Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1935: Supplements that Support Testosterone, Improve Sleep & Enhance Sex With Eric Trexler

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin speak with Eric Trexler about supplements that actually work. Eric’s background in the fitness space. (1:09) How it is better to contextualize supplements through research. (2:57) How research can be used to cross-reference studies. (4:39) The challenging balance to strike between trying to integrate academic and non-academic sources of information. (8:01) Why he stopped looking for ah-ha moments. (9:26) A deep dive into his research on energy expenditure. (11:32) The complexity of the metabolism. (17:55) What are some things he would caution people about starting on their health & fitness journey? (22:42) Why the decline in testosterone? (25:03) What does the data show about how men can increase their testosterone? Specific forms of exercise? Macros and diet? (27:08) Can a high protein diet indirectly/positively affect testosterone? (36:26) Why a hormone that is not reacting to its receptor isn’t doing much good. (37:55) The compounds/supplements that data shows can make a significant difference in your testosterone levels. (40:28) The first category of supplements: Broadly accepted. (41:12) The second category of supplements: There is evidence, but academic studies debate. (46:47) The third category of supplements: Not essential, but data shows they have positive effects. (50:16)  Make your sleep hygiene a routine. (1:01:17) Supplements that data shows can improve your quality of sleep. (1:03:00) His fascination with “the pump,” and compounds/supplements that data shows to have positive effects on sexual performance. (1:12:19) Why did he decide to work with Joy Mode? (1:31:45) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Seed for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code MINDPUMP at checkout for 20% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s DS-01™ Daily Synbiotic** Visit Joy Mode for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code MINDPUMP at checkout for 20% off your first order** October Promotion: MAPS Symmetry or MAPS Strong HALF OFF! **Promo code OCTOBER50 at checkout** Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy – Book by Herman Pontzer Energy balance and its components: implications for body weight regulation1,2,3 Energy expenditure and activity among Hadza hunter-gatherers Brown adipose tissue oxidative metabolism contributes to energy expenditure during acute cold exposure in humans The exercise-hypogonadal male condition and endurance exercise training Low-fat diets and testosterone in men: Systematic review and meta-analysis of intervention studies How To Increase Sensitivity And Density Of The Androgen Receptors? Reviewing the Evidence on Vitamin D Supplementation in the Management of Testosterone Status and Its Effects on Male Reproductive System (Testis and Prostate): Mechanistically Dazzling but Clinically Disappointing Mind Pump 1780: Why Blood Tests Are Overrated With Dr. Stephen Cabral The effect of boron supplementation on lean body mass, plasma testosterone levels, and strength in male bodybuilders Mind Pump #1910: How To Uncover Hidden Hormone Imbalances With Dr. Stephen Cabral Beyond tribulus (Tribulus terrestris L.): The effects of phytotherapics on testosterone, sperm and prostate parameters DIM — Health benefits, dosage, safety, side-effects Tart Cherry for Sleep - Supplements in Review The Effect of Korean Red Ginseng on Sexual Function in Premenopausal Women: Placebo-Controlled, Double-Blind, Crossover Clinical Trial Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest/People Mentioned Eric Trexler (@trexlerfitness) Instagram Layne Norton, Ph.D. (@biolayne) Instagram

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, please only one place to go. Mind, hop, mind, hop with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Welcome to Mind Pump, the world's number one health, fitness, and entertainment podcast. Today we speak with Eric Trexler of Stronger by Science and advisor for joy mode about supplements that actually work to support testosterone, improve sleep, and boost sexual performance. By the way, do you want to spice up things in the bedroom

and improve your own sexual performance without the use of nasty prescription drugs? Joy mode has a special offer for you on their sexual performance booster. Go to usejoymo.com-forge-slash-minepump or use the code MindPumpet Checkout for 20% off your first order plus free shipping. Finally, there's only 24 hours left

on our October sale 50% off-maps symmetry or maps strong. To get that offer, go to mapsfitinusbronics.com and use the code October 50 for that discount. All right, enjoy the show. Eric, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Now, for our audience who doesn't, who aren't familiar with you and what you do,

at first off, I love your content. I've been reading your stuff for a long time. I think you're one of the people in our space that does a great job of disseminating applicable data because there's a lot of data and studies around health and fitness and sometimes we communicate the wrong stuff. You do a very good job of breaking it down and I can also tell you have a background and exercise by the way you communicate it because you do a good job of that. But why don't you give our audience a little bit of your background for people who don't

know? Yeah, sure. I'll try to do the fast version. Started lifting when I was like 12, and I was like, this shit rocks. I wanna do this for a while. So started lifting at 12, was really into it. Started training for sports,

and then just love the training more than the sports I was training for, which is kind of a common thing in fitness. You see a lot of that. So when I was like 18, the moment my competitive career ended as a wrestler football player, I got into strength coaching, did undergrad masters and PhD in areas that kind of combined exercise and nutrition. So a lot of my research, when I was working on my PhD, you name it, you know, Citroline,

nitrate, creatine, protein, carb supplements, I mean, a lot of supplement work and a lot of metabolism work. And so after that, I started working with Stronger by Science with Greg Knuckles. And now, you know, I, between Stronger by science and our monthly research review called Mass and our diet app called macro factor That takes a ton of my time and then on the side I still like to do some of the supplement stuff So I help out some companies with with formulations. So when you when you started getting into like the research side of things This you've already been working out at this point. You've been in the

Fitness and health I guess space as space as a consumer. Obviously, you like information. I'm sure you read all the magazines, all the content that you could find. How different was it doing the research versus some of the stuff, or how similar was it to the stuff that you had thought was to be true or learned just through consuming popular information? Yeah, it was really different. I remember when I got into taking supplements when I was like 15 or 16 years old, a lot of the workouts I would do straight out of the magazines. One of my wrestling coaches, we would train together

and do a lot of bodybuilding type stuff. And eventually I did compete in bodybuilding as well. But anyway, yeah, so I had these ideas about supplements, what they could do, what they couldn't do. And then the more I got in the lab and started researching them, it helped me really kind of reframe. It's not that I kind of started to reject supplements, but I was better able to contextualize them.

Because it's one thing when you see the magazine ad with Ronnie Coleman and his, you know, his, you know, biceps and veins are just like popping off the off the image and you're just like, okay, looks like Argenine's pretty sick for blood flow. You know, I got it. It works. I mean, you know, early 2000s, everyone's taken Argenine because Ronnie Coleman's vascularity is like off the charts and then, then you get into the lab, you start actually measuring like blood flow and performance outcomes. You're like, all right, so maybe not Argenine, right?

So you get a better idea of contextualizing the utility of supplements, the magnitude of effect, and where they make sense and where they don't. Yeah, did you find, so I'm a huge, I love reading data and studies. I don't have formal education, but it's definitely a passion of mine. He doesn't have a lot of friends either, because of that.

That's cool. All my friends are in this room. But what I used to find most interesting, or I should say, what I find most interesting now, is taking old, I don't know, strength training, bodybuilding, strength athlete, wisdom, and they explained it wrong. but there's value in some of the stuff that they said. For example, someone may say, oh, make sure you do preacher curls because it works the lower part of the bicep and then do concentration curls because it works the peak.

And so they said, you got to do both because you want a longer bicep. And then you learn the science, well, you can't really make your bi-sypid longer, and it doesn't really work that way. And then you learn, oh, points of tension. There's more tension at the squeeze, more tension at the lower, so there is value in combining those two exercises. Did you find stuff like that, where you're like,

did you go through that phase where you're like, all that stuff is stupid, and then like, oh, wait a minute, they explained it wrong. There may be some value, they just didn't understand where the value came from. Yeah, I think there's definitely numerous instances of that. And there was kind of a, there were multiple shifts in that trajectory, right?

So like, when I first started embracing, you know, a really hyper critical look at the research, you started to say, okay, all the really big, strong people from the past who didn't look into the studies, they don't know what they're talking about, we have to go to the research, and then you know, you kind of make that second shift where you say, oh, it seems like with some things they were off-base, but with some things they were actually a little bit ahead of the curve, and the research helps us to kind of cross-reference. When we have, for example, a lot of conflicting anecdotes from people who are big and strong,

the research helps you sort through some of those conflicting anecdotes and say, okay, which of these different ideas seems to have more credibility when we really stress test it in controlled conditions. So, I mean, I used to do a lot of coaching, one-on-one coaching, and of course I would lean on the research all the time. But I'd also lean on what was I doing when I was working toward trying to become a pro-natural bodybuilder. I would still lean on stuff that was, I guess you would say, more in the trenches observations.

And I think evidence-based practice, even if you look into the journal articles about what that is supposed to mean, it's not ignoring an individual's experience and leaning on meta-analyses instead. It's integrating multiple sources of data, which does include properly contextualized anecdotes. You know, so it would be a shame to say that unless I have a PubMed link for it, I cannot believe it or implement it. You'd be missing out on a lot. Yeah, totally. No, I love that you said that because that's one of my biggest challenges with our space and the fitness space is you either seem to be the, I don't know, for lack of a bit of a term, bro, with all the, you know, gym, quote unquote, wisdom and advice,

or you're the data person that is only like, there's no evidence that this works, or the evidence shows this and it ignores the potential for, you know, massive potential for individual variants and all that stuff. Were there any of you, and did you find any of those frustrations entering into our space? Because this is a very frustrating space, I think, for people who really want to do a good job. Yeah, it is frustrating because you do see people that it is a challenging balance to

strike between trying to integrate academic and non-academic sources of information. And you see so many people who miss really far in either direction, people who have no value for the scientific research, people who have absolutely no value for anecdotes. And my general approach to life is that if someone is just a world class athlete, whether it's bodybuilding, powerlifting, whatever, I can probably

learn something from them that I can't learn from a meta-analysis that's looking at what typically works best for most people in typical situations that have been tested. And I think that gets at one of the main limitations of the people who lean too much on just the published research is it ultimately rests on a fundamental error in assuming that the knowledge that's currently published is a complete set of knowledge. There are things that we simply don't know yet and there are people doing things that are currently outpacing the literature in some regard. Do you remember some of your greatest epiphanies going through your masters in PhD?

You've been living since 12, so you already have some experience there. You start going through the education. Do you remember big aha moments where you're like, oh, wow. And then you went and applied it to your own regimen, whether that be nutrition or exercise that really made a big shift in your results. Do you remember some of those? If I could be totally honest, I think it might have been that I stopped looking for big aha moments. So like I think that's a good point.

