The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Have Boundless Energy with Ben Greenfield

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Energy is such a major piece to overall wellness—we don’t feel very motivated to practice self-care and pursue the things we love if we simply don’t have the energy. So what does it really look like to have great energy, and what can we do in our own lives to create more of it? Today’s guest on The Doctor’s Farmacy is the perfect person to answer that. Ben Greenfield is a human performance consultant, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of 13 books, including the wildly popular titles, Beyond Training and Boundless. A former collegiate tennis, water polo, and volleyball player, as well as a bodybuilder, 13-time Ironman triathlete, and professional obstacle course racer, Ben has been voted by the NSCA as America’s top Personal Trainer and by Greatist as one of the top 100 Most Influential People In Health and Fitness. Ben hosts the highly popular fitness, nutrition, and wellness website bengreenfieldfitness.com, a site with over a million monthly visitors, featuring articles, podcasts, and product reviews. His latest book, Boundless, is all about creating more energy to live the life of optimal health and happiness you deserve. This can happen through many different types of actions, so today Ben walks us through his extensive research and personal experience. *For context, this episode was recorded in January 2020. This episode is sponsored by Joovv and Athletic Greens. I recently discovered Joovv, a red light therapy device. Red light therapy is a super gentle non-invasive treatment where a device with medical-grade LEDs delivers concentrated light to your skin. It actually helps your cells produce collagen so it improves skin tone and complexion, diminishes signs of aging like wrinkles, and speeds the healing of wounds and scars. Check out the Joovv products at joovv.com/farmacy and use the code FARMACY at checkout. I use Athletic Greens in the morning as part of my daily routine. It’s really one supplement that covers so many bases and you’d be hard-pressed to find something else this comprehensive in one place. Right now Athletic Greens is offering my audience their Vitamin D3/K2 Liquid Formula free with your first purchase. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hyman to get your free bottle of Vitamin D3 and K2 with your first purchase.  Here are more of the details from our interview:  Ben’s new book and why he chose to focus on how to have a boundless amount of energy throughout the day (6:33) Why doing Turkish Get-Up kettlebell exercises is one of Ben’s favorite workouts (10:21) Traditional gym culture vs taking “movement snacks” throughout the day (14:40) Using light therapy to reduce wrinkles, care for your skin, create energy, and more (17:13) The benefits of creating a bit of stress to the system to activate a healing response, such as employing hot/cold routines and sauna (21:33) Why the Carnivore and Paleo Diets were developed in response to plant’s built-in defense mechanisms (25:53) Anti-aging, NAD, sirtuin activating compounds, and sirtuin activating foods (29:41) Assessing what the best diet is for you, fasting, the pitfalls of eating while stressed, and why we should all avoid late night eating (46:12) Eating meat, MTOR activation, and how to avoid high amounts of leucine and methionine (54:46) Methods for optimal sleep (59:01) Get Ben’s book, Boundless: Upgrade Your Brain, Optimize Your Body and Defy Aging at https://boundlessbook.com/ Find Ben online at bengreenfieldfitness.com and follow him on Facebook @BGFittness, on Twitter @bengreenfield, and on Instagram @bengreenfieldfitness

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. As we've transitioned into a post-industrial era where it's very easy to sit all day long, we still want to satisfy that primal urge to go out and move, but unfortunately the way we've decided to do it is to do just a soul-crushing workout at the beginning or the end of the day and then have our butts planted in a chair for the other eight hours of the day. And my approach is the complete opposite. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark.

Last year I turned 60 and I feel better than ever. My biggest overall health goal is not just to live a long life, but to do it well by staying sharp and active. So I'm always looking for ways to continue to feeling great at every age. Now one of the tools that I use is red light therapy from Juve. Now it's a super gentle, non-invasive treatment that I do at home where a device with special LED lights delivers concentrated light to my skin. Red light therapy actually powers up our mitochondria, which are little energy factories in our cells and helps them turn food and oxygen into the energy that lets us do the things that we love. And since our mitochondria naturally decline as we age, and that leads to inflammation,

supporting them means we stay youthful from the inside out. Everything we can do to reduce inflammation is a step towards preventing chronic disease and living a longer, healthier life, and Juve makes it super easy. I can just sit or stand in front of the Juve Red Light therapy device for 10 to 15 minutes a day. They have lots of sizes to choose from. One of them even fits right on my desk. Red Light Therapy is also an amazing way to improve muscle recovery and sleep and collagen production so you get multiple benefits at once. I use mine regularly and I notice my energy is better and better,

that I sleep better, and even my skin looks more youthful and vibrant. It's such an easy tool that I love using as part of my daily routine. So head over to juve.com forward slash pharmacy. That's J-O-O-V-V dot com forward slash pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y to learn more about red light therapy and what it could do for your health. It's a simple way to support better aging without ever having to leave the house. And I hope you'll check out Juve today. Now, my goal with my diet is to use food as medicine. But even when we eat super well, most of us are missing out on certain essential nutrients. Now, our soils have become depleted and our digestive systems might be considered compromised by stress

and toxins, so they just can't absorb as efficiently as they should. That's why I always use, and I recommend my patients use, a multivitamin and mineral as extra nutritional insurance. It covers the basics for all the day-to-day functions our bodies have to perform that our food might be missing. But there are so many products out there I wouldn't go near because they contain artificial fillers or inactive ingredients, so you have to be picky. The one I trust and take myself is Athletic Greens. They use high quality and highly absorbable forms of vitamins and nutrients from whole real foods. Athletic Greens comes in a powder that tastes great and mixes easily with water or smoothies and specifically supports gut health, immunity, energy, and recovery. And it's not just the vitamins and minerals. It has phytonutrient-rich superfoods, adaptogens, pre and probiotics, and digestive enzymes.

And I love that they add digestive support in their powder since so much of our immune strength and our overall wellness starts in the gut. It really is the one supplement that covers so many bases that you'd be hard-pressed to find something else this comprehensive in one place. I use Athletic Greens in the morning as part of my daily routine, and I love having it with me whenever I travel. I also love that it's diet-friendly, whether you're vegan, paleo, keto, dairy-free, or gluten-free. Right now, Athletic Greens is offering my audience their vitamin D3 K2 liquid formula free with your first purchase. These two nutrients are also so vital for a strong immune system and strong bones, and many of us aren't getting enough of them. I use Athletic Greens

powder and their D3 K2 formula to make sure I get extra nutrients that complement my diet. So just go to athleticgreens.com forward slash Hyman to get your free bottle of vitamin D3 and K2 with your first purchase. You'll get it delivered straight to your door and I promise you'll feel the difference Athletic Greens can make in your daily wellness routine. And again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Hyman. And now let's get back to this week's episode. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy.

I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about your health and you want to find a way to get peak performance and optimize your body and your brain and defy aging, well, this is the conversation for you because we're talking with Ben Greenfield and is about his new Boundless, which I'm really excited to get into, Ben. And just a little background on Ben. He's a human performance consultant. He's a speaker and New York Times bestselling author of 13 books, including things like Beyond Training and Boundless. He played college tennis, water polo, volleyball, bodybuilder, 13-time Ironman triathathlete which is impressive a professional obstacle course

racer uh and he's been voted as the america's top personal trainer and by greatest is one of the top hundred most influential people in health and fitness he hosts a highly popular fitness nutrition wellness website ben greenfieldfitness.com with over a million monthly visitors has great articles podcasts and product reviews so he's uh he's the guy he lives in spokane he loves incredible activities like ukulele spearfishing bowhunting planting and foraging and cooking he seeks to help people to achieve high performance peak performance defy aging and living adventurous fulfilling joyful limitless life, which sounds good.

