Mark Bell's Power Project - You’ve Been LIED To About Cholesterol - Here’s the Truth - Mike Mutzel || MBPP Ep. 1076

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

In episode 1076, Mike Mutzel, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about the truth about dietary cholesterol, serum cholesterol and saturated fat. Follow Mike on IG: https://www.instagram.com/metabolic_mike/   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!   🍆  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 POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   🩸 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 & Get Podcast Guides, Courses and More ➢ https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

If my cholesterol is high, when should I start paying attention to dietary cholesterol? There's really no correlation with dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol. They were giving rabbits eggs, which rabbits don't eat eggs. From those animal model studies, we've extrapolated that, oh, well, dietary cholesterol must increase serum cholesterol. Serum cholesterol is linked with heart disease, so therefore we should reduce dietary cholesterol. But there's not really good human evidence. There was a recently published study

and looked at which food groups impact serum cholesterol. It turns out coffee, green tea, actually increase cholesterol. I generally tell people don't worry about dietary cholesterol. Saturated fat is a little bit different story though. There's not a lot of good data to link saturated fat with heart disease.

If you go from a carnivore diet to a plant-based diet, your LDL will go down. But does that mean that your risk of heart disease also goes down? And that's very questionable. Will I feel the morning wood? Because I took two capsules. Better question. Will I feel your morning wood?

If you want to. It's only if you want it. You took it already? I took two capsules. This said take three, but I don't want to get too hard on the mic. Should I back up? No, no. It's one of these things like supplements and adaptogens take time. you know, so this would be something you notice after three or four days

Yeah, but it's interesting. I mean some of the customers that call in It's usually their partner that notices that the men are a little bit more hard a little bit more More drive more desire and so that it's been a word of mouth Like how long you had your supplement company for? Since 2019. Yeah. Cool. And what kind of made you decide to jump into that because it's going to be super competitive? Yeah, it's very competitive. Well, I was on the sales side for a lot of years helping other people get their products off the ground with custom manufacturing.

So I represented a manufacturer since 2006. So I helped other people take their ideas and build their own custom formulas. And then after seeing a lot of brands take off and be very successful, I'm like, well, I know what to do. Why don't I just do it myself? But I had a little bit of the imposter syndrome, didn't know all the aspects of business, but just started with just a couple of skews

and then just took it from there. It's not often that we have people coming in with research papers. Mike came prepared here today. I think sharing some of these research papers, I think could be really cool, especially this first one where you were talking to me a little bit about exercise. Yeah, this is really incredible.

This researcher, Edward Coyle at UT Austin, he's talked a lot about exercise resistance from inactivity. And so all of us here, we like to go to the gym and work out and put in the time with resistance training. But a lot of folks do that, then they sit for the rest of the day. And it turns out that being inactive

and they define inactivity as walking less than 8,000 steps per day. And so for every 1000 steps, we don't walk off of 8,000. So let's just say you get 6,000 steps per day. That will increase your risk of dying by 15% for every 1000 steps you don't walk off of 8,000. So let's just say you get 6,000 steps per day. That will increase your risk of dying by 15% for every thousand steps you don't get. So 8,000 minus, you know, 1,000, that's increase your risk of 15%.

So we can, most people are just walking like 3,500 steps per day. So they're increasing their risk of dying from all causes or heart disease relative to the 8,000 step per day walkers by some 100%. So it's like a 100% fold increase, increasing their odds of dying from all causes. So activity is really, really important in addition to exercise. So I think it's important that we, that we differentiate that. And so Edward Coyle and colleagues have been studying the effects of forcing people to be sedentary for three days and

then having them exercise for one hour and before their high fat meal, because a high fat meal will induce what's called postprandial hyperlipidemia. And so there's an inability to metabolize fat properly. So they give these subjects a milkshake and see how physical activity beforehand helps them metabolize that milkshake. And if they've been sedentary, even if they do one hour of high intense exercise, it doesn't offset the deleterious effects

of being physically inactive. So I think it's really important just for people because they hear, I need to go to the gym and go to the gym, but then they sit all day. And so that is really an important aspect. And Mark, I mean, you and both of you have been talking about this for a long time with these 10 minute walks with Stan.

We talk a lot about micro dosing on the show and we're not talking about mushrooms. We're talking about micro dosing, exercise, trying to get in some forms of exercise. We had Brad Kern on the show years ago who said that he just, he doesn't really love to lift. You can kind of tell. I was kidding.

But he- You're not kidding though. I'm not kidding. I'm kidding, I'm not kidding. He had a curl bar that was like near his car and every time he walked past the curl bar, he would just do a couple sets. So I think whatever way somebody can buy a kettlebell, whatever way you can kind of micro-dose

some sort of exercise into your life, I think what I try to share with people is no amount is too small. So I think we have a tendency to think like, ah, I only got like three or four minutes, I probably shouldn't even bother. I think you should bother, I think you should do it. Yeah, that's great.

I mean, one of the things that I've been doing, life's been really busy. I have a daughter and growing a business and things like that. If I only have 20 minutes to go to the gym, then later that day, I'll do some pushups or military pushups, handstand walks, just break it up and just spreading.

And we talked about this a couple of years ago with both of you, that know, that spreading that fatigue over the course of the week. And I think even over the course of the day is better. And so I just think it's important that we have these studies because so many people are seemingly concerned about their health. You know, you go to the airport now,

people have hand sanitizer on their backpacks, they're wearing masks on the airplanes, but are they enumerating or quantifying their step count? Most people aren't. I know a lot of us are. I aim for between 10 and 14,000 steps per day. I just find I feel so much better. But it's cool to see now we have objective data.

We have research showing. And there was one study in 220,000 people BANUC at all out of the UK found that when people start to hit over that 10,000 steps per day, arthritis, depression, anxiety, high blood pressure, like all the things that people are suffering from, they're swallowing aspirins, ibuprofen, antidepressants, all these things.

Gastrointestinal reflux, you know, these are very common conditions. They can be ameliorated by just walking, you know? It's not like it's the sine qua non. I mean, we still have to lift weights. We gotta get in the sun. But this is, I think, something that we can all, there's not really a,

you don't have to buy a gym membership to go walk after a meal, just 10 minutes. Want more bang for your buck, try to do it outside. If you're trying to couple it and make it a little bit more like exercise, maybe you find some hills, maybe you find some trails, maybe you throw on a weighted vest. Yeah.

And it's funny, because anecdotally, like for myself, I could totally kind of agree with that, because every time, like I've tracked the days that I get like maybe 5,000, 6,000 steps versus the days I get like 13, 14. HRV is always better the next morning. Sleep quality is always better. Physical recovery always is better,

because like I do a lot of grappling, et cetera, and the walking always helps me feel better the next day. So it's one of those things where you don't expect that simple act to make such a big difference, but it does. And if you're someone who wears an Apple watch or an O-ring or whatever, pay attention to it. Look at the days that you got more steps and you were outside a little bit more,

and then look at the days that you did, and then try to see if there's a trend difference. Yep, and what I love about walking is if you wear a continuous glucose monitor, which I know you guys have dabbled with, it's so impressive to see how that can drop your glucose. You know, I mean, we know all about metabolic health now, and that's emerging as a key factor for depression, anxiety.

Wearing those things is super interesting because like if you lift, then your blood sugar goes up. Right. But if you go on a walk, it goes down. Like it's kind of confusing. You're like, what the hell's going on here? But I think that's where having critical thinking and realizing that resistance training

is naturally glycolytic. So it's going to increase, but it's going to drop for an extended period of time after. It's gonna squish your baseline level down. So it's doing so for a need because you're burning, or the mitochondria, I guess, is burning carbohydrates during exercise, burning glucose, sugar, right?

Right. Yeah. And something even like acute stress. The first time I wore it in 2016, I went through an airport in Toronto and they don't honor TSA pre or anything like that. And so I was worried that I was going to miss my flight. We're just talking about traveling. And I was sitting there sweating.

I was looking at my glucose monitor. It was like 90, 95, 110. It got up to 160, but then it dropped right back down. But just that effect of cortisol and adrenaline short term, you know, it increases your glucose, these counter regulatory hormones. Being reduced to standing in line with normal folks. I know it's disgusting. I agree. This well, so I was going to a conference, going to a conference and I was like, if I miss this flight, this is the only flight to lose. I was going from Toronto to Winnipeg and it was like the one flight and I'm like, oh man, I'm going to miss this thing. My gosh. And so my stress was going crazy.

But it was cool to see it come back down and drop. So anyway, going back to walking, I think that's very beneficial. And the other thing about glucose, since we talked about heat and cold yesterday with Tom Seeger, that actually transiently increases your glucose, but then over time drops it as well. So that's another tool people can use. Sauna contrast therapy is naturally really good

for metabolic health as well. What's the importance of DHEA? You were mentioning a little bit about that before the show. Yeah. So DHEA is a hormone that our adrenal glands make. And it turns out this hormone is a precursor molecule to build. I'm sorry, did you say DHEA or DHA?

DHEA. Yeah, this is a common. DHEA. DHEA. Gotcha. OK. So we have the omega 3 fats, the fish oil, the long chain, 20 and 22 carbon long respectively fatty acids,

EPA, Ecosapentaenoic acid, DHA, Doka-sahexaenoic acid, really good for cardiovascular health, which we can get into, good for pregnancy, good for brain health and CTE prevention as well. So these are fish oils that are, and we found them, we see them in red meat, salmon that we had this morning, fish oil, but we're talking about the hormone DHEA, dihydroepiandosterone. And so this is a precursor. Well, what's unique about DHEA is it has direct hormonal effects and it's also a precursor to testosterone. is it has direct hormonal effects and it's also a precursor to testosterone.

But unlike testosterone and estrogen, this starts to decline first. And so for people that are considering HRT or they wanna put on more muscle as they get older, by the time you are 60 or 70, your DHEA levels are about 10% of what they are compared in your 20s. And so this is, I think,

something that's highly under-recognized, especially young men who are in their 30s or 40s and are like, man, I feel like I should go on HRT. Like something's not right, my libido's not there anymore, I just had a child, I'm getting fatter in the middle, all the signs of low T. I think DHEA should be something they should address first. Because if DHEA is low testosterone,

we'll absolutely be low. How do you naturally get that DHEA up maybe without just supplementing it? Is it in food or anything like that? It's not, that's the thing. Well, and so that is an interesting argument. If it naturally declines at around 25, should we be increasing it?

And my thought process is because we're all exposed to plastics and endocrine disrupting chemicals and circadian rhythm disruption from cell phones. I think optimizing our hormones is beneficial. And if you look at hormonal levels of men, just 50 years ago, they are some 30 to 40% higher compared to age match controls now. How do we have that information?

