The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Improve Energy Production, Reduce Inflammation, And Promote Longevity

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Joovv, Pendulum, and Super Simple Protein.  Mitochondria are the energy powerhouses of each cell in the body. Unfortunately, our modern diet and lifestyle compromise our mitochondria, which results in suboptimal function of the brain and other organs, reduced energy levels, and even cancer. Luckily, there are science-based practices like cold water therapy that we can do to improve the mitochondrial function of our cells, reduce inflammation, support the immune system, boost metabolism, and more. In today’s episode, I talk with Drs. Chris Rinsch and Stuart Phillips, Wim Hof, Dr. Susanna Søberg, and Dr. Steven Gundry about how to improve the mitochondrial function of our cells, reduce inflammation, and more. Dr. Chris Rinsch is the cofounder and CEO of Amazentis, an innovative life science company dedicated to employing breakthrough research and clinical science to bring advanced therapeutic nutrition products to life. Dr. Stuart Phillips is a professor in the Department of Kinesiology and a member of the School of Medicine at McMaster University. Wim Hof, also known as “The Iceman,” holds multiple world records for his feats of endurance and exposure to cold, and he is the author of The Wim Hof Method: Activate Your Full Human Potential. Dr. Susanna Søberg has a PhD in metabolism and specializes in functional breathing and cold and heat exposure for health optimization. She is the founder and CEO of the Soeberg Institute, where she teaches people how to “stress up to stress down” using natural stressors. Dr. Steven Gundry is one of the world’s top cardiothoracic surgeons and a pioneer in nutrition as well as a medical director at the International Heart and Lung Institute Center for Restorative Medicine. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Joovv, Pendulum, and Super Simple Protein.  Access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests with Rupa Health. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com today. For a limited time, get an exclusive discount on Joovv’s Generation 3.0 devices (some exclusions apply). Go to Joovv.com/farmacy and use the code FARMACY. Pendulum is offering my listeners 20% off their first month of an Akkermansia subscription with code HYMAN. Just head over to Pendulumlife.com to check it out. You can get 10% off Super Simple Grassfed Protein by heading to drhyman.com/protein and using code protein10. Full-length episodes (and corresponding links) of these interviews can be found here: Drs. Chris Rinsch and Stuart Phillips Wim Hof Dr. Susanna Søberg Dr. Steven Gundry

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Once those mitochondria begin to function suboptimally, then you begin to see tissues begin to break down. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now, I know a lot of you out there are healthcare practitioners like me, helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as the framework for getting to the root cause of the issues. Now, in my practice, this often means looking at lots of internal variables

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They're the first and the only company to offer products that directly contain acromantia mesenophilia. If you want to try it for yourself, Pendulum is offering my listeners 20% off their first month of an acromantia subscription with the code HYMAN, H-Y-M-A-N. Just head over to pendulumlife.com to check it out. That's P-E-N-D-U-L-U-M life.com with the code Hyman for 20% off. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Frequent exposure to cold is linked to a number of

health benefits, including reduction of inflammation and swelling. It also has positive effects on our energy, metabolism, and mood. When the body is deliberately exposed to cold water, weak mitochondria die off, making room for stronger, more robust mitochondria, which in turn are responsible for fueling every cell in the body with energy. In today's episode, we feature four conversations from the doctor's pharmacy about how hormesis or small stressors to the body can have big effects. Dr. Hyman speaks with doctors Chris Rinch and Stuart Phillips about why mitochondrial function is so important to our health, with Wim Hof about one thing we can do

to increase our energy and reduce stress, with Dr. Susanna Soberg about how hot and cold therapy can help reduce chronic disease, and with Dr. Stephen Gundry on the connection between the microbiome and mitochondria. Let's jump in. Can you talk about how the mitochondria affects us in terms of the aging process and why it's so important to focus on them? Yeah, so I think one of the key things, as you said, is that the metabolic processes inside cells require energy nonstop, and it doesn't have to be a muscle cell, your cardiac cells, your heart is working all the time, digestive tissue, brain tissue. It's always metabolically active.

There's always something going on. So that means that mitochondria are turning out the currency, the energy that we need to be able to function. So no cell really ever, quote unquote, goes to sleep. Even if we go to sleep, the cells are continuously regenerating themselves and renewing themselves. And that's a function of mitochondria. So once those mitochondria begin to function suboptimally, then you begin to see tissues begin to break down, not just muscle, but as you said, brain tissue, cardiac tissue, it could even be adipose tissue. And all of these things really begin to tie together to slow cells down. They don't function as well, and they really can't then talk to each other.

So this so-called what we call organ crosstalk, so between muscle and fat and liver and in parts of our brain, it really begins to break down. And so as I said, it's a central theory of aging, which is to say that once our mitochondria begin to decline in function, then things are really going to go poorly. Exercise is one way to prop it up, but not everybody can exercise or not everybody exercises to the degree that they want. And so these adjuncts that we're now seeing, you mentioned NAD, urolithin A, for example, are all of these, I think, pretty cool compounds that once we just thought, not a big deal, but we're now seeing are

pretty important. Absolutely true. And I think the phenomena around mitochondria in the research is pretty exciting. And there's all these genes that regulate aging that are in the mitochondria, like FOXO, DAF2, the sirtuins. These are really important regulators and they're regulated by diet, but they're also regulated by these various compounds, these phytochemicals in plants, which we're going to talk about in a minute because this is the work that Amazentis is doing. This is the work that they're looking at in terms of compounds that come from plant foods that can actually regulate these biological functions in our body. So you can't, you can't obviously just take a nutraceutical and eat crappy and not exercise. It's all a package deal, but, but it really can accelerate the, the, the, the muscle improvement and function. We're going to talk about that.