I want to sign up for that. And, of course, importantly, if you spell pharmacy with an F, but you say defy aging, is defy aging with a PH? Maybe. Maybe. So you've been working on this book for three years. Yeah. And we were just chatting about it.'s a tome it's it's

650 pages and you cut out 450 pages uh and it's it's an incredible uh testament to how much you know and what your um goals are which is to really provide a roadmap possibly or how crappy of a writer i am oh maybe it was mark Twain when he wrote the letter. He said, I apologize if I had more time. This letter would have been shorter. Yeah, sorry for the long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one. Right.

Exactly. So this book is about things that you've always wanted to have out there that you always wished existed in a book but never were there. It's a blueprint for upgrading your brain, for optimizing your body, for defying aging. So tell us about this book, what sort of drove you to write it, and what are the key take-homes? Well, you know, the key message of the book for me is really energy,

you know, having boundless amounts of energy at your beck and call during the day. Most everything I've written before this has been oriented towards performance, towards fitness, towards muscle gain, towards fat loss, and even towards things like, you know, Ironman training and obstacle course training and things that, uh, at one time in my life, I would have professed to be healthy and, uh healthy in a good way to extend lifespan, but now I know much better than that. And you're not doing any more Ironmans because it beats you up too much? I am not. No. Well, I don't know. I suppose if the paycheck were large enough, I might consider hopping back on the bike. You'd run 100 miles for a million bucks.

There'd need to be some serious incentive there for me to slip back into the spandex and the, uh, the chamois, but, um, the, the, the idea behind boundless was I wanted to focus a lot more on, on the things that, you know, especially in, in the, in the fitness room get neglected, you know, everything from hormone management to gut, to, uh, to the immune system, to the brain. And I also, over the past three years have just become increasingly interested in the whole anti-aging and longevity field and so i sounds like functional medicine yeah pretty heavily into that i wanted to lay out a lot of different dietary approaches and and and and highlight how people can actually determine what kind of diet is right for their biochemical

individuality rather than writing you know just a diet book or a diet prescription i worked in a lot of fitness concepts but fitness concepts more focused on longevity longevity of the joints and longevity of the training system rather than performance at all costs you know for example the the strength training session is based on targeting both strength and power. And we know, based on telomere length studies and power lifters, that having this quick, explosive, wiry strength is good. But the problem is, if you use something like CrossFit or Olympic powerlifting or something like that, you know, and you're in a very heavily loaded state or you're in a metabolically exhausted state, can also carry with it a high risk for injury. Yeah. So for building strength, I like more of the, one of the programs I outline in the book is something very similar to what Dr. Doug McGuff talks about in his book, Body by Science.

It's very super slow training. Yeah. You know, 10 to 20 seconds up, 10 to 20 seconds down. Single set to failure you get a really good peripheral blood pressure response you get the lactic acid trapped in the muscle tissue so you get a little bit of a growth hormone release you can get very strong with that type of training just one to two times a week and of course you don't you don't get those those fast twitch explosive muscle fibers targeted that you want for the longevity component.

And so in addition to that, there's a couple of body weight training sessions that you can do each week that are more quick, explosive, powerful, but not under load and not in a metabolically exhausted state. Oh, that sounds good. I want that. So yeah, the idea is to have energy and to be fit and to have a body and a brain that responds the way that you want it to, but not necessarily for the goals of peak performance or going out and doing an Ironman or something like that. Sort of like what Pierre Tia talks about, training for the Centenary Olympics. Training for the Centenary Olympics, exactly, yeah. I'm getting close to that.

I've got 40 years to go, so I better start training. Yeah, that's actually the Centenary Olympics. One thing I think about is can you get up after being down on the ground? And one of my favorite workouts that I do is I'll do a little bit of cardio. I did this workout yesterday at the gym, so it's fresh in my mind. Have you ever seen Turkish get-ups before with a kettlebell? I have my kids do this exercise too. And the way I taught them how to do it was with a glass of water.

And so you'll hold the water up above your head. And from a position laying down flat on your back on the ground, you have to stand all the way up. And technically a Turkish get up has some, some pretty strict movement regulations. It's, it's a, it's a Russian kettlebell exercise. If you're judging it, you got to have certain, certain movement patterns. But anyways, you're essentially standing up with a, with a weight, or if you're just training for balance or nervous system, a cup of water over the head and then getting back down onto the ground in a laying position without spilling the cup of water. And without using your hands. Or without your arm breaking. Now, one hand, that hand that's behind you, you can use.

But other than that, you're basically up and down off the ground and it's incredibly difficult. Like if someone, it's hard to describe on audio, but if someone were to Google Turkish get up and look up a video of it, or don't use Google, use DuckDuckGo or Quant. Well, what you're saying is so important

because I remember my dad when I went skiing a few years ago, well, many years ago, he died about 91, but when he was in his 70s and he fell on the ski slope and he couldn't get up and I had to help him up

and I think the reason people end up in nursing homes is not because of disease because they can't tie the shoes or can't get out of bed can't get up yeah so the workout i do i do a little bit of cardio like two to four minutes of cardio and i do five of those turkish get-ups on each side holding it holding a heavy weight on my head and then all i do after that is i sit down and stand up 30 times and you want to use and they did one interesting study that showed that the the fewer limbs that you can use when sitting down and standing up from the floor yeah there's a direct correlation between that and longevity okay I'm down just being able to sit down and stand up so I'll do a few rounds of that and and your hips feel great because

you're getting down and standing up it's very functional when i travel i like very non-cognitively demanding workouts where there's just like two or three exercises and you just do a few rounds and that that's a that's a good one it's the yeah that's amazing and before we had started the podcast you were down on the floor showing me the five tibetan longevity exercises you do every morning you know so i was like all right i'm gonna write those down are they in the book uh yeah Yeah, there's a whole chapter on beauty and symmetry, how to optimize your workplace ergonomics in terms of the type of pelvic-shaped stools that you can use instead of chairs. There's a very soft mat that I like.

It was created by this Swiss inventor and patterned after the Korean rice paddy fields. He'd walk in those and find that his feet grew very strong and his low back pain went away. And so he developed these mats that you can use as standing mats at a workstation. So I've got all these different things you can sprinkle around your office to optimize your biomechanics during a workday, which definitely plays into symmetry. So it's like having a trainer in a book. So like Greenfield's in the book telling you what to do. Yeah, yeah. And the symmetry chapter also has a whole range of exercises.

And this originated from just exercises I give my clients to do on airplanes and to do when they're waiting for an airplane to take off and to do when they're taking their little movement snacks during a work day, stopping every 35 to 55 minutes to do a few stretches so you know sample exercises are uh you know different uh moves called foundation training moves that decompress the spine use your own body to decompress your spine ldoa stretching which is a form of self myofascial stretching where you're actually kind of pushing through a very extreme range of motion for about a minute and holding just to mobilize the fascia.

A lot of different foam roller moves, basically all the things that you can do to kind of get the body moving. So is there like a curriculum saying like you have to like start here and do these things or this is a program? Much of the book is choose your own adventure. But what it is, it's like here's six different three to five minute routines, whether it's an Aldo routine or a foundation training routine or certain series of stretches or these longevity exercises. Stop at certain points during the day.