I've heard that thrown around a lot and people are like, oh, you know, people like a hundred years ago, their testosterone was probably like, you know, 20, you know, 2000 or whatever. How do we like, do we know this for sure? Like, is there real science behind that or is it just like a guesstimate because people maybe were quote unquote more manly at a certain time? That's a good question, Mark. I mean, I've been looking at the research. So there was a big data set in Israel because all men in Israel have to enroll in the military due to where they are geographically and all those tensions and everything like that. So they

have really good data on men because they're running blood work. And so there has been an objective decline in testosterone in men all throughout the world. I mean, this is Brazil, Israel, and as well as here in the UK or in the US, we have the NHANES data set, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, where they also look at blood work. And so we're seeing age matched, an age independent decline in testosterone in all age groups. So between 20 and 30, between 30 and 40 and all that. So it turns out that men in their twenties now have testosterone levels of ordinary men,

like is it Gen Xers? So it's like Gen X, Millennial Gen Z, I think. The testosterone levels of men in their twenties and thirties is significantly lower, 30 to 40% lower. Compared to men, it's akin to men in their fifties just 20 years ago. So something is going on environmentally, you know, and so there is good data to show this. I personally think

it's a combination of a lot of things. The circadian rhythm disruption, which I know we'll get into sleep and all that, but I think the endocrine disrupting chemicals and plastics were just, they're ubiquitous. I mean, it's hard to find water in a glass jar now. I mean, you go to any gas station, you can't buy water in a glass bottle. It's just too expensive to ship now. Even things like Topo Chico is delivered. Like we used to get that like in the health space

at a keto conference, everyone would get Topo Chico. That was acquired by either Coke or Pepsi. And now it's all in plastic bottles. And so this stuff is just screwing up our hormones. And all of our parents, you know, now that millennials are having kids, Gen Zers are having kids, I just think you're seeing this,

what's known as transgenerational epigenetic effects, meaning the lifestyle choices that our parents made is impacting the way that genes are being expressed in the offspring. And because plastics and these endocrine disrupting chemicals were not so ubiquitous in the food supply and in our environment 20, 30 years ago,

we had normal functioning hormones. We didn't have the fertility issues. We didn't have the sperm count declines. So, I mean, I think it's pretty uncommon now for people to have children without the help of in vitro. I mean, in the health of, veryro, you know, I mean, in the health of very common. I mean, my, my, I have some friends and family who are not in the health space and like all of their friends who have kids had to do fertility.

People that are maybe just in their twenties and thirties. Yes. Super common. And part of it is, you know, these clinics are making a ton of money, but it's, it's become normalized. It's's more common than not, which is very sad. And I think that's just a reflection of our environment. I want to know, do you think that, and what's your opinion on it? Because the plastic stuff, obviously, some of that's in your control, but not all of it.

But the things that are in your control are the time you get to bed, your habits, your nutrition, all those things, right? Do you think or would you say that those would be playing a bigger factor if like most people got to have the hang on those? Then I mean, the plastics are a problem, but it's not as big of an issue. Yeah. You know, it, and see, that's a great question. I don't know what's the chicken or the egg or what's moving the levers more.. I do think that the circadian rhythm disruption is huge, you know, because if you look at how people are, are their habits around phone use, especially in the bedroom, it's, it's

really problematic. And Stanford university actually did a recent study. You know, a lot of people are like, yeah, I'm off the computer two hours before bed. I think it's pretty common or wearing blue light filtering glasses. But many people utilize their phones for their alarm clock. And it's just natural to be like, oh, I'm going to set my alarm. OK, I'm going to check in on Instagram. Oh, I'm going to check my email. And because the phones are so small,

they're emitting such a powerful amount of blue light. And it's not just the blue light, but the light intensity. And that is affecting melatonin, adenosine, all these hormones and signaling molecules that feed into the circadian clock system. And so I do think it's multifactorial. You know, we can't just look at the plastics. It's everything.

Even turning off the wifi at night, you know, just like doing these small things. There's cell towers, there's these street lights. I mean, you know, life is tough if you live in a city now. If I can advise people to do one thing, it's just try to get the phone away from your head. Yeah. Even if you could put the phone down by your feet somewhere,

down by the foot of your bed would be a good, I mean, I don't know, what if 10 years, 20 years from now, we find out, oh yeah, look at how many brain tumors it caused. It's like, it's just an easy enough habit to just move it away that I think that anyone can do that. And if you still, you know, you want to use the alarm or whatever,

it could just be on the other side of the room. It's going to actually wake you up better. You're going to have to get up to shut it off. So that would be my advice for people. Do you think it's that dangerous? I do. I think especially before bed for sure. During the day, probably not that big of a deal.

I try not to carry it in my pocket around my genitals and things like that. There's been some good research around that too at lowering testosterone levels and so forth, right? Well, that, and then there's also good research in women using breast thermography. A lot of women now put their phone in their sports bra. And so there's actually imaging studies

of the shape of a phone and abnormal cells within the breast tissue in women. Cause it turns out the breast tissue is highly sensitive to all these different factors. And we're seeing breast cancer on the rise in 20 somethings and 30. Is that a phone in your pocket? Are you just happy to see me? No, I mean, this is, this is real stuff. So I think we just all need tools. We first of all, need to be aware of this stuff, you know, and one of the tools I use, I got this Garmin tactics watch. And so this is my alarm clock. So I just put Ariana Huffington wrote a book, I think in 2014 about sleep.

I can't remember the name, but she had a good routine in her family of putting the phones to bed. People talk about like, put your kitchen to bed, put all the dishes in the dishwasher, leave it clean. It's kind of like making your bed in the morning and just putting your phone in a drawer. That's what I do. So, cause it's so clean. It's kind of like making your bed in the morning and just putting your phone in a drawer. That's what I do. So, cause it's so tempting. It's designed to be used, right? This out Instagram and everything makes their money

is like just that random dopamine hit. So getting a watch or doing something else, you know, for my daughter, we just have a battery operated alarm for her, you know, so she doesn't have any distractions. So just, you know, like people say, planning to fail is, failing to plan is planning to fail. And so you're planning to fail if you have this highly addictive device

that is not at odds, that is at odds with health, right at your bedside table. So I think that's one thing. Getting a headlamp, like reading in bed, instead of using these compact fluorescent bulbs, utilizing a headlamp with a red light. That's what I use. There's a company called Petzl.

They make these things for hiking. You can buy them at REI for like 20 bucks. So utilizing that. How do you spell it? P-E-T-Z-E-L. I have one in my bag. Actually, I travel with it because you go to a hotel, you turn on the light. It's all these big fluorescent.

It's like crazy, you know? Is it all plastics? And I asked that because again, with my son, he's three years old. It's like, I can't give him like a glass bottle. And then overall, just like we were walking through Costco and sometimes it's like, oh, what are we gonna do for dinner? It's like, oh, let's just grab a rotisserie.

And I had always thought about it. I'm like, oh, it's in this like plastic thing. I wonder if that plastic's okay. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. They switched it over to a bag now. It's just in a hot bag and on the bag, it'll tell you reheat inside this bag. And I'm like, Oh, this is terrible. Like we can't get that anymore. So I'm curious, like, is it literally like every piece of plastic that we come across in life is causing a lot of this disruption? Andrew, great question. It's more the soft plastic.

So there's PET polyethylene something, and then there's a HDPE like supplement bottles. It's a harder denser plastic. So it's unlikely to leach into your food. So it's a softer plastics, actually the ones like you mentioned, like something that would be wrapped. And I think the combination of heat and plastic is problematic. And so trying to avoid, you know, when you

go to the coffee shop, instead of getting stuff in a coffee cup, because the thin part of the coffee, the slick part of coffee cups will release some of these microplastics. And UCLA did this research recently. It's like hundreds of thousands of microplastic particles are coming off in just a cup of coffee, right? So I think- It's like a credit card a week or something like that, right? It's insane.

That's what they said here, ingesting in plastic. It's hard to avoid. I try to avoid it by heating stuff up differently than always just using the microwave or if I am gonna use the microwave, just not heating, reheating something in plastic. But I don't know what I'm avoiding or not avoiding because like who knows about the ceramic that I'm using,

who knows about the paint that's on there. There's a lot of things to think about. And even with our cooking where, if you were just to throw it in a pot or something, there's a lot of non-stick stuff on there that's probably not great for us. I know there are companies now that are making frying pans that are a little bit better. I think I got one from, I can't forget the name of it.

The green pan, there's one. Something house or home or our home or our place it's called. That's what the name of it is. And they have kind of regular nonstick, but then they also made one that's like healthier, but I don't really know. Well, around that, I mean, I use stainless steel or cast iron skillet. I mean, they take longer to clean, but I think the trade off is better there. But I think, you know, one last thing about plastic, you know, because I know this can get boring for people, but a study was just published in the New England Journal of Medicine in March of this year, finding that microplastics are found in arterial plaque.

So we've been looking at cholesterol, monomaniacally focusing on lowering LDL cholesterol because supposedly it drives heart disease. But it turns out when you biopsy plaque, it's loaded with microplastic. And the people that had the highest concentration of microplastic in their carotid artery plaque had the highest odds of dying,

having strokes, heart attacks, and all that. So, you know, we hear about beta amyloid protein aggregation in the brain and dementia and Alzheimer's. What if that's just microplastic being deposited? You know, because all the foods that these people are eating, we talked a lot about, and Max Lugavere has a great documentary about this. You know, a lot of folks have talked about how, you know, dementia and Alzheimer's is a metabolic disease, but those very foods that cause metabolic dysfunction, it turns out are enriched in microplastics. I mean, think about these things, Twinkies, donuts, Oreo cookies, they're all delivered in plastic.

And all the processed foods, not only do they have sugar, seed oils, and this, and food colorings and whatever else, they have microplastic as well. So I think it's just something to be aware of, you know. And you could maybe speculate if you're a healthier person, maybe you'll get rid of some of these toxic things easier. Yeah, no, totally.

Well, that's why exercise is so good because you're sweating. You know, there was a study, Stefan Genes in Alberta, Canada has done multiple studies called the Bust Study, blood, urine, sweat. And he's trying to look at how we excrete all these things, chemicals, pesticides, plastics,

and heat and exercise are the two best ways. So going and doing, for example, hot yoga, and he's biopsied the sweat, arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, atrazine, all the bad stuff that's in our water and our food comes out via sweat. And so you look at people who are really overweight. Part of the obesity is a contamination theory. There is, there's calories, there's gut microbiome,

there's all this, but it turns out that fat tissue sequesters these chemicals as well. And so the more that we can exercise and move on a regular basis, these pathways open up. And there's obviously the sauna, which is like an inexpensive way of sweating. Yes. Right. So as far as the sauna is concerned, cause you've an inexpensive way of sweating. Yes. Right.