The more that you get into the literature, you start to embrace more of an incremental approach to the literature, you start to embrace more of an incremental approach to knowledge development. So a lot of the kind of like gimmicky things and fitness, it always takes the form of a paradigm shift where it's like, forget everything you thought you knew about it happen. And it's like, right, but should we throw out like 85 years of incremental knowledge and just start over and assume that all of that was wrong and fake, like probably not. So I think the biggest thing with getting into the research was developing a level of patience and an appreciation for incremental changes to ones approaches versus like looking for that magic quick fix. The one weird trick that the doctors hate you know about, you know, whatever the

gimmicky thing going. Oh, by that. It's like every ad of every. Yeah. So I think it was more just like the more I got into research and people would say like, you know, like right now, I'm really into this idea of exercise energy compensation. So the fact that when we really ramp up exercise energy expenditure, we do seem to down-regulate other resting elements of energy expenditure.

So I'm really fascinated by that. And it's a rapidly evolving area of literature. And people say, you seem really excited about this. And I say, yeah, I mean, it's moving so fast. We might have some real answers in 10 years. But a lot of people, before I got into science, I'd say, yeah, this is moving really fast. I'm hoping to have a breakthrough by the end of the afternoon.

You know what I love about that research that you're, I mean, if you don't mind just going into that a little bit, what I love about that research is it's showing a lot of what those of us that worked in gyms observed for years and years and years. We would see the person, average person walks into your big gyms. I grand open 24-offitness gyms for years and I own my own box or gym. I should say wellness facility and average person comes and wants to lose weight. I want to lose weight. The average person who doesn't know any better or should I say who's somewhat ignorant

to exercise and diet and stuff. The first thing they do is they say, well, I'm gonna go and just burn as many calories as possible. Get on cardio and they do a shit ton of cardio. And I would see this over and over again. They'd come in, they'd lose some weight, plateau real hard, lose motivation, and then leave. And we'd see this over and over again.

And as trainers, we're like, oh, you got a strength train, like building muscles, such a better long-term approach. But back then, there weren't really any studies on strength training, except for athletes, like athletic performance. There weren't any on longevity, there weren't any on fat loss, in fact, strength training for shit, for a lot of my career

in the late 90s, was not a fat loss way of working out. But this data is now showing, like, just trying to manually burn calories. Your body does a pretty damn good job of making up for that. Like is it maybe this evolutionary thing that we have? I mean, what is the data showing that you're reading now? Is it really as remarkable as it seems? So, yeah, this is one of those examples where like I said, like people in the gyms kind of knew, kind of had a sense for this before a lot of the research

started putting names and numbers on what we're observing, so the magnitude of the effect and kind of naming the effect. But yeah, this is one of those instances where the research is coming along that helps us kind of say, oh yeah, so that's what was going on. What's really interesting is that, you know, this is getting popularized. Now there's a great, a great researcher over at Duke name, Herman Ponser wrote a book called Burn that talks a lot about this stuff. And so it does seem that there probably is, we can speculate an evolutionary basis for this because, you know, if you're ramping up energy expenditure to a really high level, who knows?

Maybe you're hunting, foraging for food, whatever the case may be, there is a biological cost of not having a constraint where we keep our total energy expenditure within a workable range. What we see is there is some degree of compensation where you ramp up activity level a lot and resting energy expenditure goes down. But what's really fascinating to me is the way that it's very contextual. So going from low energy expenditure to like kind of moderate, we don't see a lot of energy compensation.

But when you go from very active to extremely active, we see a much larger magnitude. And that makes sense, right? Because there would be no evolutionary constraint that would say, oh, we shouldn't go from unusually low energy expenditure to moderate energy expenditure. Yeah, because that's just searching for food and working. Yeah, it's just a very typical level of energy expenditure that, you know, we should be able to accommodate through the means of gathering food. It does seem to be biased toward very high activity levels.

Then there are also a variety of observations about who is having the greatest magnitude of compensation. So for example, for whatever reason, larger magnitudes of compensation seem to be observed in people with higher BMI's and it's not entirely clear why that would be the case. So that's still kind of a pending question. Like I said, people with very high activity level,

it's pretty intuitive to see why they would have greater magnitudes of compensation. One of the ones that really I've found illuminating was it seems to be influenced by energy status. If you're in a Chloric surplus or neutral energy balance or if you're in a Chloric deficit, and unsurprisingly when people are in a Chloric deficit, they seem to have a higher magnitude of compensation. So they're having even greater reductions in resting energy expenditure as they ramp up activity level.

And that's extremely intuitive. And to me, that really filled in the gap of, you would see the people who were specifically exercising to lose weight combining it with a caloric deficit. And it just didn't seem like they were getting the bang for their buck. They hit flat toes. Have you seen the data on those biggest losers?

The contestants, they'd lose 100 pounds. And in order to maintain their weight loss, it's like they had to do circuit training and cardio every single day. They're eating like 15 hours a day. And it's like holy cow. Like that's not sustainable for most people. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting

that you brought up that cohort because Kevin Hall, he's like the lead nutrition researcher at the NIH. He's done some incredible modeling work on energy balance. He has forgotten more about energy balance than all ever know. Like he's really top in that area. He was kind of the lead person doing some of those biggest

loser studies with those actual contestants. And he actually published a paper this past year where he revisited an old publication. And he said, you know how we found that their resting energy expenditure was like way lower than anticipated. It was like kind was an outlier in the research of looking at how much does metabolic rate adapt to weight loss. He re-evaluated the data in light of this energy compensation idea. He said, what we were seeing there,

that suppression of resting energy expenditure, it wasn't just weight loss. It was a combination of adapting to weight loss, but also kind of adapting to this extremely high level of activity that was being used to maintain the weight loss. So he specifically went back and re-contextualized his previous work and said, we really should have, what, hindsight's 2020, but as more data came out, it was more clear that this exercise energy compensation was specifically within that cohort a much bigger factor than previously thought. Interesting. You know what I find fascinating is the range of, you know, and this is just for the layman, right, the range of calories that your body can burn with the same lean body mass, the same, seemingly everything's the same. In other words, you know, we talk about building muscle,

boost your metabolism, losing muscle, my slow down your metabolism, blah, blah, blah. But there's like a range where it's literally like the signaling that you're sending your body. And this could be, you could maybe see it through hormones, which I want to get to with you, because I'd love to talk about testosterone with you, because it's a big issue that we're seeing in young men especially. But you could maybe see it through hormones, you could see it maybe through catacolomines, but it's really not completely understood. But there's this weird range of more and less efficient with the same kind of person.

How complex is the metabolism? Why don't we start there? Because I think people talk about the metabolism, like it's not the second most complex thing that we know besides the brain, right? Yeah, the reason I'm smiling is I mentioned that Kevin Hall has done some great modeling work on like energy balance, like basic stuff.

Calories in calories out, right? And basic. Yeah, and that's the thing that people always talk about, calories and calories out as if it's like the simplest thing in the world. And then I dig up one of his papers and I say, if you look at the appendix, there are 64 sub equations that go into the calories

and calories out model with Greek letters that I've never seen in my life. It's complicated stuff. And people use that to kind of invalidate the basic tenets of thermodynamics. And that's an inappropriate way to view that. Thermodynamics happen to work out that physics has a strong track record

of being pretty repeatable. But yeah, I mean, the factors that influence both sides of that equation, like I said, you dig into it and what looks like a simple equation, calories in on one side, calories out on the other, it's like 64 equations that I couldn't even try to fight my way through with all the mathematical nomenclature. It's crazy. Are you familiar with the studies they've done on modern hunter gathers where there was a study done on the Hodotser tribe where they measured their

Metabolic rate and they're like oh, they kind of burned similar amounts of calories to John who sits on his couch in you know Nevada all day long. Yeah, I remember when I first read that I was like and then of course evolutionarily speaking Makes perfect sense. You don't want you don't want to be burning 7,000 calories a day when your main source of food is what you can hunt and find. Yeah, I mean, it turns out humans are pretty adaptive, which is probably a good thing for us. But yeah, it's very, very complicated. Even stuff that has kind of been pushed to the side and not thought about very much,

I don't want to overstate this finding. It's more interesting than it is actionable, but when I was working on my PhD, we did a study on brown adipose tissues, which is a kind of a special type of fat cell that has It's really fat burning fat. They would call yeah Yeah, yeah, it has high density of mitochondria and it's very responsive to cold stress and so we did this study where we would put these These pads on Pete like on the main arteries, you know, kind of the main conduit arteries that were kind of superficially accessible. We'd put these pads and run cold

water through the pads and just kind of get there, they're just provide a cold stress. And what you want to do to activate brown adipose tissue is make individuals cold, but not so cold that they shiver because you don't want to have, if you're trying to look at simply the energy caused of that adipose tissue, you don't want to insulate muscle. That's not a problem, right? Because it's shaking. Yeah. But, yeah, so we did this study and it was really remarkable to see just the physiological

ramification and the direct change in energy expenditure from simply a cold stimulus. And so, yeah, I mean, the number of factors that can influence the stuff is really fascinating. And I just want to, I know a lot of people have taken that and run with it and said, oh, well, here's a cold kind of protocol to help you get shredded. And the math doesn't really work out on that, but it is just an instance of the multifaceted factors that can contribute to expenditure. Yeah, yeah, and just to kind of put a cherry on that, it's an extremely complex system, and identifying one part of that system that has an influence means probably that other parts of

that system will move and change and compensate and either negate the effect or amplify the effect or we don't know. So it's almost impossible to break down, you know, the metabolism would be like, oh, it's this one thing because who knows how that one thing's gonna affect almost everything else in that particular system? And we know that they all, it's all connected,

it's all on a chain, so. So since we all agree on that and before you move on from this, you know, Eric, and I want to do this for the audience, so we don't lose everybody. What are some things that you would caution somebody that is about to enter into their fitness journey? I'm getting ready to head of the gym first time. I want to make some choices about the way I eat, the way I exercise based off of what we just talked about and how complicated

the metabolism can be. What are some things that you might tell someone before they get started that would caution them, like be careful, maybe not do this, maybe not do that when you get started? Yeah, I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that complex systems require really complex strategies and fortunately for us that's not the case.