Choose your own adventure. Pick which routine you want to do. It only takes three to five minutes. Do that and then just get back to work. So these are bite-sized forms of working out that have a huge impact that you can do anywhere that you don't have to go to the gym for an hour or two hours and get all sweaty and messy. Yeah. I mean the gym, if really our, our, our gym culture, not to get too much up on a soapbox, but it's, you know, the, these hardcore soul crushing workouts at the gym, you know, normally, you know, a hundred years ago would have been relegated to the realm of the, the warrior, the soldier, the gladiator, the,

the person who wouldn't necessarily be expected to live a very long time, but had to be in good enough shape to very hard to kill, you know, and as we've transitioned into a post-industrial era where it's very easy to sit all day long, we still want to satisfy that primal urge to go out and move. But unfortunately the way we've decided to do it is to do just a soul crushing workout at the beginning or the end of the day, and then have our butts planted in a chair for the, for the other eight hours of the day. And my approach is the complete opposite. I think that if you move all day, if you're using a standing or, or, you know, treadmill workstations, taking your calls while you're walking outdoors in the sunshine taking these movement snack breaks keeping maybe a kettlebell wait that's great movement snack

breaks like we got to pause on that that is the greatest idea ever snacks yeah movement snacks snack all day long but not the way not the way i used to preach as a personal try to preach six to ten small meals a day with a yogurt and carrot sticks an energy bar yeah there's no evidence eating more than two times a day is going to do anything for your metabolism. But the movement snacks, that's a good idea. So move from actual snacks to movement snacks. That is a great take home pro. The thing with the exercise is if you've done that,

maybe you keep a kettlebell or like a hex bar. I love a hex bar. It allows someone, even with a compromised back, to be able to lift a heavy weight up off the ground. Yeah. Or a pull-up bar for shoulder decompression, hanging in the door of the office. And you just create an environment

where you can move during the day as much as possible. And I think that if you structure things correctly, that formal exercise session, beginning or the end of the day, should be the icing on the cake, should be an option. And if you're training for a triathlon or a Spartan race or an Ironman, something like that, yeah, you do need to go to the gym and do something that would be considered somewhat unnatural because you have an unnatural end in mind, right?

You want to go to battle. So in a case like that, you've got to beat up the body. But I think we should structure our days not only for symmetry, but these movements throughout the day. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, and in that whole symmetry beauty section, I also get into other things. Like I do a – I'm very into the face right now, you know, like getting rid of wrinkles, taking care of the skin, things like that.

So I've got this thing I do every week now. I talk about it in the book, but I do like a clay mask over the face. I use one of those derma rollers all along the face. Then I do the clay mask, and then you use like an infrared light, like one of these new photobiomodulation panels, like a Juve. There are others, but the Juve, like one of these little Juve minis that you can keep in your bathroom, and you shine that on your face for about 10 minutes. You just listen to an audio book, listen to a podcast, whatever.

And then you rinse the clay mask on. It's amazing. So tell us more about the Juve and the light therapy. Because people aren't really familiar with that. And you write about that in your book as an incredible therapy for optimizing our body and our brain. Yeah, well, I mean, light in general is fascinating. I don't know how much you've, you've, you've looked into light there. I'm reading this book right now called the human

photosynthesis and actually gets into how, uh, the, the human melanin pigment actually operates very similar to the chlorophyll pigment in plants in terms of being able to accept photons of light and generates, I think for, for each molecule of water, it's about four electrons, which can then be used to move through the electron transport chain and technically generate ATP-based energy. That's how our body makes energy. It's human photosynthesis. Yeah, the electron transport chain is how we make energy, but normally you'd feed glucose into that cycle, right? So you can feed light to make energy? You can use the combination of light and melanin to produce energy. And I had already known a little bit about that idea of some element of human photosynthesis.

I think it was Sire G who published an article on GreenMed like maybe five years ago, and it really caught my eye. He was talking about how upon ingestion of chlorophyll-rich compounds, you saw a similar effect. Chlorophyll- compounds you saw a similar effect chlorophyll rich compounds combined with sunlight so like um you know phytoplankton or green blue algae or chlorella or spirulina or something like that but it turns out that just melanin alone you know even in the absence of a lot of these green blue compounds combined with sunlight can shift you into a state

of producing electrons so it's basically a mitochondrial it's like charging the body's battery yeah and so for those people who don't really understand mitochondria are these little a state of producing electrons. So it's basically a mitochondrial therapy. It's like charging the body's battery. It's where those people don't really understand. Mitochondria are these little energy factories in your cells, and they take oxygen, and they take food, and they burn them, and that's how you have energy to run everything. But what you're saying is that light also can contribute to the rejuvenation of your mitochondria, which is central to aging. We're going to get into that in a minute.

Right, and the discussion of melanin aside, we know that certain spectrums of light can activate an element of the mitochondria called cytochrome C oxidase. And so anything in about the 600 to 850 nanometers spectrum of light, and this would be like red light, uh, infrared light, some parts of far infrared light can fall into that spectrum, but it's normally near infrared and red that are going to target cytochrome C oxidase. It's actually wonderful for the mitochondria. You get a nitric oxide production. You can trigger collagen and elastin production. No really good human clinical studies that I've seen, but a lot of anecdotal evidence. And I think Juve has put out some articles on their site about upregulation of mitochondrial activity in latex cells in the testes. So there's an amplified total testosterone response if men are using this.

Wait, wait, wait. So you're saying if you shine this red light on you and your testosterone goes up? Yes. So you take off your clothes in front of these red light panels and so you get the skin effect and you also get the endocrine effect. Wow, that's pretty amazing. Testosterone effect, yeah. So you have to shine it on your you gotta shine it on private parts guys and um there are multiple ways to do it like i actually travel through little mini ones and i'll just lay in bed at night read a book and you know kind of tuck it in my crotch and shine it

for about 10 minutes wow at home i have one of the one of the big panels and it's at my desk so i can stand at that while i'm working on my desk you don't want too much some you know 10 minutes a day yeah excess stimulation of some of those nitric oxide synthase pathways and that excess stimulation of cytochrome c oxidase in the mitochondria can generate excess free radicals right so this is something you could overdo and we could overdo uva and uvb from sunlight so it's a little too much charge and that creates secondary damage right right is what you're saying yeah excess um in this case it would be reactive oxygen species so like free radicals in response to excess metabolic activity so you know we we know any

of these things that might induce a mild hormetic effect from you know cryotherapy to to exercise to heat they would be unfavorable in large amounts, but small amounts. So when you just said something with a very cool concept, which is hormesis, hormetic, people have no idea what that is. Most people have never heard of the word. And what it means is that when there's a stress to the system, it activates a healing response. So a little bit of stress, like if you exercise and lift a weight, it's going to create a little bit of micro damage in the muscles, but that makes them stronger. Yes, assuming you allow them to rest and recover.

And the same could be said of radiation. There's one study that showed that the rodents around Chernobyl were living longer than non-irradiated rodents. So there's some evidence even mild amounts of radiation may be beneficial. This might be partially why earthing and grounding and going outside barefoot and getting exposed to that type of radiation is beneficial. You know, lower risk of skin cancer with frequent, sane exposure to sunlight due to that hormetic effect and building up almost like a skin cancer. And the cryotherapy you mentioned, which is cold shock therapy.

Right. Yeah, with the cold, that can excessively activate the sympathetic nervous system. It can stress the immune system. It can be too much, but in small amounts. You get nitric oxide production, and you get that activation of the vagus nerve, and you get a little bit of conversion of your adipose tissue into metabolically active brown fat. And so small amounts of cold, good.

Large amounts, as anyone knows who's maybe not dressed right for a day of skiing, it can be stressful. Heat, same thing we know from like the finnish longevity study the men's longevity study that sauna is four to five times a week in the sauna and and uh you you see a distinct increase i do that i do both like a hot steam really hot and then i jump in an ice bath well that's that's what they left out in that study i think is you know because i've gone to finland and i've gone to the men's finish also say they jump in the ice they'll they'll go in the sauna and then they'll go jump in the baltic sea stand outside to dry off shivering and then go back in the heat and do a few rounds of that and then of course there's the social component right they're with their with their buddies hanging out

when they go in the sauna you're quiet you You're breathing. You're not in your phone. So there's there's some components that I think go beyond the sauna Yeah, and I remember once I was I was in Maine I had a friend of mine had a wood-fired sauna and we literally sat in there for six hours Yeah, and we go back out into the snow and roll around in the snow It's amazing and then get back in the sauna roll around the snow It was I'd never felt that good in my entire life we do that at our house my kids call them snow angels and and what we'll do is do the sauna then as you're walking out trudging through the snow out to the hot tub you stop you do snow as you get in the hot tub you get that tingling in the skin all that yeah and you go back out and