So as far as the sauna is concerned, because you've talked a lot about that on your YouTube channel, what are the benefits that maybe people aren't paying attention to there? Well, I think the number one benefit is reducing blood pressure. We talk a lot about cardiovascular disease. It's the number one cause of mortality. 630,000 Americans die every year from heart disease. All throughout COVID, heart disease was not only the number one risk factor for death from COVID,

but there was twice as many deaths from heart disease than COVID, for example. So reducing blood pressure is the number one thing. And just for athletic folks listening, you're improving your circulatory system. So you're mimicking exercise without having to exercise. Your muscles are moving and contracting, you're moving blood around, increasing capillary density.

So I think that's a really good aspect of it. It improves blood sugar health as well. So this was going back, 1992, the New England Journal of Medicine found that insulin dependent diabetics, when they went in hot tubs, and so any heat is good. Cause people are like, I don't like the sauna. So if you like a hot tub, go in the hot tub.

Like if you like hot yoga, any heat will help do this. The diabetics require less insulin because they were just going in the hot tub a couple of days a week. And so this has been known for almost 35 years now. So I think that's important. And then just the relaxation aspect is really important. So much of our problems are due to stress,

inability to properly relax. When you get hot, you really feel much better. You sleep so much better. So I think that's important. I am curious about this though, because when Thomas DeLauer came on the show and Dom came on the show, they were mentioning something, or Thomas was more so mentioning an aspect of the sauna,

cooking your brain and he rather hots up. I'm wondering, I mean, our bodies do certain things so that we don't just cook from the inside. So is there any legitimacy to that? Or I mean, do you believe there's legitimacy to that? To cooking the brain? I don't think so. But I, so my sauna, your brother, Chris went in it.

We got it up to 220 degrees Fahrenheit. So I want to get it really hot because we're filming this documentary on longevity and stuff. Because part of what makes sauna really cool is these heat shock proteins get activated. And heat shock proteins get, they help clean up deranged cellular debris and protein aggregation and so forth. If you think about in the extreme scenario, Parkinson's disease,

all these deranged proteins build up in our nervous system. So we can't really function, right? And so as we get older, the ability to break down these proteins declines. And when we get hot, the heat shock proteins increase and they help clean up our cellular protein levels, right? So I think the heat has all these benefits there. But with regards to the brain, if it was cooking the brain, we wouldn't see research coming out of Finland.

This is, Jari Laukaman has done this research looking at just epidemiological studies. People who sauna in Finland more than five days per week reduce their risk of Alzheimer's and dementia 63%. So if it was causing harmful effects to the brain, we would probably by now see that in these epidemiological studies, which we don't see. They've been doing that for decades, long time.

Centuries, babies in Finland and also in Scandinavian countries are born in the sauna. Dead bodies are cleaned in the sauna. And this is like a social, on a Friday night, in Eastern Europe and things, people go drink beer and hang out in the sauna. And this is what people do, because it's cold as hell and it's dark.

And so I don't know, I found it to be so fun socially, just have people come over in the sauna, do contrasts, and people will text me the next day, like I haven't slept that hard in years, you know? So one way, if people are worried about this, cause it can supposedly cause hair loss as well, cause the heat can damage your hair. I wear...

I mean, whatever. You can wear a wool sauna hat. And so you can buy these on Amazon. So that's what I recommend to guests. And we have this little goofy sauna hat. And so that can help cool your brain so that you can stay in longer. Do you think it has to do with like change of temperature?

Cause it sounds like we had Thomas Seeger on the podcast and he talks a lot about cold plunge stuff. And he talks about the impact on glucose, even just being in a cold room, a room that's 60 degrees. People did it for like 10 days. There was a study that was done. Do you think it has to do with the body trying to get back to a certain temperature

rather than whether we're in the heat or the cold? Because it seems like they're both really beneficial, but it seems like the main benefit is when you get out. Agree. So I think this idea of thermal stress is just improving our resilience. And so if you think about people that are sick and frail, they can't, they're not resilient. They can't walk.

They can't be in the heat. It can't be too cold. They're very controlled in terms of what they can tolerate. So getting, you know, environmental extremes on both end of the spectrum, really cold and really hot, just improve our resilience. And so people talk about our parasympathetic nervous system, that calm, rest and digest aspect. When we meditate, when we do yoga,

we increase our HRV, our heart rate variability. So when we're in the sauna or we get cold, we just improve our body's ability to tolerate stress. And I think that's probably one of the main benefits. Oh, we got a little cold plunge video right there. Is that the hat that you're talking about? Yeah, that's the wool sauna hat. I have that one too.

Nice. Except in gray. There you go. Yeah, it's fun. Actually that garnered the most comments on that video. People are like, what's up with the hat? I'm like, well, this is what people in Finland and, you know,

I thought it was like a non-native EMF hat. I'm crazy, well, this is what people in Finland and, you know, Scandinavia. I thought it was like a non-native EMF hat. I'm crazy, but not that crazy. Yeah, you're not the tin hat level, but you're getting there. You're right, right. So yeah, I think just the, excuse me, the resilience is key. And so we got to think about this like exercise as well. So exercise, it's stressful. Like if you were to look at exercise

and not know what people are doing, you're like, your blood pressure goes up, your glucose goes up, you look like you're stressed out. It's that transient stress that is adaptive. If you chronically exercise every day, that would be, if you say you did a hundred mile run every day, that would be too much stress. Just like too much perceived stress is problematic.

A little bit of stress is good. And I think a little bit of cold and heat stress is beneficial as well. Yeah, I think you have, at least from what I've seen, some of the most reasonable information when it comes to like cholesterol and heart disease, statins and so forth. And I was really shocked when you had,

you were interviewing a guy on your show, what was the name again? Phil Ovedia, he's a heart surgeon. When you were interviewing him, I was shocked to hear the efficacy of statins. He basically said they work somewhere between one to 4%. That's crazy. I was like, yeah, I was like that there's, I was like, there's just no way that's even possible.

Right. And probably how they're working has no effect on it's independent of their effect on cholesterol. Statins, it turns out, um, have anti-inflammatory properties. And so, um, that might might be how they're affecting people. Because most people that have heart disease have some degree of background chronic inflammation. And so it's not to say that statins are completely useless. They might offer anti-inflammatory benefits, but there are so many different ways to reduce inflammation that don't have the downsides.

Because it turns out when you completely block the isoprenode pathway and this cholesterol, there's all these different molecules that statins block. They block an enzyme called HMG-CoA reductase. And off that metabolic pathway, we have coenzyme Q10. That's so important. We have all these favorable molecules that aren't being produced when we completely hamper that enzymatic pathway. And this is why football players, even though some of them have high risk, like linemen for example, because they're really big, eat a lot of calories,

they generally don't take statins because it affects our sports performance in a negative way. Statins are notorious for changing glucose parameters in a negative way and increasing your risk for diabetes. So there are so many different ways that we can reduce inflammation without completely hamstringing our ability to make cholesterol because every single cell in our body has cholesterol. We need cholesterol. We talked about DHEA. Part of how DHEA and

cortisol and testosterone, estrogen are made is from cholesterol. And so we start to see these negative effects. And, but going back to cholesterol, you know, it seems that the medical community has been monomaniacally focused on reducing LDL, so-called bad cholesterol for years. But if you actually look at the studies, only 25% of people who end up in the emergency room from an infarct or a heart attack have high cholesterol, meaning 75% of them either have normal healthy cholesterol or low cholesterol. So if it was the sine qua non, the de facto cause of premature death from heart disease, we would across the board see high LDL cholesterol

correlating very tightly with death from heart disease and we don't. And so what's cool is we now are seeing tons of research coming out finding that, you know what, it's actually more the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL cholesterol, meaning you can have high total cholesterol as long as your high, as long as your HDL, so-called the reverse healthy cholesterol, reverse cholesterol transport is high, then the risk may not be there in terms of for heart disease. But even further, there was a really interesting study somewhere out, I think it was the UK or somewhere in Europe, looking at people at the age of 60, tracking them to their 100th birthday.

So it's like a 35, 40 year study. It turns out that people at 60 that had higher levels of LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol, were more likely to reach 100 years of age to become a centenarian. And this is data that you don't hear about when your grandparents or your parents go to the doctor. They're told, sadly, you got to gotta drive down, we gotta give you a statin. And so I think the conversation is much more nuanced. In fact, the only subset of the population for which lowering LDL cholesterol might reduce cardiovascular disease risk

is like our age group, like middle-aged men. Outside of that, for women of any age, LDL cholesterol has never been shown to be a risk factor. And for men over the age of 60, higher LDL cholesterol is linked with lower odds of dementia Alzheimer's as well as sudden cardiac death and all-cause mortality. So it's cool now that we're seeing these longitudinal studies and getting people to rethink this and to focus more on other parameters. Because if LDL is high, what is often also high as well is triglycerides.

And triglycerides are really a de facto marker of poor metabolic health. You know, most people can have high LDL cholesterol, but be very lean and have good cardiovascular health. But it's very uncommon to see someone with high triglycerides that are cardiometabolically healthy. Most people that I worked with in a clinic with a medical doctor, visceral adiposity, big neck, sleep apnea, insulin resistance, their triglycerides were like 300 or sometimes even a thousand. Like their blood is just full of fat and is problem.

And they have an inability to really oxidize or burn fat. So I think, you know, we really should be focusing on cholesterol in context. I'm not just, it's not to say, and Phil Oveda even said this, you know, we shouldn't just rule out the fact that it's not that LDL is useless Oveda even said this, you know, we shouldn't just rule out the fact that it's not that LDL is useless, but we need to look at the constellation. What is the LDL cholesterol levels in relation to HDL, in relation to triglycerides, in relation

to blood glucose, insulin, and liver enzymes? And so it's looking at this in a constellation. And the problem is mainstream medical doctors have 15 minutes or less with a patient. So they just need quick in and out rudimentary ways of looking at it, because they have to go, do insurance billing, deal with Medicare, do so much extensive documentation. So I think that's part of the problem. The other part of the issue is we don't really have,

there's not a prescription to increase HDL or reduce triglycerides, but we have a tool, statins, that really are good at lowering LDL. And so that's why it's been pushed from the medical establishment because the way that you increase HDL, which is good, and the way you lower triglycerides is with diet and lifestyle change. And that's hard if you only have five, 15 minutes with a patient to be like, okay, Sally, you got to walk 8,000 steps. So that's kind of where we're at with that. Yeah. And sometimes the doctor's dealing with someone that's never even bothered to read a food label yet, right?