Like if you had to personally manage your blood pressure on a minute by minute basis, that'd be pretty complicated, but you don't have to. Like it's pretty automatic, right? And if there's a perturbation in that system, it becomes pretty noticeable and then you intervene, right? So I think while metabolism is complex, and when I was going through nutritional biochemistry

in school, you'd have these charts that were interrelated pathways of every major macronutrient and metabolite and all the processes. And then you look at Kevin Hall's paper with energy expenditure and it's 64 equations. And there's complexity there. But when you're just getting into fitness, there's no reason to wrestle with all that complexity and to act as if you have to personally manage each element. Totally. So, when people are first getting into it, this is going to sound excessively like over

the top simple. The first thing that, if someone that I really cared about was getting into fitness and I wanted to foster their long-term success, the first thing I would focus on is how do I get you to fall in love with fitness? In whatever way it takes. There's a lot of different ways to do it. You hate cardio, you love strength training, we can work with that. You hate strength training, you love cardio, we can work with that too.

We got to start somewhere, fall in love with it, and then we can kind of hash out the details from there. Spoken like somebody who's trained people before. Right. Yeah, it's the behaviors that push success, not necessarily the mechanistic. It's complex in how it works, but to get the way, to get the body to work the way you want, that's not necessarily complex, I think would be one another way to put it. So let's talk about testosterone because it's not very often I get someone like you

that I can talk to. Tostostrone now has been observed over, I don't know, the last six decades, maybe more to have to be lowering in men on a relatively consistent basis. This is not a new observation, by the way. This has been observed, like I said, for the last six decades or so, where doctors and scientists are coming out saying, hey, something weird is going on. Testosterone levels seem to be declining. So let's talk about that for a second. What does that decline look like? And do we have any ideas? Because there's lots of speculation as to why. And then I'd like to get into how the individual can maybe

raise their own testosterone levels and why that's an important thing to do. Yeah, there does seem to be kind of a population level trend where testosterone is kind of steadily decreasing over time. And one of the ways that I try to cling to credibility is if I don't know an answer, I don't give one. So like if you look into the research on why is this happening, there are several plausible mechanisms that have been put forward, plausible explanations, but it is still an area of active debate. And as someone who's not doing original research

in that area, I'm more inclined to kind of wait on the sidelines and patiently say, okay, let's see how these trends continue and see if we can identify the exact, causative mechanism or mechanisms, because that's the thing is you put all these mechanisms on the table and a lot of times you feel kind of a pressure and it says, you know, pick one. Well, there could be multiple, right? So it could be a combination of several things going on. But while I am not eager to be loudly and confidently wrong, I do try to be helpful whenever possible. So when people come to me with questions about Eric, I'm seeing this population level decline, seems to be extending over decades, what's causing it. I'm not really certain. What can I do about it? Now I actually have some answers.

And so that's what I try to focus on. Okay, so yeah, that's great. So what does the data show on how a man can effectively raise testosterone or bring their testosterone to levels that optimize things like mental clarity, motivation, strength, fat loss, all the wonderful things that healthy levels of testosterone can bring us. What is the data show? Yeah, so one easy way to do that is to put exogenous testosterone into your body. That's a pretty straightforward solution, right?

But a lot of times the question that I get is coming from people who aren't quite ready to take that step for a variety of different reasons. They don't want to go that route and they're looking for other things they can do to support kind of natural endogenous production. And there are a variety of things you can do. Some of those things are kind of pretty basic habits and behaviors that can facilitate optimal testosterone production. And there are some dietary supplement ingredients that can support natural testosterone production.

So I'd like to view the supplementation route as supporting rather than boosting, because what you see in a lot of the actual studies there is that if you're putting in an ingredient, so like for example, if you have like a zinc deficiency and you correct that, then you can restore, that could be something that is limiting testosterone production, you can restore that and see a positive effect. If you already have plenty of zinc, it's probably not going to do anything. So that's why I talk about support. Before we go into specific ingredients, basic behavioral stuff, maintaining your body fat level within a particular range seems to be helpful.

Do you know what that range is? So it seems to differ a little bit from person to person, which is always a safe caveat to throw in just about any conversation, but it's very clear that you don't want to be too shredded. And that's, you know, when I was doing bodybuilding and, you know, had a, I spent one, one day competing as a pro bodybuilder. But when I was like prepping for bodybuilding shows, like, and if you're going to win your pro card in natural bodybuilding, no one's really that big. So you have to just get absolutely shredded. So I know low testosterone intimately because every time I prep

for a bodybuilding show, I drop well below the lower boundary of the clinical range or the reference range. I have clinically low testosterone. And so yeah, that's a very common observation. You don't want to be absolutely shredded, but if body fat levels are too high, that also is associated with low testosterone. One would you notice the biggest symptoms of low testosterone? What body fat percentage? Because I noticed that for myself after going down, once I get below 8%, I start noticing. And I know this is different from person to person. Yeah, the range, isn't it?

10 to 15, isn't that kind of like, I deal. I deal over 20. I think I've read you start to see testosterone levels get affected and under eight or so or under maybe nine. Yeah, you know, for me, you know, I remember one time getting my testosterone checked when I was prepping for a show, and I still had a pretty long ways to go to get on stage and it was very, very low and I was like like, well, this isn't gonna be fun. But yeah, I mean, for me, it was, you know, right around that eight or nine percent

of body fat level, yeah. It may be seven, but yeah, it's right around there. It's when you start getting into like the mid to high single digit level, that's where a lot of people start to notice testosterone fall off a little bit. And part of that is the fact that you're pushing hard on the diet. So there's the kind of acute, low energy availability

of being in a big deficit and training really hard. And then there's the chronic element of just having really low body fat. Yeah. That's such a good point, because you probably would see a positive effect, let's say you were shredded, but then you went on three, four days of feeding really well in like a calorie surplus.

We probably see an increase I would think into testosterone even though you're low, right? Yeah, I mean, definitely the fact that just, it's not even necessarily getting into a surplus per se, but just not being in that huge deficit, you know. That's definitely a big deal. And there's like an analogous situation with the menstrual cycle in female athletes,

where it's not always the leanest female athletes who lose their menstrual cycle. At some certain body fat level, it's almost a certainty, but also there are people who aren't quite that shredded yet, but because their relative energy availability is so low, because they're training like crazy and not eating enough calories. Body fat aside, they might still lose their menstrual cycle. So it's kind of an analogous scenario where if you're really pushing the deficit super hard and training like crazy and maybe your diet and program aren't properly calibrated,

you might run into issues a little bit earlier in that process. But generally speaking, if you wanna try to hedge your bets with body fat to facilitate testosterone, usually somewhere between 10 and 20% body fat is common. Now, there are people above 20% body fat who have no deleterious impact on their testosterone. That's kind of a person by person thing. But yeah.

And that's, it's speculated because fat is somewhat estrogen sensitive. So maybe that's causing, you know, the changes in testosterone. But basically, to underline it, it's, you want to be relatively healthy lean. Like, in a relatively healthy lean body fat percentage, it's where you want to be. Any, anywhere outside of that, and the odds that you'll negatively affect your testosterone, the further you get away from those ends, the higher the chances are that you'll negatively affect testosterone. Now, what about forms of exercise? Obviously improving your health overall, if you have low testosterone, should cause positive effects to testosterone, but what about specific

forms of exercise for testosterone? I'm quite familiar with the effects of strength training on testosterone, and it seems to show done properly, kind of across the board, and also increasing angiogen receptor density, which is another important thing to talk about. Is there anything I'm missing, or do we see anything else in the exercise literature? Not really. I mean, the biggest delineation there is just inactive versus physically active. You know, so that's the biggest difference. Yeah, it's just just being generally physically active versus being quite sedentary. That's where we see the biggest impact of exercise.

You know, I, and then on the, on the top end, you know, if you are absolutely pushing endurance training really, really far, there is something called, I'm going to butcher the name because it's not very into, it doesn't roll off the tongue, but I'm going to get crushed for this because the guy who came up with the name was my professor in grad school. I think he caught it the exercise hypogonatal male, the male exercise hypogonatal condition, some combination of those four words, mix them however you wish. But basically what they observed was male endurance athletes who were just pushing really, really high volumes of exercise, not really recovering effectively. They were noticing reductions

in testosterone. It's that same idea with body fat, you want to be lean-ish, but not shredded. With exercise, you want to be quite active, but not into that overreaching, overtraining type of range. What about diet? Obviously, being too much of a calorie deficit probably will cause some negative effects on testosterone. But what about within an appropriate diet? So you're not cutting too much, you're eating an appropriate amount of calories.

Does the data say anything about the macros, proteins, fats, and carbs, and it's effect on testosterone? Yeah, so there were two meta-analyses that came out within the last year or two about macros and testosterone. And it was funny because the first one came out and it was, I forget the exact order, but one came out and said like, if you excessively restrict fat intake, it's bad for your testosterone. And so everyone who's already dieting that way was like finally vindicated. And then another meta analysis from the same research group came out and said,

so one of them said if you excessively restrict carbohydrates, your screwed, the other one said if you excessively restrict fat, your screwed. And so the high fat, high carb dieters, both of them felt vindicated on one end and then really pissed off on the other end. But when we look at the literature, the most important thing is making sure that you have enough calories, like a huge energy deficit is not ideal for testosterone levels. But beyond that, it looks like just having a fairly moderate macronutrient distribution is the best way to hedge your bets. And the way I normally tell people that is, you know, 20 to 35-ish percent of your calories coming from fat. Those aren't exact numbers, but that's more of a vibe.

That's pretty compatible with the meta-analyses. 20 to 35-ish percent of your calories from fat, enough protein to support your goal in terms of whatever your fitness endeavors are. Then the rest of your calories coming from carbs, and as long as you're eating enough energy, you should be there. Here's a question. So we know that a higher protein diet contributes to more muscle growth and strength.