But one of the things that's sort of exciting and Chris, I want to ask you about this because we, we, we have been hearing a lot about this phenomenon called autophagy, which is this idea that we can clean up and recycle old cells and old proteins and sort of clean up the system to repair, rejuvenate, and extend life and improve health. And that's why people are doing intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating or ketogenic diets, for example. These all improve this phenomenon called autophagy, which literally means eating yourself. But there's another thing that happens in the body called mitophagy, which is an incredible breakthrough in understanding longevity and longevity science, which is understanding this phenomenon of mitophagy. So what is mitophagy,

and how does it help to address the phenomenon of aging and improve our overall health and energy production? Mark, thanks for having me today. Mitophagy is really a way of renewing our mitochondria, particularly when they're damaged. So as you get older and as you're more sedentary, your mitochondria get damaged as they work, as they're producing energy. And what you have inside of each of your cells is a process of renewing your mitochondria. And under this sort of umbrella of autophagy, as you were mentioning, we have mitophagy and sort of the self-eating of mitochondria.

So basically, it takes care of recycling mitochondria as they get damaged so that the mitochondrial pool is maintained very robust and you have basically cells that are more bioenergetically active than they would be otherwise. That's incredible. You know, one of the things that I find fascinating is this whole idea that I've talked about in some of my books called symbiotic phytoadaptation. And it's a big word I made up myself.

What it means is that we have evolved, and this is just my theory, that we've evolved in conjunction with the plant world and the foods we eat to regulate our biological functions. And that there are 25,000 plus different phytochemicals in plant foods that regulate every single biological function from our hormones to our immune system, to our gut microbiome, to our mitochondria to pretty much everything that happens in our body. We really have only begun to appreciate these recently. In fact, Rockefeller Foundation has funded a study which they're calling the periodic

table of phytochemicals, which is mapping these all out, identifying their function as much as we know, and talking about how do we actually use these in the promotion of health. And so in everything, there's protein that we eat, there's protein, fat, carbohydrate, fiber, vitamins, minerals, et cetera. But there's this other class of compounds that have not been thought to be essential. And I call these the phytochemicals. And that's why I think we actually need these to stay healthy. So they're not necessarily, you're not going to get a deficiency disease, but you might get a chronic disease if you don't have these things. That's my theory.

And I'm so excited by the work that Amazentis is doing because it's really rigorous science that has been published in some of the top medical journals in the world that's looking at some of these compounds in plant foods that can actually regulate key biological functions, especially the mitochondrial function. So there's this compound that you've studied, and you basically figured out how to actually extract and make, which is called urolithin A. And just for those who are listening, this is what's so interesting about biology. You eat a pomegranate, which has these elagitanids in it, which is one of these phytochemicals. So you eat a pomegranate and that chemical interacts with your microbiome. And then if you have a healthy microbiome, it might produce a beneficial chemical called

urolithin A. But if you don't, it might not. So what you've done is sort of discovered that this molecule is so powerful in regulating mitochondrial function. And you've really done years and years of research to bring it to market. So tell us about urolithin A. How does it work? How does it affect mitochondrial function? And how did you kind of figure this out? Because there's a million plants out there and a million chemicals. So, this is sort of like, you know, kind of like a needle in a haystack, right?

Good question, Mark. So, it all started with, for us, with the pomegranate. We were looking at the pomegranate and thinking about what type of health benefits it could bring. And we started looking at the compounds inside of the pomegranate, and this led to us understanding more about compounds like elagitannins, which are a big family of compounds that are quite large inside of the pomegranate. And upon studying them, we understood that they were transformed, as you were mentioning before, into urolithin, in fact, into a range of urolithins, which are metabolites through the gut microflora processing. And it was originally thought that this is just part of the processing and the digestion of the pomegranate. And so it

wasn't sure, you know, were these urolithins actually doing anything in the body? So we started looking at them. And it was at this point when we were looking at urolithin A that we saw lo and behold that it was acting on mitochondria and improving mitochondrial function. And so it's one of these processes where, you know, as you say, a needle in a haystack, but it was through a very systematic dissection, if you will, of the compounds in the pomegranate and following their sort of journey as we consume the pomegranate. So you were like, oh, let's study the pomegranate and see what's in there. It wasn't like you studied every plant chemical and found out that there was this one that regulated mitochondria? No, no. We were really focused on the pomegranate at the time because there had been some general research on the pomegranate and its health benefits. And so we thought, let's take a deeper