do snow angels and yeah the idea of hot cold you know again for for the hormetic effect is fabulous i talk about this in the book a little bit and it's kind of it's kind of what a lot of people are talking about right now and the whole the whole nutrition scene is this idea wait wait before you so just summarize we got movement snacks movement okay great concept and idea and there's lots of those in the book we've got activating your energy system with light the right kind of light like juve yeah and we have hormesis which is giving your body different kinds of stresses to activate a healing response like hot and cold etc it doesn't kill you very simple powerful ideas you can incorporate into your routine and i i've been doing all these things because they're actually so essential to life

i have a juve i i do movement snacks a lot and i do hormetic stresses with hot and cold and i think it's it's really how i stay young i got my telomeres done recently and i'm 60 but my telomeres are 39 so i think you know we we actually can reverse the biological clock by being smart about these little sort of micro hacks that anybody can do to optimize their health and your book is just full of these little micro hacks. It's free. If you think about cold, yeah, you could go pay $70 for a cryotherapy chamber. You could go into a cold by a water or go for a walk in the cold. And you could buy one of the $800 light panels,

or you can use sunlight similarly, assuming you don't have too many neighbors who are watching you tan your junk out in your backyard. The thing is, though, about the hormesis. You live in Spokane, which is pretty quiet out there. I'm out in the middle of nowhere. My problem hasn't been the forest, so I don't get a lot of sunlight through the trees. Xenohormesis, though, is also very interesting.

This idea that plants have built-in natural defense mechanisms that also induce a hormetic response. And this has sparked movements like the paleo movement and the carnivore movement, and paleo movement kind of restricting many grains and soy and some of these compounds that have built-in defense mechanisms, where the carnivore diet takes that even further. And you get rid of kale and broccoli and cauliflower and most herbs and spices because of that mild amount of damage that these plants can cause the body but i mean when you look at a lot of these blue zones and

longevity hot spots the vast array of herbs and spices and xenohormetic compounds yeah they're not doing um you know like like they're not eating like boatloads of quinoa that hasn't been rinsed and soaked and sprouted to get rid of the the soap like irritant sap like boatloads of quinoa that hasn't been rinsed and soaked and sprouted to get rid of the soap-like irritant saponins that cover the quinoa. And, you know, in many cases, the gluten is being slow fermented, like a sourdough bread to pre-digest the gluten and the phytic acids or, you know, or soy, for example, you know, edamame is not quite as good as miso or tempeh or natto because it's been fermented. And so I think it's proper preparation and deactivation

of some of the natural built-in plant defense mechanisms allows you to enjoy those foods. Shoving aside the argument whether or not those foods are necessary, which is a carnivore diet, folks will say, well, you can get eating a properly comprised nose-to-tail diet. You can get all the vitamins and minerals and everything that you need liver is far more uh nutrient dense than any plant food ever liver is its nature's multivitamin but at the same time plants are fun like it's fun to gather around a traditionally prepared meal and you've got whatever made mom's casserole and

grandma's salad and you know some beets and goat cheese and arugula and rosemary it's like you know there there's a lot of cool stuffugula and rosemary it's like you know there there's a lot of cool stuff on the planet that we can eat that goes beyond just animals but i think you just have to be smart you have to deactivate these built-in defense mechanisms but even those because you're never going to be able to fully deactivate everything i think they're not necessarily that the principle of xenohormesis these plant-based defense compounds can actually be good for you insane amounts yeah well this is important to sort of come back on this because you know i had this theory that i kind of made up uh as i started to learn about plants and the

phytochemicals and plants and the way in which they interact with their biology called symbiotic phytoadaptation which essentially means we've co-evolved with plants using their, quote, natural defense mechanisms that they've developed in response to stress or protect themselves, and those molecules activate healing responses in our body or activate different pathways. For example, when you have a wild plant, it's under a lot of stress, right? Organic, more than conventional, right?

More than the big, fluffy, beautiful beautiful sugary produce at the grocery store. When something's organic or it's wild, it's actually far more nutrient dense. For example, dandelion greens, which you can pick up off your lawn, have a thousand times more antioxidant benefit than, for example, spinach, which we think is a super food. Same thing with little small Peruvian potatoes are far more nutrient dense than those big Yukon gold potatoes because they've had to work hard

to protect themselves from stress. So we've used those molecules like the glucosinolates, for example, in the broccoli family that help us detoxify and protect ourselves. All the antioxidant colorful compounds in food are all these phytochemicals and there are more of them in stressed plants, like wild i think you know in your book you talk a lot about aging and

this idea of how do we activate these different mechanisms in our body that promote healthy aging and then reverse biological aging and i i want to get into that because you know there's a whole chapter on anti-aging in your book and you talk about everything from peptides to stem cells and nad which i definitely want to get into which is nicotinamide diriboside and that is a very powerful anti-aging compound that is getting a lot of news and press and people are using it um but one of the things you talk about and made me think about this because of the you know the xenohormesis, are this category of compounds called STACs, S-T-A-C, sirtuin activating compounds. Now, sirtuins, for people listening, are a super mechanism for regulating insulin resistance and your mitochondrial function and

longevity. And those are the things when you see these calorie restriction studies or intermittent fasting or fasting mimicking diets, ketone diets, those are all activating these sirtuin mechanisms, which are these mastered genes that regulate the aging process and health. And they only come with certain kinds of stress. And there are plant compounds that activate these. So maybe you could help us understand a little bit more about this. Yeah, there are plant compounds that can activate your sirtuin activating compounds. And when those are combined with NAD or NAD precursors, it's actually very productive for the DNA because both of those can work together to repair broken proteins, to keep

DNA strands from being damaged. It's a process called acetylation that these sirtuins act on along with NAD to protect your DNA. And I'll explain how to, how to get some more of those, but I, I would be remiss not to mention when you're talking about the wild plants, I'm, I'm in full agreement with you. I read a book a long time ago by Joe Robinson called eating on the wild side. And you forage, that's one of your favorite things, right? And so my family and I plant forage and, uh, I do a wild plant pesto and it's very very simple and anybody who has

wild plants growing nearby even the dandelion greens can make this so some of the main things I have growing on my property are nettle which cause a white tailed deer around there just to get fat nettles full of amino acids and fatty acids the stinging nettle it's amazing yeah so I harvest stinging nettle I also have wild mint out there so you know you can feel the stem if it's square you know roll up the leaf in your finger and sniff it smells a little minty so i get a little mint uh and then the dandelion greens those are perfect so a bunch of dandelion greens and sometimes i'll swing into our garden i'll grab some rosemary or some thyme you know spices i'll even throw we grow little stevia leaves and if i want to be kind of sweet i'll throw those in there so i So I come in with my big bag full of wild plants,

and all you do is you put that in a food processor, and you put about a cup of a really good extra virgin olive oil in there, and you put about a cup of your favorite nut. I like walnuts for this. And then you get some salt. Those are the garlic. You can do garlic. I personally eat a low FODMAP diet, so I leave the garlic out.

And Parmesan cheese is also something that can give it a little bit of an umami flavor. But if you want to go dairy-free, I'll actually ferment the greens. You can just leave them in a jar and ferment them with a little bit of whey from your yogurt. And they develop this fermented umami flavor if you want to take a little more time to make your pesto. You dump all this stuff in the jar, you press go go and you blend it for about a minute in this wild plant pesto when you add the olive oil and the walnuts wow okay i'm coming for dinner it's so good and i'll smear that on like on top of a steak and i'm i don't need anything else just wild plant pesto and steak and i'm i'm good so back to the uh the sirtuins though so you know most people are familiar actually with a lot

of these sirtuin activating compounds you know red wine and and blueberries and kale and a lot of the dark purples and greens and reds yeah and there were a number of studies on the red wine thing on rats where they gave high levels of resveratrol and they were able to even though the rats were eating badly in exercise to transform their metabolism and increase longevity not to say you should eat bad and not exercise but it was powerful the only problem was what they did was they gave them 50 the equivalent of 1500 bottles of red wine you have to sell you know you're not going to get this from just drinking a glass of wine is 85 of the resveratrol you buy in supplement form is made from peanut

skins not grape skins so there's kind of a kind of an. And the problem is 85% of the resveratrol you buy in supplement form is made from peanut skins, not grape skins. So there's kind of an allergenic component too if you choose your resveratrol wise. I'm a bigger fan of pterostilbene for those reasons. Molecularly, it acts very similar to resveratrol as a stack activator, but it's a lot more powerful and you need less of it. Yeah.