And it's like, I don't know, if we get specific, it's like 0.6 to 0.8 grams, propound a body weight or something along those lines for an appropriate weight individual, can a high protein diet indirectly positively affect testosterone through the muscle building process? In other words, it might not be in a direct effect, raising my protein intake,

it doesn't directly increase my testosterone, but we know building muscle tends to have a positive effect on testosterone. Is that a fair speculation or am I stretching? You know, I'd be a little bit nervous about going there because what you might find in some situations, I'm not really confident that the small beneficial effect on just the sheer amount of muscle

that you're building there and facilitating. I haven't seen enough evidence to convince me that that would necessarily lead to a meaningful increase in test Ostrone. And at the same time, I have seen evidence to suggest that if you're on a low-ish calorie diet and you're taking your protein so high that you're Displacing fat and carbohydrates, then you're getting into those ranges that the recent meta-analyses would start to say, well, you might actually be Pushing your protein so high that you're putting your fat or your car. Yeah, well, you might actually be pushing your protein so high that you're putting your fat or your car.

Yeah, it's kind of a zero sum game in that situation and you might be pushing those out of optymorium. Interesting. Now, one more thing about Androgen Receptors because there was a study that I read that compared men and how they reacted or responded, I should say, to strength training and they looked at their free test australian and then they also looked responded, I should say, to strength training. They looked at their free testosterone and then they also looked at Androgen Receptor

Density. And Androgen Receptor Density was a greater predictor of how well they would react or how their bodies would adapt to strength. So for people who don't know what that is, the Androgen Receptors are what testosterone attaches to to exert its effects. So what the study has basically showed was, well, you know, this guy over here has got lower testosterone, this guy over here, but his Androgen receptor density is high and so and he's building more muscle because of that.

So like what's your take on on some of that stuff? Because that was interesting to me to read that. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that, I mean, ultimately when we talk about hormones, it's not just how much happens to be floating around in your blood, right? It's how much is available in a bioavailable form and actually free to interact with its receptor. Because a hormone that's not interacting

with its receptor isn't really doing you much good, right? And so that's what we see with insulin resistance. It's not that there's a shortage of insulin. It's that we have an issue with the actual, that the process of the hormone binding to the receptor and then causing the downstream effect. So, yeah, I mean with testosterone and that's what I was probably looking at like hypertrophy outcomes. Yeah. Ultimately, all the testosterone in the world isn't going to be doing you much good if it's not actually interacting with its receptors. So that strikes me as a highly plausible observation for sure. Now, the same rules apply though to improve that I would think

as we said earlier, the sleep, strength training, all those, the same rules would still apply though to improve that, yes. With Androgen receptorceptor Density. Or is that the genetic thing? You either have it or you don't have it. I'm not really familiar with many studies. They could be out there and I haven't seen them. Looking at behavioral interventions to increase Androgen Receptor Density. I know there are some people push carnitine

for that purpose, but I'm not really on board with that. I'm a little bit, I'm not really convinced by that. Strength training from what I've read is the most reliable way of inquiry. I mean, basically do something that tells your body to build muscle and it improves its ability to do so through different mechanisms, which would be that. Yeah, but I do imagine any behavioral intervention that would facilitate greater androgen receptor density. It's probably stuff you're already doing

if you're trying to build muscle. Build muscle. Yeah. All right, let's get to the stuff that everybody wants to hear. So I'm glad we basically said, look, that your lifestyle interventions, most important when it comes to raising testosterone, because everybody wants to know about supplements.

Everybody wants to know about herbs and products they could take. And they just, to be clear, they don't compare to lifestyle interventions, right? If you have crappy sleep or diet, you're not working out, right, you can take all the great supplements in the world that's not going to help you. However, if you are doing all those things, then there are, or are there compounds that the data shows

actually makes a significant difference, because, you know, a 5% increase in testosterone, like that's statistically insignificant, like does the data show that there's actual compounds 5% increase in testosterone, that's statistically insignificant. Does the data show that there's actual compounds that actually make a difference? Yeah, yeah. And there's a few different kind of categories

that I think you can put them in. So the first one that gets the, I would say the broadest acceptance, even among people that are supplement skeptics, is just looking at, are there micronutrients that you might be short on, that if you rectified that, it would facilitate better testosterone. Yeah, you mentioned zinc earlier.

Right, so zinc is one of them. Another one that is broadly pretty accepted is magnesium. So magnesium and zinc are going to be present in a lot of different supplement formulas that aim to increase testosterone. And there's pretty good evidence there for zinc and magnesium. Again, if you're correcting a shortcoming. Now, those are relatively, it's somewhat common, right? That people don't get enough zinc and magnesium.

I think I read one paper that said something like 60% of people are not consuming enough or getting enough magnesium, I don't know what the numbers are on zinc, is it relatively common for people to not be getting enough of these? It's common enough that I think, you know, the question is, you know, I don't want to like plant a seed of fear in the head of every listener who's saying, oh my God, am I short on like every micronutrient, but it is relatively common or common enough at the population level that it's worth looking into. There are plenty of folks who would benefit from increasing their zinc and magnesium intake.

For some people, it could be a kind of rate limiting factor that is keeping their testosterone a little bit lower than it otherwise would be. One other micronutrient I'd mention in that conversation, just in the interest of being thorough, is vitamin D. And vitamin D's, it's a tricky one because it is correlated. Like low vitamin D is correlated with low test austro. But so far, the interventions that try to use vitamin D supplementation to boost test austro, but so far the interventions that try to use vitamin D supplementation to boost test austro, they just don't seem to be panning out the way you would expect.

I'm going to do something that you probably won't like because you're a science guy and science people who are really, really versed in science hate speculating this way, but I'm going to try and get you to do this. Sure. So I have a theory around that, right? So, in other words, they notice low testosterone is correlated to low vitamin D, or low vitamin D is correlated to low testosterone.

And then what they do is they take people and say, oh, low testosterone, low vitamin D, let's raise your vitamin D, that should make your testosterone grow up. Go up, not necessarily true. I have a theory, I'd love some speculation, I know you're gonna hate doing this, but I know that going out in the sun

helps synthesize vitamin D, and that's through the process of converting cholesterol, or there's something to do with cholesterol and using cholesterol as a way to synthesize vitamin D, and also cholesterol as a base molecule for our hormones. Could it be that people just don't get enough sun that low vitamin D is one of the side effects of that, but one of the main, one of the other issues is we're not taking that base cholesterol and converting it into usable hormones like testosterone, or hormones like testosterone.

Yeah, you know, there's a paper that you would love. It's the title, I don't know it verbatim, but it's talking about the link between vitamin D and testosterone. And it says something along the lines of mechanistically dazzling, but clinically disappointing. And it's getting at that same thing, though, which is that you can draw many plausible mechanisms where you would say this ought to work because of this reason and that reason and this pathway, that pathway.

And the question is, you know, ultimately, why is there this correlation that we don't seem to be able to very effectively or predictably act upon? And the most intuitive and kind of parsimonious conclusion would be that the correlation correlation that we don't seem to be able to very effectively or predictably act upon. The most intuitive and parsimonious conclusion would be that the correlation isn't quite causative. There's something else going on. It could be a sunlight thing. Part of me wonders, honestly, if not being exposed to sunlight during the daytime hours,

also correlates with low physical activity levels or perhaps because you're not getting that light exposure, you know, maybe physical activity is something that's in the mix there. Maybe it's sleep, because you know really poor sleep is associated with testosterone reductions. Maybe you're not getting out early in the day, getting that sunlight exposure that facilitates good regulation of your circadian rhythm. It's disrupting your sleep, you have lower sleep quality. You could, I mean, we could do a whole other episode just speculating as much as we would. And I'm comfortable with speculating for sure, as long as it's tagged, you know,

don't take this too seriously. But yeah, I mean, it could be sunlight, it could be the relationship between sunlight and sleep, it could be just being out and physically active. There could be a lot of things going on there. And another thing that could be playing a role is that I have noticed talking to clinicians that correcting vitamin D deficiency seems to be kind of tough, like kind of unpredictable,

where some people need these really big doses of supplemental vitamin D and some people they just need a tiny bit. It's very odd. Yeah, we did blood tests and it's like some of us supplementing with 10,000. Yeah, I had it very touched. I had to move the needle. Yeah, and so it's really interesting. Yeah. There's another element called boron, which I know I've seen in supplements. In fact, boron was one of the very first things that I read about as a kid to take for testosterone. I remember reading this in like Flex Magazine back in the day. So it feels like we've known a lot about boron's effect on testosterone. Is that one of those ones where if it's low, you're going to have negative effects,

negative effects I should say, on testosterone. Yeah, so this brings me to kind of the second category of supplements where I would say there is evidence, but it is evidence that in some circles will cause some disagreement or some argument, where there is evidence there, but people will kind of discuss, you know, how convincing they believe it to be, which is good. It's good to have, you know,

nice academic debates over those types of things. So, boron, there are studies indicating. If we really aggressively restrict boron intake, you know, testosterone might go down, and then if we replace that via supplementation, comes back up. There is research to indicate that. There are some studies that have tried to use boron supplementation to increase testosterone, where the results haven't been quite as good. But you can definitely point to peer-reviewed, you know, pretty solid studies that indicate peer-reviewed, you know, pretty solid studies that indicate that boron can increase testosterone and specifically free testosterone. So some...

Some of the lower sex binding hormone, hormone? Yeah, yeah. So some percentage of testosterone is going to be bound to sex hormone binding, and it won't be essentially free to release and interact with its receptor. So there's some research with boron showing, okay, it didn't increase total testosterone here, but maybe it increased free testosterone. So there is pretty good evidence there, but it's not like unanimous evidence where everyone kind of across the board says, oh, boron is a no-brainer. It's one of those ingredients that I would say,

it is definitely worth a shot when you look at the risk profile and the positive evidence that does exist. Okay. Now, what about- Where would we get that? Is there anywhere to get that naturally or is that we would have to supplement that? Who I'm actually not sure of food sources of boron off the top of my head because it's one of those things. It's like, you know, it's not like, hey, where do I get vitamin C? Right. Vitamin C you hear about it all the time.

It's like, hey, I have a glass of orange juice, but boron is such like a niche, my nutrients. That's why I ask. I think it was like shellfish and organ meats, but maybe Doug can look it up. That sounds right to me. Yeah, so it's, and it's often, what does that say there? Oh, wow.