dive and try and understand what's there. And I think, as you were saying before, what's really emerged from this is the importance of not only the foods you eat, but importance of the microbiome and how they work together synergistically to create compounds and to extract the health benefits from the food that we eat. And so, you know, it was understanding this and understanding also that very few people can actually perform this conversion. In fact, it's been estimated, and we've done some of our own studies that have shown somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the population can actually convert these compounds, these precursor compounds found in the pomegranate, into urolithin A. And that's at even various levels. So what it makes sense is when we studied all this was, you know, we don't need to give more pomegranates to

people, but we actually need to give urolithin A to people. And if we do it in the right way, if we dose it right, if we deliver it in a very precise manner, we can then get the health benefits that we are targeting and that we've shown that work. I've been using pomegranate powder and pomegranate concentrate in smoothies for a long time because of the benefits of pomegranate. And it wasn't around particularly the mitochondrial function, It was around the microbiome effects. And so, you know, one of the things we know, for example, is that there's a microbe in the gut called acromantia, which is mucinophilia, which essentially creates a coating and a biofilm on the gut that protects it. It regulates the immune system. It's necessary to fight cancer. It's necessary to regulate your metabolism. It's related to autoimmune diseases, and it's very

low in many people. And this bug loves pomegranate. And so you feed a pomegranate, it grows and it can help cure all kinds of issues. What really is fascinating to me is the story of the microbiome and the food we eat. So could you dive a little bit more into how the microbiome interacts with these compounds that we eat and then what happens to those compounds, how do they then get in our body and interact with everything that's going on? Because I don't think people really understand that. I think it's a very new science and I think it's really an important thing because when you're eating plant foods, it's not just for the antioxidants and the benefits that you get from the fiber and the vitamins and minerals. There's

this other thing that's going on that has to do with how it interacts with your microbiome. And that is the future. So talk to us about that. Sure. So as I was mentioning before about the ablagitanins that are found in pomegranates, they're also found in a number of other foods that we eat. We find them in raspberries and we find them in walnuts and blackberries. And what happens is these compounds are then transformed after you consume them in the stomach. They're hydrolyzed into a lactic acid and a lactic acid is then transformed by various

gut microflora. So the actual identity of the bacteria have not yet been found. But what we see is that there's a range of different metabolites, urolithin A being the most predominant one. And these are then taken up into the body, into the bloodstream, and then they go to the cells. And we found in our first clinical study, we found that we could identify urolithin A actually in the muscle tissue itself. So it actually gets right into the muscle cells. We've shown that, and we've shown through biopsies of the muscle tissue that we impact the mitochondria and the gene expression level of mitochondria in the muscle tissue itself. That's incredible. So how does it work to cause this phenomenon of mitophagy, this sort of self-cleaning service, almost like a self-cleaning oven, right?

How does it work to induce the self-cleaning process of your mitochondria? Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I'm so excited to share that I have a brand new protein powder called Super Simple Grass-Fed Protein. If you follow my work, you know how critical protein is for building muscle, for optimal weight, and overall longevity. I like to get a good amount of protein in every meal meal and sometimes that's hard with a busy schedule. That's why I make a protein-rich smoothie every morning featuring my super simple protein made with really clean ingredients and also minimal ingredients from grass-fed beef protein. Right now I'm offering the doctor's pharmacy listeners 10% off. All you have to do is go to drhyman.com forward slash protein and use the code protein10. That's

drhyman.com forward slash protein and use the code protein10. That's drhyman.com forward slash protein and use the code protein10. That's one and a zero. Well, with urolithin A in particular, it's taken into the cells and what it does is we've shown that it can stimulate this process of mitophagy. It's not known exactly at what point it acts to stimulate the mitophagy, but it increases the clearance of the damaged mitochondria. And consequently, we see a renewing of the mitochondrial pool inside of the cells. And so you have a much more bioenergetically favorable environment inside the cells and the cells consequently function much better. So what you're basically saying is that when you have

this pomegranate compound that basically should be made by your microbiome but most of us don't and you take it as a supplement that it cleans up the mitochondria and helps to improve the energy production yourselves. Why is that important? Like, why should we care? Well, I think in particular, as, um, as Stuart was mentioning earlier, as you get older, uh, the, the activity in our, in our muscle, the basically, the ability to clear the damaged mitochondria decreases with age. And so this causes a decline in the energy levels inside of our cells and in our muscle

tissue. And so then we sort of slow down as we get older and the muscle stops functioning as optimally our endurance levels drop. And this is part of a process in aging where mobility declines. And so what we're doing by stimulating mitophagy is to increase that energy level inside of our cells and basically making our muscles function at their bioenergetically optimal state, no matter how much muscle tissue you have. So this is something, it's really a new approach as opposed to what people have been doing in the past, which has been administering more protein to try and bulk up on muscle tissue. We're all about trying to make our muscle tissue

the most functional as possible as you get older. So it just sort of like accelerates the benefits of exercise, right? Yes. I mean, and as you were saying before, it's not a substitute for exercise. Basically, you want to keep this in your diet as part of your healthy routine, if you will. So you want your exercise, you want to have your right dietary supplements, and you want to eat a very balanced meal. So it's all part of combining the three. It's sort of like a way to upgrade your biology a little bit, right? And it's so important because as we age, the mitochondria, it's not just our muscle that's the problem, although that's a big problem. It's the mitochondria in our brain and our heart that decline. And that leads to poor