Right. What you got over there, Andrew? So, um, every time I get my labs done, the cholesterol markers are always get the red flag, like, Hey, this is way too high. Um, through various conversations on this podcast, whether it be a carnivore or just somebody like in the, I'll say alt health space where it's like, Oh, high cholesterol is fine. If you look at the, the death rates, it's always the low cholesterol, even though it's just seems like,

well, these people are just dying. So everything's down. But when it comes to dietary cholesterol, especially for someone like me, and I'll get a little bit further into my background with that. When do, when should I start paying attention to dietary cholesterol? If my cholesterol is high and let's say I'm an average person that I just went to my regular doctor and he's like, your cholesterol is way too high. You need to start eating more, less saturated fat, more unsaturated fat, and that sort of thing, because we need to lower your cholesterol. Yeah.

This is so common. It turns out that there's really no correlation with dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol. And so these studies go back to animal model studies with rabbits actually. And rabbits, as you might know, they eat grass. They're herbivores. So they were giving rabbits eggs, which rabbits don. And rabbits, as you might know, they eat grass, they're herbivores. So they were giving rabbits eggs,

which rabbits don't eat eggs, and they were seeing, and so eggs are high in cholesterol, right? And so from those animal model studies, we've extrapolated that, oh, well, dietary cholesterol must increase serum cholesterol. Serum cholesterol is linked with heart disease,

so therefore we should reduce dietary cholesterol, but there's not really good human evidence. Mark and I were talking this morning, there was a recently published study and I wanna say it was May of 2023 and I can link it in the show notes, that looked at all the different dietary studies, feeding studies and looked at which food groups

impact serum cholesterol. It turns out coffee, green tea actually increase cholesterol. So these are foods that don't even have cholesterol. And so because most of our serum cholesterol is made endogenously by our liver and our gastrointestinal tract. And so the foods that actually increase cholesterol the most are carbohydrate rich foods.

So if you wanna increase your cholesterol, you know, you should start eating bread. Or sorry, if you want to, basically, eating a high cholesterol diet is not gonna impact your serum cholesterol. But what often happens is when people cut out carbohydrates, there is a global shift in the proportion of fat to glucose oxidation,

and you rely more upon ketone utilization and fat oxidation. So as a function of that, your serum cholesterol will increase and your glucose will go down. And so you see this in the lean mass hyper responder phenotype, which is characterized by high LDL cholesterol, high HDL cholesterol, low triglycerides. And so for people that are concerned about their cholesterol,

I would advise them to Google more about this lean mass hyper responder phenotype, which I've talked about a lot on my channel. Dave Feldman has talked about this. Nick Norwitz over at Harvard has talked a lot about this recently. That phenotype is not at higher risk of developing heart disease or causing arterial plaque development. So I generally tell people don't worry about dietary cholesterol. A constant thing that's been beneficial for all of our health has been inaking enough protein,

but also intaking quality protein. And that's why we've been partnering with Good Life Proteins for years now. Good Life not only sells Piedmontese beef, which is our favorite beef. And the main reason why it's our favorite is because they have cuts of meat that have higher fat content,

like their rib eyes and their chuck eyes, but they also have cuts of meat like their flat iron. Andrew, what's the macros on the flat iron? Yeah, dude, so the flat iron has 23 grams of protein, only two grams of fat, but check this out. Their grass-fed sirloin essentially has no fat and 27 grams of protein. There we go.

So whether you're dieting and you want lower fat cuts or higher fat cuts, that's there. But you can also get yourself chicken. You can get yourself fish. You can get yourself scallops. You can get yourself all types of different meats. And I really suggest going a good life and venturing in and maybe playing around with your proteins.

I mean, going back to the red meat, there's pecan. All kinds of stuff. Chorizo sausage. There's maple bacon. That stuff's incredible. The maple bacon is so good. The maple bacon is so good. The maple bacon is really good. Yo, my girl put those in these bell peppers with a steak and chicken.

And oh my God, it was so good. But either way, guys, protein is essential. And the good life is the place where you can get all of your high quality proteins. So Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, you can head over to goodlifeproteins.com and enter promo code Power Project to save 20% off your entire order. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Saturated fat is a little bit different story though.

Correct, so saturated fat can't, I mean, it depends on the context, but again, the whole, there's not a lot of good data to link saturated fat with heart disease. The mainstream medical establishment has tried to do that for the past six years. I mean, look at what's happened over the past six years. Obesity rates are now 75, 70% with overweight bundled in there.

Childhood obesity. We've been pushing the low saturated fat, you know, way of eating for a long time and our health has gone in the wrong direction as a collective. So Nina, Ty Schultz has done a lot of good work on this. There's a lot of recently published studies that have looked at this. So yeah, I'm not a huge, I'm not generally, if someone hasn't had a heart attack, a low saturated fat diet is not linked with increased risk of heart disease. And you can go to the bank on this.

What is interesting though is you're seeing a big push from the medical establishment to push people towards a plant-based diet. Stanford University recently ran that twin study. Harvard recently ran a study looking at plant-based diets and they purportedly lower the odds of diabetes in these things. But they're again, their biomarker that they're using is LDL cholesterol.

So it's like, they're not looking at body composition changes, fat mass changes, triglyceride reduction. They're just looking at this one biomarker that we just talked about is not directly tethered to higher rates of cardiovascular disease. So I think it's just important that people, it's very nuanced, you know, but getting back to Andrew's point, I would not be concerned about eggs and this because how cholesterol against serum cholesterol is it's because your liver is making the cholesterol. It's not from diet.

The absorption of cholesterol is really, really poor. And I'm going to use hereditary with an asterisk. Mark and I were talking about this yesterday. So my dad, triple heart bypass surgery, the doctor said that he just had extremely high cholesterol and he had three clogged arteries. So again, triple heart bypass. So because it is that close to me in the like blood line is do I have to consider anything else? And the asterisk is there because so my dad's never been overweight. He was always fairly active until he got into about his fifties. You know, he stopped playing

sports in his forties and he stopped playing like racquetball and squash and all that like in his fifties. So he was at that point just would go to work and be on his feet all day, but never changed his diet. You know, he was, he's still to this day, he'll still drink beer and stuff. And so this is all stuff that I don't do. I don't drink, I don't eat sweets the way he did. You know, I don't, it's very opposite of what I'm the current lifestyle that I live. So that's why there's an asterisk next to hereditary because again, I'm living a different

life, but he's my dad. And so I was told that like, Hey, that's something you now have to consider because I guess it is hereditary. So with that in mind, do I have to consider anything else when it comes to this conversation we're having right now? This is a beautiful question. There are other things. So what I would look at for you, Andrew, specifically is blood viscosity markers as well. So I would look at your fibrinogen. So in, in individuals who have first degree relatives that have had a cardiovascular event, there is a high correlation with elevated levels of blood viscosity or clotting biomarkers.

Fibrinogen is one of them. Iron is another. Ferritin is another one. So I would look at those markers as well in context of your lipids. So it's not to say that cholesterol and its associations with cardiovascular health didn't play a role at all in your father, but I would argue that there were other factors at play here. Like you mentioned, maybe increased risk of, what was his blood pressure?

What were the metabolic parameters? What were his liver enzymes? So I think all those factors need to be considered. So- So too sometimes when somebody has administered medication, so if your dad ever took medications for, said high cholesterol, it can negatively impact his insulin sensitivity.

Or if he was given diuretics for high blood pressure, it could negatively impact his insulin sensitivity, which would actually speed up this entire process. Yeah, and I mean, he wasn't, cause it was one of those things where like one day he's just like, yeah, my left arm would just get cold and numb one day. And I'm like, you'd probably go get that checked out

because I think you might be having a heart attack jokingly saying that. And it turns out he kind of was. And so that was, yeah, that was really strange. And yeah, my blood viscosity is through the roof. I have very thick blood. That's always another one of those markers. That's like, you know, you need to pay attention

to this or whatever. I think that's, but that's been like that forever. You know, I think it comes from snoring, to be or whatever. I think that's, but that's been like that forever. I think it comes from snoring to be honest, like before ever taking anything, it was always thick. So again, this is just more stuff that like, it just makes, it forces me to think about all of this because like before it's like, no,

I'll listen to a carnivore and be like, yeah, LDL and all this stuff, like we're fine. But then it's like, well, wait a second, there's some other things I should be paying attention to. Yeah. And so again, those other things, the fibrinogen would be really good looking at the APO-B to A1 ratio.

And so APO-lipoprotein B is a much more objective way to look at all of your atherogenic lipoprotein. So it's not just LDL cholesterol, there's remnant lipoproteins, there's VLDL, and these are very affordable tests. The APO-B to A1 ratio costs between 11 and $17. And this is not, you don't have to go to any esoteric boutique labs.

And then in your case, looking at your iron, your ferritin, your hematocrit and hemoglobin. And I think we talked about this a couple of years ago, maybe donating blood once or twice a year. And it turns out that athletic men tend to run higher in markers of blood viscosity. And so this is a tool, donating blood is good for humanity. It's good for your health, especially if you're a male

that tends to have sleep disorder, breathing thicker neck, snoring at night, higher testosterone, all that can be very beneficial donating blood to reduce the viscosity, the viscousness of the blood. And so, you know, the part of the reason why cholesterol has been associated with heart disease is because in arterial plaque, you do see cholesterol deposition.

But part of the reason why it's there is the repair process. And so we might say, well, what was the initial insult or damage to the vessel? It could be just thick, viscous blood. And so blood is what's known as a non-Newtonian fluid. And there's all these different dynamics and changes within blood.

And so if we have thick blood from iron overload, sedentary activity, if we have sleep apnea or sleep disorder breathing, then we could have, we could be inducing atherosclerosis and it could be independent of our cholesterol. The cholesterol is sort of like the smoke, not really the fire. The fire could be the damage from thick, viscous blood. If you get blood work done, is there any markers that would let you know if you have that? Or is that something that you're just going to have to get told by your doc? Well, here's the thing, Encima, doctors don't really talk about this as much. The blood viscosity element.

There was a test, Jonathan Wright and Ralph Holswitz put out this test in like 2006. I don't think it ever took off. But basically, I have a free cheat sheet on my website. I'm not trying to promote or sell anything, but this is really important because I think it can save lives. So on my blood work cheat sheet, I have the parameters for blood viscosity

and I put out a bunch of videos on this. So this is not just some esoteric thing. People can look at this. And again, the cluster of biomarkers that people want to just hit the replay button, we're talking hemoglobin, hematocrit, RDW, iron ferritin. And so- What's RDW? Red blood cell width. And then you have your hemoglobin. For most men, their hemoglobin's like 16, 15.5, something like that. For men that are on HRT or athletes, sometimes it can run 17, 18, which is quite high.