Coffee, milk, apples, dried and cooked beans and potatoes. Oh, if it's coffee, I'm here. Coffee, I'm here. And Jesus, okay, so we have, so Justin's boron and Tate's got to be through the roof. Really high. Interesting, I had no idea. You know it's funny, so we all did, we all got hormone panels done and whatever,

and Doug had high total testosterone, but his free testosterone was low, and they recommend he take boron. Yeah. That was one of the recommendations that they, and it actually helped. It actually made a difference. Yeah, and I think it's important to clarify, like, I try to be, when I talk about supplements, just as transparent as humanly possible.

That's why you're on our show. There's enough there where if I really felt like it, I could say, oh, boron, done deal, no one would possibly dispute it. Here's a pub med link, but I try to give a really well-rounded assessment of, you know, to what degree is there kind of unanimous consensus across the board among the more academically inclined, especially within that, within the academics, there's kind of a particular cohort that's very supplement skeptical. Right.

And so they need a high, high level of evidence to kind of win them over. So boron, if I had low free testosterone, I would absolutely say there's enough evidence to throw it in the mix. Okay. Appreciate that. All right. So let's talk about non-nutrient supplements. In other words, obviously boron, zinc, humagnesium,

like these are somewhat essential, well zinc magnesium for sure, I'm not sure if boron's essential, humagnesium, like these are somewhat essential, well zinc magnesium for sure, I'm not sure if boron is essential, but these are essential nutrients. So if you're low on them, then replacing them or supplementing can make a big difference. But then there's compounds that, you know, they're not essential, but the data shows that they actually have a positive effect. Ashwaganda is the big one now. That's the one that I've seen some of the best data on raising testosterone.

And that's the one supplement I've taken where I actually notice a difference. There's very few supplements I'll take where I can notice a difference. Oswaganda is one where I can tell. What is the data showing on Oswaganda? And it's all the same or the types of Oswaganda I've heard about, like, one that's called, like, uh, I don't remember. There's different types of Oswaganda. And also, is it dose that's called like, I don't remember, there's different types of Ashwaganda. And also it's a dose dependent.

Yeah, let's go into that for a second. Yeah, I mean, so with Ashwaganda, it's kind of interesting because it's one of those supplements where when you start talking about it, people really feel like you're pulling their leg, like you're kind of full of shit. So like, because if you look at like, you could make a solid evidence based argument that Oshwaganda is good for sleep. And then you can make a solid argument that it's good for testosterone. There are randomized trials where Oshwaganda does lead to statistically and arguably clinically

significant increases in testosterone just as a standalone intervention. There are also, I'd say the strongest evidence for ash will gone to actually pertains to relieving symptoms of anxiety. That's an endosyolithic. Yeah. So you look at someone you say, take this and they say, what does it do? Is it, well, you sleep better, you're less anxious, your testos.

And they're like, all right, give me a break. Sounds like when you ask people about cannabis. Right. It's a snake will. But, but you know, hey, I have no problem with, you know, an ingredient that has evidence from multiple outcomes, you know, but I think I think just the sheer breadth of outcomes, a lot, it does breed a lot of skepticism. But yeah, Oshwagand there's a paper a couple years ago that was like, you know, back in the day, everybody

in the test booster world was pushing tribulus. Yes. And there was a paper that, in the title, it just said moving beyond tribulus, basically like enough. We're done having this conversation back and forth about tribulus. What are the other test boosters that make sense? And it kind of went through a variety of different ingredients and, okay, what are the trials here?

What's the magnitude of increase? And when you take that broader look at, if you were to say on the front end, I wanna take some kind of herbal ingredient, and I want it to increase my testosterone, I think Oshwaganda has one of the strongest cases. Now, again, that is an area where some people, especially more supplement skeptical folks,

will dispute that and will argue over the quality of the studies and things like that. That's fair game. If you were to say, I want to take an herbal ingredient for testosterone, Oshwaganda is the one that I would direct people toward for that purpose. Like I said, one of the nice things about it is, let's say it doesn't increase your testosterone, there might be quote unquote side effects that are actually pretty nice, you know, kind of unintended positive stuff pertaining to anxiety, symptoms, sleep, etc. And to answer your question, there is a particular

form, KSM66, that seems to really be the kind of ideal type of ash waganda in the clinical trials. In terms of dosing, you know, for each individual outcome, you kind of have to make your own dosing assessment, you know, for what's the necessary dose for anxiety, for sleep, for testosterone. But broadly speaking, you see a lot of products dosed in the range of like 400 to 700 milligrams,

and that seems to be a pretty good Well-rounded dosing range where you say that that's that's probably sufficient without being totally over. Yeah I noticed the benefits at 700 milligrams and I've gone as high as 1200 milligrams and not really that big of a difference between the two So yeah, you know, it's interesting. So this is a class of herbs that known as adaptogens and Adaptogens are like you said, it sounds like snake oil, because when you look at the class of herbs

in adaptogen, that category, it's like, helps your body deal with stress. All right, what does that mean? Boost immune system, but also modulates immune system if it's overactive. Helps with sleep, but also gives you energy. And it's like, okay, what's going on here? But ashwaganda, besides the data,

Ashwaganda has hundreds, if not thousands of years, of anecdot, right? It's one of the primary herbal medicines in aerovetic medicine, am I correct? Yes, yes, for sure. So you've got a long history of it being, I like looking at stuff like that because, you know, the science tends to follow a little later,

but we've got, you know, Ashwaganda has been used for these things for a long time. You mentioned tribulus. You know why tribulus got so many people confused for so long? Because it can boost libido a little bit, and that's why people thought it raised testosterone. Yeah. But really it raises libido through other mechanisms that aren't necessarily completely clear. Am I hitting the nail on the head? That sounds accurate. There are a number of herbal ingredients that, you know, there are some studies saying, like, subjectively, they increase libido a little bit. What's the mechanism of action?

I'm not quite certain. Probably varies from each one, but yeah, I think some people do kind of subjectively say, man, with my libido this high, I must have just testosterone through the roof. And those are, they're related things, but they are separate things. But Ashwagana has been shown to actually raise testosterone. What about DIM? I know that's the, what is the full name of that compound?

Diendoleal methane. Okay, so how does that work? Because for my understanding, it changes your, the estrogen that your body produces from a more active to a less active version, thus changing the ratio of testosterone estrogen. So whatever testosterone you do have now becomes, I guess, for lack of literature more effective in the body. Am I explaining it well or am I off? Yeah.

So when we think about estrogen, I think we can think of estrogens as kind of a class, the way that we might think of androgens as a class. So there are different forms of estrogen, kind of subtypes basically, and then different metabolites from there. When we think about the full kind of metabolic scope of androgens as a class of hormones and metabolites, obviously there's a lot of stuff going on over there. And with DIM, there's research to indicate that within certain dosing ranges,

it can essentially reduce the activity of aromatase, and so there can be a little bit less conversion of testosterone to estrogen. Got it. And there's also some evidence suggesting that it can shift some of those, it can facilitate conversion from some of the more potent forms and metabolites of estrogen to less potent forms. And so you might say that those converted compounds are still under the estrogen umbrella, but have less, you know less physiological estrogenic impact, so to speak.

The way that different, you know, when we talk about different androgen compounds and say, okay, but what's their anabolic profile versus their androgenic profile, we can think of it similarly to like the estrogenic profile in terms of the tangible physiological impact. So it's like testosterone versus DHT. One is far more andiogenic than the other,

and you see that with DMs, one of the other things that I actually felt. Yeah. So I've taken it before. It was marketed as an anti-estrogen. So as a young person working out, and you're trying to build muscle, you're like more testosterone less estrogen.

This is what you think, because you read magazines, this is everything. And it's one of the ones I felt, I actually noticed a difference. They've also given it to women to help with their hormone profiles, depending on the type of, so this is a well-known compound,

and the data shows it to be pretty effective at what you just said, am I correct? Yeah, so with DIM, there's definitely evidence there to support the mechanisms that we just talked about, so shifting that profile of estrogens and some of that aromatease activity. It does fall within that category of supplements where zinc and magnesium, you're not going to get a lot of pushback if you say correcting those deficiencies is going to have a really

positive effect for testosterone. There are other supplements where there's enough evidence to have really defensible optimism and say like, if we're trying to be pragmatic, this makes sense. And there's evidence to support that. But we're talking earlier about just the general timescale of research. And it takes decades and decades and decades before you get like unanimous consensus. And especially supplement research, it's so like niche that it just doesn't happen very quickly.

You don't get 30 randomized controlled trials just right out of the gates. So with DIM, there's definitely positive evidence there that would inspire a great deal of optimism. And it's a very defensible supplement to include. And this is where I kind of wear two different hats, where when I'm critically reviewing one study, like for, like, I've reviewed for like peer-reviewed journals, supplement work, I'm a pain in the ass about what claim you can print and say, we now have evidence

to say this conclusively. But when it comes to formulation, if I'm advising a company, I say, we now have evidence to say this conclusively. But when it comes to formulation, if I'm advising a company, I say, well, we need to be pragmatic here because the evidence is not fully complete yet, but if we have an ingredient where we have a very legitimate mechanism, supporting evidence in humans,

and a very acceptable risk profile, at some point you have to say, this makes sense. There's enough there to include it. And when you're putting together a supplement formula, you of course want to, you know, first thing is safety is non-negotiable, right? You need to have good quality evidence in humans. Even if there's not a unanimous consensus across the board, you want to make sure that you're not leaving too many really defensible stones totally unturned. And there's that balance of, you don't want to just throw everything in the kitchen sink

into a formula because it's just a bloated, overpriced mess. But if you go too rigid with it and say, no, we're only going to include the one or two things that are just irrefutably proven based on 80 years of research, you're going to be left with a pretty sparse formula that misses out on opportunities, frankly. Yeah, no, I appreciate you saying all that because that's why I have you on the show because I, if I have someone along with the science background, I'd like, I'd like that person to have a lot of integrity and communicate things in the way that you are, especially when it comes to supplements because the supplement space is so filled with crap, it's incredible

that it still is unregulated. Not that I'm promoting, but I think it should be regulated. But man, when they, when they, you know, talk about trying to regulate it, I go, well, I get why you guys are making the case because that is a crazy, ridiculous space. Let's talk about sleep because you mentioned sleep. We didn't talk too much about sleep with testosterone, but we know it impacts the testosterone. We know poor sleep impacts the testosterone. Now, we've done episode after episode on some of the natural things or behavior things you could do, like get light, sunlight during the day,

reduce your exposure to electronic light within a certain period of time before bed, not eating too close to bedtime, exercise in health and how it affects sleep. Am I missing anything with the kind of behavioral? No, I mean, the biggest things, you know, have a reason to be tired at night, you know, get out, be active. But you know, don't, the only other thing I would add there is just kind of routine.