And that's often in a lot of combined supplements, for example, with NAD. Yeah, exactly. And that's what a lot of companies are doing is they're combining NAD with some of these sirtuin activators and then typically some kind of a methyl donor. Methyl donor means like B vitamins, B12, B6. Yeah, betaine, trimethylglycine, acetylmethionine,

and any of these things that are going to contribute methyl groups. Anybody who – well, we can get to NAD in a second if you want. I can explain that in a little bit more detail. Yeah, I do want to get into that. With the sirtuins, I talk a lot about these stacks in the book and how magical they are, especially when combined with intermittent fasting or restricted feeding windows or some amount of calorie restriction as far as protecting the DNA, assuming that you have enough NAD

because sirtuins have to work with the NAD, and NAD levels will dramatically decline as you age. So you need to have your sirtuin levels elevated, but then also have your NAD levels elevated. And one of the, um, one of the sirtuin activating compounds that there's been a little bit more research on lately, that's a very good sirtuin is fisetin or fisetin. Yeah. And there's, there's multiple sources sources about like persimmon and onions but uh strawberries especially wild strawberries and you can you can buy strawberry powder and add it to your smoothie uh you can your strawberries are easy to grow they grow like weeds but they're a very very good source of this phycetin which is one of the more potent stack wild strawberries that are out there

yeah and you can buy the wild strawberry powder wild concentrated strawberries yeah you can buy, concentrated strawberries. Yeah, you can find organic wild strawberry powder on Amazon. Sounds like a yummy way to get healthy and live a long time. It's tasty. It turns your smoothie into a fruit loop. So anyways, the sirtuins are good, but because they need to work with NAD, which is also going to be very protective for your mitochondria during metabolic activity,

if you're eating a sirtuin-rich diet which is also going to be very protective for your mitochondria during metabolic activity. If you're eating a sirtuin-rich diet but neglecting to keep your NAD levels elevated, you're really shorting yourself from a DNA protection standpoint, which is all the more important now that we know that some of these forms of non-ionizing radiation, like 5G and Wi-Fi and non-native EMF may actually impact DNA. And so, so if you can do things like get your NAD levels elevated, activate sirtuins, um, you know, when you get exposed to a lot of this non-native EMF, typically there's a huge influx of calcium into the cell. So you keep your magnesium levels elevated to battle that, you know, activate some of these other anti-inflammatory pathways. Uh, There's one in

particular called the Nrf2 pathway that you can activate with ketones or with being in a state of ketosis. You know, there are a lot of things you can do to protect yourself, but I would say top of the totem pole for the DNA would be sirtuins and NAD. Okay, let's back up a little bit because people probably don't know what NAD is. So, you know, in the body there is inside every cell hundreds to thousands of these little factories called mitochondria. They're your power plants. And as I said, they take oxygen that you breathe and food that you eat and they combust them. And there's a whole series of chemical steps and basically a cycle that has to work if this is going to be functioning. And it's regulated a lot by various genes like the sirtuin genes, DAF2, FOXO.

These are genes that actually regulate the aging process. So when scientists, I was recently at an event where I listened to the head of the Buck Institute for Aging talk about NAD and talk about the mitochondria and some of these genes. They literally, by actually helping properly regulate for example one of the genes daf2 and earthworms they were able to to expend the lifespan of that worm that would be

equivalent to us living to a thousand years old and the things that turn it off are sugar and processed food and toxins and emfs and wi-fi and all the things you mentioned so do you know how old you are in worm years no i don't know know. I have to come up with that test. Yeah, worm years. A lot of people say we could live to 1,000. But what you're talking about is how the science of aging has advanced so far that we now understand the mechanisms, and we understand how to play with them in ways through the movement snacks,

some of the other things, the light therapy, but also through the right nutrients and supplements. And NAD is one of the key parts of that cycle of making energy. And many of us, like you said, decline as we age. And there are ways to increase it through various modalities, including certain supplements. Yeah, which is becoming a hot topic now. NMN, NAD, IV, NAD people are using. Yeah, from a traditional standpoint, you can fast.

You can eat a wide variety of fermented foods. There are certain teas like a Pau de Arco bark tea, which has these, these compounds called beta lapachines in it, which are wonderful for increasing your NAD levels. And you know, so, so there are, and of course you can, you can make sure that you're not turning over NAD too quickly by paying attention to the level of exposure to non-native EMF, like, you know, turn your phone in airplane mode when you can't. I mean, I'm wearing this apartment in New York City, and I look at my Wi-Fi, and there's 400 different networks.

I wanted to build a Faraday cage around our apartment. We're actually looking at buying a net, literally, that goes over your bed that shields you from all EMF. I'd use paint if you if you can if you're in your room faraday paint yeah oh there's faraday paint uh shielded healing has has faraday paint just if you don't want to ruin the feng shui of the room you know the canopy around the bed okay that's a good thing to know everybody faraday paint faraday is a scientist physicist who came up with this concept of faraday cage which essentially blocks out all uh radiation yeah and uh and i think it's a powerful idea that we should think about because

it does affect sleep it affects i wear faraday cage underwear when i'm on the airplane and that it's not here yet but i just got a faraday cage hoodie that i can wear like i'd pay attention to this stuff but yeah part of it is because of the nad and um and by way, mitochondria are the most important thing you need to keep healthy through aging. And they degrade the genetics. DNA gets damaged. And they're easily damaged. They're super sensitive.

And we don't know how to take care of them. We don't pay attention to it. It's not something even doctors think about or talk about unless you have some rare disease. But the good news is it is the center of the aging conversation. And it also is something we know how to deal with and what we can do about it. So that's what's exciting. And I spend a lot of time in functional medicine treating people's mitochondrial issues

with all kinds of modalities, including the things you're talking about. Yeah, so the nicotinamide, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, that's basically NAD. It's unfortunately not very well absorbed if you just take an oral NAD supplement. And so what you'll find out on the market now are two different forms of NAD precursors, one called NR, nicotinamide riboside, and the other one called NMN, which is nicotinamide mononucleotide, something, something. Anyways, though, NR is actually pretty well absorbed orally and so a lot of supplement manufacturers you know chromadex and elysium and thorn all these people are using nr now as one oral way to boost nad levels um nmn you can't necessarily swallow as a capsule but it can

be you can buy sublingual nmn tablets they actually sell nmn as capsules yeah well they shouldn't because it's not very well absorbed unless it's dissolved sublingually. Yeah. And the thing about NMN is more of the nicotinamide will be in the hypothalamus and in neural tissue in response to NMN supplementation versus NR supplementation. So if you're doing it for the brain effect, I would say use sublingual NMN or use, they make these now intranasal NAD sprays. If you just want a for the brain effect, I would say use sublingual NMN or use, they make these now intranasal NAD sprays. If you just want a quick full body effect, NR works just fine, but you want to make sure kind of back to what we hinted at earlier, that because NAD is going to upregulate your methylation pathways, you take a methyl donor along with it, you know, like betaine or

trimethylglycine or SAMe or something that will make you feel a lot better when you take the NAD. Now, I still think— And those are supplements you can buy over the counter. These are all things you buy over the counter, yeah. And the NAD spray is, I think, a prescription, right? No, you can buy that. Alive by Nature, I know, has one right now. That's one company that has it.