cardiac function and poor brain function. And a lot of the therapies that we talk about for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, these are mitochondrial therapies that have been studied. So pretty exciting. So what's really exciting is that you guys have been in this sort of biotech kind of nutraceutical company, which is a little bit of an anomaly and very brave, I would say, because I think it's a very daunting prospect to do a decade plus of research before you even come to market with a product. But you've come to market with this product called MitoPure, which is the concentrated bioactive component with urolithin A. So tell us about the development of MitoPure and why it's so important for our cellular health and our strength as we age. Thanks. So MitoPure is our proprietary urolithin A that we've developed. And what we've done with MitoPure is bring it to market in a product actually. that you can add into various types of foods that you want to eat,

particularly at breakfast. We think breakfast is a great time for everybody who's trying to sort of optimize their health with different types of supplements. So putting it into yogurt, mixing it in smoothies, even in your breakfast cereal. I put it in my smoothie every morning. Tastes great, doesn't it? Yeah, you know, I put a lot of stuff in there. It doesn't have a strong flavor taste. It's sort of like little pomegranatey, but it's, it's a, it's mixes with everything.

Yeah. So we're, we're excited about bringing this to market. We just launched over the summer. And now as we continue, we're going to be developing other types of products that contain the mitopure ingredient inside of it. Uh, so this is a, it's a very exciting time for us. And this way, you know, I don't know if this is public knowledge, but like there's, there's big food companies that are interested in this because they see as a

way of enhancing and upgrading their quality of their food products. Right? Yes, of course. And, and, we've formed a strategic alliance with Nestle Health Science here and they're a great partner and they're putting MitoPure into a number of their products. They've even launched one product recently, in fact, with that. That's amazing. So how does it revitalize mitochondria in the sense of the research? Because this isn't just basically, oh, this is a cool thing. Let's stick it in a pill or a powder. You've actually done the hard science on this. What are the scientific studies shown about how it affects mitochondria? Well, it all started with first a very strong collaboration here with scientists here at the University of the EPFL,

in particular Professor Johan Owerks, who's a guru when it comes to mitochondrial function. And it was in his lab that they really started doing the deep dive on studying the effects on mitochondria. And we worked together on that. And they started out by looking at the effect on worms, on these C. elegans. And they started to show that they were living 40% longer. percent longer and it was it was after you know looking at these worms living longer moving more that we started to explore further and understand the

mechanism of action and that's how we we learned that we were we were stimulating mitophagy and we you know we went through the whole process of showing that this mechanism of action was conserved not only in worms, but also in mammals. We moved into mice, and then we moved into humans. And so we've conducted a couple of clinical studies here, and we published one of our clinical studies in the journal Nature Metabolism. And in that study, we showed that administering urolithin A or mitopur for a period of four weeks, we were able to see an impact on key biomarkers linked to

improved mitochondrial function. So as I was speaking about earlier, biopsies in the leg muscle, we were able to show that we were increasing the gene expression of mitochondria genes. And then when looking at the plasma, we were able to show that there was a decrease in certain biomarkers linked to mitochondrial function, acylcarnitins. And so as the ac acyl carnitine level drops, this is an indicator of improved mitochondrial function. And also, if you're looking at the plasma, to your point earlier about mitochondria being everywhere, this is also a sign that you're having an effect on mitochondria, not only at the level of the muscle, but something that's more systemic. So what happens when we're exposed to cold, like to really cold conditions? What are the benefits? Why should we be even thinking about it? Because a lot of people are like,

last thing I want to do is jump in an ice cold bath or maybe in ice water. I say always gradual cold exposure. Gradual. First, take a cold shower. And a cold shower does wonders, miracles. Our biggest enemy within our Western society, the killer number one is cardiovascular-related diseases. And anything that has got to do with the quality of life is a bad blood flow. Too much stress inside because of the condition of the millions of little muscles in our hundred thousand of kilometers, like 70,000 miles of vascular channels and capillaries, they contain all these little muscles. When they are stimulated through cold showers, they help the blood flow go through. Then the heart rate goes down 20 to 30

beats a minute, 24 hours a day. That means stress is out and the blood flow is guaranteed going better to all cells. So oxygen, nutrients, vitamins get better into the cells. You get more energy. You get more energy and less stress. That's what the body wants. That's the natural state of our body, to have sufficient energy for anything. Because that's the influencing into the mitochondria, the energy factories through aerobic dissimilation. Oxygen.

Oxygen didn't get them because the blood flow is being helped through the stimulation of those millions of little muscles. And a cold shower a day keeps the doctor away. In this case, the doctor is arrived.

Okay. So, how long do you have to stay in a cold shower? It begins with 30 seconds. You got to take the shower anyway to cleanse yourself and to be clean and everything else. So at the end, just put the cold on? Yes, 30 seconds and naturally you will feel a boost. Naturally, you will feel the effect of the stimulation on the millions of little muscles inside the interior of your this is the greatest vascular fitness exercise ever a cold shower and 30 seconds then it goes very fast because the condition of the vascular system, it goes very fast to its natural state, which should be much better than the way we are because of our

de-stimulative behavior, wearing clothes over our biggest organ all the time. Yeah. For the body, it's not logic. So a cold shower a day is the best exercise to train all these little muscles. Then you get a lot more energy. You feel a boost of energy, yeah, because it gets better into the cells. And it produces more molecules, more energy, ATP.