So like with sleep hygiene, we know like the activity stuff, the light stuff, but the routine can be important too Which is try to give yourself a regular sleep schedule that's repeatable day to day if you can and try to have a Pre-bed routine that doesn't just involve avoiding bright lights or artificial lights in the blue wavelength spectrum but also just like Try not to be too cognitively busy. Like sometimes people will say, oh, I'm gonna wind down and get away from my device and then do this like super complicated like brain teaser puzzle. And it's like, I don't think that's really good

for promoting a restful state of mind. So yeah, just being repeatable with your schedule and having a wind down routine that isn't just about light avoidance, but is also just about truly getting into a calm, really relaxed state. So when my wife brings up stressful conversations right before bed, that's terrible. Like the bills for sleep as we are trying to say.

You have a built-in excuse to say in the interest of being compatible with the sleep literature, we're going to have to hold up on that until tomorrow. All right, so I have you here. So let's talk about supplements for sleep. Are there... This is murky for me because I know some things can make you feel drowsier, but do they actually improve the quality of your sleep? I know you can knock yourself out with some compounds, but does that necessarily contribute

to better outcomes? What does the data show on things you can take that are non-pharmaceutical that can help improve your ability to fall asleep in the quality of your sleep. Yeah, I like the way you frame that because if we were just looking at like, hey, what can I take right now that makes sure that I'm still tired in 12 hours? Like, that's pretty easy, but actually facilitating better sleep is a much more challenge. You have to really thread the needle there.

You know, you can't just say, yeah, we're gonna hit you with like 10 really strong things and you'll be out for a long time, but then your sleep schedule is just completely dysregulated for days, right? So, melatonin is one that I think it's really unfortunate that melatonin has this like, it's getting kind of a bad reputation

among certain kind of sectors of the fitness world. And I think that it comes down to just inappropriate dosing. 100%. I'm so glad you said that. I see kids formulas with melatonin, three milligrams. Yeah. Two, I'm like, what is going, this is a huge dose of melatonin,

especially for a child, but not let alone a adult. I've read the literature. It's a much smaller dose that's effective for sleep quality, right? Yeah, I mean, you can find studies where we're talking about dosing in like the 0.1 to 0.3 milligram range where it seems to be pretty effective. But yeah, you'll talk to people who they're like, you know, yeah, I've tried melatonin, but I'm so tired the next morning. It's like, dude, you took 10 milligrams.

Like, of course you are, you know? So what we want to do is try to facilitate, you know, serotonin is going to change throughout the course of a sleep wake cycle. Melatonin is going to change. What we want to do is facilitate that without just completely obliterating the entire cyclical rhythm of those fluctuations.

So, you know, melatonin, I think is a fantastic sleep supplement, but I don't really like to, I like to keep it within the range of like 0.1 to like maybe one milligrams on the high end. Which by the way, it's almost impossible to find. So that's how I use it. I try to find one milligram or less. Yeah.

And if you go and you look for it. Do they sell those one, I thought like three or five is like if you go and you look for them. Do they sell those ones that like three or five is like the lowest? Bro, I found one. I found one. I could not find less than one. It's almost impossible to find. Yeah, I can picture five and 10 all day long,

but I can't picture one or three or anything lower now. I consume a very cute, very adorable melatonin supplement that is formulated for children. But yeah, it's one milligram and you can only find it in like a pediatric formula. Like it's hard to find a one gram melatonin. That's wild. And I would love to go even lower than that, but I just can't find it at the store. So melatonin I think is fantastic as long as you're not just, you know, taking that

sledgehammer approach and going way overboard with it. Another one that I like is theanine. Love theanine. That's one of my favorite supplements to take before bed and with caffeine. What a wonderful combination with caffeine. It gives me the nicest euphoric high. I'm selling it now, but that's just legit.

I've talked about it so many times. The thing that's nice about theanine is that it doesn't really have a direct sedative effect. Like you don't take it and say like, oh man, I'm totally just like drowsy. But it has a very calming and relaxing effect, which is why it pairs well with caffeine. It doesn't have that sedative effect

that counters the caffeine. It's not making the caffeine less effective, but it does kind of smooth out some of that jitteryness that sometimes comes with caffeine. So before bed, it's not, theanine's not gonna the caffeine less effective, but it does kind of smooth out some of that jitteryness that sometimes comes with caffeine. So before bed, it's not, theanine is not going to knock you out, but it does help with just like, like I said, getting into like a really relaxed state. And of course, there are behavioral things you can do to facilitate that, but theanine helps as well for sure.

And that's just an amino acid. Right. Yeah. So theanine found in in T, naturally occurring, and yeah, 100, 200 milligrams, it is usually a really nice dose for that. Now, what about magnesium? We talked about it earlier for testosterone.

Yeah. Most of the, or a lot of the supplements I see around there for sleep, involve some type of magnesium. Now, the problem that I've gotten from friends and people who've taken magnesium is it just, it's a laxative've taken magnesium is it's elaxative.

Yeah. And it's my understanding they're taking the wrong type of magnesium. So are there differences? Because there's like 50 million different types of magnesium. What's the best one for sleep? Yeah, there's a few different routes you can go with it. There are some magnesium, some types of magnesium that are more likely to cause GI disruption, diarrhea, things like that. And another factor is that some forms of magnesium don't seem to, they don't seem to have the

same degree of bioavailability and the same ability to cross the blood brain barrier. And so if we're interested in sleep, that's something that we definitely want to prioritize. So I would say for sleep, there's really two pretty solid options for magnesium. One would be magnesium three and eight, which appears to cross the blood brain barrier quite efficiently. That was created by MIT, right? I don't know who created it, but I'm glad they did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think MIT scientists created it because it wanted to find a form of magnesium that crossed the blood part. Is that what's in mellow? That's the one I've talked about before. Yeah, that was a game changer for me. I didn't realize how deficient I was.

My sleep was mostly improved just from taking magnesium at night or night. Yeah, so that's a good one. Another one that is worthwhile, I think, is magnesium. Basically a magnesium salt that's paired with glycine. Yeah. So magnesium glycinate? Yeah, magnesium glycinate.

And the reason that that might be another good option is because glycine itself as an independent ingredient does seem to help with sleep in certain circumstances as well. So I would say with either of those two forms, you'd be in pretty good shape. Okay. Anything else that has shown promise for sleep quality? Yeah. One that's a little bit outside of the norm,

it's finding its way into the sleep supplement space but very slowly, and that's actually tart cherry extract. That's anti-inflammatory, right? It's got some anti-inflammatory effects. It is, yeah. So most of the tart cherry research that any of us would have looked at is mostly looking at acute recovery from really intense exercise.

They'll do like, hey, let's do some just unbearable downhill running with a bunch of ramp-up muscle damages as much as we can and see if tart cherry can help with recovery over the next 72 hours. tart cherry also has a compound in it that influences trip to fan metabolism. And that's pretty, you know, trip to fan, you know, everyone knows about it because basically John Madden talked about it during football games on Thanksgiving, right? So so much trip to fan and to Turkey, maybe to Turkey. Yeah.

And like some of that evidence was a little bit up. I just said evidence about John Madden talking during Thanksgiving. Yeah. So a lot of people don't know this. John Madden was not clinically trained scientist. So I don't mean to. Oh crap. Yeah, a lot of people don't know that.

But no, so some of the claims about Trip Defan were a little over exaggerated, especially acting like Turkey is like the only place you find it, of course, that's not the case. But yeah, so there's a compound and tart cherry extract that influences tryptophan metabolism and kind of it, you know, tryptophan in its metabolic pathway kind of reaches a fork in the road where it can go left or go right, you know, and if it goes left, it can facilitate production, natural endogenous production of serotonin and melatonin

as well. Now it's a small impact, it's not like going to ramp up your melatonin like crazy, but it facilitates, you know, serotonin and melatonin like I said, they should be fluctuating throughout a normal sleep cycle, and you don't just want to say, well, yeah, crank them both to 11 and leave it there for 10 hours, right? And so this is a very subtle way to kind of nudge trip to fan. Instead of going toward a pathway where it creates canyourine, which isn't really doing much for us in terms of sleep, it nudges it toward that other pathway of metabolism

where it's facilitating serotonin and melatonin growth. Interesting. I did not know that about tar cherry. Tar cherry is one of the most effective and natural anti-inflammatories I've ever used. Now that you're saying this, I have used it at night and I did get better sleep, but I thought it was because of its anti-inflammatory effects, because if you've ever over-trained, which I'm sure you have, you compete it as a natural bodybuilder, so you over-trained a

lot. It's basically my lifestyle from like the age of 16 to 20. Yeah. It's like, when you, when you, you could take any anti-inflammatory and get better sleep when you're over-trained, that's what I thought was going on, which might be part of it, but I had no idea. Yeah, it's called pro-siannidine B2. And yeah, it's a very unique compound

that is getting more attention, but very slowly. Like I said, the stuff moves really slowly. The first paper I saw really highlighting it was in like 2020. And if I would do, you know, you kind of twisted my arm to do a little speculation here. One thing I would speculate with a decent level of confidence, I think you're gonna see more tart cherry

and sleep formulas over the next five or 10 years. Interesting, cool. Okay, so when we open this, and even off air, you talked about your education and your kind of coming of age in this education in early 2000s and that was like the era. I like to call that the supplement era of pre-workout pump formulas. That's when they hit the market.

Before that, you're younger than I am, but that category of supplements didn't exist. So when I was working out as a teenage boy in early 20s, there was no pre-workout formula. There was ultimate orange. That was the only one. That was just like a sephedra caffeine, you know, the ECA stack or whatever. And then all of a sudden, you had this category of supplements that comes out super pumped 250 being one of the biggest ones and hell yeah. Brilliant marketing. They showed it before and after workout. Look at the pumpy guy. You know, it's because of this supplement, we filled it full of organising and all that of the stuff. So I was brilliant, created this whole new category of supplements, but because

you came of age in your education during this period of time, it sounds like that was one of the main places you wanted to start studying supplements was pump and blood flow. Am I right? Am I hitting the nail on the head? Yeah, I've always been fascinated with the pump. I mean, when I first fell in love with lifting, which like I said, should be the first step for anybody starting a fitness journey, it was when those pump-related products were just like the supplement market. And I just loved the process of experimenting with them. And I wish I could go back into the process of experimenting with them. And I wish I could go back into naively.