And NMN sublinguals. They have a sublingual. How do you trust the quality in the brand? Well, I know the people who run that company, and they're pretty committed to quality. And they're manufacturing CGMP facilities, and I think they do a good job. However, the NAD levels are still something that I think you should spark a pretty significant increase in prior to supplementation by doing something like NAD IV. And in terms of increasing bioavailable NAD, nothing beats that. Meaning that you actually sit and get a 500 to 1,000 mg NAD drip into your system. And many people do this for one to five consecutive days to top off the

NAD levels and then use oral supplementation after that. And what do people experience? Drop in once a month or once every couple of months to redo an IV to get the levels back up. And that's what I do. I get an IV about once a month. I take NMN right now sublingually in between those dosings or in between those IVs. And the other thing that I do is because the one time I know I'm exposed to tons of radiation, inflammation, non-AVMF, et cetera, is you can get these transdermal patches now that use an

electrophoresis patch to actually deliver NAD transdermally. And so I'll wear one of those patches that'll slow bleed about 750 milligrams of NAD into my system while I'm flying. So that's a very useful way to get transdermal delivery. What do you notice from this? Do you have any difference in how you feel your cognitive performance, energy, energy, um, better energy would be, would be the biggest one. The NMN, if I take that prior to a workout, I get almost like a mild flushing reaction, like a little bit of better blood flow. So there's that. Um, the DNA protective effect though, is something that I think is best measured with what you're using to monitor your longevity, telomere length analysis or one of these new methylation clock analysis,

because some of these things you don't know they're working until you can actually see the effect that they're having on telomeres or on DNA protection. So, I mean, my last spectra cell telomere analysis, it was nine years old as far as biological age. And one big change that I made was doing NAD for the past two years using that method that I just described. Nine years old? Nine years old. And how old are you? I'm 38. Okay. That's impressive.

So, so I, you know, who knows when you're stacking all these modalities, what's actually working, but ultimately the, the NAD I think is even if you're not doing IVs or patches or whatever, and you're just taking oral NAD, if you're doing that and including Sirtuin rich compounds in your diet and some methyl donors, that's a pretty good stat for longevity. Wow. That's a lot of information. So in order to upgrade your mitochondria and help you live longer, have more energy and repair your dna you're talking about using nad in different forms nmn uh sublingual patches ivs which is available now more and more clinics around the country including our ultra wellness center in lenox massachusetts where

we're in practice and you're talking about adding various compounds that are like the red wine, but that you can actually get from strawberries and wild strawberries and other plant foods. And then you're also talking about adding things that help with a cycle called methylation, which is a really critical cycle in your biology and your biochemistry that is going on thousands, millions of times a second. And it needs helpers and things like sammy trimethyl glycine and if you're drinking the wine same same as you were talking about with with uh with stress and and wildness drink a wine that has been from a grape that's been grown under stressful conditions like a lot of big california cabs and merlots they heavily irrigate their crops they're developing a very sugary they're kind of soft low in antioxidants that hasn't been stressed as much so yeah you know we've now gotten the

health sector you know companies like like dry farm wines for example that are that are doing more of like a like a low irrigation grape crop if you look at countries like new zealand or italy or france when you had a steakhouse usually, usually those are the type of countries that are still using old world biodynamic methods with low irrigation. So you can even consider the wildness of your wine. Okay. Now I want to talk about diet and sleep. So in your book, you talk about how obviously there's no one diet for everybody and that you need to figure out what the right diet is for your body. But there are some common themes. So tell us what those are and how do people figure out how to eat for themselves? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, all the way back to Roger Williams' book,

Biochemical Individuality. I mean, there's a vast array of different sizes of livers and stomachs and there's different rates of excretion of uric acid and vitamin D and all sorts of different ways that we respond to different vitamins and nutrients. And a lot of that is based on genetics. And so we cannot say that, let's say a ketogenic diet that might've helped your neighbor lose 20 pounds is going to be appropriate for you because maybe you have familial hypercholesterolemia, or maybe you have a, an FTO gene that predisposes you to, to gaining weight in response to high levels of saturated fat. Maybe you've got poor, you know, liver bile production or gallbladder, you know, bowel release, or there's, there's

something going on that makes a high fat diet very unfavorable for you, you know, and, and the same could be said for, you know, whether you're, maybe you're, you're an under methylator and, and trying to get by on a, on a largely plant-based diet when in fact you need a lot more methionine and methyl groups that you would get by including meat in the diet. And so there's a great deal of individuality with diets. You know, that's why I've, I've never really written a diet book just because it's so hard to actually dial in a specific diet. Even in, in Boundless, I actually outline 13 different diets from the Walsh

protocol to the plant paradox protocol, to the paleo protocol, to the carnivore approach, all these different approaches, and then walk people through how they would find based on genetics, blood testing, stool testing, urine testing, food allergy testing, which diet is going to be appropriate for them. And even then it might be a transitory diet where like, maybe you have leaky gut and autoimmune issues and, uh, and high levels of mercury or something that's going to require more of like an autoimmune or detoxification approach for eight to 12 weeks before you progress into a more kind of free diet or a diet that might be less restrictive. So ultimately a great deal of individualization is necessary with, I think, probably the most important first step

being to look at what your ancestors ate and try to in some way simulate that if you can. I mean, if it's the lowest hanging fruit, it's a very simple 23-day test. Well, about my ancestors, meaning the ones like in the last 100 years or 200 years? Well, that's the problem., because they were all Jewish food. 200 years from now, if I say that my ancestors were eating at McDonald's. Right. I'm not sure all the blitzes and, you know, all that stuff is.

Yeah. But generally, you know, you can look at things from an ancestral standpoint. Say, OK, I'm largely northern European. I'm probably going to do OK with things like fermented foods salted foods uh fish meat etc or maybe i you know i come from more like a southeast asian or sub-saharan african ancestry so i could do better with a little bit more of the citrusy fruits maybe some of the higher carbohydrates coconuts you know purple potatoes things like this so you can you can get some decent idea of your basic ancestral food choices just from knowing where your ancestors came from. But I think it's smart to delve more deeply into that, get a good blood test, get a urinary hormone analysis.

Most of us are mutts these days. That's the problem in America, too. I'm like 99% Jewish from the Middle East. I'm lucky I'm like one thing. But most people are not. Which might actually allow us to be more free with our diets. Who knows? It's difficult to say.

But ultimately, you do not want to assume that whatever the prevailing diet is from the most popular book in the bookstore is going to work for you at this point in your life. I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body. Customize, yeah. That being said, as you alluded to, there are prevailing characteristics of just about any successful diet, including those we see in longevity hotspots, like Nicoya or Sardinia or Okinawa. And a few of those components would include some element of caloric restriction or fasting. You even look at the Mediterranean diet, right,

which we've bastardized in the U.S. to be as much goat cheese and olive oil and fish and even red meat and spoonfuls and spoonfuls of nut butter and eight handfuls of almonds during the day, when in fact a traditional Mediterranean diet, if you look at the Orthodox Church and the amount of fasting and religious observations on Mediterranean diet, if you look at the Orthodox church and the, the amount of fasting and religious observations on that diet, there's huge amounts of protein restriction, certain days of the week where olive oil isn't even consumed. You, you see almost like a press pulse cycling of times of the year when you're eating adequate calories and especially adequate protein than

times of the year when there's protein restriction, meat restriction, calorie restriction. So almost every single diet has some element of calorie restriction, whether it's intermittent fasting or some religious observation of fasting, some element of protein restriction. Not year-round, but there's always something like that. It's like a reset, and it actually resets your biology. Right, and for me, I fast 12 to 16 hours every day. Overnight, 12 to 16 hours every day overnight 12 to 16

hour fast once a quarter i do a five day calorie restriction similar to valter longo's fasting mimicking diet where just for five days i eat about 40 of the number of calories i would normally consume and then one to two times a month i do a 24 hour dinner time to dinner time fast and for me that's sustainable all year long. It's easy to remember. There's, there's nothing super, there's no 10 day water fast involved. It's just, I can sustain that throughout the year. So fasting is one component. Another component is eating in a parasympathetic state, usually with people. You mean when you're relaxed, when you're relaxed, yes. Eating in your car on the way to work in your car while you're at a meeting or lunch even you know uh last night i gave a dinner talk and

everybody's talking and chatting they bring out the food and they're ready to dive in i'm like wait a minute we have all these people who just walked in they've been at work all day they're stressed out half of them were checking their emails on their phone when they still walked in here you don't just sit down and eat in that state you know and and at our house at the greenfield house we all take at least three deep breaths in through the nose out through the mouth and again and again and then typically we'll say a blessing over the food yeah and then once the meal begins it's all fun and games we play table topics and we have all these different card games, exploding kittens and unstable unicorns and bears versus babies and all these games.