And then our hematocrit, you know, in the Tour de France, this is how they would figure out, you know, if people are blood doping or not. And so the idea would be, you would donate some blood in the bag, and then before the tour, you'd re-infuse your own blood. But if your hematocrit goes over 50%, that will increase your risk of having a stroke.

And so for a lot of people that aren't living at altitude, their hematocrit shouldn't be close to 50%. I mean, unless you're like a ultra distance runner, the risk to reward benefit for having a high hematocrit doesn't really make a lot of sense. So people should donate blood. So all of us here can function athletically at a high level with a hematocrit at like 42%. So if your hematocrit is high, it could be simple dehydration, but it usually is from iron overload.

Yeah, it was super interesting in the Armstrong lie, the documentary done on Lance Armstrong. They talked about him doing his hardest workout on the hill as he's prepping for Tour de France. And then they would save that blood on his hardest training day where he had the greatest output and so forth. They would save that blood and put it back into him

for the race. Just super interesting. It's fascinating. And in that context, in a very aerobic based situation where you're training for 21 days as the tour, right? That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you have more red blood cells to carry oxygen and deliver carbon dioxide during exercise. But the risks there are increased risk of having a stroke.

Some of these guys that race in the tour, they stroke out or they have a heart attack. Some have died. Yeah. Because their blood is so thick, right? So yeah, you're playing with fire a little bit with that. But again, blood donation is super easy. I do it once a year, you know. Now for menstruating women and former vegans, they really should have more iron in the diet.

A lot of women, you know, you hear about fatigue, chronic fatigue syndrome, long COVID, a lot of that is just anemia. So women generally trend towards the opposite direction. Cast iron pan, some red meat, right? And you're good. And good gut health. A lot of women who have been eating a vegan diet,

they have villus atrophy or they have gluten sensitivity and they have chronic anemia and they don't know why. And usually it's from, you know, just they're unable to absorb iron. So it turns out that your small intestine has all these different receptors for absorbing these minerals, iron being one of them. The proportion, if you think about your intestine, it's like 18 feet long. It's like an inch, the receptor for iron. So if you have gut inflammation, you're eating Skittles and Pop Tarts and junk,

you're not gonna be absorbing a lot of iron. So that's where Whole Foods really. I do wanna know, going back to the vegan thing, the Stanford Twin Study, we all saw that documentary on Netflix. And I was wondering if there were anything that you think people should pay attention to from there because one thing I noticed just watching the doc casually was that they always put the twin that was in slightly better shape on a vegan

diet and I was like, nah, that can't be. Then you go back to the twins, it's always the twin that weighs a little bit less, has better markers. That twin is initially put on the vegan diet. Then the other twin that's a little bit more unhealthy has put on the omnivorous diet. Was there anything else you noticed with that study that people should probably try to tune into? That was curious.

Yeah, that was an interesting study. I mean, part of it, just backing up, I'll address your question, but Chris Gardner, who was a lead researcher on that study, several years ago, he did this diet fit study as well at Stanford. And they wanted to look at the genetic expression changes on a vegan versus keto diet.

And they had every opportunity to look at body composition. And they looked at body mass index and body fat percentage and all this at the start of the study, but they failed to do so at the end. And I sent him an email and he wrote back and said something sort of like, Oh, we, yeah, we should have looked at body composition changes, but we didn't. I'm like, well, you looked at genetic analysis. You did all this stuff.

Why not just look at bioimpedance? I mean, this is really low cost stuff. And so it seems that there's an agenda here with that because he actually receives a lot of money from beyond me and impossible burger. So this is the thing. There's so much conflicts of interest in the research community because there receives a lot of money from Beyond Meat, an Impossible Burger. So this is the thing, there's so much conflicts of interest in the research community, because there's a lot of money to be made. There's a lot of investors that want,

that billionaires and multimillionaires, that want to invest in novel products and novel food products such as Impossible Burger or Meatless or dairy-free cheeses. I mean, there's big money to be made because the consumers have been told that it's better for the environment, right?, there's big money to be made because the consumers have been told that it's better for the environment. Right? So there's a huge, this is the next wave of investment opportunities. So I think there's an agenda there, but going back to

what any questionable things that I saw in that study, they didn't look at body composition changes in that. So I think that would be more telling. They, the sole objective. So it's interesting when you read a study, you want to find out what's the intent of the study? What are they looking to achieve? They specifically wanted to look at how these different dietary patterns affected LDL cholesterol, right? Because if you go from a carnivore diet to a plant-based diet, your LDL will go down.

But does that mean that your risk of heart disease also goes down? And that's very questionable. They didn't look at body composition. Well, let me quick question about the body composition. On the doc, there was the section where they paid attention to their lean body mass on each diet. And so is that what you're mentioning? Were they not paying attention to body composition there?

Well, there was actually a change in waist circumference in the wrong direction in the plant-based group. So that to me is, but this is a short-term study, right? So if you extrapolate that over a year, but if you increase your waist circumference, that would mean that that way of eating is not in favor of supporting metabolic health. And then there was an increase in triglycerides

in the vegan arm of the study. And that wasn't really talked about. And why is that important? Because we have numerous studies now finding high triglycerides are independently correlated with increased risk of heart disease. And so you have one biomarker that purportedly is linked with heart disease,

LDL cholesterol goes down, but then you have another biomarker, you could say two biomarkers that increased waist circumference as well as triglycerides. Why didn't that get media attention? Because I don't know why. I mean, it seems like the media is also really pushing a plant-based diet narrative. So I think that's what's interesting, but we do have a lot of feeding studies. And one of them was published by Kevin Hall et al in 2021. And this was the so-called metabolic ward study where they randomized people to have a animal-based keto diet for two weeks and then have a plant-based diet

or the other way around, have a plant-based diet and then an animal-based keto diet. And at the end of the study, the conclusion was a plant-based diet is better for all different parameters. But that study, I don't know if you guys have heard about this, this was just like weeks ago, got reanalyzed. It turns out that there was a diet carryover effect. So the order in which the diets were applied

made one of the, particularly if the individuals did the animal-based keto diet first, it made the plant-based diet look better. In contrast, if individuals did the plant based diet first, it made the keto diet look worse. So they should have done a washout period. And even Walter Willett, who is as conventional as they come and is anti-saturated fat and this and that,

he was like, yeah, this study should be retracted because they didn't do a washout period. So what's interesting, knowing that data, then going back to the new Stanford study, it's like, okay, now that we know that there is this diet carryover effect, this, we should be considering this information. So I think it's interesting because when you go on a whole, sorry, an animal based keto diet, what happens? Your LDL cholesterol goes up, but your triglycerides, metabolic health goes down and you start to rearrange, you start to change, you know, the, the partitioning of energy that your body and

brain are using. And that seems to have a favorable effect, particularly in the context of optimizing brain health, metabolic health, mood, depression, all of that. So this stuff is very interesting. I don't know that we're ever going to get to the bottom of it. I mean, I, I'm in favor of creating a citizen science project where look, we have enough people who are vested on both sides, plant-based versus keto. We should create an app that's user generated

where people upload their blood work and just track them over time. We're never going to be able to get to the bottom of this by sharing these epidemiological studies or doing these two week feeding studies. But we have enough people that have been doing carnivore or keto or carbohydrate restriction or carb cycling for years and are very, very

healthy. And we have people who have been doing a plant-based diet for a long time. And I think the cool part about it is there's something for everyone. For some people, maybe a plant-based diet makes a lot of sense based upon their genetics, their ethnicity, their microbiome, you know, maybe in Andrew's case, maybe a little bit more plant-based might be good based upon his genetic history. Right. So I think we should be more customizing this

and people, and my position is you should do blood work, see your biomarkers. If they're going in the wrong direction on one way of eating, pivot and see what improves it. If you're someone that's taking supplements or vitamins or anything to help move the needle in terms of your health, how do you know you really need them? And the reason why I'm asking you how do you know

is because many people don't know their levels of their testosterone, their vitamin D, all these other labs like their thyroid, and they're taking these supplements to help them function at peak performance. But that's why we've partnered with Merrick Health for such a long time now, because you can get yourself different lab panels

like the Power Project Panel, which is a comprehensive set of labs to help you figure out what your different levels are. And when you do figure out what your levels are, you'll be able to work with a patient care coordinator that will give you suggestions as far as nutrition optimization, supplementation, or if you're someone who's a candidate and it's necessary, hormonal optimization to help move you in the right direction so you're not playing guesswork with your body. Also, if you've already gotten your lab work done but you just want to get a checkup, we

also have a checkup panel that's made so that you can check up and make sure that everything is moving in the right direction if you've already gotten comprehensive lab work done. This is something super important that I've done for myself. I've had my mom work with Merrick. We've all worked with Merrick just to make sure that we're all moving in the right direction and we're not playing guesswork with our body. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at MerrickHealth.com slash Power Project.

And at checkout enter promo code Power Project to save 10% off any one of these panels or any lab on the entire website. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. We talked a lot about heart disease and cholesterol and so forth. How important do you think the adjustments to light are in terms of, you know, blue light and getting sunlight and so forth? I can't enumerate it, but I think it's huge because it's, you know, it's a core function. enumerate it, but I think it's huge because it's, you know, it's a core function. When you look at all bodily functions from testosterone increasing, cortisol increasing, all of these are under the

control of the circadian clock system. And when we are exposed, when we get insufficient amounts of sunlight and or we're exposed to artificial blue light at the wrong time, we are changing the amplitude and the frequency of this sine wave known as our circadian rhythm. And so I think it's very, very important and it's, but it's hard to enumerate. One of the reasons why I got, and I'm not promoting this because I don't make any money off this,

this Garmin watch has a light future, I'll show you Mark. So it has a solar intensity. It looks at the luxe that you get. Oh, that's cool. So it's really neat. So you can just wear this and see, and you can get these so-called photometers off Amazon. It's really cool. And the days that I feel the best are the days that I get the most sunlight, right?

Working outside, going, I mean, people go on vacation. They're like, why do I feel so good? You know, what's most of the times you're outside, you're at the beach, you know, you got the pool, like you're hiking, why do I feel so good? Well, most of the times you're outside, you're at the beach, you're at the pool, like you're hiking, you're doing stuff outside. So I think this is really important. There was a few studies, I think Stanford did this study finding that,

and I think sex drive is a proxy of health and vitality. If you have no libido, something's wrong, right? Depending upon your age, of course. But like one study found that when they had people go outside, and these were like couples, they were more likely to engage in sexual behavior. I didn't do sexual behavior. Cause like the sun helps with testosterone.