I used to like switch from super pump to 50 to NL explode and say like, I think this might be what I've been missing. And it's just like, dude, it's not. But yeah, I was really interested in the physiology behind it. And it was a line of research I wanted to follow up on. And so I did some research on pomegranate extract and blood flow, but eventually for my dissertation research, I looked at citrally and in nitrate. Yeah.

Okay. So let's talk about, well, first off, this is a very interesting, um, for a study. There's a very interesting category of study because for us fitness people, the pump is good because it feels good, it can improve athletic performance. But the mechanisms that increase the pump are also very valuable to the medical community, right? Because vasodilation, relaxing the blood capillaries, improving blood flow, lowers blood pressure, it's better for the heart. I'm seeing citrally, and we'll get to this in a second. I want to talk about citrally, but I'm seeing citrally

marketed to people for heart health. Yeah. And for blood pressure. So it went from bodybuilding to, hey, my grandmother takes it because she's got high blood pressure. She takes Citrolean a few times a day. So this is like a big field of study that started with, hey, get a better pump in the gym. And now it's like, oh, and then a rectile dysfunction. Huge, right?

Huge market with a rectile dysfunction. Huge, right? Huge market with a rectile dysfunction and pharmaceutical drugs that treat a rectile's function. Literally, they work on the pump in essence, right? So let's talk about Citrolean. Why Citrolean and why not Argonine? So I always pronounce it Arginine. I have no idea if that's correct. So I'm-

I'm gonna say what you say. I'm in the precarious line of work where almost everything I talk about, I've never heard spoken. I just read it in paper. So I've just made up my own kind of nomenclature for all this stuff. But or my own like pronunciation guidelines. But so Arginine was kind of the first one that hit the market.

And for good reason, Arginine is the direct precursor to nitric oxide. So a lot of the nitric oxide research really kicked off in the late 90s. And it actually was medical in nature originally. So there was this mystery compound that seemed to be making blood vessels dilate. And no one really knew what it was. And then a group of scientists did a series of studies and said, Hey, you know that mystery blood flow thing? I think that's actually nitric oxide,

which had been known in like environmental and atmospheric research for a very long time. Interesting. They didn't know that it was actually doing anything in the body or occurring in the body. And so in the late 90s, they said, hey, that like weird vasodilating factor that we haven't named yet, it's nitric oxide.

And then it was like the Time Magazine molecule of the year in like 1998. I remember that. Some folks got a Nobel prize for it. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, I actually bought that magazine. Yeah, I remember the cover right now. Yeah, yeah.

So some folks got a Nobel prize for it. But so Arginine was, as far as we knew at that time, there was one pathway for nitric oxide production in the body. And that was your body converts Arginine for nitric oxide production in the body. And that was your body converts arginine into nitric oxide. It makes sense. Take arginine. Yeah, so it makes sense.

Do the arginine. And you use the nitric oxide synthase enzymes to make that conversion happen. But what we found with arginine supplementation was two things. First, at lower doses, the bioavailability was too poor to really move the needle too much. It just wasn't an effective way. When you're taking arginine orally, it just doesn't seem to improve blood arginine levels to the extent that they would hope. And so then you go, okay, we'll bump up the dose.

Well, at higher dosages, it causes GI upset. That's why super pumped T50 was also known as super dump T50. This is literally what we used to call it in the gym because that's what would happen. Yeah, and so then you're in this situation was like, well, do we under dose it and miss the effect that we're trying to get or do we go really heavy with it and say, hey, your first exercise of every workout

is actually gonna take place in the bathroom. Which a lot of people did. Like you remember, right? And so yeah, so eventually they find, okay, well, if we take citralline instead of arginine, citralline is actually a precursor to arginine. So, we're just going one step higher in that chain. So you take citralline really great bioavailability, it increases blood arginine levels, and now

you have what you need to produce nitric oxide when the time comes. So yeah, that brings me to an important point, which is, you know, why not just supplement with nitric oxide itself, right? Why deal with all these precursors. And there's a couple reasons nitric oxide is a gas, and I just don't think the supplement consumer market is really going to embrace gaseous supplements in a wide, wide, wide, wide surface. Take a hit. Yeah. I don't think people are ready for that. I just, it's not a good route of administration, but also nitric oxide. You'll see papers that debate its half life in the body. So nitric oxide gets produced in the blood, and it's there for like maybe a second.

And it's gone. And then it's gone. And so you can't just say, well, even if we had some non-gaseous nitric oxide supplement, the bite, you know, it's supplement, it just vanishes so quickly, its half-life is so short, you got to go with the precursor so that you have the precursors there so that when the time comes and the physiological stimuli are present, you have the necessary things to create it at that moment. Cool.

So, citrally, raises argonine in the blood, Arginine in the blood, better than taking Arginine. And because of this, we're seeing improved blood flow. Yeah. So, okay, good. So, because I hate it when people take studies and say, oh, it does this, therefore, it probably does this. Like, no, no, no, I want to see the end result. So, we see supplementing with Citroline does improve blood flow and does have positive effects on things like blood pressure. Do we also see it with erectile dysfunction? Because theoretically, vasodilation should improve things like erectile dysfunction or the quality of erections.

Yeah, I mean, like you said, when you compare something like citrally into something like Viagra, they're all working toward enhancing blood flow through mechanisms that are not exactly the same, but pointing in the same direction. They're trying to make more nitric oxide or just make the nitric oxide production more effective for vasodilation. And so, yeah, there are studies showing Citroline does enhance blood flow, and there are studies directly looking at various indices of sexual function or erectile function, and there is human research indicating that citrallyn can be helpful, and citrallyn's effects on blood flow are a little bit dependent on a few factors. It can be modified by a few factors. Number one is if you have poorer vascular function at baseline, it has a bigger effect on vascular function, which makes sense.

Also, you can make citrally a little bit more effective by pairing it with an antioxidant. The reason for that is, if nitric oxide is produced, like I said, it's going to go somewhere very quickly. It's got that very, very short half-life. The question is, where does it go? One pathway, or I guess, yeah, one direction it can go is toward a place where it can be recycled. It can kind of enter this nitrate, nitrite, kind of cyclical recycling process, or it can go and form peroxenitrite, which is just not what you want. You know, there are a number of reasons why you would prefer to not have nitric oxide immediately convert to peroxenitrite, and one thing that kind of nudges nitric oxide immediately convert to peroxin nitrite.

And one thing that kind of nudges nitric oxide after it's produced the other direction is having an abundance of antioxidants present. So it's like vitamin C. Exactly. Vitamin C, very simple, effective antioxidant that can make, you know, you'll also see glue to thion being used with citralline. But what you're trying to do is make sure there are antioxidants present. So, you know, citralline will increase arginine, increase nitric oxide, but then what? We want to try to nudge that nitric oxide into ways where we can recycle it and kind of reuse

it rather than have it just create peroxinitrite and waste it. Awesome. Not earlier you mentioned nitrate. So, let's talk about this because I'm not super familiar with this compound. Yeah. Aside from I read like two articles that said that this is like the B.O.L. end all way to boost nitric oxide in the blood in comparison to everything else that we've, that's natural that we've seen. That's what the promise was.

What does the data say? I'm a big nitrate guy. I think if you made me choose citrally or nit, and my purpose, my intention was to increase blood flow, I would go with nitrate, actually. The good thing is you don't have to choose, because what's really unique about nitrate is it uses a different pathway to create nitric oxide. So you could take it in combination.

Absolutely. You can have a synergistic effect. Yes, wow. And the combined approaches aren't quite as well studied because it took people a minute to say hey Why are we why do we continue to choose like let's let's do both so that research is coming and There there is some but yeah, so like I said with with Arginine to nitric acid-releamed Arginine to nitric oxide You're relying on the nitric oxide synthase enzyme and just like any other enzymatic reaction

You can basically saturate that and kind of reach a bottleneck where it's like, okay, the enzyme can only do so much at per unit time. But nitrate actually has a non- enzymatic pathway where it goes from nitrate to nitrite to nitric oxide. So it's very direct. So it's more direct. It's not dependent on that enzyme system.

So you can actually use both of those pathways simultaneously. So nitrate is absolutely a fantastic way to boost blood flow. And like I said, if I had to pick one, I probably would go with nitrate. Where do you find this naturally? All over the place. So nitrate is pretty ubiquitous when it comes to the stuff that we kind of wish we didn't have to eat. So like green leafy vegetables have a ton of nitrate.

If you were looking at like, you know, where would I go for like the most direct dose, spinach is great, arugula or rocket is great. Some fruits like pomegranate have some nitrate, but a lot of fruits and vegetables tend to be pretty high in nitrate. Interesting. Okay. Now, what about any herbs that can help? Like we talked about ashwagandha earlier, does that help? Or is there anything else that has been shown to help boost blood flow? Yeah. So, when it comes to supplements, and if we're looking for blood flow for erectile function versus exercise performance, when you start getting into like herbal ingredients for erectile function or sexual function,

then you get into this world of research where there's all these like single studies that have never been replicated, and you're like, that doesn't look like it makes sense. Like that effect is so big and has never been replicated and will never been replicated and will never be replicated. I will say that one of the areas of literature that I find most frustrating to wade through is the herbal ingredients that are intended to increase

like testosterone or libido or erectile function. You just get into this entire world of research that's really tedious to sort through. But there's a couple ingredients that come to mind as kind of like being the top of the pack when it comes to a dietary supplement to specifically enhance a rectile function and blood flow to the penis. And that would be, one would be Yo-Him-Bean. Yo-Him-Bean does have some good research in terms of stimulating, you know, more erections, erections that are subjectively rated as, you know, greater firmness. You know, there's a variety of subjective tools that researchers use in these studies to say like, hey, we gave

you Yo-Himbein, did it increase, you know, the quality of your erection or your sexual performance, and people with Yo-H-him being often report positive effects in randomized controlled trials. The problem with yo-him being is that for a certain percentage of the population, it does seem to induce some anxiety symptoms. Is it a beta-2 agonist? I'm not certain of the exact mechanism by,

I think you're correct. Yeah, it's stimulant. Yeah, see I don't like it for that reason right there. If I take it I'll take a little bit to work out, but if I'm trying to take it for like, you know, if I'm gonna, you know, have sex with my wife or something like that, I wouldn't take it because that would happen at night and then I'd be up all night. Yeah, yeah, it's very stimulatory. And one of the reasons that I'm not super well versed in the mechanisms is I, my personal approach, like my bias as a person who interprets research, is I go from effect to mechanism, not the other way around.