It's funny, all our cards have little grease stains on them and stuff because we're always playing cards while we're eating. But this idea of eating and not just a relaxed rest and digest parasympathetic state, but also eating with people in the presence of others, not hunched over your computer, having a salad or huffing down an 800 calorie smoothie before you know it, it's gone because you've been looking at your emails the whole time. That's another component. We also see, as we also talked about, typically a large inclusion of a wide variety of wild

plants. A lot of these xenohormetic compounds. That's hard to get for people, but it's great. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, farmer's market to get for people, but it's great. Yeah, yeah. I mean, farmer's market, community-supported agriculture, patio gardens. I always say eat weird foods. That's what I say.

Yeah, eat the ugly, weird foods. Yeah, assuming a weird food is not a coconut-encrusted deep-fried Twinkie, which I would classify as weird. And if I could throw probably a couple more in there, it would be typically not having a very large meal close to bedtime. That's another one. Two or three hours at least. You asked about sleep.

It's one of the best ways to keep your body's core temperature low while you sleep. And if you do have a late dinner, like I had a late dinner. My dinner ended at like 11 last night. I'll get cold or I'll go for a walk. I'll do something that will get that core temperature back down. So last night I took off my coat. I went for a for a walk. I'll do something that'll get that core temperature back down. So last night I took off my coat. I went for a brisk walk. I walked for 15 minutes before I got my Uber back home or hopped on a taxi back home just

so I could get my body's core temperature down. Yeah. Cold shower, cold soak, anything like that. If you have to eat a late meal is a good idea. So ultimately, you know, there's about 12 different factors that I go into in the book that are prevailing characteristics of all of these areas where no matter what the diet is, whether it's a plant-based diet in Loma Linda or fish and rice in Okinawa, there are certain principles that you follow such as fasting, eating with people, not having huge dinners right before bedtime, that no matter what diet you're eating will allow it to be more successful. Amazing. bedtime that no matter what diet you're eating will allow it to be more successful amazing so so in terms of the whole vegan meat thing i mean i think you know we talked about these blue zones

but the truth is they did eat meat i can honestly pork and you know in the costa rica they eat a lot of guinea pigs oh yeah like that yeah they're not they're not vegan trick with meat really in my opinion is that when you look at mTOR activation, two different compounds are going to accelerate that. Okay, mTOR, for people listening, is essentially one of the regulatory factors around aging. It's an anabolic switch that, if excessively activated, can accelerate aging. But if activated within reason, can do things like maintain muscle, maintain bone density, allow for repair, allow for recovery, libido, hormones, etc. But if it's constantly activated, that's a constant state of pro-growth that can accelerate aging. Well, the two things that you want to be careful with if you are including a lot of meat or proteins in your diet

is extremely high amounts of leucine and very high amounts of methionine. And so with methionine, you would get that if you were eating a carnivorous diet, but the lion's share of the animal-based foods that you're consuming were derived from muscle meat, rather than from things like bone broth, bone marrow, organ meats, liver, kidney, heart. These foods that are richer in not only some of the nutrients, returning back to liver being nature's multivitamin, but also in glycine, an amino acid, which helps to balance out those very high amounts of methionine. So if you are going to include meat in your diet, I think it's important to eat nose to tail and to learn how to prepare organ meats properly. I call it awful for a reason. And if you don't like to do that, there are companies like Paleo Valley or ancestral supplements that are selling now like uh like liver powder you get a liver shake oh

they've got prostate brain heart like you can just take capsules and i all use these a lot of times when i travel because i don't do a lot of organ meats when i'm traveling so ultimately that's one issue the other issue is high amounts of leucine and this is something i think is a bigger problem in the fitness world because any supplement manufacturer knows that a good way to make money fast is to sell branch chain amino acid supplements, which unfortunately in the literature have not been shown to be that great at all for performance or recovery. It's just basically glorified flavored water, but it's isoleucine, valine, and leucine in branch chain amino acids. And so if you're relying upon a lot of these popular protein powders that are adding extra BCAAs to the protein powder,

if you're using BCAAs when you go to the gym, there's now a bunch of different companies that are putting BCAAs in there, like Bang Energy Drinks and some of these others. They're adding BCAAs to the energy drinks. So you're not only getting all the artificial sweeteners and everything else, but you're also getting a ton of leucine. And leucine is another potent mTOR activator but it also helps muscle synthesis you can't build muscle unless you have adequate leucine which is not so much in plant foods it can but you don't want it in excess and I think a lot of people are getting too much

methionine and too much leucine when they should in fact be getting more glycine and so I think if you are going to eat a meat- diet and you know, I, I, I love me, I bow hunts, I prepare meat all the time. If my, my wife does a lot of the cooking at our house, but if there's a steak or a chicken or a fish that needs to be cooked, I'm, I'm the man or, or an organ meat. And so I, I eat meat, but nose to tail and I'm cognizant of methionine versus glycine versus leucine consumption. So how do how do you fix that so what do you what are you what are you saying you stay away from muscle meat no you you you you sacrifice some of the muscle meat consumption and instead include things like bone broth liver kidney heart organ capsules you can supplement with glycine you can use um so if you supplement with glycine you'd offset the effects is that what you're saying you can

offset some of the effects of methionine right it's your methionine glycine ratios and all this was in your example when i when i sit down to lunch i have lunch typically for me lunch will be like some like a little bit of uh these days i'm eating a lot like pumpkin squash some of these underground storage organs typically a little bit of ferment on the side like a kimchi or sauerkraut and then some sardines or anchovies or it sounds like my diet herring or salmon but i now have after after seeing a lot of the stuff about glycine i have a big cup of bone broth with lunch so i'm getting that glycine in as well glycine is very important for detoxification as well yeah absolutely the joints very powerful yeah okay so what about the other things that we care about, like sleep and brain performance? And how do you help people address sleep and sort of maximum mental performance?

We could tackle them one at a time, but sleep is pretty straightforward. I mean, we know that you need to be in a dark environment. It needs to be silent, and typically it needs to be at a low temperature. Most people can wrap their heads around that. So cold room, eye shades, earplugs. Yeah, basically. But there are a few kind of nitty-gritty details. Like, for example, if you use something like one of these new pads that you can use to circulate cold water underneath.

A chili pad. I have one. A chili pad underneath. They're amazing. I set mine at chili pad. I have one chili pattern. They're amazing. I set mine at 55 degrees. I sleep like a baby. If I'm traveling like here, you know,

New York, I sleep with the windows open all night. You know, we're here in the, what month is January. So the room gets nice and cold. It'll dip down into the fifties and it's, it's perfect,

but a very cold environment. How's your wife like that? She makes her snuggle up. But, but the chili pad actually has a his and her side, right? So my size of 55 and she doesn't even turn her side on up. But the Chili Pad actually has a his and her side. So my side's a 55, and she doesn't even turn her side on, actually. But the other thing you do is you can wear wool socks,

and wool socks actually causes vasodilation that helps to cool the rest of your body while your feet stay warm. So that's kind of a hack, even if you don't have a Chili Pad or a very cold room. And, of course, if you have a late meal or a late exercise session, figure out a way to get yourself cold. Take a cold shower. Go for a walk in the cold, brisk weather. Do a quick cold soak. Hop into a cryotherapy chamber if you're at one of those fancy gyms.

