The Joe Rogan Experience - #1178 - Dr. Rhonda Patrick

Episode Date: October 2, 2018

Dr. Rhonda Patrick is a Ph.D in biomedical science and expert on nutritional health. Her podcasts and other videos can be found at http://FoundMyFitness.com

Have you been here since you had a kid? Yeah, I was here last, right, about four months after. I didn't sleep at all. It's amazing. I, like, was able to talk for... And now your kid is how old? Thirteen months. Wow. Wait till they start talking. Oh, he says, I mean, he's now, like, his new thing is he says, all done, all done.

So he'll say it, like, he'll say it before I change his diaper because he doesn't want me to go through that. You know, he's like, all done, all done. But he'll say it like he'll lay in his crib and say it like when he's ready to get out, you know, a bed early in the morning. And I'm like waiting. I'm like, maybe I'll go back to sleep. and having a child, are you, are you like cognizant of like every single factor that's taking place? Like nutrition, all the input, emotional input, environment, like must be kind of mind blowing. And it's mind exhausting too. Yes, it is. I'll give you an example right now, like, cause we're traveling right and um you know i i'm i'm pretty this the bpa so plastic bottles you know i'm having to give him water and he's

like obsessed for whatever reason he's obsessed with drinking i brought his like you know nice cup um but he doesn't want to drink it out of his cup he wants to drink it out of these plastic bottles it's novel and crinkly sound and anyways you know so i'm like all i can think about is the bpa and you know am i am i exposing him to too much and what's it doing and is that bpa is it leach only when it gets hot is that how it works so and that's another thing i was thinking about in my hotel today because i was making a coffee with one of those um one of those paper cups that has the plastic lining. And I don't know what's in the plastic lining. BPA or some of the BPA alternatives, which have also been shown to help.

What does BPA stand for? Bisphenol A. So to answer your question, there's been experiments done that have shown heat. So boiling water and putting it in plastic increases the bpa that leaches into the the solution into the the water by like 55 fold so yes definitely heating it up is like way worse and so one of the things i'm always now thinking about is you know going to starbucks whatever the plastic lining they're putting in those cups when you get your hot tea or your hot coffee i don't know if there's bpa but there's now studies that have come out, and these studies have been done in animals

that show like BPS and some of the other BPA replacements also have negative consequences on the endocrine system, on reproduction. In some cases, they're passed on to multiple generations. Now, how much of that is actually translates to humans? It's unknown. But there have been studies, at least with BPA that have shown that, you know, you give a person a single dose of BPA and it disrupts like their insulin sensitivity. It also plays a role in like causing problems with in vitro fertilization. So it's, you know, disrupting hormones and things like that. So I was really cognizant about it during pregnancy because, you know, typically we do detoxify it quite well. The half-life is like less than five hours and we excrete it through urine. It also comes out through sweat, by the way, which is really good. But, you know, when you're pregnant, for whatever reason, the placenta, But when you're pregnant, for whatever reason, the placenta, you basically take the BPA, it's in your body, and your liver will inactivate it to this more benign compound. But when it crosses over the placenta, it gets activated again. And so it's like that's why the effects are much more robust always on the developing fetus.

And so I was really made sure I was not drinking anything out of a plastic bottle or anything like that while I was pregnant, just because, I mean, I don't know. At the end of the day, there's, there's a lot of studies that have been done in animals and just how much of that, you know, translate, how significant is it? It's really hard to say. Um, but it's certainly concern. It's probably a compounding effect, right? With all the other environmental factors, pollution, particulates in the air, chemicals, all the other jabs that we take into our body all the time. Right. Yeah. And then the fact that actually aging bottles, like as you, for whatever reason, as a bottle sits, like if you keep using, for example, the study was done with baby bottles.

If you keep using a baby bottle and putting liquid in, as the bottle aged, more BPA was leached out into the liquid. So for whatever I know, it's just, so it's another thing I'm thinking about with all like my son's stuff. It's like, everything's plastic and he's chewing on it. It's like, you know, at some point you just can't like, there's, you can't control everything, right? How many kids do you think you're going to have? You can't control everything, right? How many kids do you think you're going to have? Right now, one is it's I am so satisfied. I'm full of so much joy and it's a lot of work. And, you know, he's 13 months.

So I've only had him a little bit over a year. So right now I'm really happy with him being special. I don't know. I think it's likely maybe one, but I'm not going to, like, you know, say for sure. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. Yeah. And, you know, it's just adding another.

It's like, well, you know, you're going to. I've put a lot of energy and time, you know, spent a lot of time with him doing lots of things. And, of course, all the nutrition and all that. But it's how do you do that with two? It's very satisfying, though, watching them play with their siblings. It's really interesting. Like my two youngest, my eight and my ten, like watching them play together. It's adorable watching them hold hands and do stuff together.

It's really fun. And they develop a very unique bond. They fight all the time over nothing. Like, give me that. It's mine. It's mine! Like all of a sudden, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what happened?

You know, like, there's always, like, some blow-up. Because they have zero control of their emotions. Anything that goes wrong, ahhh! It's just a floodgate. It's either on or it's off. But they're really good at apologizing, too, which is really interesting. We've taught them how to do that.

How to just say, look, everybody gets emotional. It's okay. Apologize and hug it out. Yeah. I think it's also another thing that is really important is teaching your children how to be happy, like, you know, because that's important. They see that, though. They'll see that in you. You know, they imitate their environment if they see you know that you know how to be happy and that you can turn things

around and you know how to make light of situations and they'll they'll they take on these behavior patterns really that's one of the more fascinating things is watching kids go well what are you gonna do you know like when you do what are you gonna do and then you see them going huh what are you gonna do and you're like wow watching an eight-year-old figure that out it's kind of cool yeah that's nice that's nice to know yeah it's like right now my son he's almost always just happy you know it's so and i'm thinking about like future i'm like oh he's gonna girl problems and girl you know i just or boy problems just anything you know where you ever thought what if he's gay yeah and that's where i'm like you know all the endocrine disruptors and everything.

Oh, my God. The environment is turning myself gay. Yeah. Who knows? Who knows what's happening? Yeah. I mean, and what's of major concern to me is living in major metropolitan areas with the constant pollution. And I was reading a study that was talking about living in any major metropolitan area like New York City can take many years off of your life. Just from living there,

it will shorten your life. Yeah, I've been reading multiple studies over the years about air pollution. And, you know, there's compounds in air pollution that are carcinogens like, you know, benzene. And there's also the particulate matter and how these, you know, like, you know, benzene, and there's also the particulate matter, and how these, you know, how air pollution is increasing the risk for stroke, heart attack, Alzheimer's disease. And this is like in dose-dependent manners, and of course, there's all sorts of confounding factors, and you can never really show causality, although some animal studies have been showing causality. um it's and and some of these things are really bad in developing nations that don't have a lot of regulatory um regulations on um for example like automobile exhaust and so some some developing countries have like children coming down with like strokes and stuff like early like young teenage so um and it's been this is of course you know been linked to air pollution uh so it's it's

definitely a concern and then there's all sorts of studies talking about um you know of course, been linked to air pollution. So it's definitely a concern. And then there's all sorts of studies talking about, of course, asthma, but happiness and brain function and all that. And it's something like I live off of a busy road. And then there's noise pollution, which is another. I mean, so it's like something natural and that maybe a person who's an adult could enjoy living in Manhattan and decide that they get a thrill out of living in the city but for a baby to grow up around all that concrete and glass and all these sharp hard edges and right angles that it's maybe not conducive to healthy brain development or that's not like what your, what your body or your brain is naturally craving.

Right. There's been studies looking at, for example, like people that exercise in a metropolitan area versus like out in like a park nature and the, you know, all sorts of measurements of, you know,

depressive symptoms are measured after. And the ones that measured that did nature run were far better at basically feeling happier after the run than the people that did in the metropolitan city. That makes sense. I mean, I think that's why people like Central Park in New York City. It's an oasis. Yeah, you get something.

I mean, it's really a great place. It's really quite big. One of the things about Central Park, when you're in it, you're like, wow, it's weird that this is in the middle of the city. But it's a brilliant move to have this one area. I mean, you think about how much that real estate would be worth if they decided just to shove buildings in there. I mean, Manhattan is one of the most pricey real estate places on the planet Earth. state places on the planet Earth. And yet in the middle of it, they have this big, open, public park area that anyone could just wander around, sit by a tree. It's really a very,

very smart move. Yeah, it is. It is nice. LA should have something like that. Is the air pollution? Do you know if the air pollution what's like in Manhattan? It's terrible. It's terrible in Manhattan too, compared to LA. I think they're probably equally sucky, but the thing that is bothering me, um, is not just the air pollution in terms of like the exhaust fumes and the, the exhaust, uh, the smells, but also the brake dust. You know, when I first started paying attention to brake dust and, um, I would always clean it off my wheels, but I would never think about it like, Oh, there's dust that's on my wheels. I would think, oh, it's just dust on your wheels. Then someone was explaining to me,

no, that's an environmental hazard that you're breathing in if you live in that environment. When you're around, you know, if you're on Broadway and cars are constantly hitting their brakes around you, there's a puff of that brake dust that's getting in the air

with every pump of the brakes. Wow. And you're just taking that disgusting stuff into your lungs. Yeah, the particulate matter, the stuff that's really tiny and stuff. Yeah. I mean, because that's like mesothelioma, right? You're taking in the particulate matter from like asbestos. So you'd think there'd be similar mechanisms, maybe not going to lead to mesothelioma, but

that there would be similar mechanisms at play that are damaging organs. Good to visit, not good to stay. That's what I think. I mean, I have no desire. I don't even like living here. I think there's too many people. Yeah, I definitely don't like driving here. It's really bad. How much is the difference between here and where in San Diego? San Diego is definitely bad during typical times. People are either going to work or coming home from work. But it's nothing like L.A. I mean, L.A. is orders of magnitude worse for sure. Now, if you're not doing clinical research, you could do a lot of your stuff somewhere else.

Have you thought about being somewhere else? So my family is in san diego and uh it's really nice having my mom in particular because she helps out a lot with my son so that i can uh get some work done too right which is important and i really we could live you know a little bit further out i mean there's there are places like that are still within like 40 minute drive to like you know downtown san diego uh beaches and stuff that are that are nice and um so that is something that we are considering but we're just a little quieter definitely quieter no matter what it's going to be you know because we live there's a just it's a busy road and there's fire sirens and you know my son likes the fire sirens but there are there have been times when there have been loud motorcycles and he is like concerned like you can

see you look on it like it's you know so so it kind of worries me as well um but definitely it's it's it's it's important to get away from that it's like a goal for sure now before the podcast started you were telling me that you wrote a 30 page paper on the carnivore diet it's not a paper well it's i definitely spent a lot of 30 pages i thought about it for a long time and yes there's 30 pages of thoughts and references were you stunned that this became i mean this is a very recent thing. Yeah. People are just eating meat. Well, at first, when I was, I think Dan told me about it like a couple years ago, even like, and I thought there's no way. I was like, I just ignored it.

I don't have time for that. I don't have time for that. So, yeah, I definitely dismissed it when I when I first heard about it. But it's definitely been something that has, you know, gained a lot of traction. Yeah. You know, does it disturb you that it's gained traction? Well, I definitely have concerns. You know, I think that the most important question really is what is attracting someone to try such a very restrictive diet, you know, that potentially could be dangerous without published evidence or any sort of long-term studies and things like that. So I think that the first question really is, well, why are people doing this? And so looking on the internet and try to like read about people's anecdotes, it seems as though a lot of people are drawn to it because they have some sort of autoimmune problem. And so they try

this diet and it improves their autoimmune symptoms. And I see that seems to be a real common theme, at least if you if you look in the blog of Spears and stuff like that. So that's, I think, kind of a good place to start where it's like, well, you know, what are people doing this for? And then, so that's, that's kind of an important question. And so so further reading about this diet is sort of think about, well, OK, well, what's going on? It's really important when you have something that leads to an effect to understand the mechanism because the mechanism is what's leading to this effect. And so if you can do something that's potentially not so dangerous or risky, then understanding the mechanism will help you because then you can find other ways to do it, right? And so if you look at published studies on people that eat low-carb,

high-protein diets, what's pretty common is that there's changes that happen in a variety of different endocrine factors, like, you know, you're less insulin, that's changing your satiety and hunger hormones, leptin and ghrelin, and people become more satiated and they actually eat less. And this has been shown in multiple studies. So people actually eat less when they're having a higher protein diet, which makes sense too, because protein is more satiating as well. And also, there's also been studies on what's called food habituation, where basically habituation is when you're constantly exposed to the same stimulus, you sort of have a decreased response to that stimulus. people that are given the same food once a week. And the people that are given the same food every single day, they start to eat less calories. So they start to eat less, naturally start to

caloric restrict themselves. So I mean, and that's, it's kind of like a dietary monotony sort of thing. So I think there, and you know, if you read and the people out there on the blogs talking about this diet, they say, like, I'm eating less, I only eat twice a day, I'm fasting, you know, that's, people are talking about that as well. So I think there's published evidence to kind of explain that. And also, there's, you know, people saying, yeah, I eat less. So that's an important point. Because one thing that's really known to affect autoimmunity is caloric restriction and fasting, like it's probably one of the most well-known technologies that you can intervene and have improvements in autoimmune disease. So some of that has to do with the fact that you can sort of reset your immune system.

There've been animal studies and human studies. A lot of this done by Dr. Walter Longo at USC. He's done some prolonged fasting in animals. And also there's been sort of like a fasting mimicking diet done in humans, which kind of a very low calorie diet that sort of is meant to mimic fast. And those have shown that you basically kind of cross over because fasting is a type of stress. You cross over into this like stronger stress response where you're not only like cleaning away all the gunk in the sides of cells. People talk about autophagy a lot when they're talking about fasting. You clean away things like damaged, you know, pieces of DNA, protein aggregates, things like that. Mitochondria that are damaged get cleared out. But you also sort of start to clear away entire cells through a process called apoptosis.

sort of start to clear away entire cells through a process called apoptosis. And in animal studies, what's been shown is that if you do, for example, a 72-hour fast, you can clear away about 30% of the immune system and replenish it with, like, brand-new healthy immune cells. And literally, like, organs shrink during the fasting, and then they, like, re-expand because you're activating stem cells and you're, you know, basically replenishing all your damaged old cells with new ones. Well, Volter has shown in these animal studies also autoimmune cells tend to be selectively killed off and replaced with non-autoimmune cells. So he's also done a clinical study, a pilot clinical study with people with multiple sclerosis doing this fasting mimicking diet for one month, sorry, for one week.

And their symptoms improved. Also, a ketogenic diet was done side by side, and ketogenic diet also improved symptoms of autoimmunity. So those both were done in humans. So I think that understanding that some of these mechanisms that are at play and that fasting itself and caloric restriction both have been shown to improve autoimmunity, you may be tapping into something there by eating less. That's one possibility. In addition, there's been clinical studies in humans where they were basically fasted for 24 hours every other day for 15 days.

So they had like a total of seven days of fasting. And these were also people with multiple sclerosis. And there's profound changes in the microbiome that started happening. And this was in line with basically having, you know, a lot of anti-inflammatory cytokines, basically producing immune cells that are really important for preventing autoimmunity called T regulatory cells or things like that. So that's another really important for preventing autoimmunity called T regulatory cells or things like that. So that's another really important thing to consider is, you know, the microbiome, because the microbiome has been linked to autoimmunity in multiple, multiple

studies. I mean, it's been linked to arthritis, it's been linked to multiple sclerosis, it's been linked to other diseases like Parkinson's, which is not really autoimmune. And the point of this is that, again, understanding mechanism and realizing there's other potential factors that could be leading to an effect, right? It's actually the changes in the microbiome are really important because there's actually been a few animal studies which have led to phase one, phase two, and phase three clinical trials that have been done in humans. So humans with multiple sclerosis were treated with minicycling, an antibiotic. And basically the antibiotic was shown to improve symptoms of multiple sclerosis. And because there's good bacteria and bad bacteria that have been linked to autoimmunity.

And getting rid of bacteria, the bad bacteria bacteria is going to probably lead to improvements. And that's what was shown first in animal studies and then in human trials. So humans taking with multiple sclerosis, taking minicycling for two years. So basically they had improvements that delay the onset progression of the disease. But then after two years, those improvements went away, probably because you're wiping out the microbiome. And eventually you're also getting rid of the good bacteria. And so things are going to catch up, right? So you're not just, you may be getting rid of some of the pathogenic bad bacteria with the antibiotics, but eventually, like you're also getting rid of good stuff. So long term, you know, you may not have those same improvements. And that's very interesting. I think it's a really

important point to understand with something like, you know, changes, very profound changes in the microbiome. When it comes to someone just eating meat, so one thing to keep in mind with the microbiome is that basically bacteria really are good at adapting to their environment. That's why antibiotic resistance is such a big deal. And there's been human intervention studies. When you take a human that goes from a high-fiber diet to a low-fiber, high-protein, or vice versa, you get changes in their gut microbiome that happen within 24 hours. So within an hour, you actually start to have doubling of populations of bacteria.