People out there fucking each other in the forest, basically. Right. I mean, Be careful when you're on your walks. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.

So I don't know. I it's really important. So you can get a, it's called a Lux meter, L U X. When we look, when we want to enumerate light intensity, it's, it's in the units of Lux. And so it's good to go around your home and just a lot of people think like light hygiene, oh, that's like stuff for biohacker nerds. I think we should all be aware of light hygiene. So I have this light meter that I used, again, it's 19 bucks on Amazon. And you can just look in your bedroom.

And so we want to have less than 50 lux of light in the two hours before bedtime. And humans would not, yeah, something like that. Super simple, that one's $24. Have you seen any data in terms of like sunlight and or red light therapy in terms of like glucose or in terms of cholesterol. Cause I'm thinking like, you know, I believe the sun interacts with your skin,

cholesterol, vitamin D and so on. So I'm thinking if you don't get outside and you're not getting the sunlight and you're consuming all this cholesterol, maybe it doesn't end up in the right places or maybe you're not utilizing your energy as efficiently as you could be. I would agree logically with that.

I can't like cite any studies that I know of, but just there was one study and I want to say it was at Stanford or somewhere else. Mount Sinai did this research, but looking at the recommendations for light intensity. So during the day we should be having a thousand, between 500 and a thousand lux. So if you're working in an office or a place like this,

you can bring your light meter and be like, oh, we need to either get outside more or change the lighting or add windows, for example. And then before bed, we should have less than 50 lux. In our room, it should be less than five lux. So, you know, a lot of people in their bedroom, they might not have blackout curtains or they might have these little lights

or smoke detectors, whatever. Those are things that we should be mitigating for sure. How about, I mean, as far as mitigating light, just a really good sleep mask. What do you think about that? I think it's awesome. I bring it when I travel all the time. Gotcha.

How about in your house? Cause you know, you have a daughter, like how do you guys help like eliminate some of the blue light indoors? Because with my son, he likes to watch cartoons and stuff, and it's like, OK, that's on. And then as the sun goes down, it's like, shit. All right, well, let's get into bed.

And the TV's still on and stuff. And I've converted every light bulb into like an amber light bulb, because apparently incandescent is an issue, and we can't get them anymore. And it's going to be like banned, which I mean, hey, if that isn't throw a red flag for you, like what the hell, no, nothing will. But yeah, for you and your household, like what's some advice and some tips that you can give, you know, other family households on eliminating or minimizing some of this

blue light? Yeah. Great question, Andrew. So I think what you said, I mean, I have a lot of incandescent light bulbs in our house. And so they do, not only is the light intensity lower, but the color hue is different, which has a less powerful, suppressive effect on adenosine and melatonin release.

So that's good. But with kids, it turns out that the shape of their eyes is such that they're actually more sensitive to the harmful effects of blue light. So basically, I think we need to look at, like we talked about with cholesterol, HDL and LDL, we need to look at sunlight exposure in relation to artificial light exposure.

So if your kid is outside a lot during the day, they'll probably have more of a buffer effect of watching an iPad or a TV before bed. But I would get in the habit of just cutting it off an hour before sleep. If possible. Now if it's the summertime, you know, sun's out. I think we need to look at seasonality here as well. It's harder in the winter because it gets dark early and then what are kids going to

do, you know, and things like that. But you know, we have blue light filtering glasses for my daughter and she wears them sometimes, not all the time. I mean, these things aren't perfect, but I think just being a little bit more intentional about it, you're going to be way ahead of most people. And so reducing the intensity and I think a TV is probably better than a tablet or iPhone because it's further away. The intensity is a little bit different, but just be mindful, try to cut it off an hour

before bed. You mentioned something about streetlights. I think you said you saw a study where they were talking about people being a little bit more unhealthy in areas where they inserted streetlights. Yeah, I mean, this is incredible. And this data has been conducted, I wanna say since like 2007.

I mean, this is not like just in the last five years, it's been going on for 10, 15 years. The new streetlights are just like, like we're hearing this big push about banning incandescent light bulbs. It's all going to LED. And I'm not a light expert, but there's something about LED

that's more harmful than incandescent. But these street lights are so bright. So in my neighborhood, it used to be very rural and we'd take evening walks and like, it was no big deal, you know, without wearing blue light filtering glasses, because the street lights, just like incandescent lights, they're orange, the old ones are more orange and lower intensity.

The new ones are super blue, very bright. It's like you're lighting up a baseball stadium or something, right? It's insane. And it literally now, it's sort of like, you know, when you haven't had a McDonald's cheeseburger or chicken nugget, it's so powerful. It just hits you like, whoa, that's intense.

You know, when you're mindful about your light and you go under these streetlights, it almost hurts your eyes because you're not used to this at that time of the day. So I think it's, you know, municipalities should be mindful of this because it's having a, it's a public health threat at this point.

So I know it sounds weird, but like, you know, when I go walking at night, like I'll put my hood on, you know, just to help with the streetlights. I mean, I still want wanna get my steps in, but just being intentional about not looking up at the streetlights or taking walks away from the streetlights and things like that. And they flicker, so it's super unnatural.

And that's why we get eye strain. Yeah. Yeah. Any idea where this raise in cancer amongst younger people is coming from? This is really interesting, Mark. I mean, there's a lot of high profile cases now, actresses and things like that in their 20s and 30s that are getting really aggressive

metastatic breast cancer. And so I've been naturally interested in this. And there's an event called the American Association for Cancer Research. They have an annual seminar. And they just published this data a couple of weeks ago, actually, finding that individuals who are at higher risk of cancer

have accelerated rate of biologic aging. So it's been long recognized that cancer is sort of a disease of aging. All men will die with prostate cancer, but not of prostate cancer or from prostate cancer. So we naturally get deranged cellular metabolism and increase our risk of cancer over time. But it turns out that if we accelerate

our rate of biologic aging from poor lifestyle choices, artificial light exposure, processed food consumption, like we've been talking about, then we're at higher risk of cancer. So it seems that these individuals, and there's a lot of like TikToks talking about this now, how Gen Zers are aging like milk, not aging very well. And it's probably because of foam use,

I honestly think in bed, in eating processed food and crap like that. But it seems that higher rates of biologic aging are increasing the rates and the incidence of cancer, particularly of the gastrointestinal tract, so colon cancers, uterine cancers in women and breast cancer, as well as brain cancer. So, I mean, I don't know about you guys, but like that would be the most scary diagnoses getting cancer. And so I think we should all be taking this pretty guys, but like that would be this most scary diagnoses getting cancer. And so I think we should all be taking this pretty seriously, you know? And it comes down to the basics of fundamentals, walking, circadian rhythm, health, sleep, hygiene, eating real food.

I mean, we're not talking about buying, there's any D supplement, there's all these crazy supplements are very expensive that people are spending a lot of money on. I think if you're not doing all the foundations, you shouldn't even go near that stuff. You should really focus on the basics. And now there's ways to test this. So there's a test called True Diagnostics, and they have this algorithm based upon this Dunedin study in New Zealand.

Have you guys talked about this before? I don't believe so. This is like the most fascinating piece of research, I think, out on the internet now. This has been a 40 year study where they tracked individuals, all different biomarkers in New Zealand. They were born in 1972 or something like that. They've been looking at their pace of aging,

looking at how their cells are aging over time and correlating, you know, what is linked with a better pace of aging and how is that separate from, yeah, true diagnostics, no financial affiliation with this, but they use the Dundin pace of aging biomarker. I've had a few clients that I work with, I do some coaching for executives and CEOs and stuff like that. And they often love this test because it's amenable to lifestyle change.

You can change your diet, your lifestyle. Six months later, look at your pace of aging and they look at methylation tags on your white blood cells. And it turns out that as we get older, our cellular functions change. And you can enumerate this with these methylation tests. But it turns out that the very simple way to do this is just ask people, hey, how old do you think I am?

When people come up to many of us who live this lifestyle, they don't realize that we're in our 40s. How old do you think Encima is? I'm gonna go late 30s. He's 56. Doing pretty good. No, I'm 31. 31?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So 30, yeah, so it's like we can, there's actually tests that can look at this. And just how we are aging reflects our biologic age. And I think the most important takeaway from this is our perception of how we're aging. So a lot of people will say, oh, I'm in my 40s. I can't lift weights anymore. Yeah. It's like, what are you talking about? You should be able to do- And that was the best time, man. Yeah. There was this video on TikTok

and it was a woman outside of a bar asking guys how long they last in bed. Like how long? And some guy who was 41 and he was like, oh, when I was younger, I used to last 20 minutes, but now it's like, I can't even get it up because I'm so old. I'm like, you're 41, dude.

What are you talking about? So this is not normal. So the point is, mindset matters in all these conversations. So how we, this is not normal. So the point is we, mindset matters in all these conversations, you know? So how we feel we're aging affects our biologic age. Yeah. I had a guy at jujitsu, um, you know, he was like, kind of looked like he was hurting and like, oh, do you all right? And he's just like, oh yeah, you know, just getting old and like, oh shit, how old are you? He was four years younger than me. And so I was little bit surprised. So right now I actually have, so one cousin,

she's in the hospital. She has a lot of blood clots throughout her body. So, you know, positive vibes towards her. And then another cousin, it's about similar age, is battling cancer big time. Like she's fighting hard and it's, you know, it's battling cancer. It's not pretty.

When it comes to, I'll say cancer, like I know you just talked about like the white blood panels and other white blood cell count and all that stuff. Is there any other markers or tests or anything that somebody can do preemptively to like, to do just to be like, okay, are we good here? You know, like I know my habits haven't been good. You know, I'm following traditional stuff.

I'm in school all day, you know, blue light all day long, eating whatever I can because I'm on a tight time schedule. So it's a lot of stuff in a package. Holy shit, maybe I'm doing all these things incorrectly. What can I do to check to make sure there's not like a red flag where it's like, oh my goodness, maybe I need further testing because nobody, at least to my knowledge, is like,

hmm, you know, I feel like I have a little bit of cancer. Let me go and check just to make sure. No, it's always, something's wrong. Sorry to let you know, but you have this cancer diagnosis now. So what can people do to just, again, it's such a weird thing because nobody wants to get ahead of that.

But is there maybe some labs or something that they can do to just be like, okay, let me throw that in with my regular labs that I hopefully that they're getting once a year. No, great question, Andrew. And just for disclaimer, I'm not an oncologist or cancer specialist, right? So take this with a grain of salt. But I would look at just common metabolic parameters. And again, going back to that American Association for Cancer Research seminar that released this data, they didn't look at esoteric biomarkers.

