, and one is befitobacteria and the other's acromancea. And that became the basis of my book, the immunity code. Like, how do we, what's the biggest, dumbest, simplest thing you could do? And it's restore befitobacteria and acromancea, because the pleiotropic, big word,

the broad spectrum effects of that are insane. From just those two bacteria being restored to what they were when you were a kid, the effects are insane. B-vitamin production, energy, immune system, everything just from that from that simple lever and it's really easy to do it's not that hard so that was kind of my I know these are covered quite a bit in your book and you have courses and you've you've been teaching and preaching and coaching and talking about this stuff for a really long time do these gut resets do they include you know getting rid of you know things like sucralose

or whatever the heck's in here do we have to be super strict with our diet is the protocol hard to follow or is it or is it fairly simple to follow you think it's pretty simple it's pretty simple it's and there's levels so you can you can just do it without supplements which the foundational thing in my book was apple peels for really good reasons and then it's a math game it's pure math so if the substrate on one side of the equation it overwhelms the substrate on the other side of the equation you're going to get a certain result and so you know if you're doing the gut reset but you're reading snicker bars and drinking cokes and all this stuff, then the sheer noise of the other stuff's going to cancel this out. But yeah, it's pretty simple. And then I've got it perfected now where there's lactoferrin and human milk, I guess,

saccharides and resistant starch, and it works pretty fast. And you have products too. I know that sometimes people are a little uncomfortable with plugging your product, but Young Gut is a great product. I use it. I really like it a lot. I put it in my protein shakes and stuff like that. What's in Young Gut and how does it work?

Have we given you the ultra yet or just the base? Yeah, the ultra, yeah. You have the ultra, okay. Yeah, I'm not messing around over here. I have that's ultra. The ruling. Three ingredients. There's resistant starch and it's a special kind of resistant starch.

It's, it's all three ingredients have clinical research. So the resistant starch has been shown to increase acrimancia by itself, just that, like over 200% in 30 days. And then the lactoferrin that's in there's human lactoferrin. And that stuff's miraculous. I mean, that stuff resets the immune system. spins down autoimmune issues, drives those bacteria. And then that's the one you told me years ago that was in like baby formula. That's the milk oligococytes.

That's the third one, the HMOs. Yeah, and the HMOs, they're complimentary. So these are all breast milk components except for the resistance starch. And they work together and they just kind of, you know, breast milk is like growth serum. I mean, it sets the immune system, it gets you growing. And so these are the kind of the key components that are in breast milk. And they just, they have this incredible effect on the gut.

I mean, it's fast, too. I've taken fiber supplements in the past, and when I've taken them, I've noticed, like, discomfort. I don't have the same result with taking yours. I don't know if the, maybe the fibers, you know, I was having, like, cillium husk and those kinds of things, and maybe they were just too harsh. I think part of it's the load. These are very low doses, and then I'm not into the daily thing. So the way I have people take them is you do a reset at first, and that's about 10, 15 days.

And then you're intermittent. So getting back to that rhythmic thing, the intermittent pulse, so you're anywhere from one to terrible way to sell supplements. Terrible. Tell people not to take it that often. That is, yeah, that is like the, I've had, I've had, like, e-commerce guy ago, like, you're the dumbest e-commerce guy I've ever met. Like, you broke the book on stupid.

And it's like, but that's the correct way to do it, is pulsing it rhythmically. So one to three times a week is kind of ideal. What's an aclomancia? What is it? And what's some of its function? So acrimancia is this. It was discovered in 2004, and it's the primary bacteria that keeps the gut surface, the gut surface layer healthy. And the way it does it is it's on an all-protein diet, it eats mucin.

So it eats the mucus that's in there. And so what it does is by eating the mucous, it actually stimulates different aspects of the gut layer to strengthen the gut mucus layer. And it also puts out all kinds of metabolites that signal immunoglobulins and signal like the gut junctions to really get super healthy. So in adequate but not excessive amounts, it really helps optimize both the immune system and the gut lining. Now, you can get too much of it. So, example, if you're just fasting all the time, that's just starvation. And starvation will eat down the gut lining because you've got too much acrimancia and you get too much. much eating the gut mucus layer. But if you do it kind of the way I've suggested, which

is through rhythmic intermittent pulses, you maintain it really well and you kind of reach an optimum. And so you see it now because it's so helpful for insulin function. You'll see like different supplements on the market for it that are used to help you get lean and it does help with that. It helps insulin function. But I don't believe in really supplementing with it. I think that just by feeding it the right food, that you can grow optimal levels of it. What are a couple of things that people can do to help with just overall gut health?