It's all logic. And then naturally people are very fast able to prolong inside the cold shower, go 45 seconds to one minute. So when it arrives at three minutes, you've got so much more outcome in energy in the day than the investment is by far. It's nothing. And you know what? A cold shower is addictive.

Yeah. I like the cold bath. So I do the steam, then I jump in just the cold water in the bathtub, and I lay there for a bunch of minutes. And it's incredible. You literally feel your whole system come back online, your brain come back online, your energy increase. It's pretty amazing. How does cold and hot therapy have this massive potential to increase our health and our longevity even as a kind of strategy for enhancing our well-being and our lifespan?

Yeah, I love that question. It's a really good question. Taking it from the top, just actually, why should we actually do this? And why is it good for us? So overall said that I think that down the road, when I have read a lot of literature and also done my studies, I kind of realized that this is actually a good way to prevent lifestyle diseases. So inflammation will decrease when you stress the

body, whether you stress it in a cold way with cold stress or with heat stress, you will lower the inflammation if you continue doing this. So from the first time that you go, you will already be starting this process because you are creating what you just mentioned before, the hormetic stress in the cells, which builds the cells stronger but also the whole system is going to be activated your immune system and more white blood cells will come out in your system because of the shock and also the stress hormones and which eventually also them because of the increase in metabolism which i know we will get back to that what is that and how does that work but all in all this will lower your inflammation in the body and it will lower your stress level. So you will

have a lower blood pressure, you have a lower heart rate, and you have done this for a while. And that is actually what we measure as an outcome for having a risk for cardiovascular diseases and lifestyle diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, but also inflammation is associated with neurological diseases, such as depression and Alzheimer's disease. So what I wanted to do in my studies and why I actually went back to university after working at the hospital, I was like, okay, so many sick people here and the pile is getting bigger. I wanted to go around that pile and see if I could find out some way to give people some advice. So this, I don't know, this pile doesn't get bigger. I just wanted to figure out if I could

give advice before they actually get sick so we could prevent disease and what keeps people healthy so hormetic stress was actually what i went for so yeah the brown fat which i know we would get into but this could prevent lifestyle diseases and mental diseases i mean this is just remarkable what you're saying essentially there's this simple basically free almost free therapy that has the potential to deal with inflammation in the body, which we now know is the biggest driver for almost all chronic diseases, not to mention autoimmunity, not to mention aging itself as an inflammatory disease. And so we have this incredible technology that's been around for thousands of years that we've been using to help our bodies stay healthy. And I think of these as survival pathways.

When we were in these non-perfectly thermoregulated environments when we were out there hunting and gathering, and we didn't have 68 degree temperature controlled environments all the time. And we had to deal with these extreme temperatures of heat and cold. And when we had that, it seems to activate this ancient longevity pathway. And I think the inflammation story is so important. You mentioned mental health because it's not just increasing dopamine and other neurotransmitters. Actually, your brain is inflamed when you're depressed. And so this is actually an interesting doorway.

And I just want to share a little anecdote. I'm going to get more into the details. I had chronic fatigue syndrome when I was in my 30s from mercury poisoning. And I was really sick. I was super inflamed. My gut was inflamed. My muscles were inflamed. I had myositis.

I had brain fog. I had constant aching and pain everywhere. And I was just this mess of inflammation. And one of the only things that could actually help me get relief for a short period of time was doing a sauna and a cold plunge or doing them over and over again. And it was kind of like a miracle drug that nothing else worked. It wasn't curing me, but it literally helped me get some relief. So I know from firsthand experience, I mean, it's great to do when you feel healthy already and it just enhances your health. But even if

you're already sick like I was, it was such a powerful intervention and it really is something I've used for decades to help me stay healthy, feel good, to reset my nervous system and to change my biology. So it's super powerful. I completely understand. I mean, did you have pain relief also? Absolutely relief cognitive my brain fog lifted my muscles stopped hurting i felt like a normal human being for a few hours afterwards wow and then my you know my mercury poisoning i had to deal with the mercury the cause of it all but yeah eventually i you know it was so powerful you know i kind of want to get into the science of this we're gonna get into hot and we're getting into cold but we'll start with cold you're you're really one of the

leading researchers in this if not the top researcher researcher. So let's break down what happens in your body when you go into cold immersion and what are the effects on your biology? And we'll go through all of them, including physical and mental. Okay, so let's start with what happens when you go into the cold water. So as soon as actually you stand there on the jetty or on the beach or wherever you plunge in your cold plunge in your garden, as soon as you take off your robe, off your clothes, you will stand there in the cold wind and you will have an activation of your, starting your activation of your sympathetic nervous system. So your fight or flight system, because the cold receptors on your skin is going to send a signal to your brain in your temperature regulating center in the hypothalamus, where there will be this center,