They looked at glucose, they looked at white blood cell counts, so we're looking at basically chronic inflammation and metabolic dysfunction. And if those are in balance, that was linked with higher pace of aging, higher risk of cancer. So I think that is where people should focus on. Books that I would recommend would be Tripping Over the Truth by Travis Christopherson.

Really excellent book about the history of cancer and how we've gotten cancer wrong for a lot of years. I think that's a really good book because he weaves in all the aspects of metabolic health as it's related to cancer. So I would consider that and just try to do things to reduce inflammation. So it turns out that chronic inflammation creates the environment to foster cancerous

growth and it's likely that all of us right now have some pre-cancerous cells, but our immune system is able to deal with that noise because we have low levels of inflammation. So for bogging down, think about when you have all these windows open on your computer, you know, you might have Microsoft Word open, you might have Adobe Photoshop, your cache is bogged down. So if our immune system is bogged down with all this noise from our diet, from chronic inflammation, it's not going to be able to survey, there's called tumor surveillance, you know, natural killer cells and so forth that can help kill these precancerous cells.

And so I think that's a big part of it, as well as metabolic health. So it turns out that poor metabolic health is linked with higher rates of prostate cancer, colon cancer, uterine cancer, and ovarian cancer in women, breast cancer, and lung cancer, and brain cancer. So these are common cancers that most people suffer from. So if we improve our metabolic health, we're going to produce the odds

that we would at least get those cancers. Full body MRI? So I've done that. I think it's cool. It's about 2000 bucks. You know, there's now one in the Bay area, Pronovo. It used to only be in Canada. But your starting point would be something way less expensive.

Yeah, just doing blood work once a year. I mean, the test that I just mentioned, you can do all this for 150, 200 bucks. It's not a lot. And so if someone does suspect, like Andrew mentioned, first degree relative with heart disease, first degree relative with cancer, then yeah, I think a full body MRI every five years would be good. What else does a full body MRI tell us? Does it tell us anything else? Or is it mainly kind of scanning for tumors or cancer? Is it showing a visceral fat or anything like

that? Yeah, no. So it's looking at your red bone marrow. It's looking at visceral fat. It's also looking at, yeah, potentially soft tissue cancer. So the cool thing about MRI is it's looking at your red bone marrow. It's looking at visceral fat. It's also looking at, yeah, potentially soft tissue cancer. So the cool thing about MRI is it's non-invasive. Like you wouldn't want to do a full body CT scan all the time. There's just too much radiation. So the MRI is non-invasive.

So it would find brain cancer. It would find testicular cancer, gastrointestinal, like liver cancer, it would find. And then it would also look at your fat mass. And so the MRI is really good to look at visceral fat. Even though it's expensive, finding cancer is critical because you can get treat you a lot of times, seems like you can get treatment for it

if you find it early enough. Early enough. And then you can make the lifestyle changes as well to help increase the efficacy of the treatment. So yeah, the MRI is a good option. You know, Peter Atiyah recommends colonoscopies over 40 for people, because colon cancer is a good option. You know, Peter Atiyah recommends colonoscopies over 40 for people because colon cancer is on the rise.

So I think those are really good things. If people want to do a more sort of detecting cancer on a homeboy discount kind of thing, the thermography is good for breast tissue. So this is a way to look at imaging of heat and it turns out that cancerous cells start to release more heat. And so you can do breast thermography. And it's less invasive than a mammogram. So women can just Google thermography clinics.

They often pop up at like OBGYN centers and naturopathic centers. Like they'll have a thermography once a month on a Saturday and go and pay 100 bucks and do that, you know, if there is a risk of breast cancer. So those are things that I would recommend in general. Cause one thing that we've been talking about a lot recently is there seems to be a lot of pushback in terms of fasting nowadays. You see a lot of people talking negatively about it, whereas a few years goes super positive and some people think about doing fasting when they

do think about cancer. So I'm curious, what are your thoughts on intermittent fasting nowadays? Have any of your ideas changed on it? Is there anything people should be paying attention to about it? Yeah, great question. I found when I was doing a lot of excess, like prolonged fasting, 36 hours and more,

I felt like it was really good for mental clarity and brain health, but I just lost strength and muscle. And I've just been convinced through all the data on grip strength that strength really matters. And you guys talk about this all the time. So personally, I don't do a lot of excessive fasting, just more early time restricted feeding. So eating really between the hours of eight

or it was like 10 and six, 10 AM to six, and going back to sleep and circadian rhythm health, it turns out that not only does light exposure and darkness impact our circadian rhythms, when we eat also entrains the circadian clock. And so I think that is really helpful for sleep wake cycles. But the data on fasting is really great from an anti-inflammatory perspective. Some of the earliest data, earliest human clinical trials on fasting, we're looking at asthma prevalence in overweight people and finding that when overweight people ate

what's called ADF, alternate day feeding. So they eat like Monday, fast Tuesday, eat Wednesday, fast Thursday. They had reduction in asthma symptoms and allergy symptoms because it's reducing inflammation. So eating is necessary, but it's also a stress. Like cortisol goes up after a meal. That's when all these people on the internet talk about cortisol is bad. You're gonna need to do, well, it's like, well, then you shouldn't exercise. You shouldn't eat if you're really scared of cortisol.

Getting out of bed increases cortisol, right? So we need to keep cortisol in context. But anyway, for, you know, painting like a broad brush stroke on fasting recommendations, I think it's good for people who are relatively sedentary. Prolonged fasting can be helpful. And if they have a history of metabolic debt, meaning they've been overweight in some resistance, sedentary for a long time, fasting helps kickstart some of those metabolic pathways. But for people that are trying to be super athletic and maintain healthy body composition and muscular strength and mass. Excessive fasting, I don't think, is very beneficial.

With all the information that you found out, how do you eat? Basically like what we're talking about. So my feeding window is between generally 10 to 6 PM. That might fluctuate based upon the season or whatever. But mostly carnivore style with avocado, fruit. I love olives, raw milk, raw dairy, yogurt, berries. And for vegetables, usually it's fermented vegetables like sauerkraut, things like that.

I was traveling in Southeast Asia and Korea and things like that. And I couldn't help but notice that every meal they're having kimchi before and after. And you talk to these elders, and it was a medical conference, there was a lot of doctors who had been doing this for a long time.

And they're talking about childhood obesity and South Korea is increasing. And I was like, why do you think that is? I mean, there's McDonald's now and stuff. And they're like, well, it's because the parents aren't making kimchi like they used to, like their grandparents did. They're just buying it from the store.

It's not the same stuff. And so they were correlating it not only with reduced activity and all that, but just the lack of good bacteria. And I think a lot of people, you know, have poor gut health. They were born via C-section, were given antibiotics, weren't breastfed. And so this idea that we can all tolerate all these vegetables, you know, people's digestive tracts are not really as, their digestion is not really that good.

So having vegetables that are fermented is it's like pre-digested. So those are the veggies that I usually consume. Pre-digested and also very low calorie. Totally. And high in good bacteria. Right. Yeah. It's kind of a win-win all around.

Yeah. Yeah. I might have to look into that because, you know, the second I say I'm going to start incorporating more vegetables, it's just like an explosion goes off in my stomach. And then it's a really cool excuse for me to be like, all right, I'm good with that. So you mentioned kimchi. Is there anything else that I can look for in regards to like trying to re I'll say rebuild my gut health?

Great question. So a friend of mine, Bill Schindler, have you guys had him on the podcast? He has a book called Eat Like a Human, really, really good book. It'll be in the show notes and Andrew's looking it up. Now he has a fermented potato recipe that's really good. So basically you can buy these fermentation kits for 29 bucks on Amazon. And all fermentation usually is,

is you just mincing, in this case, potatoes up, and you put some salt in the brine, you put it in these jars and let it sit for three days and then cook it and it tastes amazing. My daughter loves these chips. So we'll take, excuse me, lard or butter or ghee, fry up the fermented potatoes and it's like potato chips. You know, it tastes phenomenal. Kind of like a, it's more of like a, gosh, what's the type of chip?

So like salty chips and the ones you would buy. Salt and vinegar. Yeah, it's like salt and vinegar type of, and it tastes phenomenal, but it's been broken down. So the oxalates are reduced and things like that. That's in the book. That's in the book, yeah. So the book is all about, so Bill is an anthropologist.

And so he's traveled all throughout the world and looked at how do humans eat? Like what do humans eat in different parts of the world? Like for example, I think it's in Greenland. The people in Greenland figured out that they would use, kill sharks and eat them because they don't have like ruminant animals running around, I guess, Greenland. But the liver is highly nutritious, but unless you ferment it, there's an enzyme in the liver of sharks that would like kill you. So they figured out that if they bury the liver for 90 days in dirt and

ferment it, that they could eat the liver. So we actually, on a trip, he brought this fermented shark liver and it would taste phenomenal. So anyway, he's really big into this and he draws on principles from Sally Fallon's work and Sally has done a lot of research on meal preparation, especially in the context for vegan and vegetarians. I think this is where a lot of plant-based dieters go wrong, is they're not properly preparing the grains and the plants that they're eating

in a way that reduces the anti-nutrient load. And so I think, just for example, like having rice that's been soaked overnight. So I eat rice, but I soak it overnight in water, a little vinegar or a little apple cider vinegar, and then put it in the slow cooker and you digest it so much better. It's probably lower glycemic, right? So it's supposed to be like almost half the amount of carbohydrate or something like that.

I don't know how true that is, but heating and cooling of those kind of carbohydrates creates a prebiotic, I guess, right? Yeah. So there's just so many things we can do from a food prep strategy that just take a couple minutes to increase the digestibility of these plant-based foods. How about probiotics, like capsule, do all the work for me. So that can be good for sure.

It really is contingent upon the potency. So when you go to the grocery store, you might have something that's two billion. You're like, whoa, two billion. You really want like, like, or millions are usually probiotics will be like, five million CFUs colony forming units, but you need like hundreds of millions, if not billions. So there's, yeah, I would just say the potency really matters, you know, getting a strain and actually probiotics are very strain specific, you know, in terms of like, what are you trying to achieve? People with depression might benefit from say, Lactobacillus

plantarum, you know, autistic children benefit from, I think it's enamelis, Lactobacillus enamelis, right? Or Ruteye. So it's very specific on what your goals are, whether it's depression, whether it's in the context of metabolic health, there's a probiotic strain called acrimensia myosinophilia that's really good for metabolic health. It turns out that overweight people tend to have lower proportions of this specific bacteria and when they supplement it, they improve their metabolic health. So I think this idea that we all need all these bacteria is a little bit old school thinking, but just kind of like, Oh, take a multivitamin.