Just somebody who maybe is having like loose stool, they're just, you know, on the toilet a lot type of thing. What are maybe a couple, like what do you think might be like, I guess going on with that person? What might be wrong? I'm sure there could be like a huge list of things. But as it pertains to the gut,

like what are things that they could try that wouldn't be harmful? Well, so if you have like chronically loose stools, that's a problem. That's definitely a problem. You want to definitely go see a doctor for that. But if you just generally want to increase your, improve your gut health, it's rhythmic, intermittent pulsing of foods that feed those two bacteria. So that's dairy, that's baryphenols, that's resistant starches. That would be like leafy greens, but not too much, just sort of like, you know, intermittent

in the picture. And that's just, just through that, you're going to feed those bacteria what they need. And at the same time, if you're not overdoing raw sugars, then you're not feeding the other side of the equation. So, I mean, that's like the biggest, dumbest, simplest thing. And with that, I'll qualify it with like, that's not daily. You don't have to do that daily. Like, it's actually better kind of intermittently by doing it like that. So, and that leaves your room for maybe some other days. You want to have tons of protein. You want to recover. You know, it makes room for that. I noticed that you have talked about mobility and flexibility and that's been something you've been talking about for a pretty long since I've known you really. And maybe that is, maybe that's from your track background where you're, you know, practicing some mobility.

It's a very common practice within track. People get to the track and that's what they do is they start to kind of warm up and they stretch and they mobilize and do different things. do you think that people lose their strength first, lose their muscle first, or do you think that they lose their mobility first and then things start to go down from there? Gosh, man, that is a, you could do a week of podcasts with different people. That's such a great question. So here's some stuff that is worth knowing just in terms of like what you're talking about. The feet are the thing that, we talked about this on our very first podcast ever,

back in 2018. The feet are the thing no one ever trains. And the feet were the center of athletic prowess when you were young. Because athletic prowess is just, you know, doing stuff where power transitions from the body to the ground through the feet. And the feet have to be super, super strong. No, there's no like, what are you working today? I'm doing legs. What about you?

I'm doing my feet. That doesn't exist. Nobody works their feet. Okay. But what you see happening with the feet as people get older, is that there are just different aspects of the feet, key muscles that get weak. And then when they get weak, the arch starts to collapse.

When the arch starts to collapse, you see things like the bones actually could twist, and then you'll see another adaption up here, and then you'll see the hip shift. And all these things come. Kind of collapsing on the inside of your ankle bone, right? And then the feet kind of get pointed out, and the shins start to kind of face one direction.

Sometimes the knees and shins are actually, unfortunately, going in different directions as someone's trying to propel themselves forward into space. And then you see the then the big one is the hip shift. So when the hips shifts, usually it's one shifts out or shifts a different direction. Then you see all these compensations in the lower back and then that goes all the way up to head position where the head moves forward and all this all this stuff coming back to the feet just going downhill and getting weak because they never get trained. So that's just an

interesting thing I think to look at in terms of like what might be something that It's a very low investment in time on a regular basis that has a big payoff later. I would also like to interrupt for a second and just say like training your calves is a form of training your feet. So just even just small amounts of calf training could be a really positive input into somebody's workout. Absolutely. What I've been doing a lot lately is maximum load, maximum extension underload. So I don't do the bodybuilding calf training, but I'll go in and I'll, Is that really me? So sorry about that.

Yeah, stop. I'll go in and I will put pretty heavy weight on the machine and I'll go to maximum extension and hold it for like two minutes. And I'm with the same weight, I'll drop and I'm just trying to stretch those muscles out. Stretch the back of the leg under load and I'll do like two sets of that. And it's just like one rep because you're taking so long so you'll go up, you'll contract and then you just kind of hold it until you start to give out. Yeah.

And then go to maximum extension. So what we're getting into is we get older is that the tendons are getting less springy, less flexible. And so what happens then is the calf muscles have to take that up, but the calf muscles are getting weaker. And so this just goes into the knees. I think so it starts to see knee issues. So keeping the tendons flexible and stretched and long, that's like a huge deal. And so I think, again, I'm not a sports scientist, but everything I've studied shows that maximum extension and compression under load really, helps that to stay kind of tuned. Yeah, the feet, we've had a bunch of people come on the podcast

talking about feet and then my good friend Graham Tuttle, he is known as the barefoot sprinter. And he just, you know, he basically just tells people like, hey, let's get just like a little bit of training for your feet because of all the things that it can do. And just a couple days ago, he, you know, he's running as hard as he can on my treadmill barefoot, you know, and it's like he's able to kind of slam his foot into that surface. But I think we just kind of forget that all these things are a skill set. Like he's made his feet to a point where they can handle that. And I think that anyone's foot can handle that if they put it under the right amount of pressure.

If you stay on it. Yeah. And no one stays on it. So like what you see is you don't really see much change. It would take a while to get to get the change. Or you might see a little change with your strength. strength at the gym and your calves or something like that. But it's not, you know, someone's not going to see you and be like, oh my God, you know,

you look so much bigger or leaner. Like, they're not going to notice something from you just training your feet that way. So it's, it's something that is, it's a really long-term play. And it's a very much more of like an overall general health thing. So people are like, I don't want to, I feel like I'm wasting my time. So that to me is like, that's the fundamental question. Just to my way of thinking is like, so if the average person has too many, and today, what's your going on that list?