Because if you start with mechanisms and say, what should this do? Who, you can go a lot of different directions that are fantasy, they will never pan out. So I like to say, what does this supplement do before I start digging into why and how? Got it. And now, before I would recommend a supplement,

I'm doing that whole process. I'm not just saying, well, it works and I don't care why. But in order, I mean, in my line of work with what I do, if I work the other way around, I would, I don't know how I would have time to eat throughout the day. You'd have to chase so many pathways and mechanisms. So with with with Yo-Himbee and I looked at the actual outcomes first and I said, okay, I'm seeing this prevalence of anxiety symptoms.

I'm seeing some degree of some anxiety episodes that are and just stimulatory effects that are unwanted to the extent that you see people who are really reporting like, I really disliked this in these trials. And I look at it and I say, whatever it's doing and however it's doing it, clearly this is not a supplement that I'm really, really eager about. Now does it work for a reptile function? There actually is some pretty good evidence.

Is the anxiety related side effects. That's not necessarily ubiquitous. It's not like 100% of users experience that, but my personal bias is someone who's been pretty prone to just being a generally anxious person. I don't need help becoming anxious. It's super common in quote unquote fat burning pills where you'll mostly see you, Hymnbee,

because of the stimulatory, you know, gets you hyped kind of like caffeine type of effect. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, him being based on the research does seem to work for this outcome. But, you know, one of the things I often ask myself is can we get a similar effect or a comparable effect with a just a slightly better side effect profile.

And for me, the one that sticks out there would be a red Korean Gen-Sang. There's not quite as many controlled trials, but they do exist showing improvements in erection quality, sexual function, things like that. They call it the king, like herb. This is one of the main Chinese medicine plants or herbs that has been used for a long time. And the number one, it's classified as an adapted gym, but one of its number one uses is libido. I know this because my uncle,

he does Chinese medicine, and he's at, Jinxing, that's the first thing that they use when it comes to libido, especially for men. Yeah, and there's also research, with Jinxing, there's stuff looking just directly at libido, sexual function, with Gen-Sing, there's stuff looking just directly at, you know, libido, sexual function, erectile quality, things like that. But there's also research looking at

mechanistically, you know, does it actually specifically influence blood flow itself, you know, via nitric oxide-related mechanisms. And the answer appears to be yes. So, so Gen-Sing is a nice well-rounded supplement that's getting at sexual function from a few different, a few different directions and kind of having these multifaceted impacts. Now there are definitely skeptics of Jinsing and so that's why I would say, if you're looking into, you know, again, like we talked about with TestOstron, I want to facilitate, you know, erectile function, sexual, using just a combination of lifestyle modification and supplements. I'd say first line of, the first thing you want to address

basically is, vascular function is a big deal. And a lot of people treat vascular function as if it's dichotomous. You have acceptable or unacceptable vascular function. But that's not the case. It's a very kind of graded thing where you could go from good vascular function to excellent vascular function, but that's not the case. It's a very kind of graded thing where you could go from good vascular function to excellent vascular function.

So, focusing on things like cardio, respiratory, or aerobic fitness level, those types of things, reducing sedentary time, being more active, potentially getting to a body fat level that's more compatible with cardiometabolic health. Those are kind of first line of defense kind of things, where you could say, let's do some lifestyle stuff first. And then of course, when it comes to sexual function, there are things outside the realm of physiology that I'm not an expert on, but you're going to want to focus on the health of your relationship, right? There's like social effects there. There's psychologically, some people have like performance anxiety and stuff

like that. So there's a whole bunch of other stuff you can address. But then if you're getting into the supplement realm, I'd say the first thing you want to do is blood flow stuff. I think it's the most direct thing. It's the stuff that is least disputed by skeptics where it's like, yeah, citrally nitrate and maybe throw in an antioxidant to help out along the way. Those things should be quite effective if you are experiencing just mild reductions in sexual performance or rectile quality things like that. And you said Korean ginseng, right? Because there's other Siberian ginseng, which is not ginseng, by the way.

I love this myself. They call it Siberian ginseng, but it's not the same plant whatsoever. There's Korean, and then there's other stuff. Yeah, it's not the same plant whatsoever. There's Korean and then there's other stuff. Yeah, it's weird. Like somewhere along the line, people started using Jinseng as like kind of a generic herbal term versus like, yeah, versus like the actual, like the actual literal plant that's being used.

So yeah, there's like 11, like, 11's just like off the top of my head number. There's a bunch of things that are colloquially called ginseng that aren't actually ginseng, but red Korean ginseng, to me, if you're going to say, aside from the blood flow stuff, I want to throw in an herbal ingredient with human evidence with a really good side effect profile. That's kind of my number one.

Now, Eric, I got a hold of you through Joy Mode, which is a company that makes supplements and we get contacted by supplement companies all the time. And so I do my research and I look at their products and I try to talk to the founder. I have to like the people, I have to like the compounds, and then I have to like and respect the people that help advise them of their

formulations because, as I said earlier, and I think this is, I can say this and I don't think anybody would dispute this, the supplement industry is just full of garbage. There's so much garbage that's out there. I'm sure you learned this firsthand as a kid taking every other supplement, trying to make something more, and nothing happened. But I was impressed when they said that you advised them or worked with them, because I'm familiar with your work, and I said, okay, good, they got somebody who, I would trust this person's advice and what they would recommend. How did you, like, why work with this company?

Because there's so many companies that work with, why did you choose to work with them, or why do you advise with them? Do you know them personally, or what's the deal there? No, so I mean, they reached out to me because I was doing, like my dissertation research was on blood flow with citrulline and nitrate. I wasn't looking at a rectile function.

I was looking at the pump. You know, I was looking at muscle blood flow. But nonetheless, there's obvious overlap in parallels. They said, we're working on this formula that is for sexual performance. The way they frame it is a pre-workout for sex. They're not saying, oh, here's a rectile dysfunction drug. Obviously, you don't want to make that type of claim in the supplement world. They're like, we're working on this thing.

It's a pre-workout for sex, but it's going to utilize blood flow stuff. And we start the conversation from there. I like the general vibe of what they're going for with the lineup of products they're putting together because it's very focused on feeling great. It's kind of like a really evidence-based look at male wellness. And not just really evidence-based look at mail wellness.

Not just mail. If you look at something like a sleep product, obviously, that works across the board. But we started talking about what's their vision for the company, their direction, and that stuff was important to me. But the thing that really jumped out to me was just being receptive, because the first formula they sent my way, I said, this is very good, but could be better. And they were all ears.

Oh, cool. And then they made changes. So they were like, Anne, we'll talk to somebody else. Yeah, because I will say, like, once you get a PhD, even though I think people overstate how much that really qualifies you to do some things, sometimes companies will reach out and they'll say, well, we don't really want your feedback. We just want your, we need a PhD, we want your stamp of approval for the website.

Yeah, and like, it was very clear to me that that wasn't the case. They said, we want to make these products the best they can be. And when I said, well, I think they could be better. They said, how? And then they made changes. And to me, that was the thing that really, I said, okay, if yeah, let's do this.

So I'm only familiar with one of their products. What, what all do they have then? I didn't know they had other things. So, yeah, they're kind I said, okay, yeah, let's do this. So I'm only familiar with one of their products. What all do they have then? I didn't know they had other things. So yeah, they're kind of first like flagship product was for sexual performance, which is why they reached out to me with my blood flow background, but then we start talking and another product that came out pretty early on was a testosterone support product.

And those go hand in hand, right? Because we talk about all these herbs for libido, but I can tell you from my natural bodybuilding days, good luck with libido when you're testosterone, you know, 100 and 40. Yeah, I mean, yeah, good luck. So those two are, you know, really complimentary kind of approaches. And I think I'm allowed to say, yeah, I'm allowed to say they're working on a sleep formula as well That that should be coming out soon, which I'm I'm pretty pretty stoked about So so for now that that's the lineup very cool How annoyed do you get when you see PhDs in our field who are just say crazy shit and are just obviously

Trying to make a buck because you mentioned, you know PhDs't necessarily qualified, and I'm sure that's because you've seen people in our space, like, I'm a PhD, take this crap and you're like, oh, come on, man. Yeah, I mean, I, I don't know, my general philosophy toward life steers me away from getting super annoyed by stuff I can't control. So you're not like our friendly Norton, who just goes after people.

No, I would say I'm completely the opposite annoyed by stuff I can't control. So you're not like our friendly Norton, who just goes after people. No, I would say I'm completely the opposite of that approach, where what I try to do, if we want to get really philosophical, I'm actually a practicing Buddhist. Okay. And one of the really key philosophies in Buddhism is that the point of speaking is to be helpful.

You know, so like I don't, I say okay, I could bring awareness to this by attacking someone and calling them out and getting into the whole big thing. Or I could try to just put out really helpful information and do my best with that. I noticed that I feel better and happier when I focus on being helpful rather than nitpicking everyone's mistakes or exaggerations.

So I do, and I don't want to just, I think there's value in having people who very vocally call out information that's incorrect and deceiving and things like that. But my approach is I'd prefer to just put out the best information I can and focus really meticulously on being as helpful as possible. I also think it's a much happier way to live. You have to, of course. Yeah, for sure.

Like I said, I used to be very prone to anxiety and those types of confrontations would be the kind of thing that they rally up and yeah, they get a lot of eyes and ears on them. But do I feel good when I'm doing it? No, do I feel good after? No. Did I really change that many hearts and minds just by being upset? No. So if you can just put out alternative information and say, well, I would be happy to talk you through why and how this is more suitable information with some good evidence to back it up. That's just kind of the approach I take. Excellent. Well, that's what we had on the show where I appreciate you

coming on, man. Thank you, buddy. Yeah, I appreciate the invitation. Good time. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy,

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