It's like, well, if you're a carnivore of like, oh, take a multivitamin. It's like, well, if you're a carnivore, maybe you don't need a multivitamin. Maybe you need like just magnesium, for example. If you're a vegan, maybe you need more iron and B12, right? So just being a little bit more nuanced, I think is beneficial. You said help with depression and probiotics.

You don't hear that too often. What are you alluding to there? Well, so it turns out that our brain and gut have an intimate crosstalk and correlation. And so a lot of us, I mean, think about it when we're sick and we have a tummy ache, we feel kind of depressed, right? So inflammation in the gut triggers by way of microglial cells and these different neuronal receptors, depression in the brain. And so a lot of people that are susceptible to anxiety and depression can benefit from supporting gut health.

And that's been borne out in the research now quite extensively. It turns out that people that, and this is just people might think I'm biased or cherry picking, but more vegans and vegetarians report increased anxiety and depression. And it probably is due to the fact that a lot of so-called plant-based food is just highly processed. Oreos would be plant-based, for example. Rice krispie treats are plant-based. So a lot of people are eating just plant-based junk food,

and that is causing poor gut health, which is affecting their mood and their memory and focus. So I think it's really important for people to acknowledge that gut health, the health of our gut affects our brain, you know, there's no way to argue that at this point. So if it's an inflammatory response, then would like red light or even sunlight be beneficial for a depressed stomach? I'll say,

I think that would be beneficial. And as well as just mindfully eating, you know, when we think about how do we get an imbalanced gut, how do we get all this acid reflux and all this slowing down our, like the act of chewing, scientists have looked at this, we should be chewing about 25 to 40 chews per swallow, which is crazy, right? But basically what that means is get off your phone before the meal, you know, sit down. We used to eat in groups and share stories and learn from our elders and put the fork down and all that. A lot of us are unfortunately eating in isolation, we're on our phones and all that.

So I think that's not a good strategy, especially if you have poor gut health. Just slowing down, chewing, being mindful, being grateful, talking with your partner, your roommate, your kid, that's really beneficial. So you do a lot of walking. You told me that you run, you lift. How often do you lift?

And is there anything that you're mindful of with lifting? Is there anything you learned maybe in the last couple of years that you figured you would implement into your lifting? Like for us, we've had, we always have something kind of like new cooking up, but it's not really new. It's just stuff that we stumble upon. Like we've been messing around with some sandbags. So has there ever anything new that you something kind of like new cooking up, but it's not really new. It's just stuff that we stumble upon. Like we've been messing around with some sandbags.

So has there anything new that you've kind of run into that's really been helpful or useful? You know, just focusing on the glutes, you know, I used to have low back pain from poor form, deadlifting and college and stuff like that. So just more like I got into Brett Contreras's work and all the glute lab stuff, hip thrusting, hip hinges, doing more sled work for my knees.

I think that's been helpful. But, you know, learning powerlifting, I think was really good. I wish I learned powerlifting early on and then blending that with bodybuilding, I think for just the periodization aspect of it and novelty. Yeah, just changing up the sets and reps and not always doing the same thing all the time. And then also, you know, doing a lot of banded pull-up hearts, you know, following like Matt Winning and some of that, like he recommends, I think like a hundred sets of reverse flies for delts a week spread out throughout the week.

So just some of those things, you know, cause when you're younger, you can get away with just hitting bench three days a week, and just like having all the, we're naturally more sort of in that hypercaphotic state, more forward leaning. So just doing more back work, more pull-ups. And then when I lift now, I just do compound movements. I don't really do screw around with isolation exercises

periodically just for biceps or triceps, a little bit finishing, but just when I lift just compound movements. How about your cardio? I think one thing that a lot of people have been paying attention to is VO2 max. So is that something that you pay attention to much? What do you do for that? Yeah, so I started testing that when I turned 40. And I've been able to increase my VO2 max every year. So, but I don't like train for it necessarily.

It's not like I'm like, okay, I do this many minutes of zone two or whatever. I just try to walk and then run. And then in the summer do a lot of hiking. So we'll do a lot of backcountry hunting and then also hiking. And that I think has a lot of carryover because it's naturally like low intensity, very aerobic, increasing capillary density and things like that. But I think, you know, providing the structural base to then when you want to increase the intensity, you know, I think it's very beneficial. You know, I was just at Sean Baker's place, you know, doing, you know, the skier and the

concept too. That's something I never really paid attention to. I thought that's just for crossfitters, but that's been, I think really good just to switch up the cardio and doing whole body cardio. A lot of us would just do cardio for our legs. The bodybuilders or fitness models will get on the stair mill, revolving stairs. And you're just improving the capillary density in your legs per se.

But then involving your upper body in the cardio process I think is really beneficial. So in the winter, like cross-country skiing, it's really good exercise for your core, for your back, your lats. And I think that just makes a lot of sense for improving your VO2 max. Yeah, if you go kind of like top down, like if you're able to handle a lot of what Sean Baker does,

then you can probably be very easy to go on a jog, you know, cause he does a lot of sprinting type stuff. He does a lot of explosive stuff. So I think it's really important to stay in tune with that. I do think that people need to be a little careful with it because it's very easy to hurt yourself if you haven't done that in a long time, if you're not practiced up on it.

So you might need to be cautious. You might need to start out with like some zone two just to kind of get your body used to some of that. Yeah, but I think, you know, one of the things that I've learned is as you become more cardiovascularly fit, it's easier to preserve muscle, I feel like, because you're just improving nutrient delivery to your muscle tissue.

I don't know. That's just been my, like, I used to think like, oh, cardio will make you smaller, you know? It's gonna shrink. And you've been working on getting bigger, right? I've been trying to, you know? Not, I don't wanna be like a mass monster or anything like that.

The heaviest I've been was 235, but that was not Natty. That was in college. Right. So I was screwing around with trend and Deca and test and all the bullshit. Right. So, um, why does everybody confess on this show? It's so funny. So, yeah, I mean, and part of the reason why I prioritize cardiovascular training now is because like I only did two cycles, but it might've affected things in a negative way. Just want to optimize cardiovascular health and, and then testosterone, you know, so I'm, I don't do any, haven't done HRT or anything like that. I want to, you know, wait until as long as possible, but I've been able to improve my testosterone just with these different things that we've been talking about and maintain that healthy

sex drive, morning erections, all that. So you're 190 pounds and what are you trying to, are you trying to get up to 200? I think just staying like this. Yeah, like about 190. For me, it's just more strength. I don't like the idea of, you know, getting weaker as I get older, you know, like we just, I have three younger brothers and we were just screwing around on Saturday at dinner.

My brother has a pull-up bar outside of his bedroom. And he was the one who was like, I thought you were going to say you started fighting. No, no, no, we don't do that anymore. But he was like, yeah, let's do a pull-up contest. And I was like, OK. So I let them all go first. And they petered out at like 6, 8.

And then I just cranked out 14. And they're like, well, you're the oldest. I'm like, yeah, well, strength really matters, man. You should be prioritizing this too. So. I've seen a handful of posts about your progress from drinking to being alcohol-free. What I guess sparked that transition and how has that been?

Yeah, well, so I was in Seema's age and that picture on the left, definitely, I liked the taste of red wine. I mean, and then just kind of like the anti-anxiety effect of it. And so in my 30s, I would just sort of self-medicate with wine. You know, I was like, you know, my wife at the time didn't work.

So it was just me. And so like, there was a lot of financial stress for me to like perform. And the way that I would sort of mitigate that was with alcohol. And I just found my sleep was shit. You know, I was gaining weight, my face was chubby, had a little beer belly and everything like that. So in 2023, my friend, Dr. Jamie Seaman and OBGYN outside of Nebraska, we were out at a conference, Low Carb Denver, and everyone was drinking organic wine and all this.

And I was participating in that. And she was like, I don't, I'm just taking a year off alcohol. And I was like, Hmm, I think I could do, I didn't think I could actually do it because I had never really, I'd always been a social drinker and I'm like, all right, if you can do it, I'm gonna try to do it. And so yeah, I haven't had a drink since February of 2023. And so I've just noticed, like, I just feel better. You know, I don't wake up, you know,

feel like I got ran over by a truck. I can remember my dreams, have morning wood, all this. So the way that I look at alcohol is just like fast food, right? It's a short-term gratification, right? And you get a temporary buzz just like eating an ice cream container feels good for the moment, but you're gonna pay for that down the road.

And so I think alcohol is, it's so accepted in our society. Every time you go out to dinner, any waitress or waiter's can be like, what are you gonna get to drink, sir or ma'am? And it's a lot of empty calories. A lot of the women that I've coached over the years in menopause, they struggle with sleep and weight issues. And sure enough, they're drinking half a bottle of wine at night in most cases, you know?

So this is very common. It's widely abused. And I think people, a lot of people are not ready to take that step, right? To just cutting it out entirely. But I think if they can for 90 days, they're gonna notice significant sweeping changes in their life.

Yeah. And I know you have like really, really good social circles, but like in those social settings, how have you been able to like, you know, kind of get around that? Because the second you start saying no, people start questioning everything. But when you're, you know, fine, just drinking and, and really just kind of messing up your health, nobody cares. So in those situations, how have you navigated that? You know, I just say, oh, thank you, but I don't drink,

you know, or I'm not going to drink tonight. And I found in social situations, I perform better. Because what I would do, even at a conference, is I would have two or three glasses of wine. And I would feel like socially lubed up and like, oh, cool, and like, you know, more touchy and whatever, but maybe more outgoing. But you tend to cool, and like, you know, more touchy and whatever, but maybe more outgoing, but you tend to lose your cognitive abilities, you know?

And so you're not as quick, that person that you just met, you forget their name because you're buzzed. And so I find that I'm just like more engaging anyway. So I don't worry about it. You know, if someone gives me shit, I'm like, well, it's actually never happened. People now, I think people are recognizing

that ethanol alcohol is a neurotoxin and it causes changes within your brain, shrinks gray matter. Daniel Amen has done a great job, neurologist out of Southern California, helping us to better understand that alcohol is harmful with the spec scanning technology. So I think it's now people are getting it,

so I don't really get any blowback. And to be honest, I I, I love whiskey. I love red wine, but I don't love it so much that I'm going to start like, you know, just going binging on it. It's like, you know what? Maybe at a wedding once a year have a little bit, but just be in control. That lack of control, I think as you get older is just not something that I enjoy. You have supplements, you have a podcast.

Where can people find all that? And where could they find out more information about you? Yeah, thanks Mark. So my podcast, YouTube channel is called High Intensity Health. So folks can check us out there. And then the product line, we do berberine, we do sleep formulations, we do creatine, it's called myoscience. Awesome.

Strength is never weakness, weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.