And that's your non-negotiable foundation. And you can have seasons where you come in and out of bodybuilding or whatever it is you want to do, but you've got to have a non-negotiable. So what's in that? What are the most important things? That's one of those things that makes that list for me because that, when you really look at what's going on there by losing that, you actually are slowly and perceptibly losing everything else over time.

So maybe you do pogo hops for two minutes as hard as you can for the day. Yeah. Right? And you just jump. Something. Right. Something. Yeah.

Yeah, I've always felt that, you know, there's training, there's so many, there's so many things to do within training that it gets to be difficult to kind of nail down. But I think you've done a great job with nailing down the time commitment side of things. And that's something that you wrote about in your first book, The Immunity Code. How much time do you usually spend on your fitness, like per week, would you say? Um, not that much. Uh, and I know that, okay, so this, this is just a pet peeve. Um, that's very true. Like if I'm, that is, that is the guy's honest truth.

I'm telling you that. Um, because that was out of necessity for years and years and years where I wasn't, you know, I was, I was just having to make ends being more full time. So that's always been true. And since, since I came out with that, I've seen a lot of people come out with, oh, yeah, I barely train. You know, I do this stuff. Then they were never saying that prior.

And I know it's just, it's like, okay, that's not true. I know you're, I know. I know what you're not saying is not true. But for me, that's been true for a long, long time. Just mostly out of necessity. Actually, even today out of necessity, and I'd say I'm always getting in one to two classic bodybuilding workouts a week, time allowing. And then every day, there is a solid five minutes of the stuff we're talking about.

So there's a solid minute on the feet. There's a solid minute at bedtime. There's usually a minute of VO2 max in there, although I assidiously try to avoid. did. Is that just going crazy on an assault bike or something? Yeah, it's just, it's just on a bike, arms and legs. And that's probably, that's probably up there with the most important things. And it's the thing you're going to avoid. I mean, I avoid it. And there's days when I just like, I know I got to do this and I don't do it. All right. Because it's, it's hard. It's really hard. Like, you get to the end of that minute and you're just gassed out. It's annoying.

It's, it's an exercise in like true discipline because you'll come up with every, every stupid reason to avoid doing that one minute of the O2 Max. But yeah, so I have a good solid five minutes every day in of things that are like the long play, the long play kind of stuff. And that's pretty much non-negotiable. And you say pretty much non-negotiable, meaning sometimes you miss it. I never miss the bedtime yoga flows.

I never really miss the feet stuff. I never miss. We've got to move around. Joel. what's up man I haven't seen you in forever I know 10 years yeah

good to see you you mentioned something and I don't even know if you recognize you said it I don't know if you've said this before but you said fit for a living oh yeah yeah which is just I think this is awesome

because that's what so many influences so many influences are doing and then they're trying to to promote, this is the lifestyle that you should live, but that's not what other people do for a living. Like, hopefully, I make it clear that this is what I do for a living. I do spend a lot of time in the gym.

I have spent a lot of time in the gym, and I'll probably continue to spend a lot of time in the gym. I'll probably continue to spend a lot of time on my fitness. I just enjoy it. I just like it. It has reduced a lot over the years, and hopefully I can continue that trend to where it reduces to a point where I'm doing

like a half an hour or something, you know, each day or something like that might be a nice place to land. But I like that idea of maybe that's what people should kind of keep in mind when they're listening to the influencers. Not that you're not listening to them at all. So you're keeping in mind in the back of your head, this guy's fit for a living. And I can take a lot of the things that he's saying and I can implement some of what he's saying, but I might not be able to implement all of it because I don't have his lifestyle. Yeah. I mean, Let's take Mike as an example. O'Hern.

I think he, I would put that guy on a level with Vince Geronda as an innovative genius in the gym. Like, I just, just my personal opinion. He's an all-time great. I think he is innovated movement in a way that I haven't really seen anybody else do. And I know that probably makes a lot of people mad, but I'm just given my opinion. He has created so many nuances on things that take away the injuries, promote muscle growth. And it's just subtle nuances. And it's just from, it's just from sure.

Reverse grip bench, still bench pressing or still doing overheads behind the neck, pull downs behind the neck. I mean, these aren't things that people haven't done in the past. They are things that people have done. But he's doing it into the latter years and still doing it at a really high level. And he's added these just nuances of the twist this way. You put this here, you know, all the nuance he does to it. This really brilliant stuff.

So I think a lot of that can translate, like someone who's, you know, looking at it. Well, what can I do? It's like, well, okay, there's things there that directly. translate. What doesn't translate is the time in the gym that creates a huge amount of the results. That doesn't, because it's like, look, dude, you work for a living. You don't have X amount of time to go to the gym every day. So that's not realistic to think that you're going to get a result like that. But there is a lot of like takeaways from someone like that. Yeah.

Thanks. Where can people find you? Oh, yeah, Instagram, Real Joel Green and deepnutrition.com. And you got two books out? Yes, immunity code and the way. Awesome. Strength is never a week. This week, this never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.