which always regulate and sense whether you are getting a little bit too hot or a little bit too cold. And from that, it would send out these signals, so stress neurotransmitters in the brain, but also hormones, which are no adrenaline and adrenaline cortisol also a little bit, not so much actually, but it's going to activate your stress syndrome system. So, and that's going to make your heart rate goes up a little bit, but also your blood pressure just a bit. It's not much. It's just between 11 to 19 millimeter mercury. Thank you. And which is not so much. And studies actually shows that this only happens

with the heart rate going up and also the blood pressure going up a little bit. Only happens if you are a new winter swimmer. And when I say winter swimmer, it's just because that is the term I use the most here in Denmark because that's what we call it. But what I really mean is cold water immersion. You could call it plunging. It's just going into cold water and you can use the way you want to, what suits you in your life. But here in Denmark, we have the open sea, so we call it winter swimming. And that is why my book is called that yeah yeah just to explain

the terms so okay so you have an activation of your sympathetic nervous system when you're new it's more of course and when you then when you first start when you first start practicing cold immersion therapy you start having you have a more extreme reaction in your physiology exactly and that's of course going to activate when you then go into the water, that's going to activate full on your sympathetic nervous system. But because of the diving response, when you submerge your body into the cold water up to the neck, it's going to activate your diving response.

And what's that? Your diving response is because you submerge the body into cold water, and that's going to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. So it's actually also your vagus nerve. So that's going to make your system go a little bit into a conflict. So the heart rate really wants to go up because of the activation of the sympathetic nervous system. But the diving response, because of the activation of the digestive rest system will make the heart rate and blood pressure go down. So there's a little bit of a stress in the body in the first half a minute to a minute

around that time, especially if you are new to this. So if you are trained and you have done this for a while, your body gets more adapted to it and you won't have as much of an activation of the sympathetic nervous system as you would if you were completely new. So you'd have more of a parasympathetic response if you were doing it over a period of time. Yeah, exactly. So you get adapted to this. And that's also because of some physiological processes that is happening in the body. And you can divide them into three processes, which is the metabolic process, where the activation of the brown fat in the body is this healthy kind of fat that we have. I'm not going to go completely into that right now because that's not...

We're going to come back to brown fat. Yeah, we are. We are. But that's... It's a good kind of fat. It's a good kind of fat. The good fat. And then there's the bad fat. That is the white fat.

And we want to activate the good fat so we can get rid of some of the white fat. So that's a good thing when you go into the cold water and you activate your sympathetic nervous system because that is going to increase your adrenaline. Activate the brown fat and then you heat up. We're going to go more into that. Okay. But that's one of the- Well, here's the- just to to stop for a sec so just to unpack it because you're going fast so the diving response essentially is to help you survive if you fall in cold water yeah because it slows

everything down and slows your metabolism down and slows your heart rate down it it's why people who have hypothermia even when they seem to be near death, can be revived because everything kind of is conserved. So that's actually a good thing. It is a good thing. That's because it's cold. Yeah. But that's sort of what the diving response is for people who don't know what that is. And it's a powerful survival mechanism. It is exactly. Yeah. So the diving response only activates when you submerge into water. So not in the cold shower, for example. So when you do that, you have this activation of all your neurotransmitters in the brain, and you will have this activation of the parasympathetic

nervous system. If you are able to stay there longer than the cold shock, and when that subsides, it takes about a minute or two, then you have the full activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. And if you can get over to that and you can sit long enough in the water for that, you have to rehearse that. People should go very slow. And this is not what you do. The first 30 seconds are the hardest, and then it gets easier. Yes, then it gets easier. then it gets easier but it goes quick actually studies show that only already after the third time actually you go into cold water and this has been tested in studies where they have they took subjects and put them into water and already after the third time they could see a lower hyperventilation in the subjects.

So they found that they didn't hyperventilate as much. So the heart rate and blood pressure went down. It's also because of, yeah, people get a little bit anxious about going into the water. What is this? Is it dangerous or is it? So yeah. So the first thing that happens is the activation of your autonomic nervous system. And then the metabolism, the brown fat is the next part, right?

So then tell us about the brown fat, what it does, why we have it, why it's important. Because, you know, there's a fascinating group of Tibetan practices called TUMO. You probably know about this, right? TUMO, you know about the TUMO. You probably know about this, right? TUMO, you know about the TUMO practices? The drying of the sheets. So the Tibetan monks, when they would go through their initiation, who lived up high in the Himalayas, they would have these sheets dipped in ice water in the cold Himalayan winters, and they would be wrapped themselves in the ice sheets, and they would have to meditate and activate their brown fat. Of

course, they didn't know they were doing that. They were doing ancient breathing and breath practices, activated their own fat and dried the sheets on their body. And then once they got good at that, they were actually given the opportunity to go up into the snow, basically with just underwear on and a loincloth and have to sit overnight and and keep themselves warm overnight in the winter so that's the power we have within us that people don't realize you didn't know about this i don't i didn't know that story actually oh my god it's amazing it's amazing you should google it drive it's called drying of the sheets or tummo it's an ancient tibetan practice it sounds like it's it's about the brown fat because it's not like you can say so intuitively we have