But figure out a way to decrease your core temperature before bed all the more if you've exercised hard or eaten a lot of food within three hours prior to bedtime. So that's one thing is the actual core temperature. You pay attention to not only the bedroom, but also the sleeping surface, the breathability of the sheets. I got to tell my wife that because she likes it hot. I like it cold. But I do have a chili pad, which has improved our marriage. That's going to be a saving grace for you.

And then with light, a lot of people know not to look at screens now. I think that's pretty common knowledge. So the blue blocker glasses? Don't stare at a computer screen. If you are, where your blue light blocking glasses, put your phone in night mode, but a few areas where I will to, to in particular, I think could be better paid attention to. Number one would be when you're in your bedroom at night, maybe you take off those glasses or you get up at, you know, in the evening to go use the master bathroom or you turn on the lights in the master bedroom. You're just basically getting blasted with all that same light you were trying to restrict from your

restricted screen usage. So what we did in our room, our master bathroom, my kid's bedroom, and my wife's and mine bedroom was we replaced all the bulbs with red incandescent bulbs, which simulate something more like torch lights or a sunset. And so it's, you don't get that big rush of blue light if you happen to get up in the morning and use the restroom. And not that I would ever get up at night to take anything out of the refrigerator, but just in case something like that were to happen, you open the refrigerator, big blast of blue light.

But you're not supposed to eat in the middle of the night. Well, you know what, though? The blue light thing, really, that becomes a rule when the sun sets in whatever area of the world you happen to be in. So even if you're cleaning up the kitchen after dinner at 8.30 p.m. and you open that fridge over and over again, you're just getting blasted, blasted, blasted. So I got some of that red light tape, and I covered the light in the refrigerator with some of that same red light tape that restricts the blue light in the refrigerator. Well, it's fascinating. There's a book called Lights Out I read years ago about how the development of light bulb

was the beginning of a lot of our chronic diseases. Sugar and T.S. Wiley, Sheep Show, Sugar and Survival, I think that's called. Yeah, it's a fascinating book. Anyways, though, so that's one thing is your actual light bulbs and what you're choosing for light bulb. I like red incandescent for that.

And then the other one is the fact that your circadian rhythm, your sleep cycle, doesn't start when you're getting ready for bed at night. It starts in the morning when you get up. And so getting as much natural sunlight or even blue light as you can in the morning. So what I do in the morning is I think, okay, let's simulate what our ancestors would have done. If I would have gotten up, I would have first seen the sunrise, right? So yes, I will not be opposed to looking at screens, looking at the phone, etc. But I put my blue light blocking glasses on in the morning. So everything I'm looking at is kind of red, right? Like the sunrise.

And then typically around 7 or 7.30, I take those glasses off. And all of a sudden, I'm getting full daylight. I'm getting full blue light from the computer screen, full blue light from the iPhone. So I'm jumpstarting my circadian rhythm at the right time of day, but you ease yourself into it. You put the blue light blocking glasses on in the morning, then you take them off as you get around seven, seven 30, and then you let yourself get exposed to blue light and computer screens and sunlight and everything else. So you blast yourself with light in the morning. And those are a couple of the biggies for light and for cold.

And then for the silence piece, it's, you know, foam earplugs, get a good, I like an app called Sleepstream. It's like a DJ first. It's got white noise. It's got a brown noise. Based on some research they did at Stanford, apparently pink noise is the best. I think Faraday pain is also up there where things are going to help sleep.

Pink noise and Faraday pain. That's right. Yeah. So yeah, the silence piece is, it's a little bit easier to wrap your head around. And then finally, just the last thing, similar to eating, activate your parasympathetic nervous system.

You know Dr. Andrew Weil and I interviewed him on my podcast and he talks so much about his four, seven, eight breathing. And I actually do four, eight breathing. I find that seven count hold when I'm breathing myself to sleep at night is a little much. Uh, but so I just do four count in quick pause at the top, eight count out. And I can lower my sleep latency cause I use use the the aura ring to measure my my sleep latency it's about three to five minutes that's pretty quick i literally get in bed four eight breathing and i'm out like a light that's great yeah that's great for us that means you

breathe in slowly to count four four breathe out as you breathe out for eight i mean speaking of longevity just having long breaths out because what it does is it trains co2 tolerance right your body holds on to more CO2. And we know all these long-lived animals from the bowhead whale to the naked mole rat, they all have very high CO2 tolerance. So if you can breathe through your nose when you're working out, when you're out walking, you can take longer exhales than inhales. You can always be cognizant of breathing out longer and more than you breathe in.

You can train yourself to enhance longevity through co2 tolerance that's fantastic so boundless is full of all these amazing tips hacks and tricks and actually incorporating the science into practical things that you can do every day to perform better feel live longer. Sounds pretty darn good. Yeah, it's... I'm going to get my copy right now. I think you're getting a copy. I think I sent you a copy.

You don't have to get one. But if people are listening in, I would encourage them to get one. I'm pretty proud of it. It took a really long time to write. And I tried to make it practical, but I also tried to weave in a lot of the sexy stuff. Like, yeah, there are like $40,000 biohacking tools in there.

And there's crazy supplementation protocols for microdosing with psychedelics and plant medicine journeys. Holy cow, this is like the one-stop shopping. Just the basics. So it's kind of a little bit of everything. So you've basically taken all the things that people are hearing about in the news, the media, on blogs, and you've put it into a coherent book that people can follow, read, look at the science behind it. I'm sure there's tons of references. Made a huge web page for every single chapter.

So when you read a chapter, you go to the web page. It's got all the books, all the articles, all the podcasts, everything you can use to take a deeper dive into anything that's been discussed. Deeper than the 650 pages? Even deeper than that. And I put all, 450 pages got cut from the book. I put all those on the website too. So I pulled out all the stops on this one.

So everybody go to boundlessbook.com to learn more about Boundless, upgrade your brain, optimize your body, and defy aging. Ben, you've been an incredible guest i learned so much from you and i think if people pay attention they're going to feel better look better live longer and have a great life because that's what it's all about and have a red light on their junk it's not just about optimizing your mitochondria the whole point of this is to live a joyful connected meaningful life and it. It's such a good point. I mean, you and I, I think we both know there's 110-year-old cigarette-smoking, gin-chugging

grandmas somewhere in Sardinia who aren't necessarily living the model of perfect health as we would define it by Western longevity standards, but they're happy, they have friends, they have a wonderful social life. It's true. It's a big part of it, too. Although they're probably part of the 1% or 2% who can smoke and drink and live forever i would imagine i would not advise that their certain genes are probably turned on pretty pretty dang high it's so exciting hey boy it's exciting to live in this time because the science is advancing so far and and the average

person can actually take advantage of the science uh unfortunately most health care is not focused on this or focused on disease. You're talking about how to create optimal health. And that's essentially what functional medicine is. So as you were talking, I'm like, wow, this is really, you know, awesome to hear you talking about the principles of functional medicine in a way that are accessible and people can get to and transform your life. So thanks for being on The Doctor's Pharmacy, Ben.

Cool. And if you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media, leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, everyone. It's Dr. Mark Hyman. So two quick things. Number one, thanks so much for listening to this week's podcast. It really means a lot to me.

If you love the podcast, I'd really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family. Second, I want to tell you about a brand new newsletter I started called Mark's Picks. Every week, I'm going to send out a list of a few things that I've been using to take my own health to the next level. This could be books, podcasts, research that I found, supplement recommendations, recipes, or even gadgets. I use a few of those. And if you'd like to get access to this free weekly list,

all you have to do is visit drhyman.com forward slash pics. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics. I'll only email you once a week, I promise, and I'll never send you anything else besides my own recommendations. So just go to drhyman.com forward slash pics, that's P-I-C-K-S, to sign up free today. Hi everyone, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor

or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes,

especially when it comes to your health.