And within 24 to 48 hours, you actually start to lose other. So basically, other bacteria start to die off. And this is at the species level. It's really hard to change the phyla. The phyla is more linked to long-term dietary patterns. Eventually, you can change phyla as well. But it's been shown that people that go from a more high fiber to a high protein diet, they have changes in their microbiome. And these changes are a lot of the microbiome, you know, bacteria that are fermenting

a variety of fermentable fibers start to leave, and you actually start to get bacteria cropping up that ferment amino acids. So the amino acids, amino acids, simple sugars, fats, those are mostly absorbed in the small intestine, but some of them make their way into the large intestine. And there's a whole, you know, group of bacteria called the putrefactive bacteria, and they ferment amino acids. And some of these species of putrefactive bacteria have been linked to colon cancer. They're much higher in colon cancer patients.

Animal studies have shown causal links where they can basically regressively cause a polyp to form a tumor. And that's because these bacteria are making things called putrescine and cadaverine, which are damaging their genotoxic agents that damage the DNA inside your colon cells. which are damaging their genotoxic agents that damage the DNA inside your colon cells. And so people that are typically eating like an omnivore type of diet, where they're eating protein and they're also eating fermentable fiber, if they're eating the fermentable fiber that's facilitating the growth of lactic acid-producing bacteria, that limits the growth of putrefactive.

So if you're, you know, bifidobacteria, lactobacillus, S. mutans, S. thermophilus, those strains of bacteria are lactate acid producing bacteria, which you'd be getting if you're, I mean, you'd be facilitating the growth of if you're eating plants with fermentable fiber, you're going to limit the growth of putrefactive because they can't grow with lactic acid. So it's not like, you know, it's not a huge, huge concern. But the question is what happens when you're only eating amino acids, when you're only getting amino acids? Right. You know, so is there a long term? So if you're killing off potentially some of this pathogenic bacteria and you're having this effect, a positive effect, what's going to happen long term? It's not known.

I mean, this diet hasn't really been studied at that level. There have been a few people that have anecdotal stories about doing it for 10, 20 years that are online, but it's very difficult to track. I mean, you have to take them at their word for it. They've eaten nothing but meat for 20 years. They feel amazing. But there's not very many of them. There may be more out there, but in terms of them. There's a, you know, there's, well, there may be more out there, but it's in terms of like what I've come across articles, you know, just social media profiles, people have talked about the positive benefits of it. It seems to me that most people that are talking about the positive benefits are talking about it within a one and two year window. That's, that's what we're really dealing with a lot of.

That's what we're really dealing with a lot of. Sean Baker, Dr. Sean Baker, who is probably the leading proponent of it or one of the poster boys of it, along with Jordan Peterson and his daughter, Michaela. Jordan Peterson and his daughter, Michaela, they're different in that they were dealing with severe autoimmune issues. His daughter has had two joints replaced before she was 18. She had her ankle replaced before she was 18. And I think she had her hip replaced shortly after that. And Jordan has had some pretty severe autoimmune issues and depression.

With both of them, those things were cleared up. But as you've talked about multiple times before on this show, depression has been linked to disorders in the gut biome. Right. And this is something that you feel like may be contributing to this as long as, as well as both of them also got very lean. Jordan lost a ton of weight. He's back to the weight that he was when he was 25 years old. And I've eaten with him and the guy eats, he eats a lot, but it's a lot of meat. just like he'll eat like a 30 ounce steak, you know, which is just crazy. It's a crazy amount of meat. But I don't know how many times he's doing that a day. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, going back to the point, it's like, there are other, you know, understand the mechanism is important. And there's a lot of

potential confounding factors, right? And that with any anecdotal data is extremely important to consider. I mean people can't even – scientists, nutritionists, just people can't even agree on the best diet because a lot of these epidemiological and observational studies which don don't establish causation, have an enormous amount of confounding factors. And it is freaking, it's so hard to like, control for that. I mean, just as a perfect example, we've talked about this before in the podcast, but you know, the vegetarian versus people that eat meat. One of the really large studies that was done, and Dr. Valtolunga was part of that study, looked at all-cause mortality and cancer mortality, and it was lower in vegetarians.

But they decided to take the meat eaters and say, OK, what about within this group? The people that are healthy meat eaters are people that are not unhealthy. So they're not obese. They're not sedentary. They're not smoking. They're not excessively drinking alcohol. Those people, when they took out those confounding factors, the meat eaters had the same mortality as the vegetarians and the same cancer. So confounding factors are so important. And with anything with anecdotal, you have people that are exercising

like crazy. Exercise has also been shown to change microbiome independent of diet in a positive way where you're actually producing more of the bacteria that are producing things like lactic acid. So, and fasting does the same thing. And so you have people that are fasting. So, you know, it's not like you can't do other things if you're on that type of diet to sort of help with the microbiome. But I think, again, if there's a way you can do, you know, if there's a way that you can get these benefits without having to do something so hyper-restrictive, and we'll talk about – I mean I have concerns for that. We can definitely get into that. But then why not try that?

And the thing with like, for example, doing like a prolonged fast once a quarter, once every couple of months depending on how severe your issues are. I mean there's been benefits shown with that, like in aging. So people that have been put on this fasting mimicking diet, they have improved biomarkers of aging. They increase their lean muscle mass. I mean, so like I said, in animal studies, and you can't directly translate the animal studies to humans because rodents have a really fast metabolism. And if you fast them for 48 hours, they lose 20% of of their body weight where humans only lose like one or two percent i mean that's like clearly you know yeah that's crazy yeah so you can't i mean it's obviously you can't completely translate everything that's done fasting and rodent to humans but they're definitely organs are shrinking and then literally regrowing after

the fast is over like it's like this rejuvenation process. And it seems as though selectively damaged cells are killed. In fact, there's a whole Dr. Balto-Longo showing that cancer cells are really, really susceptible to dying when you do a prolonged fast or even a fasting-mimicking diet. And he's shown this in animal studies, and he's done a couple of clinical studies where patients with cancer were treated with standard of care. But before their standard of care treatment, they were fasted for up to 72 hours. And what he's shown in animal studies happens is that because the fasting is a type of stress,

all your healthy cells increase all these stress response pathways. They make more heat shock proteins. They're increasing antioxidant production pathways, anti-inflammatory. They're doing all this really good stuff in response. Cancer cells can't do that. They're like screwed up. And so they can't activate those stress response pathways. So it ends up killing them. So what you end up happening is that when you're giving another genotoxic stress, like chemo or radiation, your healthy cells become more resistant to the damaging effects of the radiation and the cancer cells become more sensitized to the death. And so what he's shown in his pilot studies in humans is that basically the humans that were treated with the standard of care, I think it was chemo,

and also fasted, they had less neutropenia, which is the loss of like neutrophils, which is the side effect because you're losing normal healthy cells. They had less of that happening, less myelosuppression. So, I mean, anyways, the point is that I think if you can find a way to get positive benefits, you know, without having to do something so risky and potentially dangerous and unstudied. Unstudied in a really scientific way. Controlling for confounding factors and all sorts of long-term, just all of that is really important. This comprehensive breakdown that you just did is something that's really lacking from a lot of the discussion of this carnivore diet. and from the proponents of it, it's almost like

a lot of them are going into it blindfolded. They're like, look, it seems to be working, so I'm just going to stick with it. But again, when you're talking about most people's cases, you're talking about one year, maybe two years, sometimes even less, where they're having these benefits. And as you're saying, it's entirely possible that they're setting themselves up for some potential long-term damage. It is. It is definitely possible. And again, at the end of the day, there's no data. There's no data, so you can't say for sure, right? There's no data. But I have concerns, and we can talk about those concerns for sure. I would like to. But, you know, the thing is, understanding mechanism, like you said, going in blindly.

I mean, you have a hypothesis and it's like, OK, your hypothesis is all plants are bad. Yeah, that's what I keep hearing. And it's like, well, that's a hypothesis. But what about all the other things that are potentially happening while you're doing this diet? And why less? You're fasting more. your microbiome is changing like dramatically changing and those things all have been known multiple studies have shown humans and animals mechanistic detail to have benefits on auto immunity on aging in general on brain function i mean all sorts of things you know so it's mechanism is so important you have to realize i mean that that's the whole basis of science understanding how the world works around you understanding how your body works mechanisms

like you have hypothesis and it's very and i understand it's like someone experiences something positive it's like well this must be this is it this is the end all be all and but you also have to realize the shit's complicated. You've got to understand the mechanism. And you may be doing something long term that potentially, I mean, it really hasn't been studied. Yes. Well, that was one of the, I mean, I had Jordan's daughter, Michaela, on who's had some pretty dramatic results from this carnivore diet. But she's giving essentially nutrition consulting to people,

but she doesn't really have a background in it. And she doesn't have the information that you just distributed. Like what you just said to all these people listening and the way you're describing the mechanisms and the benefits of fasting and all these different various things that are happening inside your gut and all these different things that are happening with healthy cells and damaged cells with fasting and that this is mimicked by this restrictive diet. And this is all absent from the dialogue. This is all absent from the – and this is one of the things that's disturbing, the most disturbing for me.

It's like I get that they're seeing positive results. I don't know how I'm going I get that they're seeing positive results. I don't know, I'm not going to deny that they're receiving, but when they start saying, you know, plants are bad and there's, you know, like my friend Chris, he's always talking about the war on carbs. He's having this real, he's also got Chris Bell. He's got autoimmune issues as well. He's had both of his hips replaced before he was 35 and severe arthritis. And he is leaner than he's ever been and benefiting greatly from this carnivore diet. But he talks about it like he uses hashtag war on carbs.

And he doesn't eat salad. He won't eat greens. He thinks greens are bad for you. And I'm like, man, don't not sure that's correct i think it's so important what you're saying and um there's a researcher online that i've been in contact with his name is kevin bass and his uh base or bass b-a-s-s not sure which how to pronounce it but he also brought up this possibility that it could be calorie restriction that these people are dealing with. And that this is essentially some of the same mechanisms that are the positive reactions from fasting that you're dealing with here.

And I'm very happy that you're saying the same thing. Yeah, I think that is one very strong possibility. And that is something, you know, there's lots of hypotheses here. And, you know, given all the data, and there's lots of positive data about eating plants as well, you know, so it's really hard. That's one hypothesis. And that seems to be the one everyone's sort of gravitating to. You know, if someone's also wanting to reduce their, their glycemic load and all that, I mean, there are other, I mean, eating just a modified paleo diet. I mean, I eat something like a modified paleo diet where it's

like I'm eating fish, I eat meat, poultry, and then I eat a lot of leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables. Now you can do nuts, you know, or you can do a ketogenic diet. Like I just talked about the study that was done looking at the fasting mimicking diet in humans with multiple sclerosis, published in the same paper, there was a study that put patients on ketogenic diet for, I believe it was three months. And it improved symptoms of autoimmunity as well. Was it comparable? Yeah. The improvements?

Yeah. Interesting. So, you know, the ketogenic diet, a modified ketogenic diet is also, you know, there's also concerns with that. Not everyone responds very well. And, you know, the micronutrient deficiencies have been a concern, but you can actually eat a lot of vegetables, green and good ones that are low in glycemic. So my concerns, exactly, my concerns are much, much less. And there's, it's been studied a lot more. I mean, at least there's been lifespan studies in animals on ketogenic diet, where it's like improving, you know, the way they age, it's improving their cognitive function, brain aging, extending their lifespan. So, you know, if people are looking for, in addition to, you know, wanting

to like help with their autoimmunity issues, you know, there's also if it's like, well, I also just don't want to have a lot of insulin response, I want to lower my glycemic levels and things like that. That seems like a much better option than than doing something completely unstudied. Right. And so, you know, I think that's a really good place to start. And obviously not disregarding everyone's anecdotes. And of course, there's also the placebo and nocebo effect, which are very real. I mean, extremely real. It's why a lot of drugs don't ever make it to market is because they can't beat placebo.

You know, where it's like people think they're going to get a positive response from something. They can. Right. And the opposite is true. where it's like people think they're going to get a positive response from something. They can. Right. And the opposite is true. People think they're going to get a negative response for something. They can. There's got to be a way to market the placebo effect in a pill form. I think it's great.

I think so. And what's interesting is that genetics determines that. There's SNPs, basically single nucleotide polymorphisms, where it changes in the sequence of DNA in a certain gene, makes it function a little differently. Well, the gene that's really important, seems to be really important for whether or not you're going to have a placebo versus nocebo, controls dopamine, the degradation of dopamine. So people that are really likely for a placebo response have more dopamine in their brain. It's called COMPT, the SN SNP in the genes, called CompT. People that have less dopamine are more subject to the nocebo.

And this has been shown in dose-dependent manner in intervention trials, randomized control in humans. And it's not in diet. There's been studies on diet as well showing like nocebo effects. So people think they have a gluten sensitivity, which I do think that's a real thing. I mean, I'm not saying non-celiac gluten sensitivity. I think there's enough evidence that does exist. However, there was this great study that was published four years ago showing people that thought they were having gluten sensitivity issues, they were randomized, and none of them were given gluten. But they didn't know that. They thought maybe

there's a chance I'm going to get the gluten. I don't know. I'm being randomized. Of course, they had a negative response. They had distended bloating pain, but there was no gluten. So the nocebo effect is also real. And that's something to keep in mind as well. If you think, you know, I'm going to have a bad response if I eat these plants. Hypochondriacs. Yeah. People who mind fuck themselves. It's definitely a real thing.

I think placebo is much better. I think that's a great thing that that exists. Especially if you could figure out a way to trick yourself. You're changing dopamine levels that affects your immune system. I mean it affects – I talked to a chiropractor who was banking on that. He was doing something called zone healing. And the more I pressed him on this, the more he basically said, well, if you believe it, it works. Yeah.

I'm like, okay, so you're saying that it doesn't work unless you trick this person into believing that it works. So you're a trickster. This is what you're doing. You didn't want to go that far, but that's essentially—there's no real scientific basis to this idea that you press on someone's back and fix their thyroid. I absolutely think that placebo accounts for a lot of that stuff. Yeah.

And again- Reiki, all that shit. All of it. And I think that the genetic snips involved, really, they do play a role. Is there a diet that increases dopamine? Because you can increase serotonin with HTP and L-tryptophan, which converts to HTP, 5-HTP.

Is there anything that ramps up your dopamine? You know what does in the prefrontal cortex is fish oil. In fact, some schizophrenic patients are prescribed a really high dose because their dopamine is lower in the prefrontal cortex. And this is sort of associated with a lot of the negative paranoid delusional sort of. When you say high dose, what are you talking about? Oh, like six grams, anywhere between three to six grams a day. And what is a normal dose? Well, if you look at, if you're talking about normal in the sense where what's typically used in like a randomized controlled trial, it's like one or two grams.

What is recommended to people like USDA? Or what would you recommend? There is no recommended. Nothing? It's not. No, because what's recommended is the, so there's a plant version of it, alpha linoleic acid, because you can convert that into the marine omega-3 fatty acids, DHA and EPA. That's the one that's recommended.

So it's like what you essentially need, right? Right. So that's the one that's recommended. Is there a concern about potential heavy metal poisonings when you're taking in fish oil? Or is that all that stuff? Do they know how to filter that stuff out? It's definitely purified out. And I mean, it depends on the fish oil.

Yeah, the fish oil you're getting your fish oil from. But there's international fish oil standards organization that a lot of different fish oil companies are tested by them. And they show like they're all their arsenic, mercury, PCBs, dioxins, like all those, you know, potentially harmful compounds. And they also look at oxidized polyunsaturated fatty acids. So they're looking at total oxidation and things like that. So that's a really good site to use to look at whether, you know, your fish oil brand is. Do you get yours in the pill form or do you do like Carlson's where you get in the bottle and take spoonfuls of it? So I get mine in the pill form because i have a friend that makes it in norway and he sort of um has convinced me that it's like really good so i really like his visual and he doesn't make it in

the liquid form um but i do so i take i take about like five or six grams a day i take a lot wow five or six grams yeah and i'm taking like a high dose DHA because it gets into breast milk and I haven't 100% weaned my son just yet. How many pills is five or six grams? It's like, oh, that I take? Yeah. So I'm taking six. Six pills a day.

Yeah. Oh, so each pill's a gram. Yeah. Wow. So. That is high dose. It's really high dose. It's really, it's a really good fish it's

not he he's working on getting it available in the united states uh i think that's supposed to happen like in the next couple of months but um i used to take carlson's carlson's was uh the bottle yeah that's what i take yeah so you take a lot right yeah so yeah but i take three tablespoons i thought that was a lot how much is in I don't know I don't know I'm wondering um no idea we'll have to talk about my my Alzheimer's omega-3 publication but we still have carnivore stuff let's keep going I'll put that aside because I actually have a good friend whose dad has Alzheimer's and I sent her your clip from your Instagram from yesterday. Oh, cool. You know about that, too. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, we will. I'll send you my paper. It was

just accepted and it should be out online this month, sometime this month. But OK, so OK. My potential concerns with carnivore diet. Yes. You know, I think, and I'm sure, I mean, I know this, I've seen it all over the blogospheres, you know, the micronutrients and, you know, they don't really matter. The RDAs weren't set for carnivores and all this stuff that I've read. But I think to start out, like, understanding, you know, micronutrients are essential, about 30 vitamins and minerals that are really important.

They do run our metabolism. They are involved in making neurotransmitters. They're involved in, you know, pulling calcium out of our arteries and bringing it to our bones. They're involved in all sorts of things. People, when they hear the word metabolism, they always just think about, you know, food you eat. Yeah. And it's like metabolism refers to a lot of things. And there's about 22 – sorry. There's 22 percent of all your enzymes in your body require a micronutrient to function. And this is repairing damage from DNA, all sorts of things. Really important.

And so there's about 30 of them that are essential. You have to get them for your diet because you don't make them in your body. And if you don't get them from your diet, it can lead to health problems and death, actually. So that's kind of what micronutrients are. RDAs, so Recommended Dietary Allowance, those have been set. A variety of different studies are used. So there's randomized controlled trials, non-randomized controlled trials. There's depletion-repletion studies. There's balance studies looking at how much of a micronutrient it takes before you start

excreting it. There's cross-sectional studies and there's case studies. And this is a collaboration between the United States and Canada and some European countries as well. So a lot of experiments are done to figure out the recommended dietary allowance. The first thing that's done is the estimated average intake. So that is done by basically looking at any population and going, okay, how much of this micronutrient do we need so that 50% of the population has adequate levels, the other 50% will be deficient. So there's a bell curve. And so it's like literally in the middle of the bell curve. And then the RDA is set from that two standard deviations above, and it's supposed to make about 97.5% of the population gets enough. So that's how the RDA is set. For each micronutrient, it's different. The experiments are done are different to look at them. So there's a few concerns, of course, with an all-meat diet with particular

micronutrients because, you know, micronutrients, there's a lot of, you know, certain micronutrients that are concentrated in meat and there's a lot that are concentrated in plants. And you can find some of the ones that are more concentrated in meat in plants most in most cases um but it's much better to get it from the meat and in plants there's it's much more concentrated you know and you can find it in some amounts in meat but it's much you know it's a lot easier to get it from plants so uh one of the of course the micronutrients that's a concern is the vitamin c of course right that's the one that everyone talks about. So vitamin C is a really important cofactor for what that means. A cofactor just means that it binds to an enzyme and helps it work. It's important for making collagen. It's important

for converting dopamine into norepinephrine, which is important for that, you know, flight or flight response. It plays a role in making carnitine, which is important for using fatty acids for energy. And then it's, of course, an antioxidant. It also plays a really important role in neutrophils. So neutrophils are a type of immune cell when they're activated, when you have any sort of bacterial exposure, virus, things that can even come from the gut, you know, like LPS, leak out from dead bacteria that are dying in the gut. Neutrophils get activated and they soak up vitamin C because they release a bunch of hydrogen peroxide, which damages the neutrophil itself. And so the vitamin C sort of prevents that from happening. It plays a really important role in cell integrity and things like that.

So there's a variety of ways vitamin C is transported into the cell. And I see reading on the internet a little bit of misunderstanding. People following the carnivore diet seem to think that because they're not getting any – their glucose levels are low that they're getting more vitamin C in. So vitamin C, also called ascorbic acid, goes between two different states. Or ascorbic acid is the reduced form, which is the antioxidant form. It goes also into an oxidized form. So it's kind of going back and forth. It goes through about four cycles of that. The oxidized form, it is called dehydroascorbic acid. And there's two ways that you transport vitamin C. You absorb it through the gut.

Epithelial cells, it's transported into a variety of tissues in the body. Ascorbic acid goes through sodium-dependent vitamin C transporters. Those are not dependent on glucose. There's no competition for glucose. That's how vitamin C gets into the cell. And most cells actually transport vitamin C in that form, with the exception of red blood cells, which don't have that transporter. They use another transporter called glucose transporters or GLUT. And that one does, glucose does compete.

Interestingly, dehydroascorbic acid binds much better. It actually tightly binds to the transporter than glucose. But in conditions like hyperglycemia, like type 1 or type 2 diabetics, they actually don't get vitamin C in the red blood cells, and it leads to vascular problems and stuff like that. So it's an interesting hypothesis that maybe if you're having less of a blood glucose levels are really bottomed out, maybe there's some salvage pathway. You're able to help get vitamin C in the oxidized form is going in some other cells

that usually doesn't go in or whatever, something like that. It's an interesting hypothesis, which is there's no data on, right? But the experiments that were done to choose the RDA for vitamin C were done the more recent RDA so that it changed back in like after 2000 or 2001 or something. It's about 90 milligrams a day for men and 75 for women.

They were depletion, repletion studies. So men were given about less than five milligrams a day of vitamin C with their diet. And this was about a six-month study. They were in a metabolic ward. And it was determined that it was kind of unsafe to keep going. So basically, they started the repletion, where they started giving these men vitamin C at different doses. And vitamin C follows like a sigmoidal S curve. So once you kind of deplete someone of their vitamin C, when you give them, for example, 30 milligrams, it isn't really enough to kind of go, it doesn't really raise plasma levels much. You have to get up to like 100. Once you get up to like 100, then you actually start to excrete vitamin C.

But before that, you're just, your body's holding on to everything. You're not excreting anything. 200 milligrams was maximum bioavailability. And then after that, you start to like decrease bioavailability and you're excreting a lot of vitamin C. So the scientists that published this paper, Mark Levine at the NIH, recommended that the RDA be set at 200 milligrams, but it was set at 90, which is literally right before you start to excrete, which was 100 milligrams. That data, along with the neutrophil data, there was some neutrophil data that was looked at,

you know, how much vitamin C was important to, because neutrophils sop it up, to prevent that hydrogen peroxide induced damage. And so that's kind of how the RDA was set. that induce damage. And so that's kind of how the RDA was set. Now, the question is, with any RDA, like, you know, the important thing to consider is, well, the RDAs are set to prevent acute disease, but what about promoting optimal health? You know, like, that's really important. Like, how much of these micronegents do you need throughout a lifespan to, you know, to maintain optimal health and age well? So this is something that's really important because a lot of enzymes that require a micronutrient for preventing short-term disease,

something that can kill you, there's also enzymes that are required to prevent things that are associated with aging, like DNA damage. So if there's only so much of a micronutrient around, where is it going to go? Is it going to go where the, you know, is it going to prevent DNA damage, which doesn't make a difference until five or six decades later? Or is it going to make sure you live on to pass on your genes and, you know, reproduce? And so my former postdoctoral mentor, Dr. Bruce Ames sort of proposed this whole and he has published a couple of foundational papers supporting this idea, which he calls triage theory. So he's saying that basically he thinks actually a lot of RDAs are too low and that, you know, optimal RDAs will account for, you know, how much is needed for these long

term functions. So that's really important to consider. With the vitamin C, you know, it's really a small amount that's needed to be used as a cofactor for, you know, an enzyme for, you know, collagen production. You actually don't need that much. And so it was done, like studies were done years and years ago that established like 10 milligrams of vitamin C was enough to prevent scurvy, which can happen when you're basically don't have enough vitamin C for collagen production. And even that's kind of questionable because back at the time when those studies were done, it was before really good analytical assays were available.

So, you know, the assay that was done to measure various things were, it was lots of things could confound. So it may even be less, maybe more, maybe less. It's kind of not known. So, you know, that is something to consider as well as the fact that basically there's a lot of biological variation with vitamin C requirements. And this has been shown in other animals that also require vitamin C, like guinea pigs. So like if you take 100 guinea pigs, and this is, you know, this was published back in like sixties or seventies, um, like there was like tenfold

variation in how much each of them required vitamin C they required, even though they were given like, yeah. So tenfold, yeah. So there's like huge variation in the half-life of vitamin C and in their transporters. And like, you know, so this has been shown in rodents as well. Rodents make vitamin C in their liver, but the same thing's been shown. And actually back when the European sailors were getting scurvy and dying of it, only about 50%, only about half of those sailors got scurvy. The other 50% didn't have any symptoms. Now, how are these carnivore diet guys not getting scurvy? That's what I'm saying. I'm saying that, you know, for one, it doesn't take much. Right. And they're getting some of it from meat?

Yeah. Yeah. So the thing, you know, it doesn't take much to maintain the enzymatic function of some of the enzymes involved in making collagen. And that, you know, so it doesn't take much for that. But the question is about what about – All the host of other factors. Yeah, and the neutrophils and your body stores like orders of magnitude more vitamin C than it needs for its function as a cofactor. And it's like why does it do that? Is it just because maybe during food scarcity it wants to make sure it has enough you know, the antioxidant functions and other functions really important or other unknown functions? So I think the vitamin C, you know, they're certainly, you know, getting enough to prevent scurvy. And there could be biological variation in that as well, right? You don't need much to prevent scurvy.

And again, you're dealing with a very small sample size. You don't know how many people are actually on this diet or supplementing, supporting. How many of them are supplementing and why wouldn't they be? Right. Yeah, exactly. And you think that a lot of these issues could be prevented with just multivitamin supplementation? Well, I mean, I think the best thing is to get it from food and we'll talk about it.

Yeah. You know, so there's another one that's potentially risky and that is vitamin E, which kind of, vitamin E helps recycle vitamin C and vitamin C helps recycle vitamin E and vitamin E actually, uh, most people think of as an antioxidant, which it does. It prevents a lot of oxidative, um, chains. It's kind of breaks the chain of oxidation, but it also is really important for maintaining cell integrity. And that's how the RDA was chosen for that one. So how does it do that? So it's important for inside the cell membrane. So it's important

antioxidant inside the cell membrane. And so it's preventing a lot of oxidative factors that are happening just from normal metabolism, normal. It's happening. You and I are doing it right now. You know, damage that damages our DNA. It also damages the lipids in our cell membranes. And so vitamin E, it plays a really important role in the integrity of it. And so the experiments that were done for choosing the RDA for vitamin E were two and a half years long, and men were given three milligrams of vitamin E. So the RDA is 15 milligrams. So they were given three. And after two and a half years, they started getting hemolysis of their red blood cells because their red blood cell, the membranes of the red blood cells weren't being maintained very

well. After two and a half, it took two and a half years, it's a long time for, you know, for this to show up. And so for whatever reason, it was decided that having hemolysis happen lower than 12% is okay. 12% was the cutoff. And so when they did the repletion studies, it was actually 12 milligrams for the EAR. And they went up two standard deviations and found basically the RDA was at 15. So the question becomes, well, all right, so vitamin E, you can get some vitamin E if you're getting some egg yolk and butter and if you're eating some fish. But you're not going to – it's really hard to get 15 milligrams from those sources. And then if you're eating that, what about all the other stuff you have to eat to get your other –

What is a good source of it? Nuts are really, really the best source. Like almonds, like 100 grams of almonds would give you your RDA. Really good source. like 100 grams of almonds would give you your RDA. Really good source. So the question becomes, well, okay, you know, what happens if I'm only getting 7 milligrams a day?

Is it going to take 6 or 7 or 8 years before my cell membrane integrity is compromised more? You know, so it's just there's a lot of important questions to think about, you know, and it's like these RDAs, you know, they, I would even argue they're set too low in some cases where you're, they're really trying to just prevent things like, you know, that are like hemolysis of the red blood cells. And, you know, so what about all these other long-term effects? You know, enzymes that are involved in DNA repair, for example, and another one would be like folate. Folate you can get if you eat, you know, if you're eating like 150 grams of like cooked beef liver every day, but like who does that, you know, I mean, and if you're not doing that, and you're eating, you got to eat like your 48 sardines to get your vitamin E and you got,

you know, so it's like, it's not easy. And, you know, I'm not saying you can't get, you know, some amounts of it, but you may not be getting the RDA. And so, you know, I'm not saying you can't get, you know, some amounts of it, but you may not be getting the RDA. And so, you know, folate plays a very important role in actually making new DNA. You know, if you don't have folate, you essentially incorporate something from RNA called uracil into DNA. And all your like DNA, you know, polymerases and stuff are cruising along DNA and see it and they make a nick in the DNA. And it literally you know, it's a nick. It's like in your DNA. And if you have it, DNA is double-stranded. So if you have it on two ends of the DNA, which you do because it's really important to make one of the nucleotides thymine, then, you know, you're going to have a double-stranded break. And

actually my former postdoctoral mentor, Dr. Bruce Ames, published a study showing that if you take animals and make them deficient in folate or give them really, really low levels of folate, it causes strands in their DNA just like being irradiated, like he compared them side by side, it was the exact same thing. And then he published a study that was with humans showing that actually, humans that are getting really low levels of folate also had a certain type of DNA damage called micronuclei. You know, so the question is, well, you know, if I'm getting only so much folate, you know, is it something happening to my DNA? Am I getting strand breaks? The same goes for magnesium. I mean, you can get magnesium if you're eating, you know, it's just, then what about the folate?

And then what about the vitamin E? You know, about the vitamin E? So it's really hard. It's really hard to do that. And DNA damage, that's something you can't measure. You're not going to go, your lipid panel isn't going to tell you that. There's no consumer test available. There was a few years ago a startup tried doing it, but it's really hard because there's, if you're sending blood samples to know to a lab to be tested for DNA damage I have done many DNA damage experiments on humans so clinical studies I

was involved in Dr. Ames lab and I've done studies kinetic studies where we took blood out of a patient measure DNA damage immediately or froze it down or we let it sit on a bench for 30 minutes two hours four hours overnight after two hours all the tons of DNA damage sort of come up because it's being exposed, the oxygen and all that is creating basically DNA damage. So anyways, the point is, is that DNA damage isn't something you're going to measure. You don't feel it. And you're not going to feel it. I mean, it's happening in us right now. We don't know how many, but it is. We have enzymes that are repairing that damage, and those enzymes require magnesium. We're getting enough folate to make sure that that damage isn't happening.

And again, you can get a good amount of folate. Liver is one of the best, is a really great source. But you have to eat it every day, and you have to eat like, you know, I guess 150 grams of liver is not that much. But you have to eat it every day, you know. 50 grams of liver is not that much, but you have to eat it every day. So it's just really important to consider the fact that these micronutrients are important. They have long-term effects. I mean, the two and a half years it took to show the hemolysis in red blood cells, two and a half years. So what happens if you're getting a modest amount, not quite three milligrams, but you're getting twice that, or maybe you're getting nine. You know, what happens seven years from now? Like, you don't know.

And it's important. It's your health. It's important. So I think that – so those, you know – and there's a variety of other manganese you can also get if you're eating a lot of, like, stomach lining tripe. Is that what it's called? Tripe? Yeah. I mean, so it's not like you can't get it.

But they are not – most of these people that are carnivore diet are just eating beef. Right. And especially if the people are working a job where they go into Office 9 to 5 or they're traveling. I mean, it's really hard to eat all this cool – like, you know, the Inuits were eating things like raw – like, they were eating raw liver, raw whale blubber and spleen. Spleen is a good source. I mean, you can get vitamin C from spleen, I think heart. So there's some organs, vitamin C, when you cook it, 25% of, you know, it's lost. So that's why a lot of the muscle meat and stuff, it does start out with vitamin C.

But when you cook it, I mean, if you're not eating it raw, then, you know, you're definitely, it's negligible. There is one young guy who is a carnivore diet proponent that seems to be approaching this in a much more comprehensive way. He's really big on organ meats, in particular liver and many other things. And he's talking about how these organ meats will be excellent sources of a lot of the vitamins that people are concerned that you're missing from vegetables. vitamins that people are concerned that you're missing from vegetables. Do you think that that is possible?

And, I mean, spleen, I guess, for vitamin C. Yeah. But, like, what about just liver or kidneys or things along those lines? I mean, what are you going to be deficient in if you go the organ meat route? I mean, I think that, you know, if you're the magnesium and the magnesium would be important. Hey, Jamie, while you're out there, can you get me another one of these? Thanks. Magnesium, but you can get, I mean, you can do it, right? Right.

I mean, you can do it. But it seems very difficult, and I don't think most people will do it. And you recommend, of course, getting all this stuff from food if you were going to get magnesium, vitamin C, all those things. Right. But is it feasible that you could just supplement with multivitamins and cover all your bases? I don't know. I mean, I think the same goes for vegetarians. I think they should, you know, they do supplement.

They take B12. They take iron, which isn't necessarily. I think it's much better to take iron, get iron from food. It's not as bioavailable in a pill form? Well, also the bioavailable, the pill form has been shown to disrupt other things, like, whereas iron from food doesn't. Just depends on the ratios of other things, like, you know, disrupt, disrupting the transport of other transition elements and things like that? Because it's isolated? Also, yeah, something about that.

Also, there's bacteria in the gut that can be pathogenic and that use iron, but it seems to be only in supplemental form. I'm not saying you should never supplement. I mean, I supplement iron throughout my third trimester. But I just think that you're going to potentially run into more problems with that. But iron does, it does come from red meat, correct? Yeah. I mean, iron is very bioavailable when it's bound to hemoglobin versus So vegetarians just ate red meat. Right. Zinc's another one. You know, there's, I think that there's a whole other host of micronutrients that vegetarians are –

Sure. But that's not what we're talking about. So I think, you know, there's also other important reasons to eat the plants instead of doing just the organ meat and also just doing the supplements as well. You know, and some of those – the reasons have to do with the fact that microbiome is really important. You know, and some of those, the reasons have to do with the fact that microbiome is really important. So you're getting, you know, the fermentable types of fiber that are really important for, you know, growing all sorts of commensal bacteria in the gut. Like, we don't know what's going to happen with, you know, someone that's only just eating meat long term, particularly with, like I said, the putrefactive bacteria and all that. That's just the word, putrefactive bacteria. They putrefy.

Yeah, that's, ugh. There's putrefactive bacteria also that arerefy. Yeah, that's... The putrefy, there's putrefactive bacteria also that are like on corpses and stuff. Oh, great. In fact, that's where I think the cadaverine comes from. They produce something.

Cadaverine. Right? That's what I'm thinking. It must be where... Yeah, putrefactive. Putre... Yeah. And cadaverine.

Ugh. Sounds like farts. Sounds like farts of death. They actually are. Yeah, they do. The putref... I think there's a response to some of the... Yeah, makes sense. Really like farts sounds like they actually are yeah they do the the picture i think there's a response from the yeah it makes sense really nasty farts um but you know like that so that's another reason and then the other the other important thing are the phytochemicals the the there's these you know polyphenols flavanols flavonoid all these things

that are present in plant the humans humans were – we evolved eating. We evolved eating them. So the – it's during – throughout human evolution, you know, humans were stressed on many levels. One, they went through moments of food scarcity where the fasting came in. I mean that's important, right? Now we don't have that. We can get food all the time, anytime, right? So that was an important stress that humans have evolved with. Exercise, aerobic exercise, right?

That's another thing. I mean, you had to move to get food and run from predators. I mean, so we evolved exercising. Now you can, so many people don't do that. We also evolved eating plants and meat. I mean, we're omnivores. So we have these, basically all these pathways that are activated when we eat plants and from certain compounds in plants into insect anti-feedants.

They're in plants. And when humans eat them, they basically activate a variety of really, really important stress response pathways. A lot of these pathways get activated by exercise and fasting as well. So there is a lot of overlap between them. But I see a lot of people on this carnivore diet talking about how they're so bad for you. And if they would take the time to actually read studies like human studies where people are given a lot of these insect anti-feed-in compounds, things like isothiocyanates like sulforaphane, curcumin, resveratrol, anthocyanins, and there's tons and tons of them. They would see that there's beneficial effects that happen and there's a lot of mechanism for why that is. So, I mean, the sulforaphane is one that I like to talk about.

And there is tons and tons of human intervention data where people are given either cruciferous vegetables or they're given broccoli sprouts. Broccoli sprouts are a really great source. Cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cabbage, fermented cabbage, Brussels sprouts, all that stuff. So broccoli sprouts have like anywhere between 10 and 100 times more. A lot of that work was done by Dr. Jed Fahey, a friend of mine. He's at Johns Hopkins. Very great scientist. Does a lot of research on sulforaphane.

But, you know, if you look at intervention trials, we were talking about air pollution. Like there's an intervention trial. There's more than one in humans showing that if you give humans broccoli sprout extract for seven days, they start to excrete benzene and acrolein, benzenes in air pollution. 60% on day one, like they start excreting it in their urine, like you're just getting rid of that. And that's largely because sulforaphane activates a variety of enzymes, one called phase two detoxification enzymes, which are important for getting rid of potentially harmful compounds. It inactivates phase one biotransformation enzymes, which are enzymes that are able to like take a pro carcinogen and turn it into a carcinogen.

So, you know, there's intervention trials in humans that it's, you know, men that were given broccoli sprout extract lowered their biomarker for prostate cancer by like 86% or lowered the doubling rate of it by 86%. You know, so this is like, this is important. There's studies showing that humans given, for example, two different studies showing that humans given 300 grams of Brussels sprouts a day. One, they increase a really important antioxidant in their plasma called glutathione by like 1.4 fold. And they decreased oxidative DNA damage in their blood cells, DNA damage, like we were just talking about,

they decreased it, like by 30% or something like that. Two separate studies, Brussels sprouts. And I like I see people like, you know, talking about the carnivore diet and how sulforaphane increases DNA damage. And they like reference this in vitro study where they dump sulforaphane on cultured cells in a dish. It's like, you know what else is going to do that shit? Heterocyclic amines from the cooked meat you're eating. Like, you know, so if you dump something at a high enough concentration, yeah, it's going to fuck it up. Yeah. You know, but we're talking about humans ingesting.

If you were to exercise nonstop and not rest, it would be toxic. If you were to fast and not stop, it would be toxic. Like, you know, so how some of these pathways are working is that the dose that they're given, you know, eating, it's almost impossible to eat the kind of dose that it would take to cause severe damage. And you know what? You would get sick. You would know. You'd be like, wait a minute.

So, I mean, I think that using that as an excuse is really, first of all, they should read the studies. And there's so many more studies. It's been shown recently to increase glutathione in the brain. Human intervention studies. Humans that were given sulforaphane extract. Increase it in their plasma and in their brain. Glutathione is one of the major antioxidants in the brain.

It plays a major role in traumatic brain injury, brain aging. I mean, this is important. Like, this is a possible therapeutic intervention. It's been shown to randomize placebo-controlled trials to improve autistic symptoms in adolescents. Open-label trials, it's been shown to improve autism in children, autistic symptoms in children. I mean, there's just study after study after study. And I'm just talking about the human ones. And there's more.

There's also lots of animal studies where they're feeding a mega doses and there's like positive benefits. There's been studies, you know, feeding humans large doses, like something equivalent to like 70 or 100 grams of broccoli sprouts, which have a lot more sulforaphane than like Brussels sprouts do. And there was no toxic side effects in the liver, thyroid. That's one concern people do have. If you have hypothyroid, sulforaphane can compete with iodine for transport into the thyroid. I don't think that's usually an issue. It certainly doesn't seem to be an issue in healthy people. But, you know, iodine is found in seafood. I mean, you know, there's sources of iodine you can eat. So maybe someone with hyperthyroid might want to make sure they're not eating like tons, like you're not like,

you know, kale smoothie after kale smoothie after kale smoothie, like make, you know, make sure, you know, just that you're having your Brussels sprouts with your, with your elk meat or whatever, you know, I don't think it's a problem. So, you know, I do get a little, I see, I see, like you mentioned Dr. Sean Baker, he's like, he put get a little, I see, I see, like you mentioned, Dr. Sean Baker, he's like, he put out a video about like, he mentioned me, my name's talking about how I only talk about in vitro data. And I'm like, dude, go watch my video or my interview with the expert at Johns Hopkins. We're talking about human studies.

Right. The in vitro data is coming from what the opposite that, that, you know, the, the damaging effects it's in vitro dumping it on a culture there's there's two things going on there's one there's a real cursory examination of data where they and then this confirmation bias and the combination of the two of those things they find one thing that sort of kind of vaguely supports what they want it to support and then they run with it and they talk about it as if they're experts very dangerous yes and this is one of the reasons why i'm so happy that you're talking about this because

you can give people a real comprehensive understanding of all the different things at play. And one of the things that I get from you when I talk to you about nutrition is it's mind boggling how many different factors are going on simultaneously in the human body when it comes to nutrition, absorption, when, you know, in the various stages of the body and how it can vary with different people. And there's so much going on. So when someone just starts talking about vegetables are toxic, like, oh, Jesus Christ. Have you read any of the study?

Have you just go look at the scientific data? Like, you know. But they want it to be toxic. This, oh, Jesus Christ. Have you read any of the study? Have you, just go look at the scientific data. But they want it to be toxic. This is what's crazy. This is an ideology that's akin to veganism. It's really, it's just another side of the same mindset. It's almost like a religious mindset. There's this hashtag meat. You said it, not me.

I did say it. Look, I'm a fucking meat eater yeah i know you can't you can't accuse me of being anti-meat but i i side i eat more vegetables i think than i eat meat i certainly it's certainly like right up there and i'm not giving them up i think that's stupid i just it doesn't make any sense to me. And I like them, but there's this, there's this weird push. And you know, if you look under hashtag meat heels, there's all these people, you know, telling these stories about how they lost all this weight and they did all this disc, blah, blah, blah, and their health benefits and da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. But they only want it to be because of the consumption of meat only.

They think that it's because of the singular aspect of their diet and the fact that they've eliminated everything else, but they don't do any studying of elimination diets. They don't do any study of the prolonged benefits of fasting and all these different things that you're talking about, which I think are all factors in this really complicated thing that's going on that most likely has something to do with their gut biome and their immune system. Right. Absolutely. I mean, those are two major confounding factors, like so major. You know, it's it's important. It's just important to approach this like a science, you know, and not like a religion, like you said, where you want to believe something.

And so you just find, you know, this study that I also see circulating around that why plants are really bad to eat. It's like they're insect anti-nutrients or pesticides. It's from my former mentor, Dr. Bruce Ames, who spent his entire career advocating micronutrients from vegetables and from meat and from fish. It's so ironic. But if you actually read the paper, not only does it say these insect anti-feedings like sulforaphane don't cause cancer, but it also has a whole section on heterocyclic amines from cooked meat. So if you really want to use that paper as an argument why to not eat plants, then maybe read the paper and realize, oh, it's also talking about heterocyclic amines as well. The point of the paper was like, I'm getting a little emotional. I'm sorry.

Good. I like it. You're getting out of your robot self. Yeah. The point of the paper was basically not to worry about like some of the amounts that you're being exposed to with some of these natural, you know, insect anti-feedings that are found in plants and some of the cooked things in meat. And as well as some of the pesticides that are found in synthetic pesticides. Basically that they're in such small amounts. So that was kind of the point of the paper was back in the 90s. In such small amounts. So that was kind of the point of the paper was back in the 90s. And but I just think that it's a little hypocritical to use a paper, you know, as a as like and literally it's like I mean, it's like proliferated everywhere.

That's I see this paper all the time. Yes. Like, well, did you read the paper? Because it has a whole section on on the insect antipedics from coffee, which a lot of people drink. And also for me. on the insect antipedics from coffee, which a lot of people drink and also for me. What, what there's that thing that people do where they do have a,

I have a joke about it in my act about, um, I read a state, a study that said that, um, sperm can cure depression in women. And I slammed my laptop shut and I didn't read another word. I'm like, I found the cure, but this is, I mean, this is didn't read another word. I'm like, I found the cure.

But this is, I mean, this is what you read the title. Yeah. Yeah. This is essentially what these people are doing. They will read or oftentimes not even read, but recite from someone else's reciting it in a video. Who didn't read. Right.

Which is what's going on with a lot of this stuff. And this is what I'm concerned with. I keep seeing all these people like, hey, I'm going to try the carnivore diet. Hey, try the carnivore diet. I tell you, it's amazing. And I'm just sitting here shaking my head. I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. Why would you want to eliminate a massive source of bioavailable nutrients?

And then when they're talking about the negative consequences of consuming vegetables, that there's different sort of toxic elements, I do remember you talking about how these stressors can actually have a positive and beneficial result when your body reacts to these stressors. Yeah, that's exactly how exercise works. It's exactly how fasting works, exactly how heat stress from the sauna works. And it's how these phytochemicals, I'm calling them phytochemicals just as like a generic category,

but they're compounds that are made by plants to ward off insects. And we evolved eating them and they activate amazing stress response pathways in humans, in our brain, in multiple, in blood cells. I mean it's just human intervention trials showing this. So you're going to miss out. We evolved with – we're supposed to be stressed by exercise, by fasting, doing the time-restricted eating.

We're supposed to do that and we're supposed to eat some plants. I think they're trying to simplify something that's incredibly complicated and they're doing it with this sort of religious fervor this is it's very strange and i i can feel it when i talk about it where people get upset they're getting upset at me like i'm criticizing jesus or something it's very weird and again i'm not a vegan right i'm not a vegan either i eat I'm not a vegan either. I eat lots of meat. You know, you and I have had conversations about the importance of meat. Yeah. So it's it's it's a religious thing.

It really is. It's the same sort of mindset that allows people to get just rabidly Republican or anything else. Like fill in the blanks, whatever it is, you know. Look, there's a, there's a, it's just a thing that people do. There's for the longest, there's two different camps in jujitsu. Want to hear something crazy? Yeah. There's gi and no gi.

A gi is the, it's a kimono, this white or, you know, multicolored, you could wear it different colors now, but they start out with white. this white or, you know, multicolored. You could wear it different colors now, but they start out with white. And a lot of people learn their jiu-jitsu grabbing onto the gi, you know, like sort of a judo gi or, you know, karate gi, and utilizing it as part of the grappling technique. And then no-gi came along. And what no-gi is, they use rash guards.

They don't grab the clothes. And they concentrate on control of the body with underhooks and overhooks and gable grips and things along those lines. And it became a religious battle between gi and no gi. And I remember sitting there watching this. And it was a problem because, like, people would get angry. Like, what camp are you in, bro? And I trained both. I have a black belt in the gi.

I have a black belt in no gi. I trained both of them. I think there's benefits to both of them. But there was this weird thing where you were supposed to choose sides. It's since alleviated and people realize how preposterous it is. But for a long time, like four years, the jujitsu community was split where people were angry at people who wore the gi or angry at people who wore no-gi. Like my friend Eddie, Eddie Bravo, who teaches no gi, people were angry at him for teaching a system of jiu-jitsu that didn't involve a certain type of clothing.

It's the same mindset. People just want you to believe what they believe only, and they get rabid about it. They get crazy. And I'm seeing this with this carnivore diet. And I think there's a psychological aspect of it, to it that you were talking about when in terms of this placebo effect, then I think they feel like I've never felt better. I'm on this carnivore diet. I'm doing chin ups. I'm running around the

block. Like when you read about everyone feeling better, it makes me want in. I want in I want in on this carnivore diet. And then there's also well, if if you are doing this as opposed to the standard American diet, I think you have the same sort of response that you have when people are talking about the positive benefits of the vegan diet. I think if you have a vegan diet in comparison to eating chips and fries and soda, yeah, you're going to feel fucking amazing. And people talk about it too, just like they do the carnivore vegans. And they want you to do... I mean, I'm seeing the same patterns that I see with vegans, where these carnivore people are putting meat in their screen name.

You know, Meat Eater Mike. You know, Carnivore Carl. They're fucking crazy people. They're doing the same thing the vegans do. They're like, I'm the vegan warrior. I'm Carnivore Carl. You know, fuck you, you plant-eating, poison-eating assholes. You don't even understand what you're doing to your body.

And then I get thrown in there, too, because I like plants. You're like, fuck you. Right, yeah. You get thrown in. Yeah. You have to pick a camp. I'm not picking a camp. I'm an omnivore.

I like my paleo-ish diet. And actually, I'm probably going to try a little bit of keto. I'm going to experiment there a little bit, too. There's some great positive cognitive benefits for that. I mean, I'm probably going to try a little bit of keto. I'm going to experiment there a little bit, too. There's some great positive cognitive benefits for that. I mean, I've really experienced that. It's hard for me because what knocks me out, ironically, what knocks me out of ketosis, most of my diet is fairly ketogenic except I eat too much meat. I crave it.

You're a big guy, too. I think I need a lot. I don't know. Maybe I a big guy, too. I think I need a lot. I don't know. Maybe I'm just full of shit. But I also have a lot because I hunt elk. I shoot a 400-pound animal. You got the good quality meat. It's the best, yeah.

And I'll eat a fucking pound of it. So I'm eating, like, who knows how many grams of protein that is. It's something insane. But, I mean, I don't think it's a placebo effect because I've been doing this for years now. I feel pretty fucking good. You know, and we're doing this fitness challenge now. That's what this thing is. Me and my friend Bert Kreischer, my friend Tom Segura and Ari Shaffir, for the month,

we have to see who burns the most calories and gets the most MEPS. This is my zone thing. And I'm planning on killing those guys. I'm planning on literally having them try to die. Keep up with me. Sober October? Yeah, sober October. It's going on right now.

Is there hot yoga and sauna involved? I'm doing it. Those pussies are just going to try to go run around the block. But I'm doing the 15 hot yogas, plus I'm doing all sorts of other crazy. I did two one hour hardcore cardio sessions yesterday and then uh today I'm gonna do kickboxing for an hour and a half tomorrow I'm gonna do an hour and a half of yoga in the morning then I'm gonna run at night you definitely should eat more

more elk yeah I'm planning I want these guys to break that's awesome break them but Bert's getting cockies posting stuff on his Instagram today. I talked to Bert about some sauna. He was real into the sauna. You know what else he's really into? Vodka and cheeseburgers. That actually causes you to excrete micronutrients like zinc and magnesium twofold. Talk to him.

I didn't see. You know what else it causes you to excrete? Jokes. That's part of the problem. He's goddamn hilarious when he's drunk. It's a part of the problem. Again, balance. I think this is a very important conversation to have because I think there's a lot of people that are enticed by the magic of this carnivore diet.

I'm so happy that you are the one that can, because you can do it in such a scientific manner and just sort of illuminate all the various problems and sort of explain why they are experiencing these benefits. Because even brilliant men like Jordan Peterson, he's a brilliant guy. He's just accepting the positive benefits of this. And I don't know how far he's looked into this. Yeah. He's looked into this. Yeah. You know, and also it's important, like the fact that the nocebo thing, experiencing bad things, you know, also things when you change your microbiome and you're going a long period of time and just eating meat. I mean, vegans that like eat meat or people that are on a low fat diet that eat fat, they experience negative effects because there are microbiome changes that do occur and can lead to discomfort. And those things will eventually go away.

But that is also something to consider. Like, so there may be a nocebo on top of actual things that are short term. And it's not just people that eat meat and then all of a sudden eat some plants. They're like, I knew it. You know, there are changes that take some time, a little bit of time in the microbiome that may be happening. Because, you know, definitely vegans talk about the same thing. People on a low-fat that eat a high-fat diet say the same thing. I mean, so, you know, someone's got to be right.

Well, maybe everyone's right. Yeah. Maybe there's a mechanism. Right. The microbiome changes and everyone's right. Right. Your body adjusts dependent upon your diet. Well, yeah, and it's been shown.

I mean, the microbiome does change depending on your diet. Well, yeah, and it's been shown. I mean, the microbiome does change depending on your diet. And, you know, if you're eating a low-fat and then going to a high-fat diet, you know, you're making bile acids and things like that. And, you know, if you don't have a microbiome that are resistant to that, you can start to have microbiome being killed off and then it can cause inflammation. You know, going from the plant, I mean, you're basically selecting for if you're eating a bunch of protein, you've got a lot of putrefactive bacteria, maybe less of the other. Maybe it takes some time to be able to like ferment some of those complex carbohydrate fermentable fibers and stuff. So I think that there's the mechanism.

I mean, it's not even easy to figure out mechanism, but there's usually a mechanism and explanation for things. And sometimes you have a hypothesis and sometimes it's right and sometimes it's not. It doesn't mean what you're experiencing isn't real. It just means that you don't, you didn't understand why you were experiencing. You thought you did, but you didn't. McKayla Peterson said that when she first got on the carnivore diet, she had diarrhea for six solid weeks. Wow. That would, uh, that would, that would no pun intended, shake me loose. I'd be like, yeah. After about two weeks, I'd be like, I'm kind of tired of shitting my pants. I mean, this is six weeks.

That's a lot. But for her, it was worth it in comparison to the negative effects that she was having on her immune system. Yeah, you might want to talk to her about the fasting. I mean, trying that if she's open-minded, you know, at the end of the day, it's hard when someone's experiencing,

it is, it is hard. And, and it is hard when they, that's just, you know, I, I get that.

Um, but it also is important to, to realize that this is there. It hasn't been proved that, you know, she's experiencing what she's experiencing because she's cut all plans been proved that, you know, she's experiencing what she's experiencing because she's cut all plants out. And, you know, so at the end of the day, you know, there is no data. So you can't say definitively, but I mean, there's a lot of data on, you know,

why you should include some plants at least. And again, if you're doing this for an autoimmune, there's a lot of really good data that fasting helps. And not only helps, it helps you age. Like I'm going to start doing just like, you know, some fast like a couple times a year once I've completely weaned my son. How many days? So a prolonged fast, technically in humans, according to Dr. Valgilongo, he thinks that it has to be more than 48 hours. So you can do like a 72- hour fast. And my in-laws have been doing, they've done like a couple of three, three and a half day fasts and they're getting all sorts of massive improvements in a variety of biomarkers, you know, lipid and glucose

and inflammation, you know, a lot of things that I know carnivore people are talking about as well, but could be getting the same thing with fasting. And when you're doing this, are you limiting the amount of exercise you do? Some people do. It depends on how you feel. I mean, you know, you certainly, I think that if you're doing, if you're not eating any food and you're just doing like a water fast, you certainly, it could be more dangerous and should listen to your body.

And if you feel really sick or your heart's racing, you should eat. I mean, it's something that like wouldn't just really, really do. Water fast as opposed to what other kind of fast? There's a fasting mimicking diet where people can, this is something Walter Longo has published on in Humans and Study, Humans as well as animal data, where it's like a very, like the first day it's like 1,000 calories, and the second through fifth day it's like 700 calories,

and then they're broken up where it's like fifth day, it's like 700 calories. And then they're broken up where it's like the first day it's like, it's very much a low sugar, low protein, high fat, modest carb kind of diet. So what are the foods that they consume? Like nuts? Yeah. Well, he's got like a packaged kind of thing that people can be prescribed, like a physician can prescribe it to a patient, you know. But you can sort of make your own as well with, you know, whole foods, you know, like. Avocados, coconut oil. Like an avocado. Yeah, but you have to sort of keep the calorie cap.

So make sure you're not like getting too many calories. That's kind of important as well. And you do that for five days. What does a standard avocado, standard size avocado contain in terms of calories? I don't know. Okay. I don't know. Standard avocado, standard size avocado contained in terms of calories. I don't know.

Okay. I don't know. But yeah, you can do like, you could definitely do like an avocado if it's like the whole day. And then some people have sort of done modified versions of it as well, like where it's a little more ketogenic. Like they've adjusted the carbohydrate and fat to be a little more of the ketogenic. And like I said, the study that was published in parallel with the fasting mimicking diet study, the fasting mimicking diet they did for three months, but it was only one week that did the fasting mimicking diet. So the other part or the three months they were eating a Mediterranean-like diet. The other people, which was in Germany, they were on a ketogenic diet and they were on it for three months and they experienced improvements as well.

So there's definitely ways to tweak it. And actually, getting to the Alzheimer's, the guy that I interviewed, Dr. Dale Bredesen, he is published extensively and also has a lot of clinical experience where he's trying to understand the mechanism of Alzheimer's disease. And I'm getting to this for the ketogenic is going to come back eventually. But so he tries to understand a lot of the underlying mechanisms for Alzheimer's disease. And in his clinical experience, he sort of sees there's subtypes of Alzheimer's where you can get like patients that have a really high inflammatory where they've got lots of inflammatory biomarkers. Like patients that have a really high inflammatory where they've got lots of inflammatory biomarkers. They also have this high fasting blood glucose and they're a little like, you know, high fasting insulin. But then you can get the same sort of metabolic effect where you have people that are kind of on the insulin resistant spectra. But without inflammation, there's that subtype.

And then there's like another subtype where it's like it seems like a big environmental component, like toxic stuff people are being exposed to. And that leads to a much, much earlier diagnosis in Alzheimer and sort of different phenotype. But he has this really aggressive and very thorough protocol that's like on the individual level where people, you know, he has tons and tons of biomarkers that are measured. One is the fasting blood glucose. It should be less than 5.5. Actually, it's HbA1c, which is a three-month marker of fasting blood glucose. It should be less than 5.5. Fasting insulin should be less than 7. He's got your high sensitivities. He reactive protein should be less than 0.8. And then he has a variety of other inflammatory biomarkers that are also measured. And a variety of other things. He looks at a lot of different micronutrients.

He looks at homocysteine. Homocysteine is really important because there's publications showing that if you lower homocysteine, he actually published this in one patient. It reversed the hippocampal atrophy, which is kind of amazing. So, you know, it's not really known exactly what the mechanism is. So that's something he looks at and he does this diet um this like diet this whole lifestyle change i mean people improving sleep exercise and he gives them all sorts of vitamins and fish oil but on top of that he's this diet that he it's kind of like to lower the inflammation and improve the um insulin sensitivity and blood glucose and all that where he puts them on a diet that's kind

of like, he calls it keto flex, but it's kind of like a ketogenic diet, modified ketogenic diet, but a lot of the fats are coming from like plant sources. So like avocado, nuts, olive oil. He treats meat as a condiment, but, and basically he's getting improvements like with this type of diet, lowering inflammation, improving all sorts of metabolic things. So it's really interesting. I've read a lot of his studies because he publishes a lot on Alzheimer's disease and mechanisms, you know, and he's got a book out as well where he kind of goes in depth about it. So it certainly seems very interesting that he's actually been able to not only like delay Alzheimer's disease, but reverse it.

And this is he has published a couple of published studies where people were able to go back to work. And actually, in some cases, their brain atrophy kind of stopped and it started to reverse where they were like growing more neurons. Wow. Yeah. So and I talked to him about this. And so the publication was like the original one I had read, which got me interested in his work in the first place. When I saw that, I was like, holy crap, this is amazing. It was only on 10 patients. So it was kind of low. He says now he's got like 50 more that he's getting ready to publish. And then he's, you know, got this whole protocol where there's like just he's got like

thousands of patients where they're like kind of treating this sort of individual way. They do genetic testing, blood testing and all that stuff as well. So it's very interesting because it's, you know, he's basically showing the important interaction between diet, lifestyle and potentially genetics. And this is kind of where my paper comes in because there is a gene that increases the risk for Alzheimer's if you have one copy of it. So you get two copies of every gene from one from mom, one from dad. If you have one copy of it, it increases your risk for Alzheimer's disease by like two to threefold. If you have two copies, it could be anywhere between 10 and 15 fold.

So it's like really, it's called APOE4. It also increases your chances of having a really poor outcome if you have any type of TBI. And people with that allele and have TBI, multiple TBIs, definitely are much more likely to come down with some sort of neurodegenerative disease. So, but not everyone with it gets it. So there's like this, like, what's going on here? You know, there seems to be this clear, you know, gene environment interaction going on. And so I was really interested in this because I found out I had one of these alleles. And, of course, that got me really concerned.

One of the things that's really, really important is sleep because sleep is one of the ways you actually clear away amyloid plaques from your brain. Your brain actually swells during sleep. You squirt cerebral final fluid into your brain and you basically clean out amyloid plaques and a bunch of other gunk that's built up. It's a car wash for your brain where you sleep. Yeah. And I talked about this with a former guest years, Dr.

Matt Walker. We talked about it a lot. He's like him and I were just like, it was awesome. I just, I could have talked to him. He was a mind blower. Oh Walker. We talked about it a lot. He's like him and I were just like, it was awesome. I just, I could have talked to him. He was a mind blower. Oh yeah.

I love, I love it. Um, I really loved the conversation I had with him. Uh, so we talked about this in detail because, um, basically that is one of the major ways you,

you, you clear amyloid plaques, but the other way is through an APOE mediated mechanism. And APOE4, um, does it like 20 fold less efficiently than someone that doesn't have it. And so they rely on sleep. And there's all sorts of studies with APOE4 showing sleep is a major modifiable risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.

If you have APOE4 but you're getting good quality sleep, you have like the same risk as someone that doesn't have it. And so I was like, gee, you know, of course I was thinking about this the entire time that I had my son and I was like, not sleeping for months. But anyways, the other thing that I looked into in my publication, this is where another sort of diet gene interaction comes in, is that there's all sorts of clinical studies showing that people with APOE4 benefit from fish, eating fish, where they can basically have improved pathology in their brain, have improved symptoms of dementia. But when they take fish oil, if you take fish oil and give it to people with dementia, only the people without APOE4 benefit.

For some reason, the APOE4 people aren't benefiting. And if you look into the literature, animals that were given human APOE4 versus human APOE3, the DHA doesn't get transported across the blood-brain barrier very well with APOE4. So it's like what's going on? There's some sort of transport defect. And DHA in the brain is really important. It's been shown to play an important role in human studies, but a lot of animal studies and human studies have been shown to increase amyloid clearance. It's in humans. It's been shown to decrease tau tangles. And also, it's really important for glucose uptake into the brain because it regulates the transporters,

glucose transporters. What was the second thing? Tau what? Tau tangles. So tau tangles form inside of neurons, and they disrupt a process that's called microtubule transport, which is where basically it's the neuron system for transporting fatty acids, all sorts of goodies, energy to the synapse, where synaptic transition is happening. Tau tangles basically disrupt that whole thing. happening, tau tangles basically disrupt that whole thing. Amyloid plaques form outside of neurons in the extracellular space, and they can disrupt synapse formation. They're thought to form as a protective mechanism against viral, fungal, or bacterial infection. So it's kind of like, you know, that's the reason why they're forming, but it's just

a matter of clearing them out and also how your brain's able to, like, deal amyloid plaque burden and APOE4 is not able to deal with it very well. So the DHA transport thing is basically what I published has to do with the interaction between different forms of DHA and APOE. There's two different ways that DHA is transported across the brain. One is when it's like in a free fatty acid form, it's bound to albumin, and it requires an intact blood-brain barrier. Specifically, the outer membrane of the blood-brain barrier needs to be intact because it goes through passive diffusion. Well, if there's a disruption in the blood-brain barrier, then the DHA isn't going to be transporting very well in that form. And it's been shown that APOE4 actually disrupts that very thing, the outer membrane, the tight junctions that bind the outer membrane of the endothelial cells that line the blood-brain barrier.

And so it's quite possible that that is why DHA is not getting into the brains very well in APOE4 carriers. There's another way to get it in, and this is through a transporter that uses something called lyophosphatidylcholine DHA, which is a phospholipid form of DHA. It forms from phosphatidylcholine DHA. The transporter is called MFSD2A, and it basically takes the DHA and flips it down across the outer membrane into the inner membrane of the blood brain barrier. So it bypasses that outer membrane and then it gets transported in. So if you look at animal studies that you delete that transporter, like 60% of the DHA is not getting into the brain if you give animals DHA. Humans with a variation in that gene that makes it less active, have neurodegenerative form of neurological disorders and neurodegenerative disorders. So it's obviously very important, you know,

to get DHA into the brain through that mechanism. Well, it turns out if you consume DHA in phospholipid form, you actually form more of lyophosphatidylcholine DHA. And that's because basically where the DHAs are on a phospholipid, they're in multiple carbons and one of them can escape a lipase in the pancreas. And so basically you can form more of it. Okay. But so phospholipid form DHAs in fish, but it's really abundant in fish roe, like super abundant, like 30 to 70% of DHA that's found in fish roe, which are fish eggs, a variety of different kinds are in phospholipid form. And you consume that stuff a lot.

I do. That's the reason why. And I finally get to talk about it. I order my, so you can, like I get salmon roe. I like the salmon because it also has astaxanthin in it, which is- And do you order it like, is it bottled or canned or something? I order it, it's can, like I get salmon roe. I like the salmon because it also has astaxanthin in it. And do you order it like, is it bottled or canned or something? I order it, it's frozen. It's frozen. Yeah, it's frozen.

I order it. But you can go into like a Japanese store, you can get flying fish roe, you know, which are much, some people prefer those because they're smaller and the texture, they don't like. The salmon roe, like the ikura, if you go to like a sushi restaurant and you get like the fish eggs that come in like the seaweed. They're a big egg. They're bigger. They're bigger and they kind of. We used to use those for bait. Yeah.

Some people don't like them because it's like they squish it and it's like liquid coming out. They're great for catching rainbow trout. Rainbow trout? Yeah. Rainbow trout eat salmon eggs. So I'm basically, you know, that's one way to get more phospholipid form, but also DHA consumed in like triglyceride form, which is what a lot of fish oil is, also forms. It also forms DHA lyophosphatidylcholine, but you just need more of it. So it's also possible that some of these clinical trials showing that, you know, fish oil failed was because they were using like the dose they were using was two grams.

So maybe you need six grams. Maybe you need four. Is there any negative benefit or negative consequence of consuming too much fish oil? Well, I think, you know, certainly depends on the type of fish oil that you're consuming. I mean, if you're consuming oxidized fish oil, then certainly not very good. But why would it be oxidized if it's too old? If it's too old and depending on what the isolation process was. But yeah, too old for sure. Things that are sitting around.

So the purification process is very important. The purification, yes, yes, very important. And like I said, there's that fish oil standards program you can look up. And there's a variety of different fish oil supplement brands that are on there. The other thing is there was just recently a randomized, very, very large randomized control trial published on four grams of one of the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and other marine organisms, EPA. And they were given four grams a day for five years, 8,000 patients, randomized placebo-controlled different countries, and it reduced, and these actually were patients that had high triglycerides and also were on statins. It lowered cardiovascular disease risk by like 28 or close to 30% or something like that. So that was a high dose,

and that was five years, pretty long follow-up, and it was a high dose and that was five years long, pretty, pretty long follow up. And it was a randomized placebo controlled study. I think it was called the vitals it vital study. But, you know, the other thing that I think people are worried about with really high dose fish oil is the potential for blood thinning, because it does inhibit thromboxanes and prostaglandins and leukotrienes and things that are important for clotting. I've been taking a really high dose for over a decade of fish oil. I've been taking not always six grams, but I've been taking a high dose for quite a while. And how often do you get your blood work done? Well, recently I haven't been getting it done very often

because the pregnancy and breastfeeding and stuff sort of changes things. I try to do it like ideally like doing it once a quarter, but like a couple times a year for sure. That's what I try six months. That's good. I think like, you know, sometimes you can get super obsessive by doing if you're doing it like once a quarter, you know. But for people that are not healthy, I think doing it once a quarter until they start to get healthier is a good idea. Until they get it all dialed in. Right.

Do you supplement with niacin at all? No, I don't supplement with niacin. But I'm thinking about doing the nicotinamide riboside. You know, niacin can, that's been shown to like lower LDL and like in higher, the stuff that causes the flushing, right? The stuff that causes the flushing. But also I think that there was some problems with it, like disrupting insulin, something with insulin secretion. I don't recall. It's been like so many years since I read those studies.

But the nicotinamide riboside forms NAD. So the niacin is a precursor for NAD, which is also increased during fasting. We were going to get NAD IV injections. We still got to do that, Jamie. That company contacted us. There's two ways of doing it. One, it takes eight hours. Or two, it takes like 10 to 15 minutes and it's like excruciating.

Like it's excruciating pain? Yeah, they push it. Yeah, they push it through and it's just yourruciating. Yeah. Like the pain. It's excruciating pain. Yeah. They push it. Yeah. They push it through and it's just your, your guts feel like they're on fire for like 10 minutes. I want to try that just to see how bad it is. The fast one.

The 15 minutes. Yeah. Because I want to say. Eight hours is a long time. Yeah. I don't have eight hours. Yeah. It's not happening.

I'm not sitting around for eight hours, but apparently there's some significant benefits to, uh, IV versions of it and doing it ben greenfeld was on the podcast talking about it pretty much pretty uh in depth yeah he's a big believer of it yeah i couldn't find i actually tried finding some published studies on the iv version i really couldn't find any i think that elysium stuff too i'm pretty sure that's what i'm talking about yeah you you uh recommended it to me yeah i subscribe to that i get that stuff every

day so that's um and there have been published study clinical studies and humans on that i take That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, you recommended it to me. Yeah, I subscribe to that. I get that stuff every day now. So that's, and there have been published clinical studies and hearings on that. I take that stuff every day. I like it. Yeah. But I guess, I don't really know. I take a lot of things. I don't really know.

But the NAD by intravenous method, it's supposed to be a much more potent form of it. And the people that I know that have tried it, like the guys at Onnit, they get, someone will come down to their Onnit labs like a couple times a month and a bunch of the employees will sign up and get zapped. So I wonder why some of these guys don't start gathering data and start publishing because it'd be nice to

see some data on that. Yeah, I wonder why. You know, a lot of times it's hard to get funding for some of these things, but you know, who knows? I mean, it'd be interesting to see if it has some of the similar benefits that taking something like nicotinamide riboside has, where if you take like a high enough dose, you can, you can raise your, your NAD levels like dramatically. How many of those Elysium tablets are you taking on a daily basis? I stop taking them just right now while I'm breastfeeding.

I'm just always on the cautious side. I was taking, I think I was taking 250 milligrams, I think. Each pill is? I don't know. Okay. I don't remember. Before I forget, I did want to ask you about, when we're circling back to this whole carnivore

thing, one of the suggestions was that it isn't, is, is it possible that people that some small percentage of the population would actually be allergic to a lot of plants? I mean, there are people that can be allergic to certain components. I mean, there's, there's the whole nightshade, you know, family where I think some people can like they have allergic uh reactions to and i think that people with nightshades being tomatoes tomatoes like bell peppers eggplant yeah yeah um and then also people with like gut issues have you ever heard of anyone being allergic oh so gut issues would predispose you to being well because you know there are other things in the plants that can you know so things people like to talk about like lectins for example and you know lectins they're they are they are in a lot of

plants but they're much more concentrated something like a legume like a bean and they're inactivated with heat um but typically most people don't have reactions to lectins. And possibly, if they already have some sort of gut barrier problem, that could sort of elicit a reaction. But a lot of the data out there is like in vitro, where lectins are used to stimulate the immune system in vitro. In fact, I've used lectins before to do an experiment. But, you know, so I think that, yeah, there's, there's certainly food allergies are definitely a possibility and they do exist. So is it possible that someone would be allergic to both cruciferous vegetables and, you know, a bunch of other like celery or cucumbers or things along those lines?

I don't know, you know know if they're allergic to them. Maybe. I think that people can have, you know, with like a variety of different issues like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth in their intestines. You know, people that are sensitive to like FODMAPs, those things. What is a FODMAP? I don't know. Fructose, oligosaccharide. I can't remember what it is. But basically people can be sensitive to them.

They're usually people with gut issues. Right. So it all boils down to gut issues. It boils down to gut issues and that there certainly is some cruciferous vegetables like cabbage or something can affect people. They can feel bloated and stuff like that. Yeah, absolutely. But I do think that sometimes resolving those gut issues will resolve that problem. I don't tend to think everyone's like someone's going to be allergic to every plant. I don't know, though. I mean, you know, anything's possible, right?

Right. But there's no literature. There's no studies. I haven't come across any, but I haven't done an in-depth search for that specific thing. So is it fair to say that when people are describing this and they're saying that it might be possible that there are a small percentage of the population or there is a small percentage of the population that's allergic to plants, with is a small percentage of population that has a significantly impaired gut biome that is finding benefit to eliminating these plants, this strict elimination diet, being on this carnivore diet which also has calorie restrictive aspects to it and even fasting restricted aspects to it, that this is why they're experiencing this positive benefit and that perhaps one of the ways they could fix their gut biome would be some sort of prolonged fast or something along those lines to try to fix the problem at the

root source instead of maybe what the carnivore diet would be is like some sort of a dietary band-aid. Right. And I think that the study i was talking about the 15-day um intermittent fast where people with autoimmune disease were fasted for 24 hours every other day um they had um changes in their microbiome that were in line very interesting changes they actually um grew bacteria that are uh you know very uh important for producing things like butyrate um which makes you know helps make t regulatory cellsulatory cells. It's a signaling molecule that helps your immune system produce more T-regulatory immune cells. And this is something that comes from a state of ketosis as well?

Well, this, yeah, exactly. They were fasting. Yeah. And the thing that was so interesting, and it's a question I had had for so long, was like, what happens to the microbiome when you don't eat? Like, is it – do you start – you know, are you getting like a selection for mucin degrading bacteria, which are degrading a certain glycoprotein that lines the gut? And, you know, and the thing that was so interesting about this study was that they did this like metagenomic analysis. And they found from fecal samples that the gene – like within the existing microbiome, it was increasing the production of ketone bodies themselves. And that was fueling because your gut cells and also a lot of the beneficial bacteria like things like butyrate, lactate, propionate, acetate.

These are some of the short-chain fatty acids. Butyrate is like the big one for the gut. Gut cells like 80% or 90% are using butyrate. But fasting was like increasing all these ketone bodies. So it's kind of really interesting because for one, it helped and it basically increased the diversity of this beneficial bacteria. It was very interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that. Have there been any studies on consumption of exogenous ketones to benefit the gut bio? Not that I'm aware of. I mean, do you think that that would mirror it in any way? That's a very interesting question because most of the exogenous

would be like a beta-hydroxybutyrate ester. The question would be how similar is beta hydroxybutyrate to butyrate right because butyrate is what what we're talking about and that's a very interesting question i don't know yeah i mean that would be or even what what's happening during um during like a ketogenic diet as well right you're making you have a lot of circulating beta hydroxybutyrate is that good does that get to the gut and right is there, you know, so that's, that's another interesting question. Yeah. Because it is an interesting way to hack your system is that these exogenous ketones like a key genics, or that's one that I use for a few other companies that make these, they do put your body in a state of ketosis. Yeah, no, I've definitely tried. I've tried one, um, from,

from HVMN, the beta hydroxybutyrate ester. And, um, I, I, it definitely like gives me energy. Um, but the other thing I really liked was the mental effects, the thing, the thing about it. So there's a sort of, it's sort of a double-edged sword because I feel less anxious when I take it. And this is getting me up into like 4.5 millimolar beta-hydroxybutyrate in like an hour. I feel less anxious and more in the present. Like I'm more present and not like a million things ahead where it's like sometimes my brain goes. So I felt like, and this is something that like Dan observed with me. And you felt this more than once? Oh, yeah.

So this is a repeatable thing? I started using it. I started using it. I didn't use it today, but the reason why I didn't use it today, so I started using it like for podcasts or big talks or anything. And the reason I didn't use it today is because the flip side is it dramatically because i'm not in ketosis i'm not on a you know ketogenic diet it lowers my blood sugar levels like really dramatically and this has been published you know there's like

mechanisms that are trying to be explored to understanding why that is um and possibly as a therapeutic treatment for type 2 diabetes and things like that but so if once the once the ketones wear off which they do after a couple of hours i crash because my blood glucose is low and i don't have the ketones there to compensate right whereas if i was already in ketosis then you know it wouldn't matter because i'd already i'd be in ketosis you know what I'm saying? I see. Yeah. So, yeah, it's really interesting, the effects on the brain. It's something that I noticed and I certainly repeatedly noticed. What would be the mechanism that would allow you to be more present? That seems so strange that that would have –

And less anxiety? Yeah. What would cause that? I don't know. I mean, there's, you know, possibly the glucose is being spared in my brain for other things. That's, you know, because now the ketone, the beta-hydroxybutyrate is being used as a source of energy and glucose is being used. I mean, glucose sparing does occur a lot of times in the context of making more glutathione because that's, glucose can be used for energy or can be used to make glutathione. And the pathway that it does that is through a pathway called the pentose phosphate shunt. And that pathway takes glucose and makes something called NADPH, which is then used,

which is necessary to make glutathione. So I don't know, maybe there's some kind of, because you know what else does it for me sulforaphane sulforaphane gives me major anti-anxiety effects and like cognitive like i feel broccoli sprouts consuming which does affect glutathione in the brain oh i never thought about that anyways it's all hypothetical what about um consuming those exogenous ketones with glutathione have you ever tried that i didn't know those existed trying. Oh, you mean with the broccoli sprouts. In combination. With the broccoli sprouts, you mean.

Yeah. Well, you're saying glutathione. Increases glutathione in the brain. But what about a glutathione supplement? Well, glutathione supplements. So glutathione, first of all, gets destroyed in the gut. But even if you were to get it into your bloodstream, there's no transporter for glutathione to get into cells.

So you want to make, I mean, you can get the precursors to make it and you can increase, like the way broccoli sprouts does it is increases enzymes that make it. So you're making more. And so that's how you do it. So when you, so one of the things that glutathione does is it, it helps your body process alcohol, correct? Um, I don't, I mean, it's a very powerful antioxidant. Wasn't that what Mark Gordon talked about?

Liposomal glutathione? Yes. Yeah. Liposomal glutathione helps your body with the processing of alcohol. It's a very, very strong antioxidant. But it gets destroyed in your gut. Well, if you're taking it, yeah. And also glutathione doesn't get into your cells.

There's a video about it? From this podcast. Oh, there you go. Yeah, something about the processing of alcohol. Now, so the best way to get it would be through sulforaphane. So from broccoli sprouts, cruciferous vegetables, and then your body would produce more. Well, so from the human studies that I've referenced, one was 300 grams of Brussels sprouts a day increased glutathione plasma by 1.4 fold. The other study more recently that showed an increase in plasma as well as in the brain, that was a broccoli sprout extract that was given. I have the dose on my Instagram, I think.

I don't remember off the top of my head the dose, but, um, so that's one of the ways I know of, uh, one of the most powerful ways I know of to increase glutathione, um, and you know, basically in humans. So I don't know how much 300 grams of Brussels sprouts is. So what would be a good idea? I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, would be a large plate of Brussels sprouts or broccoli sprouts with some sort of ketone supplement. Or if you're in ketosis, whether that's fasting, time-restricted eating. So that's something that I do. So I am definitely trying to get my ketosis in. Or you're on a ketogenic diet and you're getting.

So the question is, I'm not sure the glucose sparing stuff that's been shown in animals. So I don't know how much of that is, you know, translatable to humans. What effect? I mean, you always have to have evidence to say something definitively. But animal studies do show that there is a glucose-sparing effect when you have ketone bodies. It's fascinating that it would make you more present. What's fascinating is that sulforaphane treats autistic symptoms.

So what's going on there? There's also been an open label study. So there's been two trials with two or maybe three. And Dr. Jed Fahey has been a part of these as well as his colleagues. A randomized placebo-controlled and open label, which is always less. Open label means there wasn't a placebo control. But they did measure metabolites of sulforaphane and also oxidative stress in plasma, which always helps. And then there's been a trial on schizophrenic patients.

Sulforaphane helps with that as well. That was open label. Right now, there's an ongoing placebo-controlled trial that's now taking place. So there's very interesting effects on the brain. It seems as though there is some oxidative stress component. You know, I have APOE4. Who knows how much, you know, oxidative stress may be happening more in my brain because of APOE4. There's certainly increased risk for Alzheimer's disease, increased, you know, the traumatic brain injury, poor outcome. There's all this evidence that sort

of shows that. So don't start kickboxing. Definitely not kickboxing. So do you think that, I mean, it seems like, like a perfect pre-podcast meal would be these broccoli sprouts. Yeah. And maybe an exogenous ketone drink as well. Like the two of them together. Yes. So the only thing is, like I mentioned, for me, I crash after a couple of hours where

I'm like, like, it's like thing is, like I mentioned, for me, I crash after a couple of hours where I'm like, it's like really like crashing. But do you think you could mitigate that with maybe some sort of a glucose? Because one of the things that- Maybe so. Yeah, they say to take, when you're taking those ketone salts or ketone esters, the really potent ones, is to take them with glucose. Right. And they actually say in the instructions to take it with a high carbohydrate meal.

And so I usually will take, I'll usually eat a bowl of oatmeal with like some, some fruit and, um, and I'll take it. But, but still it really like it lowers my blood, my blood glucose levels dramatically within an hour. It's like, that's interesting. I don't feel that when I've taken those supplements, I don't feel the crash. Try the one I'm talking, HVMN. It's a really powerful. HVMN.

HVNM? Yeah. I should have brought you some. I have some in the hotel. I was thinking about taking it, but I was like, I don't. Does it taste like ass? Yeah, it tastes really bad. I mean, it definitely tastes definitely tastes like you know so bad some of them are so disgusting i i did an interview with the the president of the buck institute for research on aging and i i like downed it right before he walked in and i was like and he had just published a study on on you know ketosis and animals and helping with lifespan and brain you know aging and stuff

but so i had to tell him i'm like like here i just took this and i actually gave him some as well but um because it was kind of embarrassing because your face oh yeah i was like grimacing big time it was like that's a funny way to first meet somebody and i had i know i had just like eating some pineapple because they had like some fruit available and because they didn't have any carbohydrate. I was like, dang, what am I going to? So anyways, now you know all my secrets. Yeah. Well, that's a good one. That's fascinating.

I've never thought about that. But that seems like a pre-podcast meal or a pre-comedy show meal. That might be like a really good idea to try. Yeah. Just a big plate of broccoli sprouts. Yeah. The broccoli sprouts are the really good source. The supplements are not so, it's really – sulforaphane is not very stable.

So you can get – Do you take it in a shake? Do you grind it up? So I haven't been doing that. Yes. I grind it up. But you can just put them on a salad or you can just eat them. You don't have to – it doesn't taste good.

Right. So like – That's why you made it in a shake? So if you're going to put it in a shake with other things, you want to blend it up first because the enzyme, myrosinase, that has to come in contact with the precursor of sulforaphane, glucoraphanin, has to be in contact with it. So it's diluted out if you have like a big – all this other stuff. So blend it up first and then add your other stuff. Okay. But I've been taking a supplement I got from France called Prostaphane, which there's published studies on it, and it tastes like broccoli sprouts.

And I've been taking that right now just because of the potential risk for contamination. I'm just breastfeeding. You know, I'm just like, I'm always going there. E. coli, things along those lines. Exactly. So I'm just kind of, because that bacteria has been shown to be transferred from breast milk. Yes. There was like that news story where the woman ate the placenta.

Yeah. And like it was like I was reading this guy's Instagram. He's a vegan and he was going on and on about people getting E. coli from meat. I'm like, Jesus Christ, man. You get it from fucking spinach. Yeah. You can get it from broccoli. You get it from farm raised vegetables like stop. Right. But but it comes he's right in in a way because it comes from the runoff from uh animal feces right and that's how it gets into isn't that the case i don't know i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure that's how it gets into the food find out if that's true um e coli in vegetables comes from animal agriculture. Google that. I think that's true.

I've certainly had some bad sprouts before. Store-bought. I was sick. Really? You got sick? Yeah, I got sick. And also from ones we made at home, you know, it just, if you have to be really careful, if you have too much water

around, if it's too much heat and condensation and all that stuff. And bacteria grows because you're eating it raw. Yeah, exactly. So when you clean, I mean, how difficult is it to clean? Did you find anything? For manure. Yeah. Yeah.

So it is right. Ruminants in general cattle in particular, both beef and dairy. Yep. Right. in general cattle in particular both beef and dairy yep right so a lot of these especially like a real organic farm a lot of times they're they're they vary they have animals plants all sorts of the stuff together and the runoff from the cows gets onto your broccoli and all that jazz yeah it's nasty and how do you clean that i mean if i you know told you that e coli was on your vegetables you still want to eat them if you clean them i wouldn't i'm not eating that shit so how do you

clean your vegetables i rinse them yeah but i mean right but how good i usually don't get i don't know right but if you knew like that's the thing like when people say oh you should clean your vegetables i go okay but if there was e coli on those vegetables and you cleaned them would you think that would be enough probably wouldn't washing of greens won't protect against e coli consume there you go the heat kills e coli and other types of bacteria can make you sick even greens that are typically consumed raw such as romaine lettuce can be cooked okay so e coli is destroyed at 160 degrees fahrenheit which is like seems like everything trichinosis. coli is destroyed at 160 degrees Fahrenheit, which is like, seems like everything. Trichinosis.

A lot of things killed at 160. So, but the broccoli sprouts, you don't consume cooked? No, because the enzyme that converts the precursor into active sulforaphane is heat sensitive. Is it, does it diminish it significantly or kill it altogether? Significantly. I mean, you still, there's still some plus the precursor that you're, that, you know, is important for forming sulforaphane. You actually have bacteria in your gut.

And this is something that Dr. Judd Fahey talked about when I interviewed him. He was talking about there's certain strains of bacteria in the gut that convert, because they the enzyme myrosinase and they convert it into sulforaphane in the gut. So you can actually get a certain amount. He also mentioned that you can take mustard seed powder and sprinkle it on top of your cooked Brussels sprouts, your sauteed kale, which is this is what I do because I eat sauteed kale. And so I also have raw kale, but mustard powder this is what I do because I eat sauteed kale and stuff. I also have raw, I eat raw kale, but, um, mustard powder has the active enzyme. So you can consume that, um, with it. Oh, okay. Um, that's the other thing. Like I mentioned the, the, there are the supplements I'm taking. There is one out there also that is, has a lot of the precursor, uh, and some of the enzyme. And so you can get a modest amount of, and this is what was used in the most recent autism study.

It's called Avmacol. But the one- Spell that. A-V-A-M, wait. Yeah, A-V-M. A-V-A-M? Yes. Av, no, A-V, Av-M-A-C-O-L.

There he's got it. A-V-M-A-C-O-L. A-V-M-A-C-O-L. Sorry. There he's got it. A-V-M-A-C-O-L. A-V-M-A-C-O-L. That one's probably one of the best ones in the U.S., but prostafine's better. Naturally produced sulforaphane. Dr. Judd Fetty has tested this. He's tested these different supplements and looked at sulforaphane metabolites in urine to look at bioavailability.

So what is the one that you like? Prostaphane. I like Apricol. I've taken both, but it's hard to get prostaphane in the U.S. Why is it hard? Because it's in France. Can you get it on Amazon? No. What?

Amazon's got me hooked. No. But you can get it. You've got to find it somewhere. They have a website maybe? Yeah. Okay. That's what I've been taking recently.

How much do you take? I'm taking three pills a day. I think each pill has 10 milligrams. With food? Yes. Definitely with food. Yes. Why is that for absorption or? Yeah, it seems like it can be a little like, you know, it seemed it just sometimes if you're on an empty stomach, it doesn't feel good. Yeah. I've had a lot of people email me, you know, since the first time you and I talked about

zofrofane. Some of them have taken Avamacol, some have gotten a hold of prostafane, some doing broccoli sprouts. I mean, I've had people talking about like tumor shrinking and stuff like one guy. Yeah. I mean, it's like all anecdotal, but I've had multiple, multiple people talking about their Talking about the prostate stimulating antigen going down. Sorry, prostate. Is it stimulating? PSA. My brain's sort of dwindling out. But that going down, I know. It's a real thing.

It really is. It's a real thing. I mean, I kind of, I feel like I've done really good just from like exercise and getting all the fish oil and stuff. But it's definitely, there's constantly, it's just all. You're running a marathon a day. Totally. I've seen it. It's, I mean, people that don't, we were talking about this before the podcast with Dan. People that don't think that it's difficult to be just a mom or a stay-at-home mom.

You're crazy. I was so judgmental and I really feel bad. I really do because it's the hardest thing that I've ever done. Bill Burr has a great joke about that. If you want to do it good. Oh, really? He goes, oh, it's the hardest thing. He goes, any job you can do with your pajamas on is not the hardest thing.

I really like Bill Burr. He's hilarious. He's hilarious. Yeah, he's hilarious. He's a great guy, too. But, I mean, if you want to do a good job and you're thinking about, like, the enriched environment and how important it is. I got to read to them. I got to, you know, all this.

And then all the nutrition and not getting the plastic. I mean, it's just a lot of work. Like, I don't know. You don't want to sit them in front of the television and have them watching cartoons. Right. You know, so, which definitely would be easy right um so and maybe the more kids you have you're kind of like something's gonna give but but uh it's definitely a very very hard it's a hard job but very rewarding so rewarding like i just can't even believe i ever had a life before

my son you know like i'm just my life like, I get so much joy from him now. And I'm just like, how did I get all this joy before? It's like. Well, it's crazy because I remember before you had him, you were like concerned. Like, boy, I wonder where my time's going to go. If I'm still going to be able to do research. It's like, ooh, we'll see. Yeah, it's hard.

And I, thankfully I have my mother who helps out a lot and gives me some time. But I'm like essentially doing both, you know. Do you feel the switches going off in your brain? Your brain switches over? Because essentially, there's a biological mechanism that's happening that must be fascinating to study on yourself as you're watching it happen. Because, you know, the oxytocin gets jacked through the roof you have this little thing that you love literally more than anything you've ever experienced in your entire existence you can't believe how much you love them it's hard to imagine like i it's hard for me as a father to imagine what it would be like to be a mother because i think there's a

big difference because i think there's and this is one of the reasons why me and my wife had a deal. I didn't name any of the kids. I just had veto power. It's like you can't call the kid like fucking turnip or some stupid shit. You know what I mean? Kale. Yeah. I mean, it's just nothing nutty.

But it's in your body. I mean, you're cooking it up. You manufactured it. I know. It's inside of you. I mean, you're cooking it up. You manufactured it, I know. Inside of you. The difference between the job a man does and a woman does in terms of the actual making of the baby could not be further apart from each other.

The guy just does something that feels great and it's done. And then the woman goes through this insane hormonal process. Her body morphs. She gains 50, 60 plus pounds. Her body morphs. She gains 50, 60 plus pounds. Her body stretches out. She's got a baby inside of her. It's kicking her. She's uncomfortable.

She can't move. She's swelling. Then she has to go through excruciating pain. There was a video on Dig from yesterday. See if you can find it, where they have a labor recreating pain device that they put men under. And they have these fucking macho men that they have this machine that they do something. They have these sense.

Put it up. We'll figure out how the fuck they did it. But it somehow or another reenacts the pain of labor and lets a man experience what it's like to get your vagina blown apart. That's crazy. No, it is. You just totally explain. I mean, the whole pregnancy and then like the delivery. I mean, it's just like. And then it's like a part of you is walking around.

Right. Whereas for the man, it's like, yeah, that's my kid. Wow. And you get all this oxytocin rush, but I don't even think it's a fraction of what the walking around. Right. Whereas for the man, it's like, yeah, that's my kid. Wow. And you get all this oxytocin rush, but I don't even think it's a fraction of what the woman is. Breastfeeding, you know, that whole like nursing,

that's like huge oxytocin. It's huge, huge. And, um, and then of course there's like the no sleep for like months. And for me, like I,

um, my son, like he's seen a bottle, like, I don't know, six or seven times. I've just always been there. On the nipple.

Yeah. Do you pump? So because I was always there, I've only had a pump a few times. The thing about pumping that seems to be really good, though, is that the kids can get more of it. It's like, depending on how well you're- Never had an issue. Never had an issue. I was actually an overproducer, and I had an issue of too much. Yeah, it's like...

He's like, slow down, Mom. Yeah, so... Whoa! I was looking for that, and I stumbled across this. Pouvaid syndrome? I've never heard of that. A sympathetic pregnancy is a proposed condition in which a partner experiences some symptoms and be...

That's just a bitch-ass man. These include minor weight gain, altered hormone levels, morning nausea, and disturbed sleep patterns. Like I said, that's just a bitch-ass math. The disturbed sleep patterns come after the baby's born, let me tell you. That's silly, Meg. But I know what you're talking about. Yeah, some guys say that, oh, I gained weight too when I was pregnant. That's because you're lazy.

That's because you're lazy and you ate more food, you fucking slob. That has nothing to do with a baby being in your body. your mouth that's that's embarrassing stop eating so much i'm pregnant too no you're not i hate when men say we're pregnant yeah we're pregnant no we're not no we're not pregnant mike you're not pregnant mike she's pregnant you got her pregnant you fuck what does it say here labor pain pain simulator. Here it is. Look at these guys. Give me some volume. That's different.

Look at me. Talk to me right now. You're almost getting to the active stage of labor where it's really getting good. This is just the beginning. It ramps up. Awesome. Awesome, guys.

It's starting to come down now. You guys are doing awesome. Cut it. Go for it. Please, please, please. These guys. Are you going to do it? I mean, it really does feel that way.

What's next is these gals put a strap on them and they peg these dudes. That's next. They just have sensors on their stomach, it looks like, right? Yeah, it's like, you know, one of those electro-muscular stimulation devices. And they just jack them through the roof. They could have put one on their groin, right? Yeah, well, they put them in their abdomen. They're just getting torn apart

but it's not even as sensitive as your vagina so it's ridiculous plus you're probably not making like the endorphins and oxytocin yeah it's nothing and he's getting up on his hands and knees like come on stop yeah i mean they're just basically torturing these men to make them feel bad for not being a woman. Yeah. It's definitely a painful process. That whole delivery thing is painful, but it is pretty crazy. It's definitely crazy. It's really crazy that people make people in their bodies.

You know, like I was talking to my daughter this morning, she was getting ready for school and we're sitting at the breakfast table. And I'm just looking at her. And while she's talking, all I'm thinking of is, you didn't used to exist. And now here you are talking to me about school, talking to me about this and that and all the different things you're doing. And it is so odd that you are a combination of my DNA and my wife's DNA. And here you are just sitting here eating breakfast.

Just talking. Ten years old now. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Does she tell jokes yet? She's not that. Well, she'll tell jokes. But my eight-year-old's fucking hilarious.

The eight-year-old has figured out how to be funny. She farts on cue. She'll tell you she's got to tell you something. Daddy, I have to tell you something. Come here, I have to tell you something. And she'll fall to the ground. She thinks it's so funny. She's really funny.

She says funny shit. She's a very funny person. So maybe she's got a little bit, some of the DNA from you is a little more active genetically. I don't know. I think it's like she knows how to get a like a positive response out of people you know she knows how to be silly and she loves that like she's really silly with her friends and she's just like she's the comedian amongst her friends for sure that's cool yeah whereas my 10 year old's not really that funny but i shouldn't say she's not that funny she doesn't try it's not something she works at it's also interesting how they're so different and they're like they couldn't

be raised in the same environment couldn't be more different right out of the box they come out with their own little personality like when they were tiny tiny babies you could see that they were different you know and i bet if you had 10 of them like those crazy people those duggers that have like 19 kids yeah i bet they got 19 different humans. I bet they're all totally different. I bet one of Mike's like Shelly. They're probably kind of close. It's just, I mean, I wish it made sense. I wish I could get a view of the human organism from high enough above that it all made sense. And I, and I could say, oh,

all these little varying pieces are working in conjunction with each other. And this is why things get done. And this is why art gets created and buildings get built because you have to have a this, and then you have to have a that and they work together and you know i mean that's like personalities right in terms of relationships like you don't want to have two bulls right you know you have one who's like this and the other is like that and together they make this one thing that's really nice and i mean we've both seen i'm sure people that are just not they might be really great people, but together they're terrible. Right. Just for whatever

reason. Yeah. For sure. Fascinating. So, it's Sober October. Yes. And you're going to be doing some sauna. Did I tell you about some of the new sauna stuff in the brain? No. New stuff. How new? Well, past year. May I ask you before we get

going, is there a difference but because i keep this keeps coming up is there any beneficial difference between infrared versus standard well a lot of the studies that uh i refer to and that have been published have been using a standard right and and the they definitely work differently i mean the standard standard hot sauna you're you're heating up the air and you're so up the air, so you're getting hot. Whereas the infrared, it's like wavelengths that are stimulating electrons that are sort of changing things and heating up you from a different sort of way. But I do think that the key is the heat stress itself. Personally, I think that the standard is better. Why so? Because it's easier

to get more hot, more discomfort, more heat stress. It takes a lot longer in an infrared sauna to really heat up, at least in my experience. They only go up to like 140 or something Fahrenheit. Oh. And a lot of benefits come from like 180 when you get up to like a 180 Fahrenheit. Really? Oh, okay. Mine cr cranks i have to mine this one out here you're regular you're hot yeah that thing gets too fucking hot yes it gets to 200 all the time that's and i have to open up the door yeah your ears start to hurt and it's not even my feet hurt like and it's not even close to pegged like in terms of like the the full temperature one i just have a really hot one

yeah so i think that heat's really important like 180 yeah exactly 180 for 20 minutes um is where it's sort of like a lot of studies published by like dr jari jari laukkonen in finland he's shown a lot of benefits um he's a lot of his studies have been observational but he's also done some intervention trials as well. The observational studies we've talked about improvements in cardiovascular-related mortality. Literally, people do it four to seven times a week. They have like a 50% improvement in cardiovascular-related mortality. Three to four times a week, or is it two?

Yeah, three to four times a week. Two to three times a week is like 24% improvement. So like a dose dependent manner, Alzheimer's disease as well, is like reduced by like 60% if you do it four to seven times a week, all cause mortality. But he's also done some intervention studies showing that like there's improvements, even a single dose of doing the sauna improvements in the ability of your blood vessels to contract and expand with pressure changes, which is important. So it's like vascular compliance, it's called. Improvements in blood pressure, decreases in C-reactive protein, inflammatory biomarker. Other studies have been showing recently in humans increase in mitochondrial biogenesis,

growing new healthy mitochondria, improvements in mitochondrial function, and then also improvements in anti-inflammatory cytokines being increased. And these are all intervention trials as well. People that are doing it before doing a workout, which is interesting because I've always done it after. Before doing a workout. Yeah. So doing it before a workout, it, delayed onset muscle soreness, um, doing it before workout, which is weird because 20 minutes before, I don't remember the exact amount of time. I think that, um, it was a little bit of a different protocol for that study. I can't remember off the top of

my head. Uh, I did tweet it at some point. But yeah, it's really interesting because doing it before seems like I'm so burnt out. Like after doing the sauna, it's like going and doing a workout after that. So maybe would they have the same effects doing it afterwards? Possibly. But what's super interesting is the effects on the brain. Like have you noticed? Do you feel any? I feel great. Yeah. When I come out of there,

I feel just chilled out, relaxed. I feel really good. I just feel good. Right. I feel alleviated. That's exactly the reason I even got interested in sauna was I, that was, you know, I was doing it regularly and I started to notice that. But I recently met up with a researcher. His name is Dr. Charles Raison. I recorded a podcast with him, very interesting guy. But he devised this really cool gadget where he could elevate people's core body temperature by a degree and a half. But he had a sham control, a placebo, so to speak. And so the placebo did increase people's core body temperature a little bit, but not to that amount, not to that degree. So people thought they were getting the active treatment.

So they weren't hot? They thought they were getting hot. And in fact, he said when asked afterwards, like 70% of them thought they got the active treatment. Oh, God. So, yeah. So it's actually a nice placebo-controlled study. But what he found was that even a single treatment, these were in people that had major depressive disorder. It improved depressive symptoms like even a week after.

And this was just a single, you know, exposure to the sauna. Well, the sauna. It's not actually a sauna. It was like this like heating device. But he also measured their cytokine called IL-6, which is something that's released from exercise. Muscle tissue releases it. It spills out into the bloodstream. And it's part of the inflammatory response, part of the inflammatory aspect of exercise.

And in response, there's a whole anti-inflammatory effect. And so what he showed is that actually people with more IL-6 that happened, the better they had antidepressant effect. So it's super interesting because, again, exercise does that. In fact, if you give people NSAIDs or like – so non-steroidal and inflammatories before exercise, it actually blunts the IL-6 production and it blunts some of the positive benefits like insulin sensitivity. So the IL-6, although it's an inflammatory cytokine, it's kind of like this sort of pleiotropic one that like it's released, it's in muscle tissue, it's released and it seems to like increase, have a big anti-inflammatory response that happens in response to that. So it was really interesting because the inflammation seems to be really important for depression and that the sauna was like,

you know, basically lowering markers of inflammation. So it's been shown to lower C-rect protein and then also increase IL-10. So it's a very interesting kind of connection between mood, heat stress, and then, of course, exercise does the same thing. Exercise does elevate your core body temperature and heats you up. And I asked Dr. Rezon, he thinks that things like the sauna, hot yoga, hot bath, steam room, all those things are pretty much can give you the same effect. The point is the heat stress. I'm pretty sure that yoga does the same effect with hot yoga because I have that same feeling when I get out of a hot yoga class. This is like really good alleviation feeling. I just, my mood feels elevated.

I feel happier and it feels different than a regular workout. Like regular workout does that, but it seems more an alleviation of stress. Like I've expelled the excess energy in my body and I can relax. in my body and I can relax. And there's certainly some sort of a positive hormonal effect after it's over, some endorphin rush, but it's not the same as the yoga. The hot yoga, I think, is very addictive to people. And that's one of the reasons, because after it's over, you feel amazing. You feel so good. There's studies showing that hot yoga does improve depressive symptoms. There's no sham control. I think there's a researcher at Harvard Public School of Health who's trying to do a study with hot yoga.

Yeah, they're doing it right now. Are they with the control randomly? And the thing about yoga is that it's only 104 degrees in the room. But when you take into account the extreme condition of like the exercise extreme stress that you're putting on your body a lot of it is like really difficult balancing and you're straining and all your mouth you're fucking sweating and you're not sweating like 104 degrees you're sweating just like you're sweating inside the sauna right like big time sweat yeah yeah yeah like there's certain ones that like when you do a balancing stick, when I'm standing in front of me like this, I'm watching it just pour off my arms.

Yeah. Just watching sweat drip off me. I sweat when I'm doing yoga like in non, when I'm holding those positions in a non-hot environment. You know, so I've done a Bikram yoga a couple of times. I've done the hot yoga a couple of times. I do really like it. And I've had more time 90 minutes is a long time yeah um but but the endorphin you dump a bunch of endorphins with

the sauna as well like tons and tons and then there's the whole like you're you're making dynorphin which is the sort of opposite of endorphin it's responsible for that i'm so hot oh yeah and that changes some of the, at least in animal studies, it's been shown to change the sensitivity to endorphins from the receptor standpoint. So it's kind of interesting. That's kind of initially what I originally was looking into when I was noticing all these benefits from the sauna.

But that's really cool that you're doing it because there's so many studies now showing that there's benefits on the cardiovascular health, also on neurodegenerative disease, depression, I mean the anti-inflammatory effects as well. It's so easy to have it. I mean to have it right here and just to be able to get into the sauna anytime I want. I'm basically doing it every day. That's nice. Yeah.

Right now I've been taking hot baths just because I haven't – we're trying to like get to the point where we have a sauna. But I think we're going to get there soon. But hot baths have been really doing it for me as well where I'm like submerged with my shoulders. I mean you can't – like if you start putting your arms and legs out of the water, like it doesn't count because like you feel cooler. Right. But if you like stay underneath, I mean you're – You start freaking out. Your heart starts racing.

I mean, you start freaking out. Your heart starts racing. I mean, it's like the same effect that happens where you elevated heart rate and all those sort of similar mechanisms kick into play like they do when you're in a sauna. Do you do Epsom salt baths as well? I have. I really like them. Yeah. I've been doing really hot baths with Epsom salts, especially like after like very fatiguing workouts. It seems to have a good benefit.

And I know from the tank, from the isolation tank, that it's a great way of absorbing magnesium through the Epsom salts. Oh, into your muscle? Yeah, through your skin, you know, because Epsom salts is so high in magnesium. Yeah, right. And the tank is 1,000 pounds of Epsom salts in it. That's crazy. Does it make your skin, like, nice when you do it?

Yeah, it just feels good too. But it feels really the tank. Have you done it yet? I did it once in San Francisco. You can do it anytime you want if you want to come here. Really? Yeah. If you guys are over in town.

I think it was really something wasn't right because I could feel like the temperature of the water was off. And I did enjoy what I... I mean, it was nice. So at first I got in and they had some music playing. Music? And then the music went away. Oh, to sort of relax you? At first, yeah.

But I was sort of in my head a bit in that. But I kept feeling the water. And so I didn't feel like i was like sensory deprived are you ever here other than like when you come down to do the podcast um yeah i do i'm coming back in november anytime you're here just let me know in advance and we'll open it up and this tank here is the best the float lab or if you want to go to the place in venice but the one you could do here is so easy and it's got a shower in there and everything yeah that would be cool i would like to try it again place in Venice. But the one you can do here is so easy. And it's got a shower in there and everything. Yeah, that would be cool.

I would like to try it again. Yeah. I mean, there are studies showing, you know, meditation and all that stuff is really important for – I think it's an important, you know, one of the, you know, of many components in, like, healthy aging, healthy brain aging, lowering stress and stuff. So I would definitely like to – I get out of that thing. I feel great. Do you do it frequently still?

Yeah, it's right here. So I'll come down here early in the morning and do it sometimes. How long do you have to stay in there to really? I like at least an hour, but I really like to do two hours. Two hours for me is a sweet spot. When I come out after two hours, I'm just like so chilled out. Relaxed? Yeah, it's almost like during Sober October, it's like cheating because you're basically getting high in there.

Are you doing it during Sober October? Yeah. Okay. I mean, you're not taking in a drug, but you're so chilled out. And you do have a weird psychedelic state that you achieve. It's like a very extreme form of meditation in a lot of ways because of the fact that you're not feeling your body at all. And you're only experiencing whatever's going on. It's like your brain detached from all the input of the body.

Some of those studies that have been done on like long-term meditators or even just people that haven't meditated, and then they're put in like some like eight-week trial of meditation and how there's like immediately all these changes in brain activities start to happen yeah like that are you know basically in line with good brain aging and improved you know all sorts of measure measures of improved uh cognitive function and stuff it's super interesting yeah it would be really interesting to see like you know what how that differs from meditation is one thing i have a hard time with. Well, meditation in conjunction with the tank I think is really the key. I think the tank allows you to achieve a state of your physical body not being –

you don't ever completely eliminate the sensory input, but you diminish it so significantly that that environment is not available anywhere else on earth where you're floating. So you don't feel your body. Your water is the temperature of your skin. The air is the same temperature as the water. And you feel like you're just flying through infinity. You're in total darkness, total silence. Yeah, I didn't feel that way.

I mean, I did. It was a little relaxed, but I didn't feel like I was like flying through. They have cheaper tanks. That's part of the the problem some of the tanks I could feel the water the entire time yeah it's probably either too cold or too hot it should do you feel like your brain is like uh in the now when you're doing it is that something I feel like my brain is has way more resource race way more resources available to it so like if you and I were having this conversation and we didn't have the headphones on and there was a jackhammer next to us it would be really distracting you'd want to get away from

that jackhammer like let's go talk over here until you'd want you'd want to get away as far as you could from but everything is a distraction like these the seat on my butt is a distraction was the shoes on my feet are something I'm thinking about. The watch on my hand. There's all these different things that are distracting you. But when you get in that tank, there's none of those things. You're just – you settle in. And once you settle in, you touch each side so that you can – because you get in the water.

There's like a few ripples and little waves. And then you touch each side so you calm everything down. And then I sink into the water. And then I take some deep breaths. And then I slowly bring my arms in the middle. And then I chill out. And I've done it so many times. My body goes, okay, here we go again.

Like it's not like, whoa, what is this? This is so weird. I've done it so many times that my body gets into that state very quickly. But if I take time off and I do, sometimes I'll take weeks or even a month off and then it's a little more weird at first. Like, oh, we're doing this again. Oh, I haven't done this in a while. But when I do it consistently on a regular basis, two, three times a week, then I could just sink right into it. I wonder if it would be any therapeutic benefit to people with like sensory gating disorders.

Sensory gating disorders? You know, in other words, like you were mentioning all the other sensory things that are happening. You know, there's auditory, there's smell, there's visual. I mean, these things are our brains inputting it at all times. I mean, there's stuff going on. But we're able to kind of filter it out. And like you and I are having this conversation. Jamie's been sitting over the whole time and like I really haven't paid much attention right but

but some people like particularly schizophrenic people with schizophrenia they can't they don't filter that out and so like they get overload that gets like an overload it's called sensory overload and so they oftentimes they can't go into like a room with a lot of people they don't want to like go off and you know with you know by themselves or whatever so i wonder if there is any sort of uh benefit for like doing something like that where you're where you're not you know the sensory inputs kind of like if you could kind of train your brain a little bit i don't know i don't know um i just i find that for me it helps me think way clearer because i feel like i have more brain available to access i feel like if you were trying to say something that was very

very complicated and you were trying to explain something that required a lot of the resources of your brain if there was a lot of noise around you you wouldn't be able to do it but if there's a lot of noise you're like you want to eat let's go eat and you're like some jackhammer yeah i'm hungry you want to eat? Let's go eat. And you're like, some jackhammer. I'm hungry. You want to eat? Yeah, let's go eat. Like you could be able to communicate something very simple. But if you were trying to explain the various mechanisms of sephirothane. Man, I should really try this.

Yeah. Because I think. Because I go through like this. I also sometimes use the sauna for that. Where I'll like have something like prepared. I used to actually, before giving a presentation, I would go in the sauna and I would go through it in my head. You know, so it's like, you know, that was something that I used to do a lot. Because the sauna, there's nothing in there.

Just you. Yeah. Sitting there. And it gives you that unusual environment of just silence. It really helped. Yeah. So it's kind of interesting that you mentioned that. That's a step.

But I think the float tank is the ultimate. And right now there's a really interesting podcast that's available. I've talked about this podcast before, Stuff to Blow Your Mind. They have an episode right now, this week, that is about John Lilly, who is the psychedelic pioneer who created the sensory deprivation tank. And he also is a pioneer in interspecies communication, figured out how to communicate with dolphins and did a bunch of weird psychedelic research with dolphins. There it is, from the vault, John C. Lilly. A really amazing, amazing guy who, I mean, they go deep into the history of his career, too, which is just very, very fucking really strange guy. But I think his great contribution is not just understanding the sentient nature of dolphins and how incredibly complex their language is and how smart they are, but also the sensory deprivation tank, which I think is, it's one of the most underutilized tools for consciousness, for exploring consciousness and just for relaxation. And for me, for examining

ideas, if I have an idea, like I used to do, I used to do a lot of jujitsu in there. Like I would go into the tank and I would go over moves because when you're when you're completely i would i would drill moves in my head like as if i was doing them i would like clinch hook roll tuck grab sink i would do all these different things in my head practicing yeah and i would allow i would do that to get me to this like relaxation state. Or I would go over a joke that I'm struggling with or a comedy bit. I'm like, what is a better way to say this? What's the best way to get this across? Now, I'm saying it this way, but it's offensive or it's blunt and it's not the funny part. Like I'm taking a shortcut.

Maybe I – and then I would go over it in my head. And then eventually once I would do that, I would get to this relaxation point where then I could just concentrate only on breathing. So after I've like worked out all the things that are bugging me, and sometimes it would be like a seminar on my life. I'd get in there. And then as soon as I closed the tank door and lay down, I'd take a few deep breaths and then I'd be like, okay. So here's what's wrong, fuckface.

You're doing too much of this. Clean your goddamn office. You know, how come you only get eight out of ten things done on your to-do list? That's bothering you. You know, you need to spend an hour a day just doing this. And instead of drinking coffee and looking at your phone before you work out, just fucking work out. Just get in there and get your, you're wasting 20 minutes doing that, that 20 minutes you could have been done 20 minutes

earlier. And then you wouldn't have to rush over here to do the podcast. And it's like, it starts sort of giving me almost like a subconscious, uh, renovation, you know, like just, just sort of like, cause okay, like this is this is, all this stuff in your subconscious is disturbing you. And here's why it's disturbing you. Because you've got all this clutter. So let's clean this shit up. Clean it up. Get it together.

And it's been responsible for I think a lot of my focus and discipline. Like understanding the significance of that focus and discipline. And it's not just like to be a tough guy or to just go out there and kick ass. It's more like to absolve yourself of brain clutter. That's pretty awesome, that introspection you're talking about. I think a lot of people could use more of that, including myself. I mean, it's certainly... I think all of us. I think all of us, really. Anyone listening to this. And I think there's probably one in San Diego. So if there's a tank place in San Diego, reach out to Dr. Rhonda Patrick.

And I'm sure that there's a place you could use this down there that's near you. I mean, I certainly use other things like running long runs. Sure. Do that. Do something similar. Get in that zone. The zone. Yeah.

But what you're describing sounds kind of like next level. A lot of people get it from swimming as well. Swimming. Yeah, because it's just like whoosh. Kind of repetitive. Yeah, that repetitive thing. And then you're sort of managing the motion of your body. And then once you get in, it's almost like a mantra.

You're managing the motion of your body and then the breathing. And then once you get it all synced up, if you're in good enough shape that it's not like a titanic struggle with every lap or every stroke of your arms, you can get into this sort of meditative state that a lot of people achieve with running or even just like sitting there breathing. Like a lot of people get that. Yeah, I have a difficult time doing that.

Yeah, it's hard. Yeah. Isn't it funny that it would be hard to sit still? It is. It is funny. It's actually like some of the other interesting stuff is just doing that, sit there, sit still and breathe. Changes like the activation of enzymes and stuff like telomerase, the enzyme that rebuilds telomeres. It literally activates telomerase. So fascinating how just like certain things like I wouldn't imagine doing that would actually change telomerase.

Yeah, the body is this never-ending puzzle. It really is. And whenever I talk to you, I'm more and more sort of aware of that because there's so many different things and so many different mechanisms in terms of nutrition and nutritional absorption that I just, I'm so ignorant of. And so I hear all these things and I'm like, I'm trying to get a map of the territory. Yeah. I mean, also there's so many things I'm ignorant of as well. But I feel like every time I talk, it's like someone's breaking out a little napkin and going, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you take a right here and you go there and I go, all right.

But it's not a real map. Like the map of the whole thing escapes me. It's too big. It is. It's too big and it's too complex. And I'll listen to this podcast again. Like I'll listen to all the things you said again and I'll try to take notes maybe tomorrow or the next day. But then my stupid brain will like – it will like leak.

Half of it will leak out. It's like I'm trying to hold water in my fingers. It's like I got it. I got some water. It's not fucking dripping down my wrists. It's so hard. It's so hard to get a real understanding of this stuff. I agree.

I mean certainly lots of controversy and disagreement among researchers as well. I agree. I mean, certainly lots of controversy and disagreement among researchers as well. Don't you think that's also probably what's so attractive about simplifying things like hashtag meat heals? You know what I mean? Like people almost like, yeah, let's just jam it into a saying or jam it into like one type of practice. And that's all you need. That's all you need. All you need is meat. Look at me. I'm just eating meat. Feeling great. I feel amazing. And then people are like, I want to feel amazing. And then they jump in too. Yep. You already saw me get emotional. I was. Yeah. No, I'm glad you did. I'm glad you did get emotional and I'm glad you did

sort of spell it out. And I hope, it out. I'm going to send this to Jordan afterwards. I don't know if he has the time to listen to it. He might have less time than us. The guy's pretty busy. Maybe when he's going from one place to another on a plane or whatever. I just think that

it's a movement right now. You've got to be real careful about movements. You get swept up in them. And you're like, hey, I'm moving. I don't know if this is the right way. I don't know if this is the right way to move, but I'm moving. Yeah. All right.

Well, look, we just did three hours. Nice. Crazy. Yeah. Time flies. I always love talking with you, Joe. I always love talking with you, too. It's fun.

I'm going to take you up on the flotation thing because I really do want to experience it. Anytime. Call me up. It's yours. Just give me some time. You know, just give me like a, you know, a little bit in advance. We'll open the place up for you. Awesome.

All right. Thank you. All right. Oh, give people found my fitness on Instagram. Found my fitness on Twitter. iTunes. iTunes, your podcast. And the most recent one, which is the one that we were discussing, was about Alzheimer's.

And website is also FoundMyFitness.com. Yeah, there's a lot of show notes and summaries and definitions that help people understand some of the stuff if they don't understand everything that we're speaking about. Thank you very much. Awesome. Thank you. Rhonda Patrick, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you.