known about how the body works and how we can heat up from the inside we just didn't have the science around it if you look back to our ancient greeks so hippocrates and socrates they always they said that they advised people to go into the cold water and go into the hot water because that's going to make your blood or your fluids, what is it called? Fluids, your body fluids. Yeah, your body fluids flow easily in the body if you do that. So they didn't really know exactly. They didn't have the science to back up what they were really saying, but they kind of

intuitively knew that this was already going on. So it sounds like this story you're telling is because people can feel that they heat up when they get cold. That is also what my science show, that you actually get physically warmer from activating your brown fat and doing this kind of activity going into the cold and going into the heat. But you get warmer. Yeah, it's true. It's only, you know, Seneca, 2000 years ago, was a Stoic philosopher, was a cold water enthusiast. He inaugurated the first of every year with a cold plunge in the Virgo aqueduct.

And Thomas Jefferson used a cold foot bath every morning for 60 years and died at 83, which was old back then. So it's fascinating that there's actually, Hippocrates also talked about the four plungers. This is not a new idea. It's not a new idea. They call this thermalism. That's why I actually call my school, my course,

I call it Thermalist and Thermalism Cure, because, yeah, because that's a tribute to them, because they already then saw this. And today we have some signs to back it up. So you have this parasympathetic sympathetic shift in your body. And that actually, even though it seems like a stress, eventually it actually can help your nervous system calm way down. Right. And mitigate the effects of stress.

I want to come into the brown fat, but I want to talk about this inflammation and also the mental health part, because I think that's important. And we'll dive deep into the metabolism conversation. So with the cold plunge, you get a release of other neurotransmitters and it changes your cognitive performance

and your mental health. And can you talk about that? And then we're going to talk about inflammation. Then we're talking about brown fat. Okay. Great. So the mental health part. Yeah. So what is great, or you can say what we actually need today is to learn how to stress up to stress down. And that is what happens when you go into the cold waters. So what happens is you get this increase of neurotransmitters in the brain, of no adrenaline, which gives you focus and drive. And it actually increases up to 2.5 fold within just a few minutes.

And I think that is amazing. And we knew this already back in the 70s, which is shown in studies, old physiology studies back then. So it's not kind of like new news or anything. It's just that today we can take the science together and we can make a better picture around what actually is going on in the body when we put this together. And also together with my research, which I published a year ago. But what it shows is that you have this increase in noradrenaline and you have more focus, you have more drive because you also increase dopamine. And dopamine also increases 2.5 foldable baseline.

Wow, amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. It's like taking a Ritalin, basically. Right? It is, yeah. And I don't know. I don't know. What, you don't a Ritalin, basically. Yes. Right? It is, yeah. And I don't know. I don't know. What, you don't take Ritalin?

No, exactly. I'm like, I'm saying yes, and people will be like, what? No, no. From an academic perspective, it's like the same mechanism as Ritalin. We have read this. Or cocaine. Or cocaine, right? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And I have also watched it. And it's much safer for you. It's safer. Yeah. So I think it's amazing that you can go into something this simple, cold water, and you can dip yourself there. You have an increased focus, increased drive, which will give you motivation for the rest of the day to pursue whatever you want to do. And you get a more positive angle to your life even because you also increase oxytocin, which is also a stress hormone. It's also what we call the log hormone.

But it increases your way of viewing your life also. So this is the gratitude that you can feel when you go into the cold war. I don't know if you feel that, but definitely this is what I hear. I'm definitely grateful when I get out. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but altogether, when you go into the cold water, what it does for you collectively, it widens your window for stress, actually.

So that is a process when you go into the cold water and you can relax in a situation that is a process when you go into the cold water and you can relax in a situation which is super stressful for you. And you can use this and practice in the, I call it a cold water training center for your nervous system, because this is really where you can try and open up this window a bit more so you don't get as easily stressed in your everyday life. I'm not saying that we are not overstressed, but maybe our window for stress has also narrowed. It has narrowed also. So maybe if we can open that window and we can tolerate stress a bit better mentally, then we would also not have

as much a mouth breathing society, which we have today. And when you breathe through your mouth, you activate your sympathetic nervous system, right? And that's going to also affect your mental health. So it's like you're stressing yourself. It becomes this vicious cycle. So you can use the cold to create a better mental balance for yourself not only just in the moment because in the moment you will completely forget about your worries because the body goes into a moment of just survival even though you did it on purpose the body's going to react that way

but you can use it you can use that reaction to complete delete what's at whatever was on your plate. No, it's a great reset. It's an incredible reset. It is. It is. I call it the control-alt-delete effect because that's exactly what it does. Oh, my God. That is so good. Control-alt-delete.

So you can control-alt-delete all of your stress response and come into a calmer nervous system state that allows you to be more focused, present, happier, increases all the happy mood chemicals, love chemicals. I mean, it's really quite remarkable. And it's something that happens pretty quickly. It happens so rapidly, within a few minutes, actually. So if you can stay in the water for just getting over to the other side,

I call it the cold shop, where you stop hyperventilating and you can relax in the water. You don't really have to stay there much longer. You have already the benefits, right? So you can go up and what happened there is you completely deleted your worries and you then have a new, you can say, mindset. your brain is full of all these good chemicals. And that is going to make you view your problems, your life, everything, nature, people around you in another perspective. Because now you have this positive mind, right? And that's how you go into life. So if you can do this a couple of times a week, imagine how that's going to affect your life. If you on purpose can go out and take this happiness pill, it's just cold water.

The mitochondrial story is an interesting one that hasn't really been told. And I think, you know, it all comes down to mitochondria, which is really what we're talking about in terms of energy, right? All these things affect the mitochondria, which are these little energy factories that take food and oxygen and burn them in your cells for this energy. And all the things you're talking about will have adverse effects, all those chemicals, not only by affecting your microbiome, but also just directly affects on the mitochondria. And the key to really figuring out your energy is healing your mitochondria. And I think some of the shocking data about the microbiome, and I'd love if you could sort of draw this connection a little more, is how the microbiome affects the mitochondria.

Because it's really the subject of your book. I'd love you to sort of maybe tease that a little bit. It's really all about how does the damage to the microbiome and the adverse metabolic gut compounds influence everything, including hormones or appetite, mood, brain function, weight, energy. But start with the mitochondria. Because the idea is that the gut has all these bacteria and they get out of balance and then that stuff happens. So, and what happens? So again, mitochondria are ancient involved bacteria and they actually talk to their sisters, the gut microbiome, which for the most part are bacteria as well. In fact, we inherit our mitochondria from our mother. Our dad doesn't give us any. And we inherit, if things work out okay, our initial microbiome from our mother via birth and also

by being breastfed. Believe it or not, one of the huge benefits of breastfeeding is that a woman's breast milk has huge amounts of bacteria and fungi that are also populating the baby. Okay, so years ago, one of my first times presenting at the World Congress of Microbiota in Paris, I met the director, Marvin Endres. And he and I were talking. I had a paper on and he says, you know, I'm going to tell you something. He said the microbiome talks to the mitochondria. And my eyes went up and I said, well, how do they do that? And he says, well, we don't know yet, but I'm telling you, we're going to find out that the microbiome talks to the mitochondria because they're literally sisters. And I said, well, you know, that's interesting. He says, yeah,

they send text messages. Well, lo and behold, Marvin was right because the language, what's called the trans-kingdom communication system of how the microbiome talks to mitochondria and to our DNA was discovered. And it's as big a discovery as the Enigma code discovery in World War II, the German code. So what that discovery was, is the discovery of postbiotics. And postbiotics, everybody knows probiotics, friendly bacteria. Most people are learning prebiotics, which are the fibers that friendly bacteria need to eat. But when those bacteria eat those fibers, they produce either short-chain fatty acids like acetate and butyrate, but more importantly, they produce gases, and they're called gasomessengers or gasotransmitters. And it's these messaging system that's now been discovered that actually talks, actually tells mitochondria what to do, whether to make more energy when things are good or whether to throttle back because things are bad down in the engine room.

And it's it. You know, the whole discovery is just like, holy cow, we are this incredible symbiotic organism. I mean, for instance, the Nobel Prize for discovering how nitric oxide works and where it came from, you know, for years in cardiac surgery and cardiology, we knew what nitric nitric oxide did, but we didn't know how it did it. But nitric oxide is a gaso messenger. But here's something really wild. So hydrogen gas is a gaso messenger. And part of the fermentation process of bacteria eating fiber is to produce hydrogen gas. And hydrogen gas is the world's smallest molecule, and it diffuses right across our gut wall.

And one of the shocking things as I was researching this, is if you look at patients with Parkinson's disease, they have a microbiome that does not make hydrogen gas. Whereas people who don't have Parkinson's disease have a microbiome that produce hydrogen gas. And you can give patients with Parkinson's disease hydrogen water, and that's water that has hydrogen dissolved in it. And they will symptomally improve once they consistently start taking hydrogen water. And so, as I joke in the book, in Boy Scouts, what we used to do, you know, we'd eat beans on the camping trip, and we'd have Bic lighters, and we'd actually literally light our farts with this blue flame. I've seen that happen at a campfire a couple of times.

Exactly. That's hydrogen gas. And little did we know. Methane too, maybe. I don't know. Exactly. Well, it turns out that is actually a gas messenger as well, as well as hydrogen sulfide, that rotten egg smell. And for years,

you and I were taught that hydrogen sulfide is a toxic gas. But we now know that the effect of hydrogen sulfide is that of a hormetic agent. And hormetic agent is basically that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger. So yeah, So that no hydrogen sulfide is not good. A little hydrogen sulfide is good. A lot of hydrogen sulfide will kill you. So a little dab will do you of these things. And so getting back to your original question, the more we feed our microbiome,

the foods that they can make these literally text messages that tell your mitochondria to produce energy, the better off we are. And again, you look at, oh, a tribe like the Hanses, who they eat, oh, about 165 grams of fiber a day. If we're lucky, the average American may eat 20, probably not. But they're a watch. I think it's eight is the average American. If we're lucky. And half of the fiber we eat is actually insoluble fiber,

which is actually really bad for you in a lot of ways. So long story short, we are so deprived of the energy producing compounds that are available to all of us if we'll just feed the microbiome what they need